Analyzing Masayoshi Son and SoftBank

Can only lose three million bucks. I could gain 300 million bucks. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I'll put my law in it like my day's all on a road, less travel, never lose. Alright, Chill, what's up, dude? Not much, man. Doing well. Dude, always good having you on. You are uh as always, I give you this title, the most interesting man in tech. You're a you're a in a great investor, or tech investor. Uh how big is the fund or how much uh total have you you investe now at this point? Um about four hundred and fifty million total. Okay, four hundred and fifty million dollars. So like, you know, I've learned a lot from poker, right? And in poker that you learn all these lessons that actually like cross apply totally outside the d domain of poker. What would you say are the lessons from investing that apply to life? I think You know, one Is just like Upside can be greater than downside. If I invest in a company, let's say I put three million dollars into a company, there's a possibility of it being Three hundred million dollars. But the downside is capped at three million. I could only lose three million bucks. I could gain three hundred three hundred million buy. Yeah, because if you don't work in uh investing or anywhere where they have that sort of asymmetric risk versus return. Let's just say you have a hourly wage job, right? Like your sort of your mind gets trained into this linear. I put one in, I get one out, right? Like I can't put one in and get fifty hours of pay out of this next hour. That doesn't really ever happen in a normal job, but if your job is investing, you're like, of course, that happens all the time. I lose one times my money, but sometimes I gain a hundred or a thousand times my money back. And that kind of breaks the brain and you sort of like start to see, you know, other opportunities similarly that have that. as the kids say the asymmetry of risk return. All right, so that's one there's something around just portfolio theory, like, you know out of the four hundred fifty million you deploy, right? Like what does what does winning look like? You probably need to return some multiple of that four hundred fifty million. So what does winning look like for you? You put in four fifty, what do you need to get out for this to be a success? A couple billion dollars. Couple billion dollars. Let's say two billion. Let's just use it as a rough mat. Let's say it's five hundred million to make math easy. So five hundred million for exit, that would be great over some ten year period. Now Of that two billion. How many companies would you go into and of those like how many companies would be responsible for returning all of that money? It's only gonna be a few, right? Like give me the math there. Yeah. So Almost all of the returns are gonna come from like 10 companies. out of hundreds that we will have invested in. Correct. Um and so there's something like that in life too, right? Whether it's like people you meet or dating, or like there's some portfolio theory, some power law where the few will drive like all of the joy, the value, the relationships, the the opportunities, whatever. And then you just do the rest because you need a portfolio in order to find the few that are like the big outliers. It's true. And it's also it's also In a related note. There's like If you increase the surface area of companies you meet. you have the better odds of finding that one, like when you where you really know it's it's gonna work. And so in life I think increasing surface area is good, like saying yes to stuff. Right. There's a great blog post this guy wrote called Building Your Own Yacht. Have you ever read this blog post? It's like very obscure. I got this from some random Twitter account. The real estate G six. Sorry. Uh yeah, like normally I'd be like pretty low expectations, but this is this overdelivered. And so it basically sa it argues the following. It says most people in their life They don't do anything that compounds, right? Like most people are non compounders in general. Okay. So We and then we kinda know that okay, money has this compounding thing, right? You can compound some interest or rate of return, ten percent a year in the SP five hundred and over every ten years that's gonna uh or every seven years that's gonna double. Great. So you sort of see compounding financially, but everything compounds, including relationships, skills, knowledge, everything else. And he has this story about building your own yacht. So um let me read this out for you. Okay, so he goes. If you aren't familiar Aristotle Onassis, by the way, this might be a totally fictitious person for all I know, but it doesn't matter. The story works either way. Um he was one of the wealthiest businessmen of the twentieth century. He started off as a tobacco trader and he ends up, you know being this big shipping magnet, right? So he's like he he makes his bones in the shipping industry. He's dating famous actresses. Okay. So he lives this life, but he has this one sort of hack for relationship building. He called it building your own yacht. So he basically talks about how This guy basically his inf one of his investments was this yacht, which seems just like a splurge purchase, like a discretionary purchase, but he argues like Think about the power of having a yacht. And he goes, The way that humans are wired. is like we are very suspicious of cold introductions, strangers on the street, people emailing you that you don't know. But like a warm introduction or a warm uh relationship. is so much you've already bypassed like ten hurdles that come from taking somebody from cold to warm. And so he argues he's like Think about it this way. If you think about relationships, you would want to have Uh, if you meet somebody, you want to do business with them or you just wanna socially connect with them. you would want social proof, like, is this person cool? Are they legit? Are they friends with people that I already am friends with or or respect? And basically it's like w from the moment you step foot on a yacht. Social proof is done, credibility is done. And he's like, uh on top of that, you enter their frame. Like you are literally on their turf. And from the and then he's like there's also the law of reciprocity, which is like if I invite you or give you something, there's there's a part of you psychologically that will want to reciprocate in return in some way. And often the the law of reciprocity, the way it works, is like it's not one for one. So like if I um, you know, just do you a quick favor, bring you a drink. And then I ask you for a much bigger ass than the drink, you're more likely to to say yes to it. And so he talks about how. And he's like, yeah, okay. That works with the yacht. But he's like in life, there's actually all these little yachts that you can create that don't cost the same amount as a yacht. So, you know, you host a dinner. Right. You create an event. You um send out, you know, f uh free materials, a newsletter, content. Those are all these are all little yachts that you can create. Create all this like inbound luck. and relationships and things that can compound. because you create this like asset. that you get to use from there on out. So I thought that was like a very interesting point. I'm curious what that brings up for you. Totally. And I think like for you guys, the podcast is partially that. Exactly. Thanks to this conversation, I think I'm gonna I'm gonna start doing more dinner parties. 