SPEAKER_01
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SPEAKER_01
All right, we're live, we're good? Yeah, what's up? We keep getting two things that's kind of like keeping me up at night. The first, which doesn't keep me up at night, but weirds me out, why do people keep confusing us?
SPEAKER_01
And the second thing does keep me up at night is, I don't know if they're saying it just about me or about both of us, but they say that we look differently than they thought.
SPEAKER_03
And I think both are like, I think both are insults wrapped in disguise, like they're not saying anything bad, but the way they're kind of like laughing makes me think it's not a good thing. I don't think it's an upgrade for them and they see that.
SPEAKER_01
Someone said that I write like a bro, but I look like a nerd. And I'm like, you're insulting both my looks and my, like how do you make me, I want to look like a bro maybe and talk, or wait, which one do I want to do? I want to look like a bro and talk like a nerd maybe.
SPEAKER_03
People mix this up. That means for months, they've just been listening to this and they think I'm you and they think you're me and when they follow us, they have it all wrong.
SPEAKER_01
All right. Second thing, E-foil. You know what that is?
SPEAKER_03
No, I've never heard of this.
SPEAKER_01
I'm about to rent one. So it's a $12,000 device and it looks kind of like a wakeboard, but it has like a three foot to four foot like rudder that sticks on the bottom of it. And on the bottom of that rudder is a motor and it's like a boosted skateboard with like a handheld acceleration device.
You lift off and you ride three feet above the water.
SPEAKER_03
I've seen this now that you say, I thought you were talking about something related to like, I don't know, microphones or voices. You just switched topics with the hard left turn, but I appreciate that. So I saw this because what's the name of that one surfer guy who's like a super famous?
SPEAKER_01
Laird Hamilton. Yeah, Laird Hamilton.
SPEAKER_03
I saw him doing this. I don't know if I think his was like even taller, but basically he was surfing with, there's like an underground fin and then he's elevated above the water and he was like, and it's like a jet ski that he's standing on. It was kind of crazy.
Sounds like that's what this is.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, I'm about to go do it in an hour. I'm pumped. Is this the next pickable? It might be.
It might be. I'm getting ads for it constantly on social media. It might be.
We have a good episode today because you brought something up incredibly interesting and I'd went deep on it. Before we get into that, can I tell you a quick story?
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, go for it.
SPEAKER_01
So a few weeks ago, I got mocked on the internet for doing this trap in a closet with Andrew Chen thing. So this guy named Andrew Chen, what is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz? He's got a cool startup blog, but I heard he told me one of the wilder stories I've heard recently. So when he was in, I think, I might get some of the details wrong by year or two, but when he was in about sixth grade, he took the SAT and scored really high.
And when he did, I think it's the University of Washington does this thing where every five or 10, they take five or 10 students per year who are in sixth or seventh grade, sometimes younger, like 12 years old, whichever grade that is. And they asked them to come to college, to come to University of Washington. And he was one of the students.
And so at sixth grade, I think he skipped seventh grade and went straight to college. And he moved there in a dorm, went to college, and I asked him who else was in it. And he actually said Emmett Shear from Twitch was one of the folks.
SPEAKER_03
Wait, wait, so he didn't go to college, he didn't become a college student, he just went for a camp or something? Or he's, no, he enrolled and now he's a student.
SPEAKER_01
No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Doogie Hauser stuff, like he literally, instead of going to seventh grade, he moved into a dorm, went to college, and here's where it gets even crazier.
So he moved there, moved away from home, which I think his parents are from this state as well, but it was like moved half an hour or however far away from home, lived there as a college student. And he, understandably, was kind of embarrassed and didn't really tell a lot of people. And so they thought that, even though he was however whatever age you are in seventh grade, they kind of assumed that he was just another 18 year old.
And apparently he told me that he even dated a girl, he just kind of acted normal. And they didn't find out that he didn't like hide it from them, but he didn't bring it up. And they didn't find out until senior year or something like that when everyone was turning 21.
And they were like, when do you turn 21? And he's like, oh, I'm actually 17 years old, or six, whatever. It's a pretty wild story. And I asked him like, who else was part of this program? And he said the founder of Twitch was some person running a huge hedge fund, just like baby genius, like real baby geniuses, crazy fascinating story.
And apparently the University of Washington still does this every year where they select, I forget what they call the program, but it's like a thing where they have psychologists and therapists meet with the kids every quarter, every month to discuss what's going on. And it was incredibly fascinating. And in a very typical genius response, I said, isn't that weird that you skipped high school? And he was like, well, what do you think about it? Adolescence is really just like a societal constraint.
And I kind of experienced the same thing. I was like, oh yeah, I mean, I guess you're right. But like, thanks for proving my point.
SPEAKER_03
I think it's just a figment of my imagination.
SPEAKER_03
Isn't that wild? That is wild. Also, I don't know if that's true because Emmett definitely went to Yale and so did Justin Kahn. So I don't know.
SPEAKER_01
Maybe it was through Yale, but he said that Emmett was part of the same program, or maybe he dropped out.
SPEAKER_03
College dropout at age 13. I love it.
SPEAKER_01
He said that Emmett was part of his program. I don't know what program that they do it in a ton of different schools, but like a 13-year-old freshman in college.
SPEAKER_03
Right. Would you let your kid do this, or would you want your kid to do this? Let's say your kid's 12, scores high on a test. Would you want him to skip high school and go and be a 13-year-old college student and amongst the crazy 18-year-olds?
SPEAKER_01
So it's a good question because my gut instinct is probably the same as everyone else's, which is high school is important. You learn about yourself, and it's important to go through all that normal stuff. But we also complain that high school often, or that what you learn in high school is kind of bullshit.
What does the world look like if you do combine the two? So I don't know. But isn't that a wild story? Yeah, that's crazy. It's just such a fun fact about someone.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. I also think it's an interesting strategy for the colleges. Like, why are they doing this? I remember the reason I ended up going to Duke is because they had this thing called the TIP program, which is the Talent Identification Program.
And you would take the PSATs or something like that. And then if you scored above a certain thing, Duke would send you this kind of like kit, this goody bag. And it basically was like, it felt like getting an owl from Hogwarts.
And it's like, hey, you're 12. We want to invite you to this special school for the gifted and talented. And it just said, you scored high on this.
We have identified you as a talented person. We would love to have you come visit our campus. And the shit worked.
I went to Duke eventually. I didn't put two and two together. That's why.
But if I think about it, that's why I started paying attention to them. And that's why I started following the basketball teams. That's how I even heard about it.
