Cole Gordon Podcast
Cole Gordon Podcast
Sam Ovens: How I Built a Billion Dollar Software Company
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Want me to 1-on-1 audit your business to learn exactly how to hit the next level of scale?
Click here 👉 https://bit.ly/Cole1on1Samovens
========================================================================
Using calendly/oncehub to book calls? And experiencing low show rates? Check out https://bit.ly/SalesKickSamovens
Saleskick is a booking/calendar system designed specifically for sales teams to:
-Decrease cost per booked call (faster load times, better CRO, etc)
-Increase show rate
-Auto-confirm appointments via AI
-AI score every lead so it's delegated correctly...
And more.
========================================================================
Pick up rate for your setters below 20%? Try https://www.dialer.io/
After generating 50M+ solely from outbound appointment setters in our own company…
I’ve packaged all the best setting practices into a software that simply allows your setters to click “Dial” and work the leads in the most efficient and profitable way possible.
This leads to:
-Higher answer rates
-100% TCPA compliant dialing
-Less burned phone numbers / categorized as spam
-20-30% increase in overall sets per day production
…and more.
========================================================================
Want to scale your business in our 8-figure boardroom mastermind + come to our next in-person event in Scotland? Click here 👉 https://bit.ly/8FbrScotlandSamovens
-----
Here are the updated chapters for the interview with *Sam Ovens*:
0:00: Prioritizing Engagement
8:20: Solving the Cold Start
10:02: Sam’s Origin Story
11:31: Early Inspiration For Skool
15:58: Lessons for Entrepreneurs
21:25: Simplifying the Info Industry
23:41: Bringing Skool Mainstream
26:57: Discovery and Growth Features
36:23: AI and Engineering Standards
46:19: The Skool Business Model
51:02: Raising Capital and Values
56:44: Using Product Intuition
1:00:00: Important Lessons Learned
1:03:27: Design and Product Inspiration
1:14:00: What Sam Does in His Day
1:22:06: Company Structure Philosophy
1:30:35: Using First-Party Data
So where I want to start, you remember when you visited me in Scottsdale and we were hanging out, and I remember we were having dinner at True Food, and you told me, so this was back when school was kind of like in its infancy, at least compared to it is now, and you told me you were making a strategic bet because a lot of the other kind of competitors in the space, Kajabi and Circle, they had prioritized the creator's ability to customize the platform and specific URLs and domains and almost kind of a white label feel. Whereas your bet was really the opposite, which was to prioritize user engagement and ultimately create a network effect. So obviously that bet paid off, but I'm curious if you can think back to that time, how did you kind of come to the conclusion that was the right bet to make and how were you thinking about that decision-making process?
SPEAKER_00Sure. So I've used the internet a lot since pre-Google, right? So I've like experienced the evolution of all of these different things. And it's always just been super interesting to me, like how things evolve. Um and I used to use forums a lot, like that was where I used to hang out. Um but then they got kind of killed and replaced by Facebook groups, right? And I found that very interesting. Um, and I would ask, like, why? And I realized it was because one profile, one search, one login, one domain to remember, right? Everything's there. And so for the end user it's simple, right? Because people have more than one interest, um, and you can have them together. But the other one was like the distribution. So, you know, you build your own forum and you need distribution. Facebook groups also provided that, right? So there's serious advantages to networks, because like creators of things need distribution and users of things like convenience, right? And also users of things aren't one-dimensional, right? Like they have multiple interests, and their interests also change over time. And so like they it fits well with that, if that makes sense. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And so, how did you know that it's obviously you knew there was an advantage to a network effect? What sort of because everybody in the industry was kind of going that way in terms of prioritizing, making a pretty, you know, a pretty interface that they could customize, etc. Or is there something that you saw?
SPEAKER_00You're talking about like the old whib, which is like I don't know, like um like a Kajabi kind of thing. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_03What so what are you asking? Well, well, so because I'm I'm curious, is there anything beyond just the fact that you wanted to create a network effect that made you take that strategic bet? Because you were the really school's really the only platform that went against the grain compared to, let's say, the circles, Kajabis, etc.
SPEAKER_00True. Well, I mean, there's also you like it's hard to out Kajabi Kajabi, right? Um so they're also much further ahead, and like, and so that would be a and that would be a terrible like competition too, by the way. But also I was a user of Kajabi and I didn't need 90% of the stuff in there, right? And I also found it quite confusing, and so I thought it was more of a like negative than a positive, and then I tried to like boil it down to the most simple thing. Um, and I was like, people want engagement. I'm pretty sure people want engagement, people also want growth, right? And so I was like, whatever I can do to make it grow and be engaged, that's better. And I realized that less things, less customization, less white labeling, less of basically that led to more engagement and more growth, which is ultimately what people wanted, even though they didn't say that that's what they wanted. They said what they wanted was that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So that's where like the art of it comes in, right? It's like the that overdone saying from Henry Ford, if I had asked the people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. Right. Right? But what they're really saying is they want to go A to B faster, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Well, you're big on simplicity and design. I think even like five years ago, is there a book called The Design of Everyday Things or something like that? You recommended me that book. So I'm curious, if you think about like AI right now and these coding agents, and you know, you see Anthropic, they're like shipping a new feature every other day, and now you can't, uh I can't even keep up with it. How do you balance the fact that now with software with these agents and all this stuff, you can ship things so fast, and how are you sort of balancing that with holding the line of making sure school doesn't become such a conglomeration of a bunch of new features nobody needs?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, the game was never to just ship a lot of stuff fast. That's that can lead to the end. Right? Like, we could quickly end ourselves if we just went on a rampage of shipping random shit. Like, every time you add, you make it more complicated. And you can also make it worse, right? Um, it's also hard to take away once you've added, right? Because people, if once people start using it, right, it becomes very hard. And you can kind of become trapped. So just because it if it just because it's we can do something doesn't mean we should. Like we still have that philosophy and approach. And it like right now I know what people want isn't different features, it's again growth, engagement, right? Yeah. Like who wakes up and thinks I want a feature? Like, I'm pretty sure no one, maybe some weirdos, but like normal people don't want features, they want like actual growth or engagement or like, or they want it to work. Right. You know, they want more members. Yeah, and they want to make money and they want their members to show up and get value. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So when you think about because obviously you're you're in the community and you're trying to help them achieve that goal, and there could be a lot of features that you could add, etc. And there's some, I'm sure, that are good ideas, and some stuff, I mean, obviously you've got to ship some stuff. So when you have all the things that you think, let's say you box into are a good idea, how exactly with the engineers are you prioritizing what needs to come first versus okay, that's maybe a good idea, but that's gonna be next year, the year after, etc.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, it's quite simple because there's a billion things, there's like infinite things we could do. Right. Right. But there's only like a few things we can do now. Right? And so it's always about it's not about yes or no, it's about prioritization. So like what are the most important things right now? That's all you really need to do. Right? Because once you've done those, everything changes again. Not everything, but a lot changes, right? Um, and so it's pointless to try to be like, that's a good idea, we'll schedule it in for this time. And we don't do that. Like our roadmap in terms of like detail is only 30 days out. Like, because things can change a lot in 30 days, right? Then we have like a list of vague ideas that we want to do, and and those are always kind of moving in terms of priority, but in terms of like actual roadmap and what we know what we're gonna do, it's it's not that far out into the future. That makes things a lot like that's the only way to deal with this because otherwise you would go insane.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So going back to the decision to really build something with a network effect from the very beginning, uh, I know one of the books you had all your uh old consulting.com employees read, David Dre told me this was the cold start problem. Because obviously, with a network effect, you're not just going, it's not like a software I would sell, you know, where I'd go out there and do a sales call and sell it. It's something that has to kind of take hold and essentially grow. So for the people listening, can you explain what the cold start problem is? And then I'm curious how you thought about overcoming it and how school really did overcome it.
SPEAKER_00It's hilarious. I didn't know that I recommended everyone read it. Because I only read like two chapters. And then you got it. I think I got it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03It looks like it worked out, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um, but it also didn't age too well because I think one of the first examples is that was um what's it called? Uh Clubhouse. Yeah. Yeah. And then like it quickly disintegrated. But you know, the the core idea is right. I'll give it that. Um, and it's basically like when you deal with a marketplace or a um a network, the value comes from everyone being there, right? Um, so like what's the point in buying the first telephone? Who are you gonna call? Who's gonna call you? Right? It's useless.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And networks are like that. If you're the only one in there, there's it's not a network. Um, and the the value of the network grows with the number of people that are on it. And so you have to figure it's like the chicken and the egg problem, right? Like which one do you get first? Because you need an egg to get a chicken, but you need a chicken to get an egg, right? That's that's the hardest part about this. Like, well, getting it started, it and still it is the hardest part about it. It makes it very complicated compared to just building a tool that you can give to people, right?
SPEAKER_03So how do you think because you have to get initial, like you know, the story of Facebook, right? Is they started with us one college, then multiple colleges, then high schools, then everything, right? What was the version of that for school?