'Cause I think it's just like such an easy way. You bring people together. Also you Oftentimes I meet somebody and I'm like, I wanna hang out with them again, but there's no real There no excuse. There's no excuse. But if you just invite them over It's better. And I I think actually I think the best thing to do is invite them over to your house. Because Then there's some feeling that like It's a much stronger feeling than if you invite them to a restaurant. Well, even as an investor, Saka did this, right? Chris Saka did this with his m he moved out of San Francisco where in San Francisco you don't have a yacht. You know, you're just meeting at coffee shops and little you know, little places like this. You have an office, but everybody has an office. There's nothing special about it. He moves to uh Tahoe and Truckee, actually, and he basically has like a cabin on the mountains with a hot tub and you can ski and like his dog is there and his kids are there, and he's got this guest house. And then he invited, you know, Travis from Uber over and they hung out for two or three days and invites Kevin Sistram. Hey, dude, come just work out of my Place in Tahoe for the week. And then when they're on his turf in his yacht, obviously like the connection and the depth of the of the relationship built way faster. And he basically attributed That move. to um you know some of the best investments of his career is like having that little yacht. It's great. Makes makes complete sense. before about the way that I know how to make money, about how to build a money-making skill, about how to leverage your time and energy. And the team at HubSpot actually went through the video where I explained all that and turned it into a free downloadable cheat sheet. on my four rules of how to make money. Now, this is not, you know, give rich quick advice. It's just core principles, foundational principles about building wealth. Things that I wish I knew when I was, you know, just getting started. And so if you want to download it, it's in the description below. It's totally free. You can go get it. Thanks to the folks at HubSpot for doing the research, making this document and making it available to all you guys. All right, back to this episode. Yeah, there's some people who've done uh uh they've they've sort of productize this in an interesting way uh that I've met. They uh one person I know They knew that Nick Gray is amazing at these two hour cocktail parties. And so they just like were like, Hey, Nick, like, can I commission you? do the dinner party part for me. And uh and he's like, Great, I love doing this. And so they worked out a deal where he would do it for them. Or I know somebody else that did this with um if there's a conference in town. They would kinda free Airbnb. Actually, Travis from Uber used to do this in his old uh blog post he talked about what he called the jam pad. Which was his house in San Francisco. He's like, Hey, if you're in town for this You could stay at the jam pad. And he's like, you know, what does it cost me to have some people on the couch? Nothing. A little inconvenience. I might have to put up some some weirdness. But ultimately like I'm creating this magnet, this this little mini yacht, where I'm just gonna have this flow of interesting people coming through that might who knows? Who knows what's gonna happen. But the asymmetric upside was there for I've got a friend, Satya, who does this poker game every week. And he'll invite anybody, all sorts of interesting people from like CEOs of like prominent companies. I was I just went to this deli, had a sandwich. I loved it. Was talking to the owner. And he knows that the and he was like, Yeah, he came in here, he loved the sandwich. And then he invited me to play poker. And I was like, that's so interesting. And he this like this guy went to go play poker with these CEOs and All sorts of interesting stuff has happened thanks to that. So I think that's his little yacht. It's interesting. Whatever. But if you kinda look I I know, at least for me, if I look at my life, I'm like I'm I'm very underweighted there. like, you know, I'm pretty overweighted on I don't know, social media or you know, other things that I spend a lot of time on. And these other things that I think if I if I'm honest with myself, like would clearly add value and I just don't make the time for them. Like and then sometimes you need a reminder, or in this case, like Just the word of like, Oh yeah, I'm just building a yacht here. Suddenly it elevates the importance of the thing I'm doing from like I'm just br h posting some people over. We're gonna have a dinner to like no no this is part of my this is part of my not yet my yacht. I'm I'm like this Greek dude. Uh you know, that that's me right now. And so sometimes you just need to delude yourself. Totally. Another one is so Yeah, we're both active on Twitter. There are folks that are like mutuals. Folks that you like their stuff. They like your stuff. Recently, I I would say like once a month. Somebody I meet somebody for the first time because there's somebody that uh is a mutual on Twitter, like we like each other, and they reach out to me and say, Hey, like let's grab lunch. And it's usually people in from out of town. Like people who are in town, you just expect that you're gonna see them. But if somebody's in from out of town, they're coming to San Francisco, they they go on a mission to meet all their Twitter mutuals. And I think that's great. Like people people should do that. Like when you're traveling, especially to San Francisco, if you have a lot of mutuals here, just reach out to them. Right. Yeah. That's it's so true. It's like tourism, right? Like if you like I've never been on to Alcatraz. I've lived here for fifteen years, but if I came to visit, I would have seen it that weekend. Absolutely. Yeah, I was gonna ask you about AI because I feel like you're pretty plugged in and you have you're a thoughtful dude. So I think you have a opinions on kind of like where the world is going. So I I want you to paint the picture. Like Game of Thrones style. You know the intro of Game of Thrones where they have the big map? It's like you have this map. First of like the high level map for AI is like What well here's what it appears to me. I'm curious your per point of view. that there's this um race. And I don't fully understand the idea of a race because it seems like whatever one company does, the other companies have six months later. So I'm not sure like If you got to the finish line, then what? What is the finish line and how do you win this supposed race? I'm not sure about that. Obviously so much money's being invested that Somebody believes that there's like a a victory condition of this race. I'm curious about that part of it first, like the the concept of an AI race. What do people actually mean? And How is that gonna play out? so many things in life have been winner take all in tech especially. So like there's one major search engine and there's one, you know, Facebook on social media. course there are others. There's Twitter out there. But a lot of these businesses have scaling returns or network effects. And The same is true in AI, probably. Like one company is gonna have all of the context they need to be your best assistant. And so I feel weird saying this because I use I right now Use Claude, Gemini. And chat GPT. Every day. And some queries, I'm doing the same query on each. But in the long run, that's not really sustainable. And also not everybody's like me. Most people are probably just gonna have one. And The context embedded into it, which is like all of your past conversations or if it's Gemini, they have all your email. Or, you know, if it's if it ends up being meta somehow, they have all that context. That's gonna be really valuable. So the first idea is that everybody in the world is gonna want is gonna have some ultra smart helpful assistant, which is some blend of like Google that just answers your questions for you. But then also like Can make things for you, write things for you, create a plan for you, uh, research a thing for you, like do the job for you. And like today. That's Today the leader is Chat GPT. I think they're like close to like a billion M A Us and you know Google's gonna quickly try to like, you know, Google's trying their best to do that. It seems like nobody else is close