I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like all Days on the Road Less Traveled never looking back. Have you been with the Riverside thing how they were, you know, I don't know if they were listening or weren't but I have this.
Fear with any startup product because I know that I don't know if we're just like we were just morally bankrupt but whatever we would build a new product the main you get the excitement you get it out there, but you want to see how are people liking it. How are they using it? Is it working? It's not working one way to do that is to have like some God mode version of your product where you can kind of like Co they you know, let's say you're doing slack. Maybe if you were doing slack. I bet you somebody has eyes like I could see. Oh this organization signed up. They created a bunch of channels. Oh that's interesting thing.
Created a channel for like music room. And so because I know that we did it I bet that every fucking startup kind of does this where they look into the customer stuffed in order to get feedback right? Couldn't
tell ya but it's so weird. Do you keep one of those slider things on your
computer now dude, I have a Facebook portal like, you know, I've basically given suck, you know root access to my
kitchen. What's funny with Mercury? We see all this transactional data
says the guy who owns a bank on the call,
but we try to like avoid in like have good ethics around it, but you know,
A big wire comes in thank you. Can't not notice it right. Like that's and like we need to make sure yeah, everything works successfully with it and like all compliance checks are done like so I was talking to someone who is like 500 or 1000 employee at stripe so not early but kind of early but late enough that you think they would have rules and he said that any employee could log in and see anyone's
transactions. There's been a bunch of things. I remember Uber there was a story where like people could basically just stop there, you know, ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend.
No friend like their whereabouts because it's like, oh, they're requesting a right here. And I'm p.m. Why did they do that? And like there was a story that broke. I don't know all the details but it was like the journalists who were writing kind of like hit pieces on Uber. They were like kind of like we know what you're doing,
you know be code. Really?
Oh, yeah Panda that's
right. This completely legitimate reasons to do it, right? They need to like go debug. Someone's problem or like save this. Yeah, some other issues than like having like layers of restrictions around that
It's
Tricky we had it I remember for one day we so we built this little video messaging app like a video walkie-talkie app. So it's kind of like a slipknot like Snapchat. It's not meant to be super private necessarily but like wasn't self-destructing or anything like that, but these were video messages from like one friend to another and the day we launched. I remember like one of this year's just had his like debuging terminal open and the way his debuging terminal was working was like it was just refresh every 3 seconds and like the latest message would just show basically right there, and he just wanted to see like he's just checking. Is there audio and video?
Be transmitted but I saw it and I was like dude. These are like people's video messages. Like we can't just have this we can't just beat wiretapping, you know every user of the platform. So I made him delete it but for like 5 minutes, we looked at it and we were like, oh, that's cool. We had all these users in France using it and I were like these, you know these children like in high school and France we're using our product and I didn't understand anything that they were saying, but I remember feeling so dirty so evil in that moment for being able to even see
it. Yeah in my previous company who ran like a social network.
Like mobile game is and we had like 50 mph in it. It was a little bit of the Cesspool like we looked at it. Once again. I were these messages like that out of control. I won't tell you what the contents will like. It wasn't always Savory stuff and they were like, we should never get this stuff again.
I have a Mercury bank account and we did a big injection of capital into the account and I literally wanted to email you being like hey, you see what's going on over here the bank accounts going up, but I was like, okay. Yeah, I probably shouldn't assume that they're looking at
What they are I was so excited. I wanted to tell you I was like, who could I share this with? You know, maybe we
kind of we have enough Muses now that it's not like a see all of these things company. We're going to introduce you in a second. So I will do a quick one, but I want to ask I need to ask Sean something Ahmad started a couple companies told one for about four to five million dollars now is thing called Mercury. It's a banking startup. We're going to talk about the second. He also is a prolific angel investor, but first of all Shawn is like a Twitter guy now, apparently that's like his thing.
Like gone from like 18,000 followers like seventy five thousand followers and like 60 days and now he's
like, I broke 80 K this morning.