SPEAKER_00One school. Like my one for my own, for my business, right? I remember I moved one one over first, just me. There was no other, you couldn't even create a group on school. It was on it was only one group. Um, and I think it was like Accelerator or Quantum or like one of the things. I think it was quantum, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so I was like, if I can just contain this one network, like, and make it functional and and good and and run my business on it and and it and it be nice for everyone, then then more should want to do it too, right? And so I spent a long time just trying to get things right with my own stuff. And then when I did that for long enough, people said, Hey, can I use this too? Then we let them use it too. Then they add questions and things and we improve it for them and yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Well, I would think too that wouldn't you think that really the info industry is kind of the first initial user base for it. And then now, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that there's all sorts of different stuff that they wouldn't consider themselves info, they wouldn't even know what info is, right? But it's expanded beyond that. Like, let's say I know there's UFC fighters who have communities, there's Chris Bumstead as a community, there's communities for pottery and stuff. So I would think that like kind of the initial school's collar for um what Facebook's was for colleges was kind of the info industry, and then it sort of kind of expanded on from there. Would you agree?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that was like it was what I was doing, so it was easy to start there because I knew it and I could put my own stuff there. And it was also who I had in my network, and I also like the space. Um, but you know, I actually started as a user of forums long ago, and not about info of money or anything, like about rock climbing or overclocking computers or um or playing counter professional counter-strike um or building race cars, like just random uh hobbies and interests that I had. Like I learned how to do almost everything on forums on the internet, yeah, including building a race car, like while I was at school. And you built one. Yeah, yeah. Like the whole thing, the engine, like the internals, like all of it, roll cage, like That's wild. Yeah. And I just learned, I was like 18 years old, and I was just on forums chatting to people, and they just tell me, yeah. Yeah. Um, and so I started there, and I loved that about the internet. That's the thing that I fell in love with was that you could do anything. And I remember one day I was like pulling the engine out of my race car with this engine hoist thing in my parents' driveway, and the neighbor looked over the fence and he was like, That is crazy. How do you know what you're doing? And I said to him, The internet. Yeah. And he was just like, he didn't have any idea. But it was like, that's how I knew what to do, right? Um, the internet, and so that's what I loved about the internet, and that I could find, no matter what the interest was, even if it was, you know, building a race car, I could find that forum or that space online, and there would be other people as obsessed as me, which was really nice, because if I just talked to someone on the street, like they don't give a shit about an engine.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And that they would freely, because they like the interaction too with other like-minded people, they would freely share with me and help me, right? Yeah, and so and I would even trade parts on there, like I'd buy parts from people, I would meet up with people, I'd hang out with people, and so that was my like passion, was the internet in random interests and like-minded people doing doing things. And then, you know, I got into the corporate world, didn't like that, so started my own business, right? So it started just as a user and being a passionate user of it, but then I went to university, got a corporate job, went there, I really didn't like it. It kind of sucked. Um then I thought, well, start a business. Um Do you know this full? I know the story, but go on. Yeah. I I'll I'm making it kind of brief. But then how I tried starting a business and it it didn't work like I sucked. Like I failed a few times. Did I tell you about the cafe loyalty card app that I made? No, I don't think so. Yeah. I always wonder how much detail I should give in these little parts of the story, but like back then everyone was making apps. That because the iPhone was new and it was all about apps. So I was like, what kind of app can I make? And I went to this cafe and bought a coffee, and you know how they've got those loyalty cards where you get five stamps? Yeah. And I had one of those and I was like, I can make an app for this, right? And then so I mocked it up and everything, and then I went back to the cafe and I tried to pitch this guy like this out. And I pitched him, and he was like, What's wrong with my paper one? And I thought about it and I was like, fuck. It's probably better than my app. Yeah. And that was the end of that. Um, I had a lot of ideas like that, and I really wasn't I was clueless, I had no idea what I was doing. Um I started listening to interviews online from entrepreneurs, and back then it will most people won't even believe me, but there was like no interviews of entrepreneurs on the internet back then. There was like one website, and there might have been 30 interviews, not even shooting you. It was called mixergy.com by the way. Yeah. That was the only place that you could hear entrepreneurs do interviews back then, which is crazy. Now there's it's all over the place. Um, and this guy had started a software company, and he was gonna teach people how to do it, and he started this course, and I joined that, and so I started in this industry as a customer and as an end user of an info product or community, whatever. And then he taught me like the most don't come up with ideas, instead, go and ask the market what their problems are and solve those, and it will work. And I was like, this is genius. This is I've been coming up with ideas, and then I find that no one wants them. So then I just started cold calling people, trying to learn about their business. It was fascinating that they would just tell me everything. And I came up with this idea for a property inspection app because everyone said they hated inspections. Then I mocked that one up and came back to them and they bought it. And I was like, holy shit. It was like a magic experience. And that company was successful, and it still exists today. I sold my shares to my co-founder, it's called snapinspect.com. But I didn't like property management, right? But what I fell in love with was that online entrepreneur community and experience, like that was awesome. And I flew over to America to hang out with these people, and that's what ultimately led to me moving to America, and I just wanted to be in this industry, right? Like, and so then I started in this industry with like making courses and things, and what I learned about this industry is it was great. The thing that makes it great is that it's where doers teach, right? And so have you heard the saying, like those that can't do teach? Yes. It's it's true in the classical education space. And because for example, I took an entrepreneurship paper at university, and the guy had a PhD in entrepreneurship, but he had tried to start one business that failed, and he had a PhD. Whereas I listened to like one call with some random guy on the internet, and I started a successful business because he had done it, right? Exactly. And so that's what I loved about this industry, is it was it made a lot of sense to me. It was very for very similar to how it worked building race cars and all of that. You were just talking to the people doing it, right? Um and so, you know, I started doing courses in this industry and stuff, and and I I love this industry, but then I started to see that there was an opportunity for a platform that could make this a lot easier, and then I thought if I made this simple enough, the mainstream could adopt it and all of those interests could come on too. Because the thing info has figured out is how to make money with info, that's what they're really good at. But what it's missing a lot of is like passion and soul and and and things like that. Yeah. And so I I knew that if I made it simple enough and and solved enough of the problems that I could get all the hobbies and interests on too. And then it's like all that would matter was the passion. And so does that kind of answer your question?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and what I want to know is when you when you feel like our industry, so we've we've figured out how to make money, but we're kind of losing the passion and the soul. How do you think that shows up in kind of the way the industry operates or what you've seen?
SPEAKER_00I mean, running the businesses, if it starts to feel bad, is a good indicator, right? I was running one of these businesses and I didn't really like it. I didn't like what I had to do to make it work. Um I also nothing was really inspiring me that much. Like I didn't I wasn't like browsing around being like, this is so awesome. Like a lot of it looked like the same. Um and it wasn't like very fun. Um that's that was just my experience of it, right? And I thought it was extremely inefficient. If you think about like this industry, it's like highly fragmented, and most of the time is spent marketing, right? Yeah. So that showed me that it was probab the fragmentation is why everyone spends so much time marketing, by the way. What do you mean by that? So every like it there's no place where you can just see like where the best shit is. Yeah. It's all like over all over the place, right? Right. All disconnected, all over the internet. And people use all of these proxies to s to to determine if something's good or not. Like, oh, the dude's got a Lambo, must be good. Yeah. You know, like or like the the signals aren't reliable. Yeah, it's a it's a complete minefield. And actually, the most efficient tactic has been not to be good at what you do, but actually just to be famous, which shows me that it's completely kind of corrupt. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? No, exactly. And then because it's all fragmented and everything, people have to spend all their time and money like marketing, not looking after their people or working on their craft, unless their craft is marketing. Yeah. Um, then so I was like, there's got to be a better way to rearrange this, right? Like I thought a lot, like, what if there was an Airbnb kind of thing for this, right? Because to make money in info, how it has been, you when you think about all the little things you need to like figure out, it's insane. So, like, if you've got a website, if you've got a funnel, if you've got Facebook tracking pixel, if you've got like a CRM, an email system, Zapier, then you need like a checkout, payment processor, you know, then analytics, like. How are you supposed to do that? Because you're using 20 different things. Um, and then where do you put your core stuff? Where do you put your videos? Where do you how do you do your calls, your live calls? How you know, like we're we're talking about 20 systems already, right?
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_00And then gluing them all together, and then trying to like look at all of this disconnected data to try to figure out what's going on, and then don't even get me started on the accounting of it all. Like it's crazy. Like to expect that to go mainstream is it's impossible. Like that that like imagine if someone's just talented at knitting or cooking, and someone says to them, Oh, you should you should make a community for that online, or you should do this online, you could make money doing this online. They can't, like, they would have to sacrifice their passion.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Right? And hate their life. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03If you ever wanted to get my one-on-one help in terms of scaling your business, then listen up really fast. So we're taking on a few clients where I can personally one-on-one audit their business across marketing, sales, operations, fulfillment, finance to be able to tell you what your constraint actually is. And ultimately, what are the one to three things you need to do next to be able to scale, working entirely one-on-one with me? So if that's interesting, there's a link in the description that'll say call one-on-one that you can go book. But essentially, not only will you get my personal advice, but we'll also be opening up our entire playbooks of my $36 million year company across marketing sales, operation fulfillment, finance. So you can basically model the best practices of what we've done right into your business. And it'll include the opportunity to meet in person up at an event with me. So if that's interesting, click the link in the description and mount back to the video. Do you think kind of part of your own personal mission is because this industry has done so much for you, you want to help sort of take it mainstream and almost legitimize it more so more people can have access to it and not have to worry about the marketing and the advertising and all this stuff and just focus on the passion?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think if this industry is a f is properly efficient, then talent and passion should be the most important thing. Obviously, market need is always there, right? Because you can't fight the market. But if you come up with something that is cool and you're good at it and you're passionate about it, it should pop. And you shouldn't need to go and learn all this other shit. Yeah. That was what I that was the the the dream. I didn't know if I'd be able to achieve that. What's crazy is that that started happening now. I don't know if you've seen this GTA community that we've got. No, it's gotta be good. You've seen it?
unknownOn Instagram, on Instagram.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so this this is crazy. This guy made this community. It's called GTA Creator Academy. He just comes up with the idea, makes the artwork for it, and he's he's teaching people how to make money with the GTA 6 game before it launches, right? Costs like, I don't know, 25 bucks a month, something like that. He has no audience, just an idea, puts it on school. Within one week, he has like 250 paying members, and it just popped. Just like that. Like he didn't do he just came just the idea and the concept and his passion for it, just that was all he needed. Um, and it's still on the home page. Well, when I checked this morning, it was like number three trending on the homepage of school, and that's what's starting to happen now.
SPEAKER_03Interesting.
SPEAKER_00So it that's really and what's so cool to me is you know, you can't fight the market, right? You the what we have on school must match with what the market wants, right? And I was wondering, I wonder what the market wants. I guess we'll find out when we started doing all of this. And it's really refreshing to see what the market wants.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And way more accessible, right? Like the price points are like in between, I don't know, nine dollars and a hundred dollars a month kind of thing. So very accessible, fun, and and that's that's what's working right now. We're we're at another community, it's called like AI Video Bootcamp. Have you seen this thing? So these guys don't have an audience, they have a nine dollar product. Like, you know, in the old orthodoxy of info, you if you said you're gonna make a nine dollar a month product, everyone would call you an idiot, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah. So this community makes like 250 grand a month, and it's the hottest selling thing on school, and they had no audience, and their product's nine bucks. And they got there in maybe four months. And this is coming from the discovery feature, right?
SPEAKER_03And the ads that we run. Yeah. So explain that because that's been over the past what three to six months, probably the biggest focus of what Oh, this the ads and the growth stuff we've s I mean, we've been optimizing discovery on school, which is like search and trending and stuff, right.
SPEAKER_00Um, for maybe like two months. But then when we started running ads for people, that's only like two weeks old. Oh, really? Explain that because most people probably don't know what that is, what the the growth is. Like I said earlier, people want engagement and they want growth, right? I that's and if you ask people really what they want, they want more members because that would help them make more money, right? And the the old way of doing that has been, well, you've got to go start a YouTube. It's like, whoa, that's a massive job, and that might take a year or some shit, right? Um, but that has been the answer up until like two weeks ago. Um but then we had this idea which was like, what if we tested basically everything on school, just all of it. We we started running programmatically ads for the products on skill. So it's fully automated, you don't see anything. So this guy, this GTA guy just added his cover image, added a group description and stuff, and like within I don't know, a few hours it was just like that. And so what's happening in the background is it's all programmatic, like through API and everything. We take that community, put it into an ad and try to find an audience for it and run it out to the market to see if there's and to see if it hits or not, right? The same way when you upload a YouTube video, it the algorithm takes it and it sees like how hot it is, right? Interesting. And very similar to YouTube, in in it's almost a one-to-one mapping, it's crazy. It's all about the packaging. So the cover image is the thumbnail, the title, and the little description. If you look at the homepage of school right now, it's just banger packaging, right? Um, and this guy, this GTA guy had a cool concept and good packaging. And when we and there's also a market for it, right? There's a lot of people who like GTA.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00So our algorithm found it and the economics worked, so we pushed it, right? So that's what's going on just all behind the scenes now. It's like usually you would have to test the market. Like, think about how hard it is for a regular person to like do market testing to see if there's their business is viable. Right. Like, fuck. Yeah. It's forget about it.
SPEAKER_03And so the way that would show up is at the end result of all that is just a Facebook ad, essentially. But it all comes from how they essentially set up their thumbnail, so to speak, within the discovery page and so on and so forth.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, it's more than that because you know, a lot of people just visit school discovery anyway, like more than a million people a day, and they're browsing and searching. Search is huge. Like search, I would say, is most of discovery still. Even though we're running ads, search is still the main thing. And so naturally there's people coming there every day, browsing and searching. That's one way you can be discovered, right? But then we added this other element to it where we go off our platform and we just run the ad to see if it's if it hits. Because one's like intent-based where someone searches, and the other one is like going out and seeing if it's there, right? Yeah. And then when it hits there, it starts trending on our homepage too. So like people coming in normally can find it, and the two kind of feed on each other, or something might hit from search and then get distributed on ads. I don't want to explain too much about how it works. Right.