in that race specific. That specific part of the race that every human has an assistant. Open a eye. kind of launched chat GPT and it was unexpectedly a hit for them. It's it's crazy to think now, but they didn't think it was gonna work that well. Right. And OpenAI was an enterprise company and then through the success of ChatGPT became a consumer company. But Google already has all of this context on you. And they actually started this whole LLM thing. They screwed up along the way with Bard and all sorts of funny stuff that they did, but now Gemini's really, really good. And so In that consumer race. They've done a very good job, Gemini has, and I think has the momentum on consumer right now. Then there's the enterprise piece, which is like A lot of enterprise folks Use Claude. And I personally use Claude more than I use chat GPT. And it just allows me to do more things like for for the kind of research I do on companies. Claude is just my partner. It's my sparring partner. Like I'll It's like having like we actually didn't hire somebody this year. Because We're using Claude more than ever. Well you you you essentially did. You hired a person named Claude, essentially. Exactly. Okay. So there's the race to have everybody gets the sort of all intelligent, super helpful, always next to you, chief of staff. That's that's the Chad GPT analogy. Then you have um You know, like in Game of Thrones you'd have like the whoever like o is like really good at the the sea battles, right, the ocean stuff. That's let's say Enterprise and and Anthropics doing pretty well there right now and then and they're all gonna compete for everything, but like they're doing pretty well right now. And then you have the king of the north, so you have Elon up there, and he's marching and he's like, I'm gonna put data centers in space. And I'm gonna catch up with Grok. And we're gonna win. And so what do you what's your take on how that where does he go? How does that work? I would never, ever, ever bet against Elon. As of right now, I find Grok to not be as useful. But I think I think like it's possible that everyone has their favorite. And You know, over time people sort of slot into their favorites. It's like Coke Pepsi. If you're like Coke Py. Right now if you are Uh working in code, you're probably using Entropic. Okay, so now okay, let's keep going through the battle. Then you have all these SaaS companies. You've got uh you know, today's sponsor, HubSpot, you've got Salesforce, you've got like all uh Adobe, Figma, all these companies that are like cranking on revenue and growth and earnings and then their stock is just plummeting because the market believes that like They're gonna they're gonna get w somehow eaten away by uh I believe I it must be that that's why the stock is going down. The business fundamentals are strong. There's this question of twenty years in the future, is this company stronger or has that has it just been eaten away by AI that can do all these things? What do you think happens there? Is that overblown? Is that a is it a buying opportunity, or are you equally suspicious of of the future of these companies? I'm suspicious of the future of a lot of these companies. And I just think about myself, like right now I already am doing a lot of image creation. In Gemini. Nana banana. Um I I'm a paid user of Canva. Uh A bunch of Adobe products. Uh and yet now most of my image generation is already on Nano Bananas just so much easier. So then like Can those guys build it? Probably yes. Like some of them already have pretty good stuff. Like Adobe's AI stuff is very good. Figma's good. But will I just will there just be one model to roll them all? And I'll just do everything in there. It's my assistant. My assistant's doing it for me. So what do you need To be successful. as an independent company is a good question because If you look And all these like early AI companies. So there was like There were the ones that just helped you write Jasper was one. There there are some others. And like those guys I don't know how they're doing now, but I imagine. not well because I don't need another tool to tell me how to write. Right. Can do that for me. And then I think the same is probably gonna be true in image generation. And then all these other products too. Like even Even law. There are these companies Harvey and Lagora, which are both doing phenomenally well. Um, but Anthropic launched their own legal thing. So like what are the businesses in which You're You have less to worry about being cannibalized. from an existing AI. Right. There there was like a quote from Sam Alwin, maybe two years ago or a year ago, where he said, uh, they were kind of asking him this question, hey, developers are trying to build, but we're all worried we're gonna get steamrolled. And he he was like, Yeah, you should think about what we're not gonna build because here's a simple test. Like um there's some companies That when we say there's a new model update, they get really excited 'cause it made their existing things so much more valuable. And then there's other companies that are terrified when we say there's a new model update, because we might have just swallowed what they did and you should think fairly carefully. And the response was sort of like Okay, so so wait, what are the so what are those things that you're not gonna do, right? That's like it's like a meme where it's like Wait. So are you gonna say what they are or we just need to guess, right? 'Cause it seems like an ever expanding scope. Um that that's pretty tough. Seems like the lawyer one would probably be easier, 'cause A lawyers, uh, you know, it's a workflow specific thing. There's like security compliance. There's like there's like really like a lot of nuance that you would have to build on top of that. Even if Chat GBD can quickly generate a document and write it or read it. Still probably there's enough like domain specific workflow and risk where somebody specializing in it will solve the hundred sp small problems that the lawyers care about, uh, that Chat GPT's product managers aren't gonna care to do. Totally. I think that's true. And I I think In your in your c the case of HubSpot or Salesforce, like I don't think those things are gonna change overnight. I think it's gonna be There's a People are gonna keep using those like systems of record for a long time. As a fund, we think about this a lot. And my partner Nihar wrote a piece last week. The last mile problem. And basically. Talk about what matters and it's what you just said, domain context. And workflows. So like If you've got the specific terms and norms of a given field. If it's healthcare, legal accounting, you can produce more trusted outcomes. Um, and integrations. So like integrations into your Salesforce instance are valuable. Um, or in health EHRs or whatever the case may be. And then there's also some like compliance and human in the loop. element that I think really matters. So I It's hard to know though. It really does feel like A lot of these businesses could at least be very challenged by the general models. What are some uh like if if I just gave you a million dollars and I'm like, you gotta invest this into any AI companies, public, private, anywhere. What Where do you have like a lot of conviction? What would that what would that portfolio look like? Where would you put the bets? Let's take a million dollars. Where are you putting the bets? Yeah. So I would say like right now With You know, anthropic being valued at nearly 400 billion and Uh open AI at like eight hundred billion. I don't I'm not gonna put it there. Like How big could those companies get and what's the risk reward? I think Could they be trillion dollar companies? Yeah, but they better be trillion dollar companies. Right. Like if they're not, that's a failure. Right. So I'm I'm not putting it there. Um, it's wild to think that like We only had the first trillion dollar company like not that long