Okay, sorry 18 or 20 of you for x or something and like 60 90 days you are now apparently like a stock God. Apparently, you're like the biggest troll ever. You're tweeting it out that like if something gets X likes you're gonna buy a billboard was going on and what's going on with your
trades. So I'm just trying to build my Twitter follower. That's the base of it. Right and I was like, okay, so we talked
about this. I don't remember this but a few months ago two months ago. Maybe there was a little email thread between me you and Jack Butcher and it said, you know, let's do a Twitter race like Let's Race to a hundred care stuff like that. Jack was already at like 80 seems pretty far ahead. You were at like 40 or 50 and I was like Fuller behind at 20 and I was like, oh, yeah, that's great. Let's do it. They're all kind of forgot about it. We didn't even do anything. But more recently. I got added into a little iMessage group with five other people and it's called The Hundred k club and it was all of us race. It was like this.
My dear as different set of five people, who was it really trying to do it. So two of them have been guests on the Pod and there's a you know, all of them. I won't say everyone's name, but you can kind of tell because we're all like just this last month gone real active on Twitter and really shouting each other out really all like really it's a pump and dump scheme without the dump right? We're just trying to pump each other's accounts and help each other and we're trying to share tactics like, oh dude. I know it's cheesy, but at the end of your thread just right like hey, follow me if you like stuff like this and the one he started doing that.
Right you do that I was doing it but like I'm just give an example of we're just sharing tiny little tactics of like, hey look after you have one that starts to go viral. This is the ratio you want of likes to Impressions and retweets to likes that tells you it's going to go viral if it's going to go viral then start doing this every hour. That's like the best thing of the algorithms are all just like testing little empty has it's mostly for shits and giggles. It's not really like any science to it. That's the background. So Twitter following Thanksgiving was that like, I don't know twenty three thousand followers today 80,000 followers. I
My mother's day. I'll be back at zero because I'll be canceled because I am taking some risks in order to grow the following right because the fastest way to grow is get lucky or say things that are controversial say things that are like a little out there and so I've been taking some risks along the way and I think that there's a 40% chance. I just can't cancel
and you do that with a storm about what happened with James stopped and isn't that wasn't that huge? Was that Big Driver? That's
what I did yesterday. So our two days ago I tweeted out this The Game Stops or I basically said hey if you're out of the loop like
Here's the hilarious story of the GameStop thing. And that one tweet alone has brought me 30,000 followers, which is like kind of insane. I've never had a treaty that so yeah, that one went viral.
Okay, and what happened when your trade so you also tweeted that you're going to put $100,000 into GameStop.
That was the first reaction screenshotted a trade I had made on you try to put $100,000 into GameStop. I just said it for by market on open right which is like, you know, just like a total Gamble and I was like, okay cool. This is fine. And then I tweeted out this story about like
I'm doing this right here's what's going on with GameStop. If you're out of the loop, there's this really funny thing where the redditors have literally bankrupted a multi billion-dollar hedge fund because the hedge fund was betting against GameStop and these redditors all started bidding in favor of game day starts buying up all the stock and basically capitalizing on the greed of the hedge fund the hedge fund had shorted more than the supply of the stock that was in existence, right? So that's what they recognize was. Like, holy shit. These guys have taken such an overextended position. Maybe we make
Them pay for their overextension as I was explaining what was going on and I bought I put the trade in and you know the next morning I happened to wake up before the market opened. I woke up in the middle of night and I was checking my Twitter feed and the Tweet had gone viral and so already I'm this is crazy. I'm getting 5,000 10,000 followers really quickly. And so I thought okay. I kind of already got a lot of value out of this straight gambling to be buying GameStop right now. So I was like, maybe I don't need to do this $100,000 gamble. So I canceled the trade morning of that hundred thousand would currently be I think 600 or
A thousand dollars within 48 Hours of that trach and this is with no leverage. Right? Like if I had levered up like the way these guys do on Wall Street bets I could have been seven million dollars if I had actually gone wild like them. But yeah, I canceled the trade. That's the short story. I'm an idiot. I got thirty thousand Twitter followers and zero dollars out of
it. You pussed out man.