SPEAKER_03Because it's but but and can you answer this though? Because you mentioned it's all API based and that you essentially created an algorithm for it as well. So is that I mean, that algorithm is that AI driven, or is that been a big has AI been a big part of this being able to do this? And also my broader question about this is I was gonna ask this later, but I'll ask it now, is how much um of AI is being used in school and how has it affected how you guys operate day-to-day?
SPEAKER_00There's definitely some AI involved, not the normal, not like you know, LLMs and GBT and things, what what normal people would think. But there's a an algorithm is like a form of AI, right? Exactly. And so there, yeah, there's a lot of algorithms. There's also like image detection stuff and and um and some AI, but you know, like with this feature and the rollout of it, like I never even want to say the word AI because I don't think most normal people care. They just want it to work, right? And so if it just works, who cares what's under the hood? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. What when it comes to AI, because so I was watching your My First Million podcast, this was years ago with uh Sam and Sean, and you weren't too impressed with AI. You were kind of like, it's like slop, I just use Google. I don't have much utility for it. Has that view changed at all for you?
SPEAKER_00For images, yeah. Like I I used to go to Photoshop and I was I was uh I was pretty average. Um now I go to Chat GPT for images, right? So like I think its image generation capabilities are pretty cool. I hate its text generation capability. I think it's awful. Like I think people sharing things written by machines is is stupid. Yeah. Like write it yourself. If you've got nothing to say, just don't say anything. Right? Like I I really don't like that. There's also something special about like it's almost like the spirit of someone comes across in their words if they carefully select them, right? But when it's some you know what it's like reading someone's AI books, I just don't even know. It's fucking awful. I'll send it right back. Yeah. Yeah. So I hate that. And then just day-to-day decision making, honestly, I never really use it because like what am I I always ask people like, what am I gonna use it for? Like, what am I gonna use it for? Really, like tell me. Well, do your engineers use it, coding agents? We don't write code with AI. Really? Why not? Because we've tried it and it's not that great. Um and I'm sure you've even heard now it's starting to come out that like even Meta's kind of fucking up their product with too much vibe code. Yeah, yeah. You like I said, the the goal was never to ship a lot of stuff, it was to make something that works, right? And with software like the devil's in the details, it's insane. Sometimes you can chase a little detail for months. And AI like can is very bad at that, right? Like it's kind of sloppy. Um, but it has definitely made us more efficient. There's places where it's useful, but it's like not in for us, it's not writing code. Um, you know, there might be some things that you can use it for that will help you. Like, it's quite good at SQL query optimization. So if you've got a SQL query and you it's slow and you ask it, how can I make this faster, it's pretty good. It's also good as like code base being source of truth instead of documentation. So instead of like laboring to create all of this documentation to explain what's in the code and always updating it, which sucks. You can ask if you use like Claude code and stuff, you can ask Claude about the code and it knows it. So the code base becomes the source of truth instead of the documentation. That makes sense. That accelerates things a lot. And then, you know, in the like monotonous stuff like um code review, so reviewing code before it gets shipped to production is a huge thing. Because you've got to thoroughly check code before it goes to production, otherwise everything can go haywire. And this is getting kind of technical. I don't know how No, I think it's very interesting. Okay, okay, okay. But like usually how that would work is you know, someone, an engineer's kind of finished up their feature, like they want to go to code review, they send it over to code review. One of our best engineers has to stop what they're doing to review it, and then give feedback, and then that person might do it again. Now they submit it again, and that person. So you're taking your talented people offline to review stuff, and they're also waiting for like some lag. So now there's a you know, we've got a like a AI code review thing. What that allows the engineers to do is just hit it early and often, because it's not taking someone offline, and do their own cycles of code review a lot before they go to a human. So then when the human comes to it, it's already probably they've caught a lot of the stuff that the human might. And then the human can also run the check using AI too, so it it massively accelerates that process, basically. And it can also be good for like um you know, for for many things, but like I think the internet's very bad at like nuance, right? You hear AI is gonna take everyone's job, right? AI is gonna write all the code, like, but at the same time, you also see that the demand for software engineers is through the roof. Exactly. So obviously it's not true.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, even the companies that are saying AI is gonna take all the jobs are hiring the most amount of engineers at the highest pay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So it's like the the reality is much more like nuanced, and it's good at some things, it's really not good at other things, and you gotta type kind of take a pragmatic approach where you use the tool where it's best, right? But you can't build insane hype around that. So yeah.
SPEAKER_03So on the on the note of technical talent, um, tell me the story about finding Daniel, because I know that I think you had built up school a little bit, and then you found them, and then basically it was building it up again. But I'll let you tell the story.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, uh trying to build this thing, you know, your ascent step one was to make a better Facebook group. That's what I was thinking. Right. And my the the sentence I had in my head was like Facebook groups, but better, right? Like that's an enormous step one. When you look at what's inside Facebook, you got DMs, notifications, you got app, video, lives, posts, comments, likes just a lot, right? Look at this, it's insane how much there is in there. And but it's also a social network, which is it they're quite hard to make, honestly. There's a reason why there's not a lot of them. Um and the standard that everyone expects is extremely high. Because it's like Facebook groups, but better. That they've got some of the best engineers, they've got like trillions of dollars, and you know, they're it's hard to meet that standard, right? And uh even the things like the speed of it is extremely important. Like yeah, most people dramatically underestimate how important this speed is. Because if something's a little bit laggy, people just ow, right? Like it's gotta be fast. And that's hard to do. And you need exceptional engineers to be able to achieve the standard. So I knew that in order to even have a chance, I needed to be at the standard, right? In order to have a chance, not in order to succeed, but in order to like have a chance. And that the only way I could do that is if I had some of the best engineers in the world, essentially, right? There was no other way. You can't you can't achieve that standard with talent that isn't also at that standard, right? So the the hardest part about school, especially in the beginning, was finding engineers talented enough to make school. And talented engineers tend to follow talented engineers. There's nothing more repulsive to a talented engineer than a non-talented engineer, right? So who you have first is very important. Because if you have someone average, you will continue to get people worse than them, right? But you have someone great, you will be able to get other people that are great. And so I knew that we needed to do that. And so the first essentially like the first engineer or the co-founder and the CTO had to be really good. And so then I set out to try to find a really good software engineer or co-founder, and that took a long time. It took me about a year. I did maybe five, six hundred interviews. It's like all I did for like a year, it was pretty, pretty hardcore. And I eventually, just by chance, found it was just like a fluke. You know, if you do something enough, you get a fluke. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and I managed to find Daniel, and without him, it would be completely impossible. Like nothing really happened until we found him. And then, you know, I'd hired some other engineers and and we'd built something, but it wasn't very good. And we were also moving kind of slow. Then he came along and we made more progress in a week than we had in a year. And then we that's when we started moving. And that's when I had my first taste too of what like really good talent is like. Yeah. And it immediately made me feel inferior, which I really liked. Because I would rush to the office, I was like, I gotta get ahead of Daniel before he catches up and ask me for the next thing. And I was like living in anxiety that I couldn't keep up, like, but I I loved it. I've never had that feeling before. Usually it's the other way around, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing was is I would think about something a lot, give it to him. He would ignore some of the things I said, break the rules, and come back to me with something that was better. And I was like, whoa, this has never happened to me before. Usually you give someone something, it comes back not how you wanted it, then you have to exert effort to get it there. This was something very different.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so you knew immediately he was the right person. Yeah. And so was there a um obviously that was when he started working. When you were in the interview process, did you know right away, or what was kind of the signal that that was obviously the right person to go with?
SPEAKER_00It's hard because if you're not a software engineer, you can't really know what a good software engineer is, right? Right. Um, but also the people I had said he wasn't good. Preservation. Oh yeah. There's so many complicated things going on, right? All my wife was like, I have a good feeling about this guy. And I did too. And what we were doing currently wasn't working so well. And so like it took me a little bit to like untangle that and I was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna I'm gonna have a go. Because ultimately you don't know until you until you try, right? Um, but then once he started like day one, it was very it was immediate, immediately obvious on day one. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Hey, if the way you sell your product or service is through phone sales, you need to stop using booking systems like OneSub County, iClose, and other booking systems that aren't designed specifically for a phone sales approach or a phone sales team. So we at SalesKick just launched a new calendar and booking system that'll decrease your cost per book call because it's conversion rate optimized specifically for call funnels, whereas most other calendar systems are meant for corporate all-purpose booking and it'll increase your show rate. So we've had clients see 30 to 100% increases in their show rate because our calendar system is specifically designed for call funnels and other funnels that are high volume sales call booking funnels. And the software does so much more. It's really the only product designed specifically for sales teams with inbound booking systems. So if you're interested, go to saleskick.com, check it out. Now back to the video. You know what's interesting you said about culture in terms of hiring that person and them keeping the standard. I have a I had a lot of clients ask me, like, they want to create a culture like my company. And they're like, How do you create such a good culture? How do you create almost like it's something you do after the fact? And you know what's funny is I realized, because I was really thinking about it that way too. And then I realized it's actually something you really set with the initial conditions.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Because I thought back to, well, I never really tried to do it. I just had my first six hires, were all phenomenal hires, all full stack, not like people who were doing little jobs. It was people who were doing many jobs. And then they just love the culture. So much that they really preserved it and made sure we kept hiring. So it sounds like it was very similar.
SPEAKER_00Well, yeah. I mean, I I had built a company before, right? And I knew that when I wanted to do this, I had to start again. Sometimes the answer, if you depending on the standard you're trying to achieve, I knew that in order to hit the standard, I had to start again.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah. And he basically redid the whole product in the first 30 days. You had to scrap everything that you had built up into that point. Yeah. So by I think it's 2022, school has like a recognizable shape. There's users. Um, I don't know if there was revenue at that time or not, but you were still running quantum.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And maybe up level a little bit, or I think it was WeTube at the time. And so I know I believe you were doing 300 grand a month, maybe profit from those businesses, and school's burn was just eclipsing 300 grand a month. And that's when you decided to just go all in. So, two-part question. How did you know that was the time? And do you think maybe you should have just done it earlier if you had to do it again?
SPEAKER_00So, in in the beginning, like to start school, because the most important thing wasn't the business model, it was making something that was like Facebook groups, but better. And if if it if I couldn't do that, who cares if what the business model is? It won't work anyway. So ignoring the business model part I found very helpful for me because it was many years of just building to achieve that. Right? And thinking about making money just just changes the dynamics.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And then, you know, over time we've hired more engineers, we have more users, our costs have gone up, right? And we need to hire more engineers and spend more money. And so now the no business model problem is a pro real problem. And also the I was cash flowing the cost with my info business, but now it it wouldn't work. And also my infobus needed my time. So I was like money constrained and time constrained, and both things like yeah, it was it was very stressful. Um, and my first instinct, because it was this is just how I used to think, because I might, you know, how I used to run the business was like, you want more money, you you sell something, right? You like make a course. So I made WeTube, right? Made a million dollars. That disappeared pretty quick. I was like, fuck. And I also had to make WeTube, which was taking time away from school. Um, and I was like, I can't, this isn't working like so. I thought we need to start charging for school. Um and so we came up with a simple business model, like $99 a month. Um then we emailed all of the users and said, Will you pay? And surprisingly, a lot of them said yeah. And so now school is making some money, not a lot, but maybe like a million dollars a year, but you know, its costs are probably more than that. Um so then I'm like, I'm still running quantum and I've got this, but at least there's a business model there now. So I was doing all of this math to be like, if I shut this down now and go all into this, how long will it take to get to the point where like we'll survive? And it was like this gap. I was like, can I make this gap? It's like trying to jump a gap on a on a bike or something. Because you know, if I go all in, maybe we can grow faster and then we get to this point, and I can go all in if I shut down quantum, but the hard part was that to shut down quantum I had to refund a bunch of people because they had unused time, and so that made the math more interesting. Um it wasn't until it's I couldn't figure it out still like this. It just the math wasn't working. But then I came up with the idea to to ask quantum, my my mastermind people, if they wanted to invest. Right. And that actually worked. Um and I started, I think, with you, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I was I think I was the first one outside of maybe you let a few of the consulting employees uh invest first. But I think I was the first outside investor.