ago. Yeah. And now what, six, seven years ago, I feel like it was a really big deal. And now we have Basically almost trillion dollar private companies. It didn't even exist ten years ago. It's crazy. Okay, so where would I put that money? So I I think it'd go back to this, like Where are Where are the vertical opportunities that are very interesting? And I think on the general consumer side. I think it's tough for me to find one because On the consumer side, it feels like Probably I'm going to be using Gemini or ChatGPT or one of those generalized models. They're going to end up getting my context for for the stuff I need. Yeah, there might be other interesting ones that do stuff like Suno for music is interesting. They've actually they've grown like crazy to a to an amount that I would not have predicted. Um they're like hundreds of millions of revenue, I believe. Yeah. I'm a power user of you know. Amazing. It would be a fun project. I mean, a lot of people are obviously doing this, but a fun a fun project for somebody would be build a brand around a musician you've created on AI and like market it through Spotify and all that stuff. There are obviously a lot of them out there, but if I had more free time, I would probably do that. That'd be a fun one to do. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Uh yeah, I've played around with that idea as well. Like, what would it take to get on the charts, right? Can I take this song, can I create an artist with an avatar? Can I build them up on Instagram? How would I do this? And just see, like total just get to play, you know, have have this sort of like fantasy musician arc, you know, take take six months. And just see what you could do. Um, like I'm pretty sure I could do it if I just dedicated six months to to doing it. Now again, it's like maybe it's not worth the time, but Fun. It's on my list. It's on my my itch list here of like p possible projects. Yeah. As on a related note, I just saw this on Twitter, so I don't know if it's fully accurate, but Um there's an Epstein Files. Podcast. that's entirely AI generated. And apparently is now a top fifty podcast on the charts. I saw when he launched it and he was like, it's getting downloaded like a thousand times an hour right now. And then it was like Update three thousand times an hour, right? It was like uh but but what is the actual podcast? What is it? Is just reading the emails out loud, or what is it trying to do? I so after I saw the tweet, I went and I listened to the intro. And it's kind of like notebook L M. So it's like it's like they're two hosts talking back and forth about it and they talk they talk about a different thing each each Episode. I wonder how many more things that are gonna be like this, right? So like I'm not safe as a podcaster, right? Because you can um you can create podcasts about you know about anything. And now if you can auto auto create it. And so what they did was they were basically like, here's the source material. That's very juicy. Very dense. And maybe is gonna be keep growing. Right? So there's some runway here. And then you feed it into Notebook LM and then you create a podcast out of it like automatically. You could do that like, you know, about everything. I could do that about sports. I could do that about anything that has like this and this big feed of Uh like your feedstock to put into the to the into the bottle, right? That's Pretty wild. I thought about creating a podcast. That was interviews with The Great Dead. So it's basically like Could I do a podcast with Steve Jobs now with AI? Oh yeah. Like maybe I could. Maybe the tools are now good enough where you could actually figure out like what would he say and it actually Has enough. It would give like sensible answers. You could copy his voice using eleven labs. Yeah. You could create a digital avatar. Using one of the video models. Yeah. And you could do the whole thing. And so like that's kind of interesting. Like, Well what if I did that? That'd be cool. Like, you know, just me and Genghis Khan for today's episode. Totally. Have you seen S um Delphi? Uh the like they're making like a clone, right? Delphi what is a Delphi. So you can make it's Delphi.ai. Um you can basically make a digital clone of yourself. And they have them with like Arnold Schwarzenegger and other folks like that. Like you can you can talk to them, basically do what kind of what you just said. Are they pretty good? Is it uh They're pretty good. I I haven't I haven't played around with it that much, but from what I saw, it was pretty good. And apparently the company's doing very well. They raise from Sequoia other like After the races. Wow. So people are like, I just want to chat with Michael like Michael Ovitz on here. I want to chat with Michael Ovitz. Yeah, I think like I saw Lenny Uh Lenny has one, Lenny Brajitski. Your guy, Brian Heligan. has one and and he does like founder coaching. Via Delphi. So I just asked Michael Ovitz, the creator of CAA, the talent agency. I said, Hey after this. I was like, I'm having a meeting about our podcast deal to renegotiate. What should I do? And here we go. I got Michael Ovitz representing me now. This is fantastic. That'd be incredible. He's like you're he's said, you're negotiating leverage, not just rates. And then he goes into the wrong strategy. Okay, this might be awesome, actually. I don't have to give this guy ten percent either. This is fantastic. Exactly, exactly. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book but then tearing out four fifths of the pages. Point is you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the custom platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it, visit hubspot.com. All right, so that's that's it. Are you personally using AI in any interesting ways? I think there's some too annoying for me to do. Like I My my wife and I my wife Works at Meta. She has after after five years there, you get a five week break called recharge. And we're like figuring out what to do. And there's like a ton of research I'm trying to do. And one of the ideas is a road trip on a camber in a cambervan in Europe. And um There are these things call relocation specials that I've done a bunch of times where like they need to move a camper van from one place to another. And they basically give you the camper band for free. And you can like move it over a couple of weeks. I've done it multiple times and it's it's fun because you take the camper van one way. Normally you have to take it and bring it back to the same place. Right. This is both cheap and you don't have to bring it back to the same place. And it'll be usually be like a new van. They have to move from the factory somewhere else. So what is it in private jets, empty legs or whatever? Empty legs. Yeah, kinda like empty legs. Uh but but for for the the normal people like us. So I I've had AI Do a bunch of research and find it for me. message message the camper van places and ask and uh ask them. That's been kind of fun and useful. Um I For this event I had, I uh wanted to save some money. And uh Had had AI do an exam for me to become like a licensed travel person. I saved sixteen percent on this big uh big event. So you needed to become a life licensed uh what travel agent or what did you have to do become? Yeah it it w it was sort of a hack because uh One of my portfolio companies helped me that is in the travel space, but I had to do I had to do these exams. It was like I don't remember how many hours it was like ten hours of training and then some exam. And I just I had uh AI do it for me. And so it it goes through all the training material. It took the exam as well? Or that's amazing. Um all right, I wanted uh you had this tweet a while a little while. I want I've been wanting to ask you about. So you were somebody tweeted out They said The worst mistakes are decisions in human history. And they were, you know, Adam and Eve eating from the forbidden dream, the