And then I did the worst possible thing. I chased the Miss which is like if you're going to like we're going to miss just miss and I chased the most I bought Bed Bath and Beyond which is like one of the other candidates of the you know, that the try new stuff $100,000 in about
one and it's okay. It's up like five grand something but it didn't do the GameStop
thing. I'd never buy stocks of said this but you looked like you were having fun. So I did like 10 grand AMC and like I've got enough profit now I could buy like a sick used motorcycle. I
wanted to buy a billboard. So now I've decided from this that a is very fun to day trade and so I'm just going to set aside.
It's fun when you yeah, it's fun today. Sean
don't know but what I'm saying is I've okay just if I lose the money I lose the money is no problem right like I used to gamble.
Used to play poker like really seriously. I was going to say a semi professional poker player by stopped gambling for many years just because business became more fun, but now I got that little rush again and I remember this familiar Rush. This is his old friend is back in town. And so now I'm going to set up a every day. I'm going to make a single trade and I think I'm going to let it run for either just 24 hours or 48 hours and I'm just going to take this underground. I'm just going to roll it into a new stock every day or every two days and I'm going to see where I end up at the end of the year.
If it goes to 0 this is 0 if it goes up it goes up, but it is very entertaining to do
this. But in last thing you also have been going hard on bitcoin are you up or down
if you're down on bitcoin, you're doing something wrong? Most
people who are in a big Corner up a big win for sure. I just want an update.
Well that I'm just like that one's less interesting. I think because like the drama of the GameStop thing is like you have the internet nerds versus like the Wall Street suits that's like already at,
you know, they actually have the best slogan on all time. It will stay retarded longer than you'll stay.
Didn't ya and they have like a very good sense of humor and we were talking about Wall Street. That's a few months ago. Ever since you brought it up Sam. I've been I've been hanging out in there, you know more than I should just because I find them to be a very funny Community there obviously like sort of sick and twisted but you know, hey, it's entertainment on Reddit. You know, I who am I to judge
him on are you too how many startups have you invested in think? I'm above a hundred and eighteen. Now, those are definitely high risk. Are you playing in any of this craziness?
Are you a degenerate like me or do you just do good
investing? I think there's
nothing fundamental going on with like the u.s. Is just going way too far and like fiscal like stimulus and it's just like very broad-based like it's not like needs-based. So I think 2021 is going to be crazy asset bubble across stocks and Bitcoin and everything. So like that's like a fundamental thing that I'm willing to bet for so I did like that you my wife got mad at me because I removed like most of our cash into like stocks and Bitcoin because I just think they're trying to anyone like it's just gonna go up. It's like there's just so many
Trillions going into the market these bats. Like I think they like kind of fun. I actually also bought Bed Bath and Beyond because I missed the case of my baby. Let's go. I'm not putting money that I do mine like using and it's like tiny tiny things. I think the market over to the digit the degenerates club
mostly by thinking is like look, I can't lose right whether I win money or I lose money. It's all just content for me and the content builds the audience the audience is what makes me money in the end. So like, you know, I learned this from
we had mr. Beast manager on the other day and write this guy's going and tipping $10,000 at a coffee shop, right? Because he understood pretty quickly that hey when I do these stunts these money starts these acts of wildness. It generates a lot of attention at grows my audience. And so I think that most of us in you know, kind of Silicon Valley or like kind of the more successful you get the more buttoned up you typically get I think what you see some people doing a Hamas is doing a ton of this which you on does a ton of this which is when you're supposed to be buttoned up and then you act a little
You get this disproportionate reward of attention because that Community doesn't get a lot of that. Right? If you're 13 years old. You're just watching YouTube Stars, you're used to one person just one upping the other with Ridiculousness after Ridiculousness. But if you're like a tech person or you're like, you know, you're an entrepreneur you're used to people saying the right thing and doing the right things or at least publicly doing that.