SPEAKER_00I thought if I got you, then I'd get quantum. Yeah. So I went and got you first. Yeah. I flew over there. I'm glad you did. I was like, I'm gonna get coal, and then when I pitch quantum, I'm gonna say coal's already in.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. And then I knew that probably And then you said the amount too, and they were like, Oh, I guess if he did that much, I at least gotta do this. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00And so it's like marketing in a way, right? Yeah. Getting some social proof. And then I told people at Quantum, I remember I only mentioned it for like five, ten minutes, that was it. And I just said, if you're interested, apply here. It was I didn't know what to expect. And then later that night after the mastermind, I remember looking at the Google Sheet and it was like five or six million. I was like, holy shit. It's like I wasn't expecting that. So I raised five million from people in quantum basically from like a 20-minute pitch. Yeah. And then I redid the math, and now I could jump that gap. So then I closed down quantum and refunded people. So it's kind of a funny sequence, right? Like I was doing quantum to fund it, but then I raised money from quantum to shut down quantum to do this thing.
SPEAKER_03What's so funny about that? That that weekend, which we were here in this building, was it was honestly a blast. And, you know, I was already invested, so obviously I have a vested interest in trying to make that as successful as possible. And you didn't ask me to do anything, but I'm just like, my inner sales guy can't help it. So I was like, I think you need to do a little bit more, man. Like I think, I think, no, you should a hundred percent do it. I almost just turned on my uh sales gear and I was like trying to make as much of that as possible. So since then you've you've raised more money, and I'm curious just because I know you've delved into this world so much. Like, what's the biggest thing you've learned just in general about venture capitalists?
SPEAKER_00It's a game of whoever needs who the least. You it's like being a hot girl at a party, basically. Like, if you make something great, there's not many of them, and everyone wants to invest. The hard part is making something really great, right? So I never learned anything about raising or anything. All I was trying to do is make something good. That was it. And I never really pitched anyone, I've never made a deck. Like, still to this day, never made a deck. And I have VCs constantly spamming. We get cold calls and shit. Like, it's weird. Um, they they like, you know, they want to put money into goods good companies, and there's not a lot of good companies, you realize. Yeah, there's way more capital than there is good companies, right? Capital needs a place to go. Um, so if you just make something great, you'll people will knock on your door and want to give you money. Whereas, you know, if you try to raise capital, like, okay, now that's a whole effort, and you can probably still achieve it, but how much energy you're going to exert to pull it off, right? Like, I don't know, that wasn't worth it for me. Yeah. Um and so I never tried. It just people started coming and asking.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah. And so when you're, you I mean, you have the limited supply and right and all the demand. So when you have all these VCs wanting to give you money and you do need to raise, are you choosing them? I mean, obviously the terms is probably part of it. Is part of who you choose a values alignment thing? Or like what's the decision making, maker, uh, making filter or decision filtering that you kind of go through to choose who to go with?
SPEAKER_00Um so for ages I just ignored it and put them all into a folder in my Gmail, right? That was all I was doing. I wasn't even assessing them because I was like just building the thing. But then, you know, we did the hormosey thing and blew up, but then I was starting to see like the cracks in our business model, like charging $99 a month just for people to create communities. It was getting harder and harder to grow. And the main complaint we were hearing is it's too expensive, right? So I thought we need to lower the price. If we're serious about making this thing mainstream, we it needs to lower price point. $9 felt like free, basically. It's also 11 times cheaper than 99. And I this was my idea. I was like, we need to do this. And I pitched it to our team, our leadership team, and everyone was like terrified. They're like, we can't do it, we don't have enough money. Because everyone was trying to do this math, how many people downgrade and you know, all of this. Making lowering your price by 11 times generally isn't good business advice, right? Usually people are saying increase your prices.
SPEAKER_03And you were doing more because you're adding live streaming, oh yeah, video, and all of that stuff. So it's 10 times less for 10 times more.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I said to the team, my plan is unlimited expensive things for 90% off. I was serious, and they were all terrified, and they said we need to raise money. And I was like, oh fuck. Um then a VC emails me that day. Says, hey, like, do you want some money? Basically. And I was like, actually, this time I do. Because, you know, I just I want to do this nine million. And then I chatted to them and I liked the I liked them. That was the main other than the timing is a big part of it, right? Because it it came at a time when I really needed it, but also I really liked them. Like, I just I think that's super important because you're gonna disagree on so many things, and if you don't just like the person, it'll be terrible, right? But if you like the person, you can still live with it when you're disagreeing. He also had some very good experience, like he was like CEO of like Blizzard games when they changed business models and stuff. Um the other thing was their strength was really data, like they were hardcore on data, and that was also our weakness, and I liked that, right? So I liked that they were like exposing things that we didn't even know, and like because I knew that was gonna make us better. Um, so a combination of timing, liking them, and their strength being our weakness and me liking what that did to us. Um and also like they just they like almost like forced it. Um, because I said to them, I don't know what I'm gonna do with this money. I was like, I got no idea what to do with it. And I don't even know if now's the right time. And they said, just take it. I was like, all right, then fine. Like let's and good good deal, good terms, all of that. Um yeah.
SPEAKER_03So, and you've mentioned repeatedly now, you know, when it came to raising money and also just the focus of school overall, is it's not about money, it's just about your only focus was creating something great.
SPEAKER_00I wanted to do the nine dollar plant. That was it. I didn't see VC money, I saw nine dollar plant.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So I'm curious. Do you do you take a because when you say that, I think about like Steve Jobs, like he's famous for saying, you know, money is a you know, it's a byproduct, but all we want to do is just create great products. Yeah. And so have you taken a lot of inspiration from him and John Ivy and stuff like that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I really don't care about the money, which might sound like but I I do care about the money because it's important to build, right? But I don't the money isn't the main thing for me, it's the building that that I like. So it's math. Money is like math, right? And there's a lot of math in this. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So back to the decision about the $9 versus 99. Obviously, you ended up lowering the price and creating a new tier. The leadership team was really scared. How did you guys get through that decision to finally just be able to give it a shot?
SPEAKER_00Well, once we had the money, everyone's like, all right, fine, let's try it. They were still scared. Yeah. Yeah. But like once we had the money, it was like there's a lot of padding, you know.
SPEAKER_03Okay. So it was really the the the funding is what made it kind of essentially possible.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And also the plan of unlimited expensive things for 90% off, like saying unlimited live streaming, unlimited video, and dropping the price right down, right? Like, that's kind of ballsy, and we were only willing to take those kinds of risks knowing that we had more capital. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Well, and one thing is I feel like it's an intuitive decision. And I think one of the biggest things, because I've known you for a while now, that I've seen change in you over the years, is developing more intuition and then using that in business. So can you speak on that and how you think about using intuition and following it and the importance of that as it's been in terms of you know running school?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, you can imagine how many possible things we could do with skill. There's like a million different directions we could go in. Everyone wants different stuff. We could go in all kinds of different directions, right? And the amount of data you could look at is infinite, right? Um like you could just you would die just trying to like look at all the data. Like it's just crazy. Um and so if you're trying to be like calculated and data driven and stuff, it you won't go anywhere. You will be like paralyzed, right? Um So I think it's you if you don't have intuition, it's um I think it's extremely hard. And I don't honestly don't know how you would do it. Because to to actually gather data and make a like data-informed decision is a lot of effort every single time, right? And you have to make so many decisions all the time that like you you would just be stuck. Um so when you in the absence of that, like what do you have, right, to to make choices with? You that's really all you have is your instincts and your intuition. The cool thing about this business though is that if you use that, you immediately have data to show whether your intuition was right or not. Right. So I do make pretty much, I would say, most of my choices with intuition, but I also cannot deny the data. And so that the both of them together has been very, very fascinating because when the intuition starts to map to the data, it tells you you're it's right, and so you trust it more. Do you get what I'm saying? Yeah, it reinforces it. Yeah. And I think you'll notice this with all of the best people, like they use it a lot. Like, whether it's like basketball players or traders, financial traders, um, it's they use both, but the intuition one is the primary. Yeah. Because if you get it really tuned, it's kind of magic.
SPEAKER_03And so part of, you know, part of the reason I was asking that too, is I know when you did this, you were doing the school games and school was growing like 700% or what have you in a certain time frame. And can you tell the story about how it started to kind of bring in some people or kind of start to create a culture you didn't like? And I think then intuitively that led you to shift some things away. Because obviously the metrics weren't showing that, they were just showing growth, right? But can kind of tell that story and then how your intuition led you to sort of change the school games and also you know, some of the pricing and so on and so forth.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, we did the school games, grew like 700%, then um started to see cracks. Like, one, the growth was slowing, so like it wasn't like it was still going how it was earlier that year. And the culture and vibe was the big, big indicator, right? Like people were doing, we called them like pump and dumps to try to win the school games. They just launch, go hard, make all this money, win the school games, get their photo with Hormosy, run ads, piss Hormosy off. Um and then everyone would churn. And then we'd get complaints at customer support. This person's scammed me, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, holy shit, this what have we done? The peak of it was when we started giving away cyber trucks. It was crazy. And I called it the season of madness, and it did, it went completely mad. There was like stories coming out, and people would DM me and they're like, I don't like what's happening here, or like. And I also saw some interesting things like there were there were some communities on there that were like hobby-based, like this guy, this Dr. Seuss community, and it looked real cool. And it was about his passion, which was Dr. Seuss and all this. But he had closed it, shut it down, churned, and started a new one about how to make money on school.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I asked him why, and it's because he had to pay $99 a month. And so the the even the price was forcing people to to make money, right? And then the the like meta or like the the most efficient tactic was to teach people how to make money with school on school, and when you get too many of those, it's incest, essentially, right? And it and then people judge school as it's it's just like this MLM thing or Hustlebro thing or whatever. And so, you know, I'm seeing parts of this from all over the place, and I can detect like what it is, and then that's what led me to think the way out is nine dollar plan, but then the capital, and then you know, the VCs, and yeah, that was all kind of tied into one. You're trying to solve a problem similar to how I was back when I started school and raised the money to drop that and do this. It's like yeah.
SPEAKER_03And and are the school games, I think I heard you're changing how that's done.
SPEAKER_00They're gonna be like we did change them like a while ago, and we made them a lot cleaner. Like you we don't have the same problems as we did before. But now we're just stopping doing the school games because there's a new school game. The new school game is getting your packaging right and blowing up on Discovery, right? Yeah, and we're already seeing it happen. And then the effect of that, the side effect of that is MRR, there will still be an MRR leaderboard and stuff because I love the transparency, um, and you know, status emojis for different levels, like of MRR, right? And then, but just more like Evergreen always open, and you get a physical reward if you hold your MRR emoji for like 90 days or more. Very similar to how YouTube does their plaques, right? Yeah, yeah. So, like let's say you get to 100k MRR, you maintain it for three months, you get your trophy shipped to you, you're still on the leaderboards, you've got your emoji, right? So it's there's still like a game, but it's not like quarterly based trying to win a school game to come to an event. Like, we're removing that part. But there's absolute there's a better game now than there's ever been, honestly.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. That's gonna be super exciting. And one thing that has always impressed me about you is I remember one time we were on a call, and you were kind of showing me this feature in school, and then you would show me like a gaming website, and you'd be like, You see how they do this here with their engagement and their gamification, like, and then that was incorporated into school, and then you'd show me Airbnb and this one thing you liked about there and incorporating into that. And I think there was the same with Google, and you just mentioned like YouTube, and I think what really separates you as an entrepreneur is I mean, it seems like you just love software and you have a great taste for what good products are. And so I'm curious if you can talk about how you think about that at all and how that's helped you create such a good product.