Mavs training Luca Donce, right? So they're just going through random examples. And then you had a bunch from the business world. I wanted to to to go through this. I was curious if you have any You know, tell some of these stories. I think I don't think all these stories are super well known. Totally. A lot of them are this like Innovators Dilemma. That's kind of a broad theme. Which is Kodak. They invented the digital camera and then they didn't sell it because they were worried It would suppress their film sales and then All these other companies started selling digital cameras and then Kodak basically went out of business. Kind of the worst way to lose, right? Like that's my nightmare, Exactly. And then the same thing happened with Excite. So Excite Had an like Google wanted to sell to excite. For seven hundred fifty thousand dollars very early on, it was just Larry and Sergei wanted to sell the this idea to them. And Excite said. Um We don't want them to get answers. We want them to stay on the page. So we can serve up ads. And then so obviously the rest is history there. So th those are kind of like A theme is you would cannibalize our business. So we're not gonna do it. And that actually like back to our early discussion about AI. That's one that I I was worried that Google would get into. I think a lot of people were worried Google would have that problem and Google stock was really in the shitter like a year and a half ago. And then as Google like Gemini became great and people realized okay, like Sinners not just sitting back saying I'm not gonna I'm not gonna do this, like he's doing it too and and then Google stock has done really well. But I think that that was a big worry people had because How Google makes money is on ads when you're searching for stuff. And if you're not searching for stuff. their entire revenue model goes away. Right. Yeah, that's a that's a good one. Um what about this story of uh It seems like another one is like selling early. Um that's the Ron Wayne story. So what's the what's the Ron Wayne story? Yeah, Ron Wayne was a co founder of Apple. with jobs in Wozniak and very early on he Uh, he had a ten percent stake in the company. And he thought it wasn't gonna be worth anything and wanted to focus on other stuff. So he sold his steak back to them for eight hundred dollars. A hundred dollar, not even like eight hundred grand. Uh So t he owned ten percent of Apple. He's like kind of written out of history. If he was I I didn't know he was actually like a co founder. What what did he do? What was this guy's uh role? Lazanic's making the computer, jobs is jobs. He worked at Atari. With Um with jobs and and Wozniak. He was actually one of the early people that brought them together. And he was like, let's figure out a new business opportunity. And I think it was actually like in his home that they created the idea. For Apple? And um and it was like It was split between uh Wozniak and Jobs. Like I think they each own 45%. But Wayne for like bringing them together, he was like he was like the adult the original adult in the room. Right. And then I think there was something where like Steve Jobs got a line of credit. they would be personally liable for? To start like to purchase materials to to fulfill an order. And so Ron Wyn was like listen I can't be personally liable for this. I'm out. And he sold his shares back for eight hundred bucks. What happened to this guy? Is he has he talked about this? Did he end up doing okay? Like uh there was a guy who was a partner with Buffett and Munger. I forget what his name is. Rick something. And he He got overleveraged, he had to sell. his stake back to Buffett and Munger and basically missed out on Berkshire. And you know, he ended up doing well outside of it, but like, you know, a cautionary tale for like kind of the Buffett, I think said it best he goes, uh You know, Rick was in a hurry. And he's like me and Charlie, we were not. And that was the difference. Yeah. I I looked it up afterwards Wayne ran a stamp shop and he'll be disclics original someday. Tell me about this one. So you said SoftBank, they own five percent of NVIDIA. Yeah. And they sold it to plow all the money into We Work. And I'm I'm what I'm interested in here is actually your opinion on um Massa. So I don't I mean I don't know a lot about the guy. But um I can't tell is this guy a genius or an idiot? Um like you know, when they um When he released like his like I believe in AI Raise the Vision fun, and he releases the deck and it's like a picture of like a unicorn flying and it's like there's not a d two syllable word in this deck. You know what I mean? Like it's like this is made by children, but this is actually the and the vision of this like the biggest venture fund in the world. Did he just get lucky? Is this just a guy who got lucky and it's kinda like uh you know I've been to casinos where I play against, you know, some random ch you know, guy who's some Asian guy who's got a sh a huge chip stack. And then you you're like, Wow, you assume he must be great, then you realise like, Oh no, this guy is like superstitious and if this is happening, he goes all in and he just happened to win, right? Like what's the story of Masa? Is he a genius or an idiot? Yeah, listen, I know people Who have pitched him. And people who've worked with him. Who are still wondering the answer to that question. I don't know. I mean, so like the backstory for people who don't know is he had this legendary bet, which was on Alibaba. He invested them very early on after he met Jack Ma. put in twenty million dollars and it turned into a hundred billion dollars. So like Just like this massive And he had the twenty million from what? He he created like CES, right? Is it was that the first thing he created like these tech conferences or magazines? Was like a software distributor and publisher. And it was like really big in In Japan. And he partnered they partnered with Yahoo. to create Yahoo Japan, which Yahoo Japan ended up being Way more successful than Yahoo in the US. And so they because it was a J V, they like Yahoo only owned a small part of it. I think Softbank owned more and they had a bunch of money from Yahoo Japan. And I think that's what he plowed into Ali Raba. Okay. So he was a good entrepreneur, at least. Great entrepreneur. I think he's like and he's very risky. Like he's fully risk on. Like he lost all of his money, then gained it back and then, you know, does it again. And he's like he'll he'll like go full leverage, like All out debt. And look with the vision fund, $100 million fund. What's crazy a hundred billion dollar fund seemed so crazy that it was like Is it even real? Is this April Fool's Day? Like when it launched whatever, six, seven years or no, I guess now. Eight or nine years ago. And they wrote massive checks into a bunch of companies, sometimes competing companies. And I I never thought it would work. And my main reasoning for at the time thinking it wouldn't work. was Companies that need a lot of money are not necessarily the companies that you want to plow money into. Like it ended up being a lot of like money losing companies um that now eventually like many of them ended up being successful like Uber and DoorDash. But Yeah, then there was We Work, which I think They put the most money into. Yeah, so what's the verdict on the vision fund? It it did did well, or we just too early to say, or just not? I think it ended up being okay. It's an okay fund. It's not great. Like, if you're looking to deploy a million dollars, like there are ways you can get Five, ten million dollars, like if you invest in a good fund. But a hundred billion. If you're deploying a hundred billion, like you're not expecting to five exit. If you One and a half, two exit, maybe that's okay, depending on timeline. Gotcha. Um, what do you think people should be paying attention to? And maybe the better way of asking that is what are things you're paying attention to right now that you don't think a lot of other people are, or you know, the the masses maybe maybe or or uh even like general population of smart individuals. Right. So not Not like literally the average American, but also not The guys at your V C dinner? So somebody in somebody in between, right? The general smart person. What are they not what are they underweighting, paying less attention to, um, thinking about the wrong way that you you you were paying attention to differently? I think everyone and I'm encouraging my parents to do it too should just be and this is like An easy answer should be just using AI more. Um I think When my parents give me an assignment, like my parents often are like, Hey, Sheil, can you book this for me? I'm their personal assistant. And now I'm trying to teach them to use AI. And actually they're doing it. It it actually kinda surprised me, but they're but they're able to look stuff up on AI that they you know they weren't doing a month ago. And they're getting answers. And I'm also encouraging them. Not to send me like Stupid fake forwards and to look everything up and make sure it's it's legit. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. Uh, they make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why uh I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife, very easy to spin up virtual cards. Uh one click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a FinTech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and call them N A, members FDIC. Curious if you have any non consensus or contrarian opinions about something. So for example, you know, most people Think that XYZ is, you know, kind of useless, but actually I think that's wrong. I think this is amazing. I'll give I'll give you a simple example. So Brian Johnson was initially, I would say, completely overlooked. First time we had him on the podcast, he really wasn't like Brian Johnson, the kind of media personality at the time. He didn't have a big social media. He just had his website, his blog where he's uploading like his own like blood markers too and we were like, Oh, this is cool. This guy's like really tracking everything and he's publishing it on a blog. And then Brian Johnson became this like kind of like beacon of longevity. And then people were like, Wait, is he a vampire? What's going on over here? Like, is this too much? And so he became this like polarized figure and now he's like full on like YouTuber, content creator. And So one of my like I think Brian Johnson might be the best content creator on earth right now. You know, like I just think he's like running circles around everybody in the same way that When people saw what the Kardashians were doing early on. Or the Paul brothers, it was really easy to dismiss. As, you know, sort of silly silly, stupid, useless, whatever. And then like, you know, fast forward a decade and they built these really big empires off of that. I think what Brian Johns is doing on social media is uh incredible. And it's just I literally as just a content creator, like I just think what he's done is is is genius. I think a lot of folks Especially going into a new area they weren't before they started on content. And became successful that way. And kind of like In our in my world of venture capital. And Drees and Horowitz. Like they are basically All of the story adventure firms are pretty old. They were around in the dot com bubble. The only new one. is Andrew Sonorovis. And the way they did it was by like Owning and controlling the media. And they've done a really good job at it. They have a lot of people, they put out a lot of content and it's worked for them. And that was pretty strategic of them, right? So like the they they enter the V C world. They want to do well. You to do well in the V C world, you need to have brand that will either bring deals to you or get you access into a deal when you want it to to be able to go lead that round, right? Yeah. And so I guess like give me the inside baseball there. H what did they how did they approach that problem? How did they how did they solve that problem? Yeah, so You need a brand. You want to be recognized. And the way they did it. Like so first of all, it's only like fifteen years old, Andrews Norwitz. And if you if you look at the other storied firms, benchmark, Sequoia, et cetera, they're a lot older and they they really earned their reputation Sequoia even earlier, but Benchmark in the dot com era. So these guys basically said like We we're gonna do it differently. And we're gonna provide, instead of just having one partner work with. You're gonna work with a whole team of people and we're gonna support it with content. So um we're gonna promote our portfolio with content, but also people are gonna listen to that content and they're gonna think about Andreas and Horowitz and think like those are smart people I want to raise from. And it really like before Andrews and Horowitz, there was not a lot of content on Venture. Like a couple of guys had blogs and had recent totally changed the game. And they actually they learned from Michael Lovets. I think Ovitz did a lot in building this. CA into this You have this whole team of support around you. And that's what Anderson modeled it off of. Right, right. Yeah, it seems like you know, you had Fred Wilson have a blog or whatever. Yeah. I and I've seen this now in a couple of spaces where We all think we're doing the thing. Like I would say at the time there were some VCs who thought we're doing content. What do you mean? Oh yeah, I have my blog. And then they're like somebody brings the gun to a knife fight where they're like, Oh, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna invest essentially, you know, like I I would how much do you think they spend every year on just the media and content side? Um like what do we what do you think is the expense part of the P and L for them? It's gotta be Easily tens of millions. Easily tens of millions. Exactly. Tens of millions of dollars on content. So you're like, we're doing content. And then they were like, Well, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna build this like a company and we're gonna like they made acquisitions in that space. I they bought Eric's company. They uh they have huge teams of people. They create multiple shows. They put like have studio sets, they go on tour, they're spending a huge portion of their time just going on other shows. And so They go in with just a level of seriousness and scale. blows other people out of the water. And I've seen this over and over again. The Charlie Munger quote. Take a simple idea, but take it seriously. Uh, where it's like, We're doing this, right? The Mr. Beast, like we got to know Jimmy recently. Yeah, like the last few years. And like he did the same thing. Like YouTubers were a thing and YouTubers would do these stunts or challenges. And then he just took that simple idea. Way more seriously than everybody else. He's like, Well I'm gonna put all the money into it. I'm gonna build my own sets. I'm gonna be if you've ever been to his place like uh I mean it's like giant like he's got the biggest sound stage in North America. Like you know he's he's building the biggest sets. It's like a construction company when you walk through his his his area. Um you know he's got teams of people every dollar they make, they invest and more. They lose money on every video. Right? Like YouTubers were like, Hey, we're doing we're doing this, right? And then he did it at a different level of sale scale and seriousness. And so I always find that interesting because whenever you go into a news space, sometimes the right idea is actually there. It just hasn't been like taken to the limit. And if you took it to the limit, which is also what Brian Johnson did, by the way, like biohacking, quantified self, that was an existing community. And he just took it to the limit. And and when you take it to the