Otherwise, as a 12-year-old kid, you don't even hear about colleges, right? So I thought that was pretty interesting. And if you think about it, these schools are for profit. These schools are trying to get tuition.
They're trying to get people to come in and pay the $40, $50,000 to go to school. And so these little investments, and who doesn't like to be called talented? Who doesn't like to be called kind of like a phenom? What parent doesn't want their kid to be identified as a special? That shit works. And I'm surprised that more schools don't do this.
And when I start my school, I too am going to do this.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. I'm trying to do some research on it right now, while we're talking, and it's not really effective. But you'll have to look up this program when you're done.
It's just a really interesting thing. And it was funny to meet someone who went through it. And it was just such a silly, fun fact about someone.
SPEAKER_03
By the way, my roommate in college, when we got to college, I was like, yeah, yeah, we're all 17 or 18, whatever we were as freshmen. He would say, yeah, but then I noticed his expression. I was like, well, what? And he's like, well, I'm like 19 and 1 half, about to turn 20.
I was like, what? Why are you so old? And basically, they do the exact opposite when it comes to sports. So in sports, the common thing to do is to sandbag your kid and basically hold your kid back a grade or send them to school a year late, so that they're always bigger, faster, stronger than all the other kids in their grade. And you're always like the star athlete, because you have an extra year of development.
Or you have a better shot, I should say, of being a star athlete. And so he was from Wyoming. He's like, oh, dude, in Wyoming, that's par for the course.
Dude, every sixth grader is like an eighth grader's age, because everybody wants to have their kid be captain of the team.
SPEAKER_01
My first two years of college, I was an athlete. And I would compete against these guys. And there was two groups of people that we would like.
And I was friends with them, but we would tease about they're not really. It's a little unfair, which is the first was Kenyon. So Kenyon runners.
I don't think they were lying about their age, but I think there's an exemption if you serve in the military. So you get to compete in college, in college athletics. I think until you're, this was of 10 years or eight years or however long, you get to compete until you're 26 years old.
And then the second is for religious stuff. So the Mormons at age 18 would bounce for two years. So they would be a 20-year-old freshman, which means they'd be a 24-year-old senior in college.
So I was 18. My freshman year competing against 24, 25-year-olds. And so yeah, the Mormons and anyone serving the military.
SPEAKER_03
I know this topic is basically nobody gives a shade about what we're talking about, but I will say there is a lesson in life you get to choose. Are you going to punch up or punch down? And the Andrew Chen thing, going to college at 12 or 13, that's a kid who's punching up. You're in an unfamiliar circumstance.
You're stretching beyond what you're playing in the bigger leagues than where you are. And then there's the athletes that are held back years or come back and compete against people two to five years younger than them. That's punching down in weight.
And I would say punching down has some benefits, because typically you're going to score better, do better in these little games in high school or college athletics. But in the end, you really want to be somebody who punches up. You always want to, I think, for long-term success, you want to be somebody who punches up, who's somebody who's always in a room where you're just barely hanging on, because it'll push you to get better, more so than just dominating people, because you're older and stronger than them.
SPEAKER_01
Well, it works for Andrew Chen. I think he's 38 years old, but I was like, well, you're really like 45. You've got the experience of a 45-year-old.
All right, let's get to the topics. OK, let's get to the first one. So Sean put something on here that I actually think I was telling a friend as I was researching.
I actually think that this is one of the better ideas that we and you have ever come up with, the Michael Jordan thing.
SPEAKER_03
OK, so I've been looking at this house for a long time. Michael Jordan's house has been for sale for a decade, and it hasn't sold. And this is his house in Illinois, near Chicago, where Michael Jordan was on the bulls.
And he had this 56,000 square foot home. In Highland Park. So this thing, originally, he put it up for sale and, I don't know, nine years ago for $30 million, $29 million.
Now, the price has been cut in half, and the thing is still not selling. And if you look at the photos, you can just go. It's on Zillow.
So you can go look at the photos. He's got an indoor basketball court. The gate leading up to the driveway has his big 23 number embossed in it.
He's got everything you would want, huge closets, because he's got all his Air Jordans or whatever. And so his house, it's pretty unbelievable. There's all kinds of epic shit here.
But it's not selling. And it's not selling for, I think, a couple reasons. It's very custom to Michael Jordan.
It was custom made in many senses. So the other rich people don't necessarily want to live in a house that's made for another dude. It's also very expensive for the area.
The property taxes are really expensive, all that stuff. But I was thinking, OK, the price is now cut in half. Now it's a $13 million house.
Or $13 million home that you could buy, $13, $14. And now it's in range where maybe there's something fun you could do with it. Now you might be getting a value buy.
So I was thinking, all right, there's a bunch of people, obviously, that are basketball fans that love Michael Jordan. There's a bunch of new ways to crowdfund that we've been talking about, NFTs or Kickstarter or different crowdfunding platforms. So the question is, should we buy Michael Jordan's house? Should we start a crowdfunding campaign and buy Michael Jordan's house? So if you could get 5,000 people to each put in $2,500, then you could own a fractional share of Michael Jordan's house.
You could own a piece of this history. And we could just buy it out, take it off the market. And we could own this thing.
And then the question is, what do you do with it? And so I wanted to brainstorm with you, A, should we buy Michael Jordan's house? And B, what could we do with it if we did buy it? What do you think?
SPEAKER_01
So the whole NFT thing, I wouldn't do that. I think you've had two ideas here. One is to buy his house and two is to do the NFT thing.
One of those ideas is great. I think the other one is over-complicating it. I would 100% buy it.
And the reason why I think it's such a great idea is immediately after seeing you write this, my thought right away went to Graceland. You know what Graceland is? No. That's funny that you don't know what that is.
It's such a big deal in my family, or Elvis is at least. So Graceland is Elvis Presley's house. It's in Memphis.
It's in downtown Memphis. It's actually in a pretty crappy neighborhood now. Or the neighborhood is not nice.
And it's kind of gross. But it's just a cute thing to do if you visit Memphis. And I went and did research on it.
And so around 600,000 people a year go to Graceland, which brings in something like, I have the numbers here. OK, so Graceland, just in attendance, just in ticket sales, brings in $21 million. Yeah, pretty wild, just on tickets.
SPEAKER_03
600,000 visitors a year, $36 a ticket, right?
SPEAKER_01
Yes. And I got interested in this. So I thought, what are the most visited homes in America? So I came up with a few, and I want to fill you in on them.
So the White House doesn't count. I think you can get a tour, but you can also just walk outside of it. But Graceland, $600,000.