SPEAKER_00Well, you know, I like I said, I've been using the internet since before Google. Right. So I had to write down websites in my notebook and then go to them, and if I got a single letter wrong, it wouldn't work, right? And then to call my friend back to find out what their website was, I had to disconnect from the internet to call them.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_00That's where it began. Um and then you Google changed everything. I was like, Google is insane. Google to this day is my favorite evolution of the internet ever. And why is that? Think about what it did to the world. That's really what unlocked everything. Yeah. Before Google, you couldn't, you had to go to the library or some shit, right? Or you had an Encarta. Oh no, the Enkata was the evolution after the insight, the Encarta physical copies. Remember people had those in their bookshelves? Yeah. That was your knowledge base. Then they put it on a disc, and that was your knowledge base. And I remember exhausting that shit pretty quick. And then you needed to get on the internet, but then then you could get more, but you didn't know where to find it, so you had to like trade websites with your friends. Google just made it, you could just type in any word and boom, there it was. That changed everything, honestly. And then, yeah, that was that blew my mind, and it it it really, without that, and the internet would not be the same. And then, you know, all the other parts of then Google basically invented the internet. Not really, but pretty much. Yeah, it or it organized all the world's information on a way that there was a directory. Yeah, it's my favorite. And so, and then, you know, using forums, um, and then seeing what happened, and you know, it was the combination of Google and forums, that was very interesting. And then, you know, YouTube came out, and then the videos started being embedded in the forums. And so you were like, you've got a search engine, you've got a forum, you've got videos in there. And then seeing what Facebook groups did to that, right? And then seeing what mobile apps did. And just being a using this stuff and experiencing it all over the time and being immersed in it, you just notice a lot of these patterns and and in the evolution of things, right? And these are also like world-class products we're talking about. Like Google was way like Google was like revolutionary when it came out. So was Facebook, um, even YouTube, right? And so if that's your that's my you know, I always think that like people in order to make good stuff, you need to consume good stuff, right? Like you don't know what good is unless you've seen it, right? I honestly think this is most people's problems. Like they might think that their thing is good, but only because they don't know what good actually looks like. And you can't create good unless you know what it is, or even employees. Yeah. It's for everything. Um and you notice this too if you look at like the social network of all geniuses or like scientists or whatever. They had other people that like they had good inputs, basically.
SPEAKER_03So with uh, do you know with the Brazilian jujitsu black belts, it's basically a spider web that all goes to like one or two people at the very top. And so this person influenced this person who influenced this person or this. Isn't it the same with like Newton and Galileo? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, and those people. It's the other one is um it's either Bill Belichick or Bill Parcells. If you Google like the coaching map or like who was inspired by Bill Parcells or Bill Belichick, it's one of those two. It's like all the coaches in the NFL literally came from you know almost that one guy.
SPEAKER_00Because it's good inputs equal to good outputs. Yeah, that's what you realize. Um and so it does it's not like magic, like there's good. So like I grew up with that. I experienced the whole evolution of the internet, right? Like the whole damn thing. And so when I'm working on something, what I can draw from is quite interesting, right? Yeah, I've also been all over the place, like because I was doing it before info just out of personal passion, right? Like, and even my first experience with info was as a customer, not as a creator, right? Yeah. Um, so you know, when I'm using things, I think back to like, oh, that reminds me of when like Google did this or when YouTube did that, and then I go back and read about it. Like, what was going on back then?
SPEAKER_03And and and don't you think that's really like because I hear people say, oh, you know, taste is what matters now with AI or whatever. And it's like, okay, well, what is taste? And I think that's the best description of it. And also the problem a lot of people have with AI and why it is just slump is because they don't know what good looks like and they lack that taste. Would you agree?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and you know, it's just it's wrong a lot. Like, I remember I said something to Kirby once, I was like, with Facebook, when you make a new account, does it ask you for your profile picture first or your bio? And then Kirby asked ChatGPT, and he said, Oh, it said this. And I was like, I don't know. I I seem to remember it might be different. So I just opened Incognito, create a brand new burner account. It's the opposite. And I'm like, see, you can't fucking use this thing for anything. Yeah, that's right. Like, and if you start building something based on you know bad assumptions, every like choice and assumption you make like is important. It all adds up, right? And you want to be right as much as possible. And some things don't matter so much if they're right, and fine, AI is good for that, but there's some things you really want to be right on. And I like to do things manually if I if it's high stakes.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03It's it's almost like if you want to know the truth, you have to go analog and just write to the source. Yeah. So, like I'll give you an example is we are creating another division of our company to address a different market where there's a labor supply shortage for recruiting. And there's a lot of good information I've gotten from AI, but what I'm doing right now is just setting up as many calls as I can with people who are on the front lines in that industry. And I guarantee what I have learned is probably gonna get a lot of those assumptions are gonna get shattered.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Just because of essentially learning actually what's going on right now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You I think it it leads to mania of some form, right? Like if you all you do is chat to like this AI thing. Um I still think the best information comes from doing it and talking to people who do it, right? Like that is very pure, very close to reality. It is reality, right? And I do that all the time. Yeah. And then I might make an image or some shit with ChatGPT. Um, or if I say to Claude, but you know, you've got to be careful with with Claude too. Most people have no idea how like I'll give you another example, which is pretty, and Claude's pretty good, right? So like I had two data sets. So I had a list of countries that were supported by one payment processor and a list of countries that were supported by another one. And I all I had two cleanly formatted CSV files, and I told it, I was like, tell me the countries that are supported in this one that aren't supported in this one. Very basic. Does it. I get the list, I start looking at it. Cool, spot you here. North Korea, what? I'm pretty sure no one allows that one. So then I check both sets. North Korea's not in any of the fucking sets. And I'm like, I can't trust this. Someone's gotta have to do this shit manually. Like, yeah. But people have no idea what how much error they're amassing, you know.
SPEAKER_03That is what's interesting. Because we would like to think it increases productivity. And I mean, my company uses it.
SPEAKER_00It definitely does.
SPEAKER_03Right. But also it creates more work because in that example, even if you use Claude to go through those countries, it still creates the work of somebody having to QC basically the work that it did in the first place.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and if you QC it and it's right, you I would have probably accepted it, right? But yeah, I think you it's definitely a useful tool. And we do use it and we are more productive. But you've got to be pragmatic with how you use it. And when it's high stakes, you've got to be, I wouldn't trust it, with something so high stakes, right? Like if I'm doing a model, like a math model, like I'm gonna do that by hand and I'm gonna check every cell, like, in the in the spreadsheet, right? Like every formula, like, because I I don't want just some random answer. I want to check every step. Do you know do you know what I mean? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03If you're a business owner who has appointment setters or an outbound sales team, you're gonna want to hear what I have to say for a second. So a multiple eight-figure business owner texted me the other day, and when he started using $.io for the first time, his pickup rates went from 9% to 20%. So imagine doubling your pickup rates and ultimately the throughput of what your outbound salespeople and centers are gonna get, how does that impact your business? The answer is a lot. So if you want to check out dollar.io for a phone sales outbound system, just click the link in the description or just go to $.io. Now back to the podcast. So now with where school's at, how does your day-to-day look in terms of what you're working on within the company?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's I can basically bucket it into a few categories. Like there's the roadmap. I basically own the roadmap. And that's like what are we going to build next and what are we building now? Right. Um, and we've got different teams, so there's many things being built in parallel. And we also need to be one or two steps ahead from engineering because you want to think about what you need to make and then design it and then spec it, and then even test it with users in the conceptual phase to make sure it is something that they want before the engineers are ready to start working on it, right? So you want to stay a few steps ahead with that. So I'm thinking what should we do next? What does the roadmap look like? And which thing should we give to what team? And then also the designs for it, the specs for it, and the validation from the users in the conceptual stage. That I'm doing that, but at the same time, I'm also working with the engineers on the things they're building right now, because they've got questions live as they build it. Because things, details come up when you're writing code that you can't possibly think about in conceptual stage. Also, you know, they make it, and I got to try it because it looked one way in the design, but when you use it, you feel what it's like to use. And the two are different. And sometimes when you use it, it's it's off. And so you've got to iterate it a bit live before it's gonna go out, right? All of that, testing it. So it's like working ahead of them, but also working on the things that they're working on. And then some changes when we ship them, you've got to monitor what happens after you ship it because things could go all over the place. So once you ship it, you've got to see what the users think of it, you've got to see if they're adopting it, you've got to see what it did to the data, right? And there's many sides to school, like what it could have unforeseen consequences in random places. Or you might ship it and immediately something's off and you need to iterate it many times before it's right. And so that's what I mean about not planning too far ahead, because if you ship something and it needs iteration live, what they were going to work on next gets pushed out until that thing is is ready to sit, and then you move on to the next one. But by the time you've shipped something and iterated it around and looked at the data, what's most important to do next might not be what you had originally planned. Which is why you only go out 30 days.
SPEAKER_03Partially.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, even though we're like 30 days out in terms of design, specs, validation, and everything, that plan will change even within 30 days. Yeah. Because when you ship it, you don't know what's going to happen, right? Um so then that might not be your 30-day plan anymore. Because things change when you when you change something, things change, right? And that changes your plan. Like the general direction is still the same, right? Like, we're building a community platform, it's a network, it's a marketplace, you know, we want to get a billion users. That's all the same, but it's these little details, and also like there's a saying, like the time you're best equipped to like solve a problem when you're like closest to it. The best time to solve a problem is when you're close to it. When a problem's far away and you're strategizing a solution, it's not a good time to do it. You might think you're being um efficient by planning ahead, but by the time that that problem actually is a priority now, everything's changed, right? So that just leave the problem, like leave it alone. Like you'll just focusing on that is um is good because otherwise, if you force your plan just because it was your plan, that's kind of silly, right? Yeah, yeah. Um so I spend a lot of my time doing that, and that involves using the product. Like I use the shit out of skill, and I learn a lot from using it. Personal frustration, right? Then I talk to people that use it a lot, right? And then I also look at the data a lot, and then I talk to the team. And so that's a huge amount of it, right? What else do I do? I do a lot of math like about growth, return, capital, you know, there's a bunch of math. But it's pretty straightforward. Um then what else am I doing? I that's probably most of it. And then, but there's also just if a if there's a fire, I gotta put it out, and there's always some fucking fires, right? Like, oh, we're getting attacked, or oh, like um Can you talk at all about the attacks? Yeah, when you make a social platform, like there's a lot of bad actors that want to, you know, participate. Um and especially these days with AI and bots and and all of that, it's pretty wild. Like to have an open platform on the internet is crazy these days. And so, yeah, you're you've got people trying to do fraud, spam, scam, bots, you know, like everything you can kind of imagine. Um and you what you don't realize until you do this is that there's an entire industry that's one of the fastest growing industries in the world that is scamming. And it's not the scamming that most people probably think, which is like a coarse person scamming. It's like fishing. Yeah. It's uh it's like Nigeria's biggest industry. Oh my god. Yeah. And the government matches their scammings. The government what? Like contribu like matches their earnings. It's their national industry. Wow. Yeah, this is what you learn when you get into it. And then there's like, it's it's like a professional industry. And you said there's a tax on school almost every hour. Well, that then there's something else, which is just cybersecurity, which is like people trying to DDoS, people trying to, you know, people trying to. I don't even know why some people are trying to do some shit. And you know, it could just be some kid in some bedroom that just made something weird, or it could be some organized effort to like degrade a service or something. Um either way, it's always coming at you when you've got to defend against it. Because, you know, if you bring school offline, like it's that that really cripples us. Right. And everyone on school, right? Like you go to do your live call and it's just not there. It can't be down, you know?