limit, like you get a whole new thing, a whole new level of success can emerge. I think a lot of these folks like if you're if you're starting it Something new, you have to take it to the limit. Yeah. Uh, you just uh sent me this thing. I've I've seen this before. So this is Uh explain what this is. Uh explain this. So I thought this might be fun. Basically, two weeks ago I saw that the breaking bad house, you know, the house that Uh, Brian Cranston throws the pizza on top of Was for sale in Albuquerque. Iconic. Iconic house for any of you anybody who's seen Breaking Bad. And so a friend of mine, a friend of mine told me this for sale and I was like, We need to buy this. Was this like very publicized or like kind of a friend just noticed hey that hey that's the house? Like how how popular was publicized? Like it got out there. And it was listed at four hundred thousand dollars because That's kind of it's kind of like a small it's like a nineteen hundred square foot house. in the suburbs of Albuquerque, like 25 minutes from downtown. And I immediately was like, we need to buy this house. It was listed 400,000. And so we like book a flight to Albuquerque like an hour later. And we like built this model around what are we gonna do with this house? How much can we spend on it? So you go you go to the house, does it look like the show in inside still or it looks totally different? It looks totally different on the inside. Okay. So they they changed the inside. Yeah. Huge mistake. Um When they did the show, that was just someone's home, basically they rented from it. And it's this family that's lived in the house since the seventies. They bought it for almost nothing in the seventies. And then They they like got a call from the show saying, like, hey, your house looks like a normal house in Albuquerque that we might want to use for this. They only use the exterior of the house. They didn't use the interior of the house. For filming. Oh, okay, gotcha. And are they were they just annoyed people kept taking pictures of the house? 'Cause in San Francisco there's like the full house house that was Sorely. couple blocks from me and just people constantly stopping and taking photos of Yeah. It's extremely annoying for them. So so much so that they built a fence around the house so you couldn't actually like throw pizza over. And then the neighbors are pissed. It's not a good situation. So they were like, Let's sell this house and they listed it for like Fair market value might be $350,000 like looking at comps and they listened to $400,000. And they they had tried to do Like a museum or something, but they got They got shut down by the city. And so it's been you know, the show's been off for what, like twelve years. They could have it they could have turned it into something amazing in the meantime, but they did. They just continue to live there. And so they sell for four hundred they listed four hundred thousand dollars. We say, Okay, like How much can we make off this thing? If we turn it into an Airbnb. I love experiences that are also the house. Like I stayed in Brian Chesky's house. I've stayed in this like you I've stayed in a bunch of architects' homes around the world. Like I love unique architecture. So I thought like I can turn this into an Airbnb. What what do we do? So We like built this model around it, like assuming we assumed we could charge eight hundred dollars a night. Versus like It's a four bedroom place. In the area you might be able to charge Trinity or fifty dollars a night, but Given Given that it's an iconic place, like if I went to Albuquerque with some friends, I would definitely want to stay in the house. It would be worth it for the story. We assume like sixty percent occupancy. We we made a bunch of assumptions based on information we learned. Like we looked up what the stranger things house is going for, all sorts of stuff like that. And then and then also like what the rules around short term listings are. We actually spent time with an Airbnb consultant. Like I called up an Airbnb consultant, spoke to her for an hour. And and got some ideas there. And like I had this other idea of like Build an R V like his R V and just park it out front. That'll be another bedroom 'cause there's enough space in the house. And so we basic we basically got comfortable that we could spend nine hundred thousand dollars for this thing and it'd be worth it. Like sorry, so the so the math was You thought base case uh you know, uh worst case scenario. Oh, worst case scenario is ridiculously low. So you didn't even need to worry about that one too much, but you were basically uh the expected case was that it would make like a hundred seventy five grand a year of rental income off the Airbnb. Um, and that it would cost hundred twenty K to run. Yeah. And you'd net something like fifty five, sixty K a year off this rental property that you own in Albuquerque. And more importantly, an epic story. An epic story. Absolutely epic story. And it was just like it was honestly so fun. Like actually part of the thing part of what I love about my job is I get to do this. Like I get to do due diligence on a space I don't know much about. And over the course of the next day, like I learned a lot about Airbnbs. I learned about a lot about breaking bad, a lot about this house. Right. To be clear. Does this have anything to do with your job? This is not to do with your job, right? Due diligence. My job is like doing diligence. Use the same skills got it. Yeah, same skills. So we decided we could spend around $900,000 and it it would be worthwhile. It would make us a decent return and then also, to your point, be just an epic story. It'd be so fun to own it. But then the major risk was Albuquerque has these short term rental laws where Neighbors Call call this hotline and basically shut you down if they're unhappy. And so there is some concern that that happens. And if if the short term rental ability goes away. This house becomes worth three hundred fifty thousand dollars. Like exactly. What every other house around it is. And so there was some risk there that you it's hard to price in. But basically we decided we could spend up to nine hundred thousand dollars and Ultimately the house went for over a million. We don't know exactly how much. But it was sold to Aiden Ross, who uh for those of you don't know, who's who's a popular streamer. And You know, for him, he's got a totally different revenue stream, which is like he can make a ton of streaming this a to this audience. He can market to this audience. So he came at it with something that we just don't have and can't compete with. But it was really fun doing this. So um so somebody who who owns the stranger things house, what are they making? It's like $2,000 a night. And It's fulbooked. Hundred percent occupancy. And did they make the inside match the show? Yeah, they made the inside match the show and put a bunch of other memorabilia in. That was our plan too, was like reconfigure it to make it m look more like the original. Like some of the rooms will look like the original parts of the show, and then the other rooms will just have like Breaking bad memorabilia. Yeah. We had talked a long time ago about buying Michael Jordan's house, which was on sale for like a very long time in Chicago. It like started at like twenty something million and then had dropped all the way down to like thirteen, twelve. And on the uh one of the early episodes of the podcast, like, should we buy Michael Jordan's house? Um, and like can we turn it into whether it's Air B, it's like a um We were like you know, you could fractionally like uh you could use an NFT basically to fractionally own it. Yeah. And so it's not an Airbnb actually, it's a bunch of people who co own this thing. And ultimately we we kinda l took our eye off it. It ended up selling for like think like seven or eight million dollars. Like it ended up going for like kind of a steal. Um, who was