There's like a ball build nests to being kind of syllable. Like if you're in the middle you can be canceled. But if you're completely ridiculous a completely like buttoned up and you can't be
Cancel so you better pick one man. And anyone whose slogan is what it is. What is their teachers? They have a t-shirt. What's it say Shawn? I forget their t-shirt, but they had one slogan that says will remain retarded longer than you'll remain solvent and they have another thing I forget what it is. But anyway anyone who's Mantra is that is on that one side of that barbell. Oh, it's what is it as if 4chan got an options account or something like that? Yeah. Fortunately Bloomberg's oh, yeah had a Bloomberg
terminal. There's a part of me. That's like hey,
Disclaimer like don't just do shit, like make sure you know what you're doing or like you're working with some amount of money that you can afford to lose. And also what I'm tweeting shit. I'm just tweeting shit. Okay, that doesn't need I am like doing these things or recommending you do them. I'm just tweeting shit. I feel like I should put that disclaimer out there. I agree.
Oh come on, you have an interesting perspective you own Mercury or your what their founder of mercury so you see a lot of banks or Mercury basically startups come to you and they use you for banking. So you're able to see like what's growing quickly you're also
Like you said invested in a hundred eighty startup. So you clearly have some type of perspective. What are you looking for? Now mean what interests you at the moment? Yeah. I kind of think of like this style of game nowadays in like these two slightly different perspectives. Like number one is kind of what Mercury is doing where you you see this like industry which is huge. It's full of these incumbents that like everyone hates. And I mean the crazy thing to me is there's so many of these industries right? It's not just banking where it was very obvious everyone hates that bank, you know, they're not customer friendly.
Don't have good products all that but it's the same thing in like a ton of different Industries where I'd like to try to get a mortgage or something. It's the same thing like life is full of these like painful consumer and business experiences. So I think that's like a whole class of startups. That's really interesting. And yeah, I'm always investing in something like that. What are some other ones
besides thinking that come to mind that you've either seen people innovating in or you think somebody should go look at that old big stodgy.
Let me jump in real quick. Ahmad was asked that question, but I do want to answer it really quick.
So when you guys bought your houses Sean, were you a W-2 employee a mod. Where you a W-2 employee? Yeah. Okay. My wife was
not for example, and I think you were not right
technically a W-2 employee. But if you own more than 25 percent of a company, they want to see your business financials for like the trailing three years. Yeah, and I didn't like that. I thought that was weird. I'm like, why does that matter when employee gets a mortgage they call their boss or HR which had a small company? It's me. So I answer and I said, yeah, you know Mallory works here. She makes this much money.
We're not going out of business. She's probably safe. They get mortgages me personally because I own more than 25% of a business. I couldn't get a mortgage. And if I in the mortgage that they did allow me to get it was like four and a half percent versus the 2.9 that my wife got is that crazy. One of the most important things for entrepreneurs is staying focused and that's why this episode is brought to you by Focus Aid America's first and number one nootropic drink that's sold over a hundred million cans on episode 30, they're found.
Actually came on to the podcast and he told us how he started to drink why he started it how business is going. Well opportunities are in space all types of really cool stuff like this. We had them on because this is something that Sean and I drink regularly so pretty cool. They're sponsoring Focus Aid has zero sugar which mean it's keto friendly. It's naturally sweetened and has just a little bit of caffeine and most importantly has my favorite thing Gaga. Go ahead. Say it with me gah bah GA ba. It's a fun word, but more importantly it helps you get in the flow state, which is why I love it. So check it out.
Out for 30 percent off your first order go to drink Focus a.com. That's drink Focus Aid.com. Check it out. Yeah, I mean all of these institutions around banking then and excetera are like, you know, they're freaking like 1500 Euro institutions and they're not there as conservative as I get like they don't change quickly. That's why fintech exist. Right? Like we're kind of attacking these institutions from like all these vectors but
let's do the same thing right bricks Beck's was basically like, oh you just raised a ten million dollar venture.
Around and you can't go open a credit card because of stupid reasons for like all the traditional ones. If you have raised money, like we will get you a credit card, you know tomorrow we understand what credibility means in the startup World. Whereas these Banks say, what's show us your history and show us your Revenue show us something and you're like, well, we're just two guys with you know, some code like that's not necessarily what they were used to looking for. So Breck's did it over there Mercury's doing it in the banking space. What else you got?