The second one, you guys are going to make fun of me. I don't know how to pronounce this. Is it Monticello? I think so.
OK, Monticello, that's Thomas Jefferson's house. The interesting thing about this place, as well as a few other I'm going to mention, they're nonprofits, which means all of their numbers are public. And so the revenue for Monticello, which includes a ton of investment revenue, was around $200 million in 2010.
But around $8 million, $7 million, came just from ticket sales. So $8 million a year in ticket sales, which is crazy. And they have around 500,000 people.
Another most visited homes that people drive by, Neverland Ranch, people don't go there. But another great one is Mount Vernon, which is George Washington's house. And they do in food sales alone.
This is crazy. Just in food, $17 million a year.
SPEAKER_03
Is that crazy? This is insane.
SPEAKER_01
And then they do $15 million a year in admission sales. And in total, they do about $51 million a year in total income, which includes $10 million from contributions.
SPEAKER_03
Is that crazy? No, that's absolutely insane.
SPEAKER_01
All right, everyone. Today's episode is brought to you by Imperfect Action, hosted by Steph Taylor. It's a podcast on HubSpots Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.
Imperfect Action is a bite-sized online marketing podcast for business owners. So join Steph Taylor as she answers all your business marketing questions that deep dives into the nitty gritty of online marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and marketing for strategy for business owners. A few recent episodes include some of the biggest mistakes you can make with your launch.
Another one is why growing your audience feels so hard in 2022. And another one is five ways to make content creation less consuming. So check it out.
It's called Imperfect Action. You can look it up wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_03
So let me ask you. OK, so this all of a sudden, this starts to get really interesting, right? Because I think Michael Jordan is on par with Elvis. And Thomas Jefferson, Michael Jordan's got TJ beat by a long shot.
So MJ over TJ, I think, is part of the slogan that we have when we buy this thing. But if they're doing this much in traffic, I got to know, is there something else, meaning, are these in really popular areas where there's already just a lot of tourists or something like that? And this is just a pit stop? Because Michael Jordan's house is in a neighborhood. You'd have to only be going to go to this place.
SPEAKER_01
I looked up Michael Jordan's address. Guess how far away it is from Chicago Airport, one of the most popular airports in the world? I'm going to guess 45 minutes. 20 minutes? It's 20 minutes away.
OK, so have you been to Memphis? Memphis is like, there's not that much going on in Memphis. And all these people are going to Memphis. Chicago's what, the fifth most populous city in America? Or maybe third, something like that? Yeah.
Something is interesting here. So what I would do is I wouldn't do the NFT thing. I would raise $2 or $3 million from much of rich people.
Or I would try to use my own money if I had $2 or $3 million that I wanted to spend on this. And I would buy it. And then it would probably cost a fair bit of money to get it set up.
It would probably cost a lot of money, another many more millions. But then you'd have to convince collectors to lend you the stuff. And you create a Michael Jordan museum.
And that's how you do this. And the companies that we just mentioned, Graceland, Monticello, and Mount Vernon. So those folks lived in the 1700s, probably died in the 1800s.
So they've been around, those properties have been around as tourist destinations for 100 plus years. But they've done $50 million in revenue, which is shit toned. But even if you've just done $2 or $3 million in revenue, and you could do that and adjust for inflation for 50 plus years, kind of like Graceland has done for 60 years, that's incredibly fascinating.
Right.
SPEAKER_03
I'm with you. So I think you're shitting on the NFT thing a little bit, but it's not about NFT. What I'm saying is crowdfunding.
So I think that there's a benefit to crowdfunding, which is that crowdfunding is a way to make the story more viral. It's a more PR worthy story that people from the internet, people from Reddit, whoever got together and bought Michael Jordan's home off the market for $15 million. They raised $15 million and bought the house versus a rich guy went to his rich friends and raised some money.
The second thing is those become your evangelists to spread the word and to come make the pilgrimage to go see Michael Jordan's house. And I think you could do two or three things with it. I think you could make it a museum that's like a modern museum that we've been talking about, like the Museum of Ice Cream or something like that, where the tour is very heavy photo based.
And so you're going through and it's all these different photo exhibits of you in Michael Jordan's bed and wearing a pair of his Air Jordan's or standing in a pair of his Giant Air Jordan's or something like that. And you make it like a museum of ice cream where you're going to walk out with 10 photos that are Instagram worthy at the end of it.
SPEAKER_01
Give people background ice cream museum.
SPEAKER_03
I think these guys raised at like $100 million plus valuation. If you ever go to one, they're pretty cool. It's not the most amazing thing.
I honestly, I was a little bit disappointed. But the photos do turn out cool. It's a museum that you walk through.
So it's like a guided path. And you go through maybe like 13 different rooms. And every room is something cool.
And you get a little, you know, you get an ice cream cone of some flavor. And then you can take photos next to some like exhibit that they've set up. And the idea is not for you to look at the art, like a traditional museum, but for you to like take a photo in the art and post it on Instagram.
And that's their marketing. That's the free marketing that they get. And so museum of ice cream.
Oh yeah, here, everybody has it. They raised $40 million. They raised a $40 million series A at a $200 million valuation last year.
I think this could be much, much bigger as a brand. The other thing that you could do is sports cards are having this incredible boom right now. And I think what you could do is you could have certain collectors put their collection in the house.
The house could be basically the vault to store some of the most rare memorabilia in the sports world. Signed basketball shoes and sports cards. And that could be part of the museum.
And you basically store it and you store it for some of these collectors. So I think there's a bunch of stuff you could do to make this work. But the idea is like, can you buy this thing for $13 million, put another $4 or $5 million into getting it all set up.
And then could you make $5 million a year? Or could you make $10 million a year like you're saying these other guys do as a pilgrimage for tourists going to Chicago and basketball junkies?
SPEAKER_01
I think the answer is definitely yes. And I think it's so interesting. I found another example of one.
It's called the National Trust for Historic Preservation. And it's a nonprofit and all they do is buy historical buildings. I looked at their numbers.
They've been doing like 50 or 60 million in revenue for years. And I'm still trying to figure out how to entirely read nonprofit statements, but they have a line item that's revenue less expenses. Which I guess that just means profit.
I mean, I don't know how they define.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, it's even.
SPEAKER_01
I don't know how they define either of those. But it was $26 million. And it's been doing that for years.
Is that nuts? It's pretty wild.
SPEAKER_03
OK, so I like this idea. I like this idea a lot. And I kind of want to dig a little further into how these home museums work.
Because I think this is pretty interesting. The other good thing about this, by the way, is that the basketball hall of fame sucks. Nobody cares about it.