SPEAKER_03So when you mentioned you you have multiple development teams, these teams are all full stack.
SPEAKER_00Well, most teams are like probably like back-end engineers, front-end engineers, but typically front-end engineers also work on some back-end, but our back-end engineers tend to only work on back-end, they're like hardcore. Um, and then like a QA person, quality assurance engineer, and a PM who's like the product manager slash leader of the team, and maybe a designer. So that these teams are about five to seven people, and between them all, they can do things end-to-end, right? Right. Um, and we have like uh how many product teams do we have? I know five or something. Five. And they all report to Daniel. The teams? Yeah. Or do they report to you? Well, like design and product is me, but the code, because it each thing is different. Like when it comes to like what should we make and how it looks and feels, that's me. Yeah. But when it comes to how we should structure the code and whether it passes our checks to ship it into production, that's more like Daniel, right? So yeah, there's like two sides to it, right? So there's a little bit of a crossover. There's a lot, because it's the same thing essentially, right?
SPEAKER_03Like have you thought all, you know, the big shift in like Silicon Valley right now is going from these hierarchical bureaucratic organizations to like founder mode, which is, you know, Brian Chesky's talked about it from Airbnb and Jensen Huang, and then Elon Musk runs his companies this way to where it's more flat. Have you thought about I mean right now school's in a place where you probably are pretty flat in terms of an organization. You know what?
SPEAKER_00When I heard founder mode, I was like, oh damn, now everyone's gonna use my strategy. That was my reaction. I was pissed. I was like, I wish you guys just kept going in that other direction.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well, can you talk more about okay, so you've been thinking about that for a while and you're like, okay, clearly that's the way to go. Can you talk more about that?
SPEAKER_00It was honestly more just validation that my way was legit. Because I had been fighting the opposite. Because, you know, you hear all of these sayings like um, good leaders hire good people and get out of their way, right? And delegate, delegate, delegate. And it really sounds true and right, because every business leader and expert and whatever says it, and then it becomes a thing that everyone repeats. So I even thought I was doing things wrong, right? And then my team was even pressuring me a bit to do it that other way. But I had tried sometimes I'd tried some things and I didn't really like how it went, and so I was very cautious about it, and I would I thought I was wrong, but I wasn't willing to do it, and I thought that made me extra wrong because I was wrong and not willing to change. Yeah. Right, which is the worst. I thought I was just like, yeah. Um, but then when I started to see that happening, I was like, oh damn, maybe this is the right way. And then that gave me a huge amount of confidence to just lean into it and not worry about it again.
SPEAKER_03What's interesting too, if you study the way Jensen Huang's done it, the the TLDR is basically if you hire good enough people who are truly like how you were describing Daniel. If you hire good enough people, you don't need this massive hierarchical organization because they can essentially self-manage. And the amount of communication, essentially, like bandwidth that it takes between person to person isn't very high because they just know how to do the thing and self-manage, and they're very, very talented.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that was interesting. I listened to his Joe Rogan one, or maybe it was Lex Friedman, where he explained how many direct reports he had and all of that. Yeah. And that again gave me more validation because I have a ton of people that are supposed to report to me, but I don't do any one-on-ones. I used to, because that's what business leaders said. I gave them up long ago, and man, my life got better. Like it was so much better. And I was kind of joking how much of a bad manager I am because I don't do one-on-ones. Um, but then when I saw that, I was like, shit, there's even something to that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. It was continuously getting more validated.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I because I was just instinctually, I'm like staring at another person on Zoom, I'm like, how you going? And they're like, good. I'm like, okay. Got 28 more minutes left. Like, and then I gotta do another one. Fuck. I just want to build something. Like, and I did that for like two or three years I went through that pain. Yeah. But then I was just like, fuck it, I'm not doing one-on-ones anymore. And I s the thing is is I actually talk to the the people more because I talk to people when I need to talk to them. Like if I'm working on something, I'll get in a a s a slack cuddle with someone. It's not scheduled, it's not on the calendar. It might go for one minute, it might go for four hours. Just whatever needs to be done. Yep. And that just is in the moment kind of morphing around. It it trying to schedule and plan, like putting meetings on calendars, and it it kills the process. You need some things on the calendar, like we have a stand-up for each team, right? Like a stand-up meeting. That's a nice consistent for for the team. We have an all hands once a week. So every team has a stand-up, which can be like sometimes four minutes, sometimes an hour, depends what what there is to discuss. And the whole company has one all hands, which is like 30 minutes once a week. Those are the only things that are like scheduled, those are the only things on my calendar. Um, everything else is open space for whatever needs to be done, which might be talking to a user, it might be designing, building, talking to an engineer. Like, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I find that one-on-ones can be an excuse to just not talk to your employees for six days of the week. And one of the things I encourage my managers to do is just pick up the phone and call people. And so, like, even David Dre, like one thing that he does do really well is he just calls his sales reps every single day. Now, what do they talk about sometimes? I don't I mean, they're talking about you know, Call of Duty or who knows, right? Or he's dusting them off after they had a bad day. But it's that frequent, it could just be a five-minute call. But if I think about the people I'm most in sync with in my company, it's the people who I'm always just like, I'm not even gonna type out a Slack. I just pick up the phone and I have a three-minute conversation done.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, and I think you've got to be careful too with all of advice. So I'm not trying to give any advice here, but um I don't do one-on-ones, but if every manager in our company didn't do one-on-ones, it wouldn't work.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So we have managers and they do do one-on-ones, and that is extremely important for the functioning of the like of the organization, right? But we do have an interesting thing we do with managers. So like we only hire like individual contributors, so people that do it. We don't like people that don't do it. So the only people we've made a product manager. Are people who have been software engineers and then got into engineering management? So, like, those are the only people we let do it because they can still actually write code and they thoroughly understand it, and then they're only managing the people that are on their team, so it's in context of what's being built, right? So if we do it like that, it's it works really well. But if you just have a manager whose sole job is to show up to 101s, they don't and they don't know what their manag their report does. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Like that's where management gets all Well I would say that I would say that that is not even just tech. That's just what management should be across every single position. I mean, if you think about sales, how are you gonna coach a salesperson when you don't know how to sell? Right? Or if you have a client success manager, how are you gonna coach that person if you were never done the role? But there is some interesting ones.
SPEAKER_00Like, did that guy who taught the Bulls did he ever play basketball?
SPEAKER_03Um Phil Jackson? Yeah, was he? No, he played. It just he was nowhere near as obviously good as the coach. I'm almost positive he played, but he where it's coming from is he was a bet far better coach than he was a player, I think. I could be totally wrong.
SPEAKER_00But that's what I'm getting, that's what I'm trying to get at about advice. I don't want anyone to think that any one thing I'm saying is like the way. Because you can find I find that almost everything I I find there's like a counter to it that proves that it's not even true. Right. I think almost anything can work and everyone's got to find their own style, you know?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um because if it works, who gives a shit what anyone says?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. You know? Well, and a lot of the most successful companies are just very direct reflections of the founder.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's true. Um I think the good stuff comes when you when you let it naturally form. Like I bet you what happened with Jensen and a lot of these people, it's it's just he you know he probably had tried the other ways, but then just gave up and then just went with his gut or something, and it turned out to be better. It it has to like naturally evolve versus trying to just copy some playbook. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Well, people want to not think, which is why they like AI a lot. And so, you know, I think Dan Kennedy, he has this uh saying that people's uh umbilical chords are like a spark plug and they're just trying to go plug it in somewhere. You know, it's almost like people in the course industry, it's it's like they're always looking for the next course to tell them exactly how to get to that next level.
SPEAKER_00I've talked to Almozi about this a little bit. It's like when you it's the difference between first party and third party data, right? When you're not doing anything, you have no first party data. So you can't use it, right? So all you can really work off is third-party data from other people's experience, right? So you read books and whatever, and you learn from them, and there's definitely a lot to be learned there. Like if you can learn something without having to go through it, that's great, right? You you can that's how evolution got really good. It's when we could learn from other people's experience, right? And so that's how I think people start in the game and info, and there's definitely a period where you're mostly consuming and learning and all of that, but once you get going, and people should as I say this, I realize that people should just get going right away anyway, and get that first party data real quick, but and then maybe they don't need to go through that whole journey. But umce you're doing it, you can see what's working and what's not, and that's that's the most important data versus what someone is saying, right? Because I was doing I was doing it and realizing I didn't like one-on-ones and I liked this style. But if I was looking at what the third party data said, it was to delegate, get out of people's way, right? It can be very confusing when you're you don't have a lot of confidence in your style and stuff, because these two are often like at opposite ends. Do you get what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well, and it goes back to what you were saying about intuition, because the way I think about intuition, if you want to make it more science-y, is it's essentially information stored in your body about your first party data and your real world experience. And so we can't like analyze all that information at once, but you're kind of So you think con you think it's local then. Yes. I think it's kind of like your gut feeling I don't think it's local. You think it's something that I think you tune to it. Oh, like it's something that uh like a frequency. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Like a like a radio wave.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Interesting.
SPEAKER_00And there's some interesting, if you want to talk about the science of it, there's there's this thing you can look up. It's called the Global Consciousness Project. It's run by Princeton. It's been running for, I don't know, 20 years or something. They get these random number generators, truly random, like proper entropy. They put it, they put them all around the world in different locations. They're all independent, but they generate their data, their random number set every few seconds, and they send it back to a central server. And then they analyze the data sets to see if there's correlation. And most of the time there's not, which shows you that randomness is random, right? But there's these moments where it spikes and there's insane correlations. And it the biggest one there's been was 9-11. The second biggest one was the most televised Olympics.
SPEAKER_03Interesting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And so there was a spike during those moments. Where the data sets were too closely matching for it not to be random. And what what's the representation? The data sets are what exactly again? Random numbers. Random numbers. Like you know, like you can use a random number generate generator and generate truly random numbers, right? And it should there should be no correlation between them. And there isn't most of the time. But when a lot of people observe or tune into the same thing, it tends to change probability.
SPEAKER_03Is that because of like that quantum entanglement? Or how would you explain that from a quantum physics standpoint? Well, I don't know. I mean, that would that that that was out of left fields, that was pretty interesting, maybe I thought you'd know.