I always have these ideas that I'm like, oh, I wish someone did this kind of
nothing and something that I would love for someone to do and I have lots of ways of doing it is the Salesforce competitor. That was actually good every time I say this like lots of people like it's not possible sales forces. So like entrenched and I'll all the stuff which is quite similar to things that people saying to me when I started my queen 2017, but I think everyone hates using Salesforce right? Like I think that's like there's a strong entry point there and I just don't care what people say, but I like those things. So we use Salesforce. I thought that the our guy
I liked it because you like it. I don't even use it. I'm not a salesperson. But I mean I login it mean it's just like pretty robust. It's relatively customizable but is it they're like pipedrive
I'm with I'm with a mod I've used it and it's pretty painful to use
there's a few but none of them have done it like none of them have like threaten Salesforce. Right? And I think up spot is a marketing to I don't think that CRM is like that means l so this is how I've got like two or three methods of doing the sales post saying I think one that I quite like nowadays,
I've been thinking about this idea for like four or five years. I built my own CRM at my previous company. So I'm pretty opinion of many one idea is to do an API first Salesforce. So the problem right now is like we see it at Mercury. I think most companies see it is your customer data is just all over the place. You've got some in your database. You've got some in like this and then takes off where you were some in the marketing tool. You've got someone stripe in theory. You can plug that all into Salesforce, but it's not like API first to start like very easy. I mean even to get an API like
And Stewart, you have to pay like way out more. I think all your seats go up to like two hundred dollars a month or something like that. But yeah, I think there's an interesting approach to go data first and a developer first and make it so you've got basically like really become like the single source of Korean Spotlight customer data the other ways to go like super Snappy super nice like CRM and none of these like new crms. I mean to be fav and tried all of them and there are like tons of them but none of them are like, you know, really like like the Superhuman of
seems kind of thing with that really customer first and really great sounds very skeptical 90% of people should be skeptical for those are typical. I also think the Superhuman analogy is kind of dumb because I think and we had Rahul the Superhuman founder on here. I think so awesome guy. I think it's gonna be huge. I think superhumans. Not that cool. I don't think it's that good. I also have a horrible reaction whenever people particularly startup people which I all three of us are that do this. They call it like a design first and they wanted to be slick, but it fucking sucks. Like, you know, what's not
Slick is Amazon. Amazon is not slick and it's awesome. Craigslist isn't slick and it's awesome. I challenge your and you didn't say slick, but I challenge that opinion if that's what I think you mean. Yeah, the these markets are like so huge that it doesn't matter. If even if 90% of people don't want stick if the other 10% of people are willing to make a decision based on slick. It does like that's like probably a multibillion-dollar you like copper as an offer. They advertised all over the place. Isn't that called copper Am I Wrong guys Cooper? What is the dude?
It's like a Salesforce competitor and it's very designed for
one of the interesting angles to do the sales force or whatever. It could be the banking thing. Right like what you guys did with bricks. Did you go to a customer segment that is small but growing and is completely neglected or misunderstood by the incumbent and it's really not even worth their time to like make it a big priority to go understand this segment. We see this happening with the crater economy. People are building all the financial tools for the crater economy because they're like, hey if you're a
How do you get a mortgage right if you're a twitch streamer, how do you get a credit card? If you're clear Bank did this with e-commerce? They're like, hey, if your eCommerce store that's only got you know, seven months of data, but your every single month you're putting in a dollar into Facebook ads and getting Out 3 will lend you money. We can just look at your Facebook track record and no Bank could ever lend you money based on your Facebook ads manager, but clear Bank was like no we understand your business and therefore will lend against what we understand and so I think you have to go to like one of these groups that
It is misunderstood and underserved by the traditional infrastructure. Whether that's young people International people. It's a new job category like creators. It's a new company category. Its crypto companies. Like I think that that's the entry point you kind of want because especially if that market is growing right if there's all of a sudden you look up and there's a million creators earning over fifty thousand dollars a year, which I believe that there already is then, you know, you're actually in a big Market that just looked like a small Market when you started or from the outside.
Yeah. I mean, that's why a lot of ideas right now.