Nobody goes to visit it. All the other sports like Canton for football, these are tourist destinations. Tons of people go there every year.
It's really cool. And the basketball one is known to be super lame, because they let way too many people in. And it's not a thing that basketball fans really care to go do.
SPEAKER_01
Can I give you two more examples that we could consider doing instead of even doing a museum? Maybe this is even simpler. So I'm staying at my friend Jack's house. It's a badass house.
Five doors down, or 10 doors down, something like that, nearby is what they call it the Obama house. And when Obama was in office, when was he in office? The 08, 12, with the second term, whatever it was, he would stay at this house down here. And the owners let him stay, I think, for a massive discount.
Now it has its own Wikipedia page, and it's called the Obama house. And it sold 10 years ago for $7 million after he had already stayed there, which, sorry, $7 million. I said I say $7 million for $7 million, which is a lot of money.
But they rent it out right now on Airbnb for $6,000 a night. Or if it's booked all the way up, $180,000 a month. And it's branded as the Obama house.
I think that you could absolutely crush it with a Jordan Airbnb house. Would you and a group of friends be willing to pull together $3,000 a day to stay there? Maybe.
SPEAKER_03
I think the way you'd have to do it is you'd have to make it like a Vegas alternative for bachelor parties and stuff like that. Birthdays. It's like, what is the man cave, man dream vacation? It's like, dude, we're going to go stay in Michael Jordan's house.
14 of us are going. And it comes with all the amenities and all that stuff. This is where you want to go if you want to live the sports fans dream.
I think you could do that. I do like the museum one better. What was the second idea you had? You said you had two.
SPEAKER_01
Oh, what was in the second? I guess it was more so just another example. The Fresh Prince of Bel Air House. It's kind of interesting.
But do you remember living in San Francisco how there's what's it called, the Painted Ladies, which is the full house house? Yeah. And then there's the Missed Out Firehouse. I would just want to buy all these and turn them all into tours.
SPEAKER_03
So I lived a block away from the full house house. Literally 24 seven, there is somebody standing outside of that house during the daytime taking a photo of it. So there's just a constant.
And it's not like a huge line of people. But there's always like four people standing outside taking a photo in front of the full house every single day for the whole year. It's kind of crazy.
And then it just sold, actually. And it's sold at basically like, I think 1.5 or 2x the market rate in that area.
So they got basically like a double premium because it is the full house house, which I think is kind of interesting. But OK, I think we should buy Michael Jordan's house. I think we should crowd fund 5,000 people together.
We should own this thing. Or we could go to Raleigh Road and we could say, hey, Raleigh, let's put Michael Jordan's house on Raleigh and let's sell this baby out. I think if 5,000 right now, if you go on Raleigh Road, you'll get 2,000 or 3,000 people buying a fractional share of a pair of Jordans or a signed autograph or a signed rookie card or something like that.
Fuck all that. Let's own the guy's house. So I think you could easily get 5,000 people on Raleigh Road to buy a fractional share of Michael Jordan's house.
I'm surprised they don't already do this. If they're listening to this, go for it. Just give us credit and give me a share of the house.
SPEAKER_01
I actually think that they wouldn't do that because how do you liquidate that? It's been on the market for 20 or how long? 10 years. Obviously, no one's buying it. So how do you get liquidity from that after seven years? I don't think you don't.
I think the game here is.
SPEAKER_03
That's the point of Raleigh, right? The point of Raleigh is that they take things that are not assets and they make them, not liquid assets, they make them liquid assets. Because you can own a fractional share, now there's liquidity. Any one person who owns a piece of Michael Jordan's house can swap it for anybody else who wants to own a piece of it.
So you don't need a $15 million buyer because you can sell them in blocks of $1,000 or $1,500. And so when you bring that price point down, there's people who want to own a piece of the asset, which is how they do. They'll sell a Harry Potter first edition signed set of books.
And instead of selling it for $25,000, they'll get 2,000 investors to each put in whatever the math comes out to, $150 to go buy, to own a piece of that thing. So they introduce liquidity by making it fractional owned.
SPEAKER_01
Yes, but there's still no cash flow. You have to create an operation around this to create cash flow.
SPEAKER_03
There's no cash flow in a baseball card. There's no cash flow in Eric Jordan's. There's no cash flow in Harry Potter first edition.
SPEAKER_01
There's a rich Asian investor who's willing to buy it.
SPEAKER_03
You're still thinking like the old world. You haven't seen what's going on in rally. You're staying with Jack Smith.
You should go ask Jack Smith about how this stuff works. He's the one who taught me, and he's one of the biggest investors in this stuff. He's not buying it for cash flow.
He's buying it because there is another collector. And when you make it fractional, now way more people can get in on collecting it versus just the rich, depocketed people who could buy the whole asset 100%.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, bro. But who liquidates it after a handful of years? On Rally Road, someone actually buys the car after a few years.
SPEAKER_03
Very rarely. Occasionally, somebody comes and offers to buy out the whole lot, and then they put it to a vote. I don't know if you've seen this, but like, let's say, a box of Pokemon cards went on there, like a super rare Pokemon card set.
I don't know what the IPO was, but on Rally, the IPO did. Let's pretend it was $50,000. And then what happened is a big Asian investor came in and said, we'll buy this thing out for $85,000 now.
So you'll all get a profit, but we want to own this thing. And they put it to the vote of all the share owners, and they said, no. They said, we're going to hold it.
We think it's going to go up. So they voted no. They voted to keep it.
So they're not all trying to liquidate soon. Some people who are buying and holding investors will want to own these assets for a long time, because they think, hey, if I just hold this now, what's Michael Jordan's fame going to be 20 years from now? If Michael Jordan passes away, how much is this going to be worth? And there's people who are in it for the long term. So I think the collectibles thing is a little bit different.
I think about it differently than you do, I would say.
SPEAKER_01
You basically need Jordan to have a good tragic accident.
SPEAKER_03
Or like, for example, the last dance came out. So the last dance is 10-part documentary that came out on Netflix and ESPN. Millions and millions of people watched this thing.
And Jordan's brand, you could see all the price of Jordan's went up. Jordan's brand visibility and brand sentiment went up. Because this documentary came out, and he's still alive.
It wasn't a tragic event. But somebody told the Jordan story to the younger generation who grew up, they were two years old when Jordan was at his prime. And so Jordan's brand got stronger with the last dance coming out.