SPEAKER_00No, I because you know, people talk about intuition and stuff, but there's and then there's that which is very scientific, and they're not saying this is what it is, it's just this is what they're observing, and it's real, and you can go see it. It's it's all on the internet. Um But I think it's that I think what it is is that um conscious attention on something changes the probability of it. Yeah, right? Reflexivity. There's like an observer effect. Um and there and I think that is you know, there's all of these like inventions that happen where people seem to have the ideas at the same time, kind of thing, right? Yeah. And when you listen to like musicians talk about how they write songs or whatever, whenever they have a banger, it like it seems to like they say it like comes through them. They don't it's like they're just It's what I say when I have a great sales call. Yeah. Even though that's not as cool as writing like a Beyonce song or whatever. Yeah, and sometimes I'm just like, oh my god, it's all coming at me right now. And it's just like just just all coming. Um and it's and I don't know where from. Like I don't know how to explain it, but there's definitely something there, like that there's something there, and I think that's where intuition comes from. It also comes from experience, right? But that's the more like practical part of it. But how do you explain the things where there wasn't experience, right? And I love listening to like psychic phenomenon scientists and and how they've done all of these experiments and stuff, um, like pre-cognition, like, you know, how does like a dog know that their owner is coming down the street, kind of things? Or like even with there's a lot of this with animals, they just they have a lot of good instinct, right? Humans definitely have really good instincts when when they're tuned. Yeah. Um, or when they're not ruined, more like it. Like I think children have them for sure. Um and and so like I don't think I think it's something you can like tune into. Um and that it's not all local. I've also noticed this because when I went back to New Zealand during COVID, I would have a certain thoughts, but then those thoughts started to fade, and I had these new kinds of thoughts. And the thoughts that I was having that were new were like what everyone else was talking about and thinking about in that country. So it was almost like I was losing my connection to the market and was getting pulled into another one, which I thought was interesting. It could have just been because I was there or whatever, but it felt like I was losing my sense of it, like the market, and I needed to get back. Yeah. This is getting pretty like um, I don't know, weird, I guess.
SPEAKER_03I think it's pretty cool though. You want to hear something also weird. We we uh were talking about this on the way here, or no, maybe uh yesterday when we were driving. But you know the George Sor Soros' principle of reflexivity about the markets and observing the market actually changes the market and it even changes the markets. Um I read the first chapter. Which one? Alchemy and finance? Yes. Okay. And then I was like, okay, it's reflexivity, observer of the market. Am I a trader? No. Okay, I'm gonna read something else.
SPEAKER_00Well, you know what's interesting is that first of all, it's called alchemy of finance.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_00Those two words don't usually go together. And then the name of his fund, Quantum Fund, right? Yeah. There's clues like that the way this dude's thinking about financial markets is very different. Yeah. Yeah. And also, if you kind of like trace back modern economics, it kind of comes from a um from Newton. Like it it works a lot like physics, right? It does, yes. Yeah, and that's because it at one point the UK government or something got Newton to help fix the economy. And a lot of modern economic theory comes from Newtonian physics. But the markets, it's it's like we're using physics to apply to something that isn't physical. It doesn't map properly, actually. There's many, you know, like one clue in economics is these assumptions that participants are perfectly rational and have perfect information, like.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, which is like well, that's also the whole uh Daniel Kahneman, I think, is about what's the book uh predictably irrational, right? Where that basically debunked all of that.
SPEAKER_00Well, those are your two assumptions, like I mean that it's pretty easy to validate that those are wrong. Yeah, perfect information and rationality, come on. And so Soros's whole view of this was exploiting it. Because it was based on Newtonian physics, he would take a quantum view on it, right? Yeah. Which is he he found the flaws in the theory, and that's like he shorted the Bank of England and broke the pound. You know, he he done he's done some crazy shit. And when you read like how he does it too, like he said his biggest trades often manifested as a pain in his lower back. Like very like um not how you'd expect one of the greatest traders to talk about trades. It was feeling and instinct, but for like betting on it, but of but then you quickly find out if you're right or not, right? But everyone who's at the highest level, there's an extreme amount of um instinct and intuition. Yeah. I mean, even Newton, if you go back with that, right? Uh-huh. Yeah. I've looked at the stuff I find kind of interesting. I haven't looked at the stuff for a while though.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Do you find like, you know, uh Jay Abraham says when you take an idea from a different industry and combine it in the industry that you're in, you can create an explosion, right? In a good way. Do you find that looking in different places like physics, biology, art, for instance, does practically help you with business?
SPEAKER_00You're it's like if you're a painter, right? Um I just think of myself, I'm like a painter. I got a canvas and a brush, and what do I have in my palette? Right? Like what what have I got to use? And that gives you a lot of different colors, right? Like if I can pull from Economics or Newton or Soros or Global Consciousness Project or you know, Google's evolution, YouTube's early internet, you know, like this is a lot of good stuff, right? That you can pull in to make whatever you're making. And so, yeah, 100%. Like, you a lot of people I think are just too one-dimensional. They only know about one thing, and what they know about that one thing is what everyone else says about that one thing. Well, I mean, you're gonna be able to make something that is the same, right? Um and so if you look at the greatest inventions, they tend to come from outsiders. Like um, like Elon with SpaceX, yeah. Yeah, made rockets, he got into cars, right? And then you there's a there's a um an advantage to being an outsider where you don't have all the dogma on you, and you're like naive and you find these new ways, right? Um but also cross-pollinating ideas between industries is huge. Yeah. Like, you know, I saw that with info. I was like, I thought, what if I applied platform tech with like info? Like that, that's never been done, right? Like the tech in here is pretty pretty average. Like, what if I bought the best? And then what if I networked it? Like that's that's interesting, right? Um, and what if I bought the best talent to the problem too? Um, because you know, you you usually weren't getting like we've got engineers from like SpaceX, Coinbase, Meta, like some of the best. Umfo hasn't had those people working on their shit. No. No. So like I thought this will be interesting if I bring these things together, right? The thing I will say though is when I was exploring those different things, I wasn't intentionally doing it because I thought I would later use it to do something. It's just I follow my my interests. Yeah. Like sometimes if something's pulling me in a direction, I'll I'll let it carry me a little bit. Like wandering, exploring.
SPEAKER_03Well, that's what I do with my reading, is my only rule of reading and why I read so much is not because I'm like super disciplined. I just only try to read what I'm most interested in in the moment. And what's interesting is like that I went through a whole phase where he knows, where I was uh, you know, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington. I was reading the Oxford history uh of the United States, which is about the drive, but for whatever reason I was just into it. Now I'm into um, you know, physics, and I was talking about the.
SPEAKER_00Have you seen the series The Men Who Built America?
SPEAKER_03I I have it, I know what you're talking about. I have not seen it.
SPEAKER_00It's a it's a banger, that one. It's good. Oh yeah. It's like early America before like these Titan dudes like Carnegie, Rockefeller before them. It starts before them. You see the rise up of the first one. I forget who came first if it was Carnegie. I think it was Carnegie, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But like it's showing you the evolution of America from because it it's a it's a network, right? Yeah. It needs rails, literally. Um so the the the evolution of the railroads, the evolution of oil, and the oil uses the railroads and the refining and and you know the how basically America came to be, and some of the most like badass business people, right? Yeah. I learned a ton from that. And it was highly entertaining because it's a TV series. Yeah. Yeah. But that was just I was actually having entertainment, but also learning. But going there's, you know, there's not many people that have done really great things when you think about it. There's not a ton. And I think if you learn from them, those are that's all I really learn from. Like I want to learn from people who have done extra like the outlier people, and I hear about what they did, even if I don't know how it's relevant to me. Because I find later there's little pieces that I can just pull from. And I think when you when you look at enough of it, you realize it's all the same.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. One thing about those, that group of people is the one thing they all had in common. So Carnegie, Jay Gold, Rockefeller, and uh, there's one more I'm missing, is they knew the numbers and the financials of their business better than everybody else, which at that time was a very new concept. So, like, for instance, Carnegie in the steel industry, nobody was actually like running their steel factory or whatever it was with, you know, the theory of constraints and an idea about production and um really like making sure that they were limiting costs, you know. And then they also that's where really the economies of scale for and and all the conglomerations first came of. But the interesting parallel to today is if you think about who are the top people in every industry, you know, if you think about Hermosy, like he can basically break down your business into a couple of numbers and then know exactly what's going on in your business, right? Same thing with like I uh listened to a lot of interviews of this guy, Tommy Mello. He happens to be like my neighbor, but he's like the top guy in the think about Hermosy for the home service industry. So he's like the top guy. And the way he just like you can tell he knows the numbers of that business better than anybody in his industry does. And I think back when I hear that stuff to kind of how you know Rockefeller, Carnegie, all those guys were.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they're definitely like special people and very talented. But I I what I find most interesting, I think, is the the actual story and how they navigated the journey.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Right? Like from when he was a kid to like owning global oil. Okay, like there's many steps in that process, and how did he evolve through it? I almost learned more from the journey than like the specific The tactics.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Well, you learn more about, you know, it's even like Napoleon. Like what I really got from Napoleon and reading about him was just his stance towards life, and I mean, how how much he valued speed, which sounds like such a he valued speed. But if you really read about it, I mean, just the stories are ridiculous. To where, like, as soon as he would figure out somebody was mounting a force, like he would just basically cut all the supply lines, not not uh barricade down any of the cities, and just go surround the force before they even had time to mount. And that was like very unheard of at that time. But it's like his standards. Orthodox, yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's always the way. But it's also kind of hard because orthodox is orthodox for a reason. Yes. It it is probably the current best known tactic. Well, but that that means it's hard to improve upon, but it also means that if you can, you'll change things.
SPEAKER_03Well, it was part of when you were talking about the info industry being fragmented and trying to add the platform to the industry to be able to raise up the industry. I didn't say it at the time, but what I was thinking about is that is how Rockefeller thought of the oil industry. So, you know, there was like this fragmentation, and you know, he's a very interesting guy because he was also not, I mean, he was very money-driven, but it was also he felt like similar to Napoleon, that he had a divine right to own that. And that's very common.
SPEAKER_00After a train near train crash, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. And um the fragmentation of the oil industry like gutted him to his core. He hated it. He thought it was disorderly. He thought it was like, he almost thought it was against his religion in some ways. Like it was undivine. And that was, you know, because he had some tactics that obviously are suspect in terms of how he consolidated the entire industry basically into one company. But the reason he justified it was because of, you know, he thought it was undivine. He didn't like the disorder, etc. So I'm not saying you're doing that with our industry, but I'm curious if you took some. You're doing it the ethical way, but I'm curious if you took some inspiration uh from that. Or maybe you just noticed it was kind of similar.
SPEAKER_00Well, of course. Yeah. Like, that's what I mean about the the thing might be different, but the evolution or the the shape or the pattern of it maps. So that's a lot of the time what I'm trying to do is I'm like, this is the situation. What can I map it to? And I'm like scanning, and it's like something random that's that isn't the same, but it it has a similar shape or pattern to it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Whereas I think a lot of people just look at it very much like one-to-one. Like, here's this situation, who has had this exact situation, right? Which is kind of limiting. But sometimes that's all you need, but sometimes. Do you get what I'm trying to say?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you have to take the inspiration. It it's a lot of it I think of too is if you just spend time thinking about, let's say, their journey or what have you. Sometimes I'm reading a book and like the book about Napoleon, look, I'm not gonna go conquer, you know, all of Europe. Okay. But I was reading that book and I would get ideas about my business that kind of don't really have to do with the book. But I think when you're feeding in really high quality information, sometimes you just get really high quality stuff out. And there's kind of no RAM or reason to it.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. I think a lot of the time it comes easier from a totally irrelevant place. Like so long as that person is at the absolute top by a mile. Yes, the there's there's information there that's extremely useful that's probably unknown in your space, right? Like I remember I I don't even watch basketball. I don't think I've ever seen a game, right? Got no interest. But I do know that Michael Jordan was like the best. Yeah. And so I watched every documentary. And this one shocked me because I heard about how like savage Michael Jordan was and everything. I was like, this pro this guy's probably like dark and like cold and calculated and all of this shit. Um the first thing he says in a super loving way, in this, this is in the the movie Michael Jordan to the Max. Okay, that's the one. That's probably my favorite one, it's an old school one. Yeah. Um, he's playing basketball with some children, and he says, the thing everyone always asks me is what's the secret to being the best basketball player in the world? And he said, The key is to fall in love with the game. That was it. And then you see him playing with these kids, and he's enjoying it, and you can tell that, oh, this guy just loves basketball, and it's all he wants to do. And that is there was emotion and love at the core of the greatest, most savage person ever, like in basketball. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, that that shocked me. I was like, whoa. Um, and that made me think about my industry and if I had that, and I didn't. And so I thought, well, what do I have that for? Right? Mm-hmm. And see, it it I got a lot from that, and that's why passion, I thought, was really at the core of this, and now it's actually being proven with what's popping naturally in the market, yes, it's this. Yeah. Like the everyone popping is like passionate, and you can tell they're not doing it for like just for the money, they are making money, but there's something there.