Like these remote work ideas. It's been happening for a while these Nomads and like all of this kind of movement. But since the pandemic, I think it's not most but a ton of people that can be remote will be remote and like kilotons of interesting things can come from that like maybe we're going to have like cities in the middle of frickin nowhere. They're going to become like these kind of nomad cities people really enjoy having like tons of nature like this look ridiculously good internet connection there or something like that and I've seen lots of ideas that are both touching the real world and preparation and online stuff that some of these are going to
The unicorns and like that's like a big friend you mentioned
before you come on. You said I you know Travis probably before I came on think of a bunch of ideas. So I thought of a bunch of ideas rattle a couple often than if one is interesting like give us the kind of quick to liner on them. And then if we'll dive into whichever one sounds cool. So
the CRM was one of thought about for a while another one that actually again was like a second or third best idea that I had instead of mercury, but there's lots of like ways to do it is kind of like I like someone's raising for this as like a clubhouse for business.
It doesn't make sense in like a tiny three or four person company. But how did once you companies get bigger? Like how do you create like this Serendipity where like people can have conversations? It's not like meetings are like boring and annoying to set up like how do we create like this kind of interaction water-cooler moment for officers and I've seen a few versions of this. Nothing is like quite hit it for me. I'm actually invest in sidekick which is which I think is like super interesting and it's very close to my vision of it, which they
Basically give you like a tablet that sits next to you and then your colleagues also potentially have that tablet and you can like there's very settings but you can like do a happy hour and all this stuff and it's like almost like you're sitting next to someone kind of think I've seen like some online versions of that as well. So I think there's something that I can't really think if the future is going to be remote we need to solve this problem of making a human connection with like colleagues and I don't feel like that's unsolvable. I think like the combination of right software and Hardware can do it. So I don't know what the form factor.
Yet and that's the interesting thing about these kind of social behaviors. You just like little things can turn it from like a bad idea to a good idea. So it's very hard to like come up with it. But people doing thousands of experiments. I think someone will come up with the right Factor keep round off of you. I just like hearing what you what you think about. I think there's something like cool happening with stop stack right now. I'm in Investments abstract. But like I feel like there is I guess I could goes back to your create a point but there's gonna be a whole economy of people that are
like journalists basically and they have a direct audience and I think sub stack is like one part of that but I think there's other tools to be built around that I would love to pounce on that Sean you and talk about this. I like this one. No go for it. So sub stack I think is badass. So writing a newsletter as Shawn can tell you as I can tell you running a newsletter consistently is significantly harder than probably any other medium. Well, maybe not video, but it's really hard.
And what I'm going to be curious about is seeing if these people are willing to do it for two or three years because I think that will be important but I think what sub stack has done is really sick. I like seeing subset completely. Kick mediums ass. I think that there's a lot of interesting ways to monetize do know what's going on subset right now with the advertising Ahmad. So the hustle I advertised on sub stack and they don't like it but they should allow that. So in their mission if you go on their website and their mission, they
I say we will never allow advertising or I don't know what the phrasing but basically says like no ads ever or something like that and the founders were interviewed in an article that I actually participated in and they said like no we don't want like because people are like, hey, can you help us monetize with ads and they're like, nope. We're not going to do that ever. And so the hustle we went direct to a couple guys a couple different people and we paid them x amount of dollars. I don't even remember but collectively maybe six figures spread out and they monetize their email with advertisements and they actually made more from us and they
At their subscription and in order to monetize an email with advertising you actually have to hire a full time sales team. It's so expensive and it's very very challenging. It's easy Once you got it, but it's really hard Ahmad. Have you ever thought about monetizing? Have you been when you're thinking about monetizing has that been something you've been thinking about is advertising in email? We're talking about like from subjects perspective, right? You are crater. But yeah, I think sub stack has like an interesting kind of line where they I think they will not facilitate the
using I don't think they will make an ad Network at least like they as you say they say don't know website and you know from like talking to them. They are very against that for good reasons. I think, you know one thing you have to always worry about criticizing them one thing they have to worry about when you're doing a company and like I worry about this with Mercury is like as you scale what stops you becoming the incumbent right? Like what stops your incentives aligning with like the thing that you were trying to solve and I think as soon as they're going to advertising the incentives like aligned to it's like clickbait and lack of
Vasily and like content that's like kind of churned and all this kind of stuff where it's like subscription kind of lines better to like long form content where like people are really giving you a bit of trust in you have to like keep it over time kind of thing. So I think it makes sense. I mean, I would be very surprised if they do stop people from running advertising like there's going to be some forms of like newsletter content that I just not going to monetize very well by subscription, but will monetize very well by advertising. I'm like, yeah one thing that people don't get is like Facebook makes it
Ton of money per user for a free product. Like they I think they make like four dollars per user on average or something but month that's insane. Right? Like I mean, you're giving away a free product like the whole world and you you're making like that much money but user so advertising. If you've got the right then a data in the right kind of audience is very lucrative. I think it will be real cool lucrative. And actually this is a good start up idea. Someone is probably going to make like a really nice newsletter for newsletter and at work right like because subjects not going to do it. I don't think they could stop.