And I think this is going to continue over time, because he's got all these different, the legacy becomes bigger than the person itself. So the different thing that's sports related and ties into the idea of making liquid assets out of things that were non-liquid assets. So there's this company called Big League Advanced.
Did you see this thing?
SPEAKER_01
No, keep going. I'm looking it up.
SPEAKER_03
So shout out to Joe Pompiliano, Pomp's brother, one of his brothers, who does these Twitter threads all the time. So he did this Twitter thread that caught my eye. And it was about this player, Fernando Tete.
So this guy's one of the young, I don't follow baseball anymore, because baseball's slow and boring to me now.
SPEAKER_01
Is it Fernando Tete's junior? Because, OK, when I was a kid, the senior played in St. Louis. And he was like a huge deal. I think he hits three grand slams in one inning.
And he was like our hometown hero for years.
SPEAKER_03
OK, that sounds crazy. But yeah, basically this guy is one of the youngest star baseball players. And now he signed one of the big contracts.
We signed a $340 million deal with the Padres. And the interesting thing that came out of that was that this company that I had never heard of called Big League Advanced made $30 million off of that deal. So who is Big League Advanced? So basically what these guys do is they go to minor league baseball players, of which there are thousands.
And they say, look, you don't make shit in the minor leagues. You ride in the bus. You get paid nothing.
And you're hoping to one day get to the league. And you're hoping one day to become a star. You're hoping for the Fernando Tete story, where someday you'll sign a huge contract.
And what they do is they go and they offer you a deal. So they'll say, hey, we'll give you $100,000 for 1% of your future earnings. So it's an income share agreement, like we've talked about with Lambda School and whatnot.
And they'll go and they'll say $350,000 for 8% of all your future earnings. So we'll bet on you. We'll take a risk on you.
So you get some money today. You can give your family a better life today. You don't have to keep roughing it while you work your way up.
But hey, if you hit it big, we're going to get paid out. And they basically do a bunch of analytics on their side to try to guess which players to invest in, what is the exact deal to offer them. So it's like a startup investor who's coming up with the valuation of every minor league baseball player.
And they know they'll lose money on 80% of the deals that don't pan out. And they're hoping that the 20% that do turn into huge returns like a Fernanda Teteis, Jr. I think this is an awesome idea.
This actually is similar to a company that we've talked about called Pipe. Pipe is they basically take companies that have SaaS revenue and they say, hey, you got all the SaaS revenue. Let's turn that into a tradable and vestibule asset.
Let's take your contracts you have with customers. Let's make it so that anyone can just buy some of your SaaS contracts off you. And you get money today up front for those contracts.
You don't have to wait the 12 months for your customer to pay you every month. And for that investor, they're going to get a premium. So they'll pay you the year's worth of the contract.
And in exchange, they get like a 12% return on their money. And you get money up front, which you can reinvest into your business. So I really like these companies that are taking things that were not investable tradable assets and making them investable tradable assets.
And I think Big League Events is a cool one because it's basically betting on minor league players that might turn into stars. What do you think of this?
SPEAKER_01
I'm looking at their website. Does that ruin the amateur stat? Or is there still amateur status within a month? Minor league is pro.
SPEAKER_03
Minor league is that you're a pro. You're a professional player. You're part of a team's farm system.
And you get paid. You're out of the college system.
SPEAKER_01
You can't do this for college kids, correct? Correct. That's cool. So I'm looking at their website now.
I imagine this would work for golf, baseball, basketball, tennis, I guess. Anything that's like crazy numbers related, right? Like you can kind of like, I wonder what sports do you think are the most predictive in terms of?
SPEAKER_03
Baseball is known to be the most predictive and the most statistically modelable because your teammates kind of don't matter. When you're up there batting, it's just you. And there's no team dynamics.
Whereas in basketball, a player can be better or worse because there's five other people in the court all moving around and it all affects each other. But that doesn't really matter in this case. Here, what you're basically saying is, let's say there's a, like this guy Spencer Dinwood, he tried to do this on the Nets.
He had signed, like let's call it a $30 million contract. And what he tried to do was offer people token shares in his future. So he said, look, I think today I'm a B level player.
I think I'm going to be an all-star someday. So if you invest in me now, you'll get a share of my future contract. And so you're just betting on a player.
You're just saying, I think that this player is going to be a star. And I think this player is going to earn this much in his career. So I'll invest now in an income share agreement of his future earnings.
And so for the player, they get money upfront. They don't have to wait to earn their contracts. And they get a little bit of insurance.
If anything happens, they get hurt or something bad happens in their career, hey, at least they didn't risk it all. They got paid some upfront. And for a fan, it's a way to kind of bet and invest in players that you think are going to have more future earnings than what they're offering today as a valuation.
SPEAKER_01
This is so amazing. I'm looking at their, so they've raised $150 million. I think that from the looks of it, it looks like they only have like 30 employees.
Do you think that's accurate? And if they made 30 million from this one guy alone.
SPEAKER_03
So this was like the big home run. They've had other things where they got sued by a player because they offered him $360,000 for 10% of his future earnings. He tried to sue them being like, oh, shit, that was like a predatory deal.
I didn't want to give up 10% of all my future earnings for just 360K. But in actuality, the guy only made 1.2 million in his career.
So it actually turned out to be a profitable deal. He took 360K upfront and ended up only paying 120K out to these guys in the end. So he dropped his lawsuit.
SPEAKER_01
Why is there so little information about these guys online, you think?
SPEAKER_03
They're not a tech company. It's just a financing company, basically. They try to fly under the radar.
They also got like kind of disavowed. Like the majorly baseball doesn't like them. The players association said, we don't say that this is a good thing.
But for a player, they're cutting a deal with an individual player. I guess it's allowed in baseball, whereas in basketball, the NBA blocked the thing I was talking about. They blocked Spencer Dinwoody from tokenizing his future contract and basically selling off future earnings.
So some leagues are not allowing it, but Major League Baseball still does allow it. And Minor League Baseball still allows it.
SPEAKER_01
So my question is this. And you're more of a sports guy than I am. And I'm looking at this.
And it seems awesome. My question is, what actually would make this fail and not work well?
SPEAKER_03
So bad predictions. So you invest in a bunch of players that don't pan out. You can go underwater.
Like I don't know how favorable their, I don't know how much margin of safety they have when they do this stuff. Like with startups, for example, just like startup investing, a lot of people are angel investors or a lot of average VC funds actually can't even beat the stock market in terms of returns. They're illiquid and they're risky and they don't outperform.
And so it really comes down to these guys' ability to pick and value players accurately. If they can't do it well, they're gonna go broke. And if they can do it well, they're gonna make a bunch of money.