like, dude, I can buy Michael Jordan's house. This is amazing. And he's turned it into like, you know, a short term rental uh sort of deal as well. I've I've one more thing, which is I had another um business idea for people. Okay. So yeah, we've we've talked about Parents before I think. Uh my dad is kind of a funny guy and I'm always trying to get him to work out to like, you know, live longer. And you know, people like us do stuff like Barry's boot camp, Soul Cycle, like these classes. And the idea is A Barry's Boot Camp style class for old people. And you could franchise it. Isn't it Zumba? Exactly geared towards old people. I think I think you can easier make it easier. Like sort of lighter contact. And um emphasize stuff like balance, joint work. And even like maybe even cognitive exercises. And you basically have this like welcoming place for people fifty five plus. who have a lot of free time and want to stay active and healthy. And maybe you you build like a a club around it. Is the idea. So that that's uh I think that's a great idea. I'll tell you why. So I have a trainer um who basically was like, you know, kind of like had a bodybuilding era, trained a bunch of brides trying to get in shape for for uh weddings, all the classic models, right? Then like, you know, me like tech guy trying to You know, workouts, we comes to my house. I've been working with him for I don't know, five, six years now. He Um so I was like, I really want my mom. to um to work out. Like I think it'd be great for her. And she's too cheap to like, you know, be like, oh, a personal trainer. Like bucks for a session. That's like, you know, three months at the gym over here, like at the YMCA. Like I'm not doing that. And so for Christmas, I got her like uh I was like, I paid for it, my trainer will train you for a little bit. She got hooked. So then she started like oh I'm definitely gonna make this investment. And uh she loves it. She's been doing it for years now and she's been in great shape. So my trainer basically like suddenly his his clientele over the last couple of years has totally pivoted where his his entire network is basically like aunties and uncles of like the Indian community. And so like my mom was doing it, and then my father in law started doing it. I posted this video of him running. And my father in law's I think he's like seventy nine years old. And he um I see this video on Instagram of him running and I'm like, What? Like, what is going on here? And he's like, He feels so good. He's moving again. He had he was having like blood pressure and headaches and things like that. This has really been helping him. He fell at our house. We had this stool that's like kind of like we shouldn't have this stool. A little risky, like I don't even know why we have it, but he was he's sitting on a fell. And literally the first thing he says when he falls is like, good thing I've been training because he like bounced back right away. He didn't like break a hip. So we were like, this is amazing. So then his brother, his and so like my my trainer basically goes from my house. to like people who are literally like learning to walk again, stand straight again, like just be able to move, rotate, because we one thing that you lose a lot as you uh grow old is your you sti you s just stiffen up. So you lose rotational ability. Which if you go to the gym and you sit on one of the machines or elliptical, like the things that people older people do at the gym all rigid, no rotation type of exercise. And if you do rotation unsupervised, like you can also really get hurt. So Anyways, he's been doing this. And I've been telling them the same idea. I'm like, bro, you should like this is a real s act of service that you're doing for the world. And There's not other great options for uh, you know, people who are fifty to eighty years old who want some form of like, Organized Tell Me What To Do movement. Ideally, in a social format where you're with a group of people, you got out of the house, like there are so many benefits. Like my grandparents used to just go to Costco every day. 'Cause it was like Word place. Right. It's like a place to go. They would walk around. They would see people. They could get like a two dollar meal. Like and it was it was awesome. And so like that was like a huge deal for them. It's like they don't have really have third spaces the same way that like, you know, younger people have. So I kinda love this idea. It like makes a lot of sense. I'm surprised it doesn't exist already. I kinda did a little bit of research. I couldn't find anything. So I th I need something here. Well there's no like killer brand, even if obviously there's gonna be something that exists. But there's nobody's build like Soul Cycle, who's built berries, who's built just like a really fun and by the way, this playbook has been done fifty times now, right? Like solid core and F forty five or whatever. There's like so many so many, yeah. You could literally just copy the the the blueprint. You just change the demo. I also wonder if you could like get the insurance to cover in some way or like some way. Like is there some like Medicaid hack. Should cover something. So there is There's something called Silver Sneakers, which is a great name. which is a a fitness program for older adults through Medicare Advantage Plans. But it's it's like P N D X? Like digital or No, it's actually um it gives members access to gyms. And actually my net does this. I think that's how he pays for his YMCA. But it doesn't it's not like They don't have this specific thing which I'm thinking about, which is like Camp around low impact and and senior friendly stuff. Right. This is great. Wait, so so Silver Sneakers that's a private company. And they're basically saying uh you get access to so they kind of class past it. They went and did partnerships. Is that how they did this? That's right. Yeah. And they do have they do have like Online classes. But I I but it's different. It's like It's videos and then they have partnerships with gyms. Is this like a venture back company? Or is this a is this like boot shop? They they have two million visits a month on their website. It's pretty crazy. Oh, interesting. The acquired Nutrisystem in South Beach diet. Yeah, this is interesting. Like these guys, the silver sneakers, like they're not gonna do You know, like the the modern way of doing things. They're like an old school company. Right. But it says here 19 million Americans, uh available to more than nineteen million Americans through Medicare Advantage plans, um, supplement carriers and group retiree plans. That's cool. Yeah, that's there's definitely an opportunity here. I like these because I feel like with AI. Let's l like, you know, with AI, you kinda want AI proof businesses if you're gonna if you're gonna start something new. Either you need to be a big beneficiary of AI or you need to be AI proof. You want to be on either end of the spectrum. You don't want to be in the middle. Um and so AI proof, like, you know, there's not gonna be AI that works your body out for you. Like even if it's in if it's smarter, it guides you You're still gonna have to do the work out. Totally. And so you and so giving people a place to go, especially if AI gives people more free time or more income, like anything like that. It could be a big beneficiary of that. I like this idea. Yeah, it's a fun one. Um, all right, Sheil, I appreciate you coming on and sharing ideas, insights and all that stuff, man. Always good to hang. Likewise, man, that was fun. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to So on the roadless travel, never looking back. Alright, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit. And it's hosted by Luis and Fonzi Cameo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Louise and Fonzi are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're gonna hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content Profit.