Great is doing wanting it.
I have a too kind of interesting points. Did you guys see that Twitter? Bot
review? Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep
think if I'm sub stack here's worry number one, which is Twitter buys review which was a subset competitor essentially was the easy way to publish a newsletter and have a pay wall for it wasn't done as well as subject took off. So this becomes very interesting. Right? Like I was talking earlier about growing my Twitter following like nobody who's in the game right now really wants to have a big Twitter following that's a top of funnel to get you to own your audience on email.
Which is something Sam figured out like I don't know how many years ago seven years ago. When I started the hustle he was like and I remember back then being like dude. You got to be on Snapchat. You got to be on Facebook. He's like, yeah. Well, like will do that. But like all I want is my own little pirate ship. He kept calling. He's like, I love my own pirate ship where we own our own way of email connections with our customers and we don't have to worry about Facebook changing everything
look. Can you see this? This is how much I care about the pirate show.
I said Michelle I guess is his inner thigh right now where he is a giant tattoo of a pirate ship that he used to
Like some cheesy thing like every subscriber is a tough of wind in our sails or something. But basically my point is, you know, anybody's growing audience somewhere they want to own it if they can and I think if Twitter integrates in the email like the ability for me to email my followers, that's a fucking game changer. That is a huge huge win. If I could basically grab subscribers natively without them clicking out to go to some other app. There's just a button to subscribe and if I could just Auto email them, that would be amazing.
And the second thing I think is interesting is did you guys see what's going on with the everything bundle of you familiar with this? The everything bundle is a group of guys Nathan Michaud and shipper. They got together. They're like, look, let's create a media company on top of sub stack what they did was they created a bundle where if you subscribe to the bundle like 20 bucks a month or whatever it is. You get to be a paid subscriber for like seven Riders instead of just
the one right because it's the problem is
it sounds cool like oh, yeah. I can just charge a $5 a month subscription. But like if all of us,
It now some reader who just wants to like follow all of us has like ten subscriptions for five dollars a month and it gets really expensive at the same time for us. It's hard to get customers. Right? So one cool way to do it is to join a bundle and like people talk about those before but most of businesses bundling or unbundling things. And so when everybody gets a personal newsletter, these guys came along or like screw it let's bundle together the personal newsletters and they have like Jerry Kelowna and they have like, you know a bunch of interesting people who are a part of the bundle
the
URL is every dot t-- o-- every dot to every Dot t--
o-- and so this was like a side project that they were doing that they kind of started taking it more seriously. And then yesterday they announced they raised around and now it's like a media company named every you know, this sub stack bundle that the few guys were doing like it's turned into like a real experiment and like let's see what happens and it's pretty cool because if you join the bundle you get paid for every like, I know you're an affiliate basically so for every subscriber that joins the bundle through you you earn like the bulk of their subscription, but any
Peter who's a part of the bundle like see you get more reach because you're sharing audience with the other guys. I think it's pretty interesting what they're doing. I actually think that this model is in some ways. Like I think that you know people doing something like this can have a pretty good outcome if they focus on bootstrapping this business now, they raise money is this ever gonna be a billion-dollar thing no in my opinion, but whatever. I think it's cool,
but he also sold Sam's Point a little bit more that it's hard to kind of, you know, make a newsletter interesting every single week for like two years. Whereas
Maybe you can make interesting every month for two years or five years. What's interesting is I just looked up the guy Nathan who started every bundle. He actually used to work at sub stack and now they're no longer using subset. So that's kind of interesting. But my issue with this is I actually went to their website. It's awesome. I'm going to sign up the content. The product is pretty cool. I'm excited for it. I don't know what the truth is, but it's positioned a little bit like a collective e type of thing where it's like we're all equal and anytime I see that I think oh, well once you guys get remotely successful you're going to implode and