And I think that's a healthy setup.
SPEAKER_01
How challenging is it to do this? Because I don't know anything about sports, but I feel like this whole money ball thing seems kind of like table stakes at this point for professional teams.
SPEAKER_03
Right. I don't think it's that challenging to be honest with you. I think that there's, you're collecting data all the time.
You have scouts. You have all these different ways to value players. And in this case, it's such an inefficient market because the minor league players just make nothing.
And the baseball team don't wanna pay them a lot. It's like, hey dude, do you wanna live out your dream or not? And so we'll pay you the absolute minimum required just to have you in our minor league system. And so what these guys are doing that's smart is they're taking a percentage of all the future earnings.
And so I think they're basically going up against nobody right now. And I think there's an even an easier way to do this in the NBA because the NBA has guaranteed contracts. So let's say I sign a five year, $100 million deal.
I'm an NBA star. Cool. That means I'm gonna get $20 million a year. Drip to me.
And so somebody could come and offer this guy $80 million upfront or $75 million upfront, lump sum. Here's your money today. And good, you can use that.
You can go ball out if you want.
SPEAKER_01
Does the NBA have as big of a minor league? I know they have the D league, but I feel like I know so many, I've got three friends that go in the minor league of baseball.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah. So the NBA G league is not anywhere near, like all baseball players, stars, and not go through minor league baseball. Stars in the NBA go straight to the NBA.
They skip the G league. G league is like journeymen. And so you wouldn't do this with minor league in the NBA.
You do it with the actual NBA athletes. And for them, what you would be doing is saying, cool, you're on your first contract. I'm betting that your second and third contract are going to be bigger.
And I'm willing to pay you upfront on this multi-year contract, because hey, it's guaranteed. You could go and break your leg tomorrow and you're still going to get all this money from your team. The NBA has guaranteed contracts, so it's way less risky.
You could just say, look, I'll give you this money upfront so you can go invest it and you can go ball out, you go buy your mama house, you can go buy that thing you always wanted. And in exchange, I want to get some margin on the, because I'm willing to wait the four or five years for your contract to play out. And I can bet on your next contract and I can give you some future, some money today in exchange for some percentage of your future, because I think you're going to be a star.
SPEAKER_01
I think that this is awesome. Would you value this at a software company? Because at the average length of an MLB or NBA player, I don't know what it is, but I bet it's in the eight to 10 year range, which means you have a really high LTV. You have, I imagine, a quite predictable stream of income.
Would you value this at software or close to software?
SPEAKER_03
No, I don't think so, because it can't scale. That's the beauty of software is that it scales sort of infinitely. You know, for every additional customer you have, you don't have that many additional costs.
In this case, I think this is more like real estate. I think it's just people as property. You're buying this asset, this multifamily property that has this much rent, and it's going to cash flow for this many years.
I think you're just buying properties.
SPEAKER_01
Real estate sells for almost SaaS like multiples. Real estate sells at like what, like a five or 6% cap rate.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, but software is like 50, dude. Like if you go look at Salesforce or Slack or go look at these guys multiples, it's like you're at HubSpot. HubSpot is doing a billion dollars a year of top line revenue.
That's not profit. And even on the revenue, I think HubSpot's valid at what? It's like a 30 billion dollar company or something like that. So it's a 30X of revenue in that case.
So software has better multiples than real estate.
SPEAKER_01
We don't have enough time, I think, to really dive deep into the studio model, but I'm really interested in this. So there's two companies that I've been eyeing. The first is Atomic, which is a startup of this guy named Jack Abraham.
And he has launched maybe 10 different startups, one of them being HIMS, which is a multi-billion dollar company. But the more interesting person is this guy named Josh Kushner. Kushner, his brother, everyone might know as Jared Kushner.
He's the guy who was on Trump's cabinet. Josh Kushner is married to this model. What's her name? Carly Kloss, I think.
So he's like, quite a fascinating lifestyle or a fascinating life. But with, he started a small fund. He was born into a wealthy family.
So he had money early on, invested $400,000 into Instagram, made a significant sum from that, and then has since not invested in companies through his fund, but really started them. And one of them, or he has two of them. One is Oscar, which just went public, and his stake in that is 1.
2. The other one is Cadre, I think it's called, which is a rich person's investment platform. But what do you think, the reason I brought this up is because you kinda had that experience a little bit, like your Bebo was kind of a startup studio.
Do you like this model of starting companies and operating them, but doing more than one at a time? Or do you think that just passively investing is better?
SPEAKER_03
The thing we did, which was called Monkey Inferno, Bebo was one of the companies inside. Monkey Inferno was definitely a studio. And in fact, before Jack started Atomic, we met up in our office and he said, hey, I'm thinking about doing this studio.
Tell me everything you've learned good and bad about running the studio so I can learn from those mistakes. And I told him, hey, here's what I think is great. Here's some of the things I think that trip us up.
If I was you starting from scratch, here's how I would do it. And then he took that and he took... Wait, so Jack came to you? Yeah, he came to our office and we hung out and we brainstormed and I told him, look, these are the strengths and weaknesses of the studio model. How are you planning to do it? And to his credit, what he had as an idea coming in was already the exact advice I was recommending.
And so it's not like, oh, I told him, you should do XYZ, then he went and did it. He was already planning to do it that way. But yeah, and at the time I was like, good luck, because very few studios, there are many, many studios.
The studio is like, the reason studios happen is successful entrepreneur wins, they take some of their lottery winnings, and they're like, all right, fuck it, I'm gonna do a studio this time, because I can't pick one idea and I just wanna do a bunch of shit. I wanna do a bunch of cool things. And now I have my own money, I don't need other investors so much, or I can easily raise money from investors to have this big reputation.
And so you saw Garrett Camp, the co-founder of Uber, he starts a studio. Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga, he starts a studio. Kevin Rose, that sold his company to Google, then he starts a studio.
Michael Burch, does Bebo sells it to AOL? He started at the studio that I ran. There's a whole bunch of these guys that do this stuff and very few of them have success. We didn't have any breakout wins.
Garrett Camp from Uber, he didn't win. Mark Pincus, he didn't win. Kevin Rose, he didn't win.
So for a long time, there was literally zero breakout winners from studios. And recently there's been a few that have worked. Atomic has had a few that have worked.
Hymns is like the big win for them. It's a public company now, I believe, and a multi-billion dollar win that they incubated in their studio. Then there's the BarkBox guys, so they think their studio's called PreHype.