SPEAKER_03It's the difference between Apple and all the other tech companies. Like, Apple is a company that genuinely like sometimes if we think about Facebook, you know, granted I run a lot of Facebook ads, so it made my life better. But I think like to the average person, if they think about Facebook, they're probably like, yeah, I I use it, I don't want it to go away. But they kind of know TikTok's a great example. Even the people who use it, I think there's a study that's like 80% of the people use it think it makes their life worse. Or something along those lines. And Apple's, you know, one of the only products I think in that era that almost everybody genuinely is like, this made my life better. And I think a part of it is like the intentionality that was put behind the products and how Steve Jobs um, you know, the culture he ran, that it wasn't just all about money and it was about the passion of creating great products. And they always started with design first and engineering second, not the other way around, which at that time was unorthodox.
SPEAKER_00Well, that's what you know, because I started learning business from business people. And when you learn business from business people, it's very much about business, right? Which is like money, profit, blah, blah, blah, accounting. But then I thought, well, let's see what like the best guys ever do. And I was expecting a more extreme version of that, but it's something very different. And I'm like, whoa. So you mean like the greatest of all time weren't even businessmen? They they have a business, but they didn't want to be in business. Right. It was just the structure they needed to do what they wanted to do. Yeah, like Elon's an engineer. Yeah, you know, he wants to make things and do things, and businesses are structures, right? And and you need resources. Right? It's like if you're playing Warcraft, you need to chop wood. Right? Like, no shit, you need some. I did my wood shopping back in the day. You need some fucking money. Yeah. To to to feed everyone and to build. Yeah, that's all I said is is just like my guys chopping wood and getting gold, like, so that we can do shit. Um, it's the same thing.
SPEAKER_03That's very cool. Um, what do you think is next for school? I know that you are in a place where I think you're kind of not shipping anything for a while.
SPEAKER_00Oh, we're shipping a lot, but it's not features. The schools change now in that like a lot of the the things are there, right? What now people want growth, people want members? That's and putting growth into the product, it there's a lot going on, but it's it doesn't appear as a feature to you. It's all hidden, right? Um but we're shipping changes to that many times a day. Um that's how we order the search results, right? Algorithms there, how we show the trending on the homepage, algorithms there, how we run the ads and optimize the ads. So like it's all we're working on it, but it's not things that show up as features, right? You get it? The other thing is it's just internationalization. Like, skills are extremely international. Our fastest growing markets are like, you know, not they're like all very international, and like payments don't really work in in international markets. This is something you don't know until later, but like, you know, Germany doesn't really use credit cards, they like PayPal, and Asia likes Wii Pay and stuff, and in Latin America and shit, like they have their own things, and their cards don't even work on a US merchant. Like, there's a lot of this, and you learn some fascinating rules, like in Africa, parts of it, that the maximum amount that people citizens are allowed to spend out of their country is 10 grand a year, and they save it for their summer vacation. Um and so like there's a whole lot of shit there to make to connect to truly bring the whole world onto school. You need the payment methods to all work, you need the payouts to work too. Like, we need to pay money out, we need to get money in, and when that money goes out, it needs to be fast and reliable. Right now, it can take up to 10 days in some countries. Um, so we're like trying to get payouts to every country and really fast, pay-ins in every payment method, and because then you can open up buying and selling like globally. That's an enormous project that we're working on. The other one is um languages, right? So we're we're actively working on that right now, and then there's currencies. I wouldn't necessarily call these features, right? Right. But they're absolutely things, they're massive engineering. It's accessibility. Yeah. That's what how I think of it. You know, you've got core features are utility, then these things are accessibility, and then the other one, growth is more like an optimization thing. But um we're doing all of that right now so that soon enough when you visit school, you would see a discovery that's fully in Spanish, that the UI is in Spanish, but the content's in Spanish, and you see the ads in Spanish, right? And it's like there's this whole world of school, and this already exists right now, by the way, it's just the UI's not in Spanish. But there's a Spanish discovery that's vast. Yeah, like there's a whole economy on school that's just in Spanish. So, like soon enough when you visit school, it'll be in your language, the UI and the content, and in your currency, and work with your payment method just dynamically without you doing anything. So it's like, no matter where anyone in the world is, your one landing page just adapts to like everything. Do you do know what I mean?
SPEAKER_03Oh, so even if you're, let's say, I have a sales community or what have you, right? That all can go into the span like a the Spanish market with Spanish payments, etc., even if I'm English. I was almost thinking you were talking about um if you if I was somebody trying to create a community in Spanish, that I would have more accessibility that way. I mean, I know that's true, but yeah.
SPEAKER_00So let's say someone in Latin America wants to buy your shit on school, like it's hard right now. Um, I mean it can work, but it's Latin America is very hard for payments. Um it's why a lot of it took companies like Amazon and stuff a long time to understand the market. Not everyone uses cards and every market's different. Um, and so it's quite hard for someone there to pay you right now. And even if you're a creator there, trying to get money out is hard from like as a payout, right? Um, and so you know that they would that'll be frictionless soon. Like they would see their like let's say your price is a grand USD, they would see it in their currency and with their payment method. So it feels natural to them and it's frictionless, right? Um, and then if they spoke Spanish, the their UI might be Spanish, but your content would still be English, right? Um does that make sense? Like it removes a huge amount of friction, like, because people in in Europe are used to seeing Euros and paying with different payment methods. When they see dollars in a credit card form, it's not that's friction. And so if we can if we can make it so that the whole world sees what they're most familiar with, but it all works, then we can truly open up like global trade in this industry. I I know it doesn't exist right now for sure. It's highly fragmented, and that's why there's these massive players in these different regions. They've figured out a region and they have almost a monopoly there, but they haven't got this other region. No one's connected at all, really.
SPEAKER_03What's interesting is all the there, you know, in almost a lot of these different languages, there's a person, a business who has my exact same offer.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And they're all in my program.
SPEAKER_03And I'm like, I mean, because I can't access that market, so I'm like, well, you speak in.
SPEAKER_00Right now you can do it. On school, you go to Discovery, you change your see what's number one in English. It might be something about Claude, change to German, Claude, Spanish, Claude.
SPEAKER_02Very cool.
SPEAKER_00Well, it just shows you that Claude is trending not just in English, it's in and and often someone will see someone who's making something work in English, and they will create a version of it in Chinese or whatever. That's just how the world's always worked, right? And I guess you don't really care because if someone can't speak English, you can't really serve them. Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, but it's really cool to see that happening, just connecting the whole world and open like I think of it like a global financial system. Like, how can everyone trade properly on on here? And how can we surface quality?
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Right? And how can we get, how can we make sure that because really what people are looking for is quality, and it's right now it's hard to find. You've got to use all of these heuristics and proxies and things, and you've got to go through a minefield to find the truth. I just want to like surface it so it's just there. Yeah. And then I think when people see that that's what works here, more people will do that, and that will just make the industry better, right? Because it's making everyone like optimized for truth instead of like other things.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. It's interesting because um, similar to what we were talking about earlier with the railroads, it's almost like you've identified all of the nodes and you're trying to construct all the rails, so to speak. You know, to essentially be able to have, like you said, everything be able to interact globally dynamically. Did you ever hear about Britain Woods? The uh the gold, or when they the creation of the like modern financial system.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_03I was thinking I always was thinking so Bretton Woods was when they pegged it to the gold dollar after World War II.
SPEAKER_00But it's also when they agreed on global trade.
SPEAKER_03Yes, and they set all the payment whales, SWIFT, and all that stuff, which gave the US the ability to do that. Really? Well, you had to tell me about it.
SPEAKER_00I read all about Bretton Woods and how it happened. Because I was like, this is kind of what's going on here. There's all these countries and they can't bloody trade with each other. Yeah. And then I'm trying to figure this shit out. And this happened before at a much larger scale than school. It was the whole world economy. But you know, it was still just a bunch of people working with concepts, trying to find a system that would allow people to integrate together in work and trade, right? And that's the system that we've used since what, 1940 something?
SPEAKER_0319, I think, 45, and then until 19 either 71 or 73. And then since then it's been pure chaos.
SPEAKER_00But also there hasn't been a uh um a Great Depression since then. That was their main idea. Like, let's not make let's make sure that doesn't happen again. And it and it's kind of succeeded in that, honestly. It has been kind of all over the place, but it it hasn't been that bad, you know?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So when you think because obviously you could probably go into a bunch of detail of that, but if you had to think about what was the number one insight then you took from Brenton Woods that you've used in school?
SPEAKER_00It's probably more just like you realize that there's all of these things that you just you ass you you take for granted, but like, you know, just time, for example. But when you really think about it, someone invented a concept. Like, what even is time? It's not there. It isn't something, it's a concept, right? Time. Um, but you everyone's using it, and you know, and then to make it work, they have to invent like time zones and daylight savings and all kinds of other things. Um, but it's just a concept, right? Um, and these concepts like layer on top of each other, even like language is conceptual, um math, you know, all of these things. But like even the financial system is again concepts like currencies, exchange rates, all of this, um, and and global trade. Um and when you realize that, I th and when you realize it was just made by like some people in a room, um it's it's kind of interesting. I don't think most people realize that, that these are just things made by some people. Um and so learning a when I realized that I was like, whoa, this is similar to like what I'm doing, but obviously not the same. And some of the problems they were trying to solve were kind of the same. Most the most interesting thing was the the exchange rates. Um like how do you consolidate all of that together, right? Especially with what we do, which is subscription. Because if you're if it's one time, it's it's simple. You do a live FX quote, boom, done. But when it's subscription, what happens the second month? Because the creator expects the same amount, the member expects to pay the same, but these things are moving all the time.
SPEAKER_03That is wild. I didn't even thought I'd never even thought about that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So yeah, I don't want to like share all of my How you're overcoming it, right? Because this is just not relevant to so many people. Um, I think it's very interesting. It's interesting for sure. Um, but also just not super relevant to understand. But that problem has fascinated me for like a couple years. Um, it's also why we haven't touched currencies, because I haven't known how to best approach it. Um that's what they were trying to figure out then, right? And their solution was to peg it to USD and all of this, and that is kind of interesting with what I'm doing now. Again, it's like you see what I'm trying to say, it's like having this broad understanding of things, which was never my strategy. I just always followed my interests and thought I was kind of weird and just looked at weird shit. Um, but you have a good library to draw on when you get to these different things. Instead of going to Claude and being like, Hey Claude, how do I do this? Like, come on. Yeah, yeah. I mean, sometimes Claude can give you a pretty good, a pretty good answer, so like why not give it a go? But like, it's not gonna make you great. Yeah, you know?
SPEAKER_03Well, and you also have to not just you have to question the answer, you know.
SPEAKER_00Or even the question, you know?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah. So Sam Evans, we're at the school HQ. Thank you. That's the pod. If you enjoyed this podcast, you're also probably gonna like this podcast I also did recently that you can check out by clicking the screen right here.