They took BarkBox public and they've done very well. And I think they also have Rowe, which is a competitor to him. So now there's been a few, like somebody got on the scoreboard.
So it definitely can work. I would say the odds are that studios don't work. And then this guy Thrive.
And now Thrive, yeah, Thrive with Oscar going public is great. I would say the odds are still, it's just like startups where it's startups, 90% of startups fail. Similar odds with the studios, not like you get that much better.
I would say a couple of things. Super fun to do because who wouldn't want this? It's like an entrepreneur's playground. You get to go to work, dream up ideas.
You have a bunch of teams that are building them all in parallel. In theory, you're killing the losers and you're doubling down on the winners. And you're just being super creative every day.
So it's like the dream job. Then do you actually increase your odds of success? On one hand, yes, because you're getting multiple shots on goal. You don't have all your eggs in one basket with one idea.
The second thing is that you're learning pretty rapidly. So you're learning from all these different reps, these different attempts you're doing. And you're keeping the team together.
So like when a team, even if you fail, the team retains those learnings and just applies it to the next project right away. Whereas in a normal startup, if you fail, it's like everybody goes and gets a job for two years because now you're, you just did this thing for three years, it didn't work, you're in debt, you need to go make some money. And so typically the team breaks up and goes and does something else.
In this case, the team's six together, the learnings are retained. That's what's good. The bad part, which I think is what you're gonna focus on, the big butt of this whole model that I think is what makes it not a great idea.
If you're optimizing for success, I don't think this is the best way, is you're not focused because you have multiple ideas. And one of the key things in life is focus and laser focus on making something successful. And the second thing which is kind of related to that is like shiny object syndrome.
Every project goes through like kind of periods of plateaus. Like I remember with the hustle, you started off with the events and then you started the blog. There was a moment, I remember our conversations where you were like, the blogs are bringing in a bunch of traffic, but I don't think this is working.
I need to figure out something else. What if I did this daily email newsletter, right? You were like trying to figure out, what do we do? Is it video? Is it this newsletter? What is it? And in a studio, when that happens, when you plateau or things just stop working or some growth stalls, it's super easy that instead of being like, fuck, how do we find a way out of this? How can we try to make this work? It's really easy to be like, hey, what about that other idea that we're doing? Like that one's still super exciting. It's not in a plateau right now.
So you just like unconsciously start to spend more energy on the thing that's not stuck. Cause like who wants to stay in a fucking stuck on a stuck project? But as an entrepreneur, you have no choice. You told everybody, you told your investors, you told your team, you told your mom, I am building this and you have to find a way.
And that's like the most valuable thing a startup has is that like the do or die situation for a startup. And I think a studio takes away the do or die mentality cause it's like, do this or do that or do that or do the other thing. And so you have all these options and those options actually take away your biggest asset as a startup.
So I would say if you're going for fun, studios are dope. If you're going for success, I think that dabbling and picking a startup to go all in on is a better model than trying to run a studio with multiple projects.
SPEAKER_01
And that's actually what I remember my, what I spoke to you about years ago when we started hanging out at Monkey Inferno is I don't remember which one it was, Blab, Bebo, one of them, like it seemed pretty good, but like every business there was some problems where you're like, people are coming, but we're getting hacked or I don't remember what the problem was or it was like kind of good, kind of bad, dude, just like, just figure it out. And part of me was like, oh, Sean's at this great place where he can do anything. He makes money and he has an unlimited budget.
He can do anything. I actually think that that hurt a lot of times and it would have been a little bit better if it was like, look, if you don't figure this out, you're fucked, you're broke.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, exactly. I think you called it for what it was. Like really early on, you were like, dude, I think having everything, right? We had like a fucking private chef.
We had the dopest office. We had all the engineers we needed. We had unlimited funding and runway.
We could just keep going. And you were like, dude, it's gonna make you soft. Like don't, you know, having all this shit is like not good for you.
I remember you like pointing that out really early on. And then also just pick one of these and stick to it. Don't get distracted by having a lab or a studio where you have all these different things going on and you're just dividing up your attention, 20% here, 30% here, 10% here.
And what if you just put 120% into like the one and you just found a way? I remember you saying that stuff.
SPEAKER_01
But it seems really fun. It is fun. And when it works, it's like, oh wow, it worked and it's fun.
And that's what I'm seeing. I mean, I don't know these guys, but from an outside perspective, and I'm sure it sucks on the inside just like everything else has pros and cons. It seems quite fun.
It seems really exciting to be able to win big and have multiple shots on target. It seems really interesting.
SPEAKER_03
So one thing, by the way, one thing I think Atomic did good that they changed the model. So he was, so I told him, I was like, I told him about these problems. And he was like, yeah, we're gonna do it differently.
He's like, we're gonna only do one project at a time. That team is do or die on that project. He goes, they have nine months to raise their Series A.
If they can't raise their Series A in nine months, they're out, you're out of a job. And he's like, in reality, we're gonna keep the good people. We're gonna offer them a job on the next one.
It's not a given that like, oh, if this doesn't work, no problem, like just work on this other thing that we're doing. And he's like, that's gonna have urgency. That's gonna have focus.
They're not gonna split their time between different projects. And he's like, I'm gonna be the CEO of the project, you know, like that we're doing. And the other big thing was, they weren't going after consumer.
Like we were doing consumer and like social apps, which are lower odds of hitting the lottery. Whereas he was like, yeah, consumer's super hard. It's just really hard to, consumers are fickle.
We're gonna do B2B. And so that they started doing only B2B stuff for a long time. And Hymns was the one kind of like consumer hit that they've had.
The other things that they've had that have done okay are B2B companies, which I think are a smarter model to do. E Founders is a great example of one of that that's working in Europe, where it's like they only do SaaS and they really focus on problems that they know that are in the B2B space, because their own companies have this problem. So then they build a product for that and they build it, make a company out of it.
They've had big hits like Front came out of that and different things like that.
SPEAKER_01
Well, Rocket internet does it as well. And they're tens of billions of dollars with the value that they've created. But the best example of this, my favorite actually, and I just realized as we were talking, is Kevin Ryan.
Kevin Ryan is someone who I admire. And I joke that we kind of look like, he's probably 30 years older than me, but I tease that we like, he kind of looks like, I look like him, we kind of look alike. And he was the 20th employee at, I forget what it was called, but it was double click.
It was called double click. And it was sold to Google for multi billions and eventually became Google AdWords and AdSense. And he told me that he made around $20 million when he sold it, which is definitely a shit ton of money.
And then using that, him and this guy named Dwight would invest $300,000 and give a company six months to show traction. And the outcome of their companies, there's a couple losers and a couple winners. And probably a lot more losers than winners.
But the first one is MongoDB, which is currently publicly traded at a $21 billion valuation. The second one is Business Insider, which is probably a billion, it was sold for $500 million, probably worth a lot more now. The third one is Zola, which prior to the pandemic was doing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.
And I think that there's like four or five more that have been hits. And he told me, I actually called him and I emailed him like every month for like three years to try and get him to talk to me. And eventually he let me fly out there and meet with him.
And he told me that all he does is him and Dwight, I mean, they're wealthy, right? So they can do this, but they just come up with an idea and they just get a piece of paper and a pencil and they like right out the math and they're like, oh, that's kind of interesting. All right, let's try to find someone to do it and we'll give them 300K to do it. Now, this sounds like a very simple process.
It might be simple, but it's still quite hard to pull off, but they've done it. And it's called Silicon Alley Insider. It's the name of his thing.
And you'll have to look this guy up. It's really interesting.
SPEAKER_03
I think that's Jason Calichana's thing. That's not those guys.
SPEAKER_01
No, they have the same name. Oh, okay, interesting. It's called, wait, is it called Silicon Alley Insider? It's called Alley Corp.
Sorry, you're right. It's called Alley Corp. But Business Insider was called Silicon Alley Insider.
SPEAKER_03
It's just like accelerators, right? There's like a million accelerators in the world. Every college has one. Every little city has one.
And then you have Y Combinator that just kicks ass. And Y Combinator is the best. Sorry to interrupt.
SPEAKER_01
Guilt. Guilt is the other one that he started. Right, go ahead.
SPEAKER_03
That's a bunch of hits. So basically you have like, is this model good or bad? It's like, how do you execute it and who are the people involved in it? So Y Combinator is an accelerator that has probably created, I don't know, $100 billion worth of value now out of the companies that have come out of it. Easily over $100 billion actually.
Or Airbnb alone is $100 billion. So Y Combinator is like the best. And then you have tech stars.
And then you have like all these other accelerators that like have never had a hit. So are accelerator models good or bad? Like if you said it was bad, you'd be wrong because Y Combinator is not a hit. But if you said it's just great and you can repeatedly make success using this model, no, that's not true.
I think the same is true for studios. And everyone is different. Because you have to make a bunch of choices.
It's like, for example, are you gonna do multiple ideas at once? Or are you gonna do one at a time? Are you gonna have shared staff working across projects? Or are you gonna have staff dedicated to their one and they live and die with the one? Are you gonna fund it? Definitely. Or are you gonna give it a six month or nine month time period to get to some traction and raise money from external investors? Or are you just gonna let it run forever? Do you come up with the ideas? Or do you invite in founders? They spend some time coming up with the idea like EIR. Right? There's all these different differences that like, there's all these like little choices that will lead to a totally different outcome.
It sounds like in that case, they come up with the ideas and then they find an operator. In Jack's case, he came up with ideas and he was the initial operator and then he hires a CEO. You know, in Expo's case, they bring in an operator and the operator comes up with the idea.
And so there's all these different versions of it. And a lot of it just depends on both luck as well as who's involved. Like truly great entrepreneurs and investors can have success where somebody else copying the same model that they have, won't be able to pull it off because they don't have the right judgment.
And that's why I think I failed. I think I didn't have the same judgment that these guys who have had success were their model. I think they were better at playing that game than I was.
SPEAKER_01
It also helps to be wealthy, I think, and be able to write 10 to $2300,000 checks and have the time to do it. And so I don't want to dismiss that.
SPEAKER_03
But a lot of them raised money. Like Jack, he raised money. He raised, I don't know, like $100 million or something from entries and Horowitz and others to fund his lab.
Even though he himself was like, you know, doing super well, he had sold the company to eBay. He was like crushing it at PayPal or whatever, like or eBay when he was there. He sold his company for $75 million when he was 24.
SPEAKER_01
I'm not dismissing any of their skill. I'm just saying this is definitely like a, after you get your hit, I'm not dismissing that at all. It's like, it's a lot easier to become a good golfer if you have some money to afford a fancy clubs and a membership.
SPEAKER_03
And there's a bunch of people trying to do this that don't have that, right? There's a group, just got Bobby, he listens to the podcast. He's doing this for creators. He's like, all right, we're gonna make a studio.
We're gonna just build products for the creator economy. I don't think they have a big track record or anything like that, but that's their focus. They're trying to do a studio for that.
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying it's a little bit easier.
SPEAKER_03
Another group of guys that I would bet on that the main guy is this guy, Kumar. And if you should follow him on Twitter, he's amazing. He's super interesting on Twitter and Facebook.
His handle is data raid.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I know him. He's a weird guy.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, he's a weird dude, but he's really sharp and he's really out there, different type of thinker. He's like really into like, the energy industry. And so he'll build like little products for the energy industry that you didn't even know there was a need for.
So I think this guy's gonna do well because he knows where to sniff. He knows where to sniff out some money because he's looking at problems that the average kind of engineer in Silicon Valley or New York or LA, they don't even know these problems exist, they don't even know these companies exist. And so he was doing one, for example, like his friend as a lawyer and there's like all these like little rule changes in like your local regulation or your local law.
And he's just made an alert system where it'll alert you but whenever this rule changes, and he can go get a bunch of lawyers to sign up for these email alerts. And it's a SaaS business that can do well or energy prices when they rise and fall, how are you gonna track that? How do you build a database of that information? So he's got all these like really random ideas that I think the average entrepreneur doesn't really even know about those markets enough to know those problems. And therefore he finds the kind of untapped opportunities.
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think we should dive deep on this sometime like even more and I wanna get Jack on here. And I would love to get Kevin Ryan on here. Definitely sounds like a rich guy's playground.
And frankly, I wanna do it. We're at about an hour and four minutes. Abraiu, what do you say?
SPEAKER_02
It's pretty good podcast. By the way, that baseball talk that reminded me of this other company, things called Bulford Capital or something. I looked them up years ago and what they did, they do I think over a hundred million in revenue or at least they did at the time, they would invest in litigations.
So it's kind of the same concept, using statistical models to find winners and a sea of losers. We should dive into that. The Michael Jordan house, probably our best idea ever.
SPEAKER_03
I feel like Abraiu's grading system has gone up for some reason. I think he's grading us on a curve now for some reason.
SPEAKER_01
He seems like he's been in a better mood. No, the research is good. All right, well, cool.
All right, we'll talk soon. See ya.
SPEAKER_00
That's all the afternoon.