Die,
yeah, like when I talk to them I was like, okay cool. So how much do I have to share with the other people in this bundle? And what if I want to leave this bundle because I get so popular that I'm like look I am the bundle right? It's like when Bill Simmons leaves ESPN, it's like I don't want to be on this roster of journalist. I am the headliner. So why don't I just do my own thing or Conor McGregor in the UFC like this happens the stars get so big that they the top two people will be worth more than the next 200 people on the in the bundle and what's going to happen then is going to be very
interesting. What else were you thinking about? What subset a commodity
Sorry, we're kind of talking over. You know, it's all right, you guys more creative than I am. So I
think we do we invited guests on and then they say half a sentence and then we talked for 30 minutes and we're like thanks for coming. That was awesome.
I loved hearing ourselves talk, but tell us about yourself. Shut the fuck up. Okay. So let's say change subjected to something that I probably know more than you. I think there's ton of interesting things and fintech and like I have started it fintech in 2017 as like a noob where I didn't know anything whereas now
I'm just seeing so many interesting things as this whole Trend called embedded fintech. I don't know if you're familiar with it. But the idea is like let's say you run like a SAS platform and you have like all this access to like business data. Maybe you helping with payments and things like that. What if you offered these people on your platform alone? So there's a company that it just invested in I think that public enough that I can just say this it's called Len flow, but basically that's like the thing they're going after and there's someone else doing this with like
credit cards come also investment, but I don't think it's public but I think there's like there's something interesting here where you know, you can take a company and like it's built up an audience score all of this data and what if you can provide like fintech products and that's historically being like very hard to Impossible right? But I think it's getting easier because of these like tools that are stitching it together and also banks are more willing to work with fintech companies and that's enabling this kind of so I make sure I understand
so it's basically
Like wind shopify's launch Shopify Capital, right? It's like exactly they launched the lending platform within their tool branded as themselves and maybe it's actually even run by others. I don't know what chop fight did but like the idea would be you give a business that has many customers or users the ability to be to have Financial Services as one of their product offerings is one of their revenue lines. And is that why people do it is it so they can earn that revenue of lending or what is the
real reason is the revenue is definitely part of her, but the other thing is the state.
Achiness right? Like if you all if this platform is not just like something I use as a stool but it's something that's like really powering like the cash flow of my business now that's like 10x more sticky. So I mean, that's one of the fun things about these fintech products. Okay, come on, you dumb ass down even lower a little bit more for me. So you're saying that if I am MailChimp,
I'll tell you for you for the hustle. Here's the example for the hustle you have Trends to the subscribers are trans. I think most of them are going on small business or there's a lot of small businesses that are subscribers to the hustle and subscribers to
Today when they want to go get a loan they have to go to another third-party provider and say Hey, you know, we would like alone. Now, let's say you had some data about these customers, right? You know that the use you for in some way where you feel comfortable offering as an additional service instead of just giving you an email instead of just just give me a research reports. You can also get a credit line through the hustle, right? We love to support businesses. That's why we do what we do. Now. You don't want to build a credit line product or a mods investing in these companies that will just make it where you just
Plug it in and now in the hustle can offer
credit. I think like a household is not the best example you want ones where they have like unfair advantage in terms of data. And for example, if it's like a dentist practice software, right? There are like two or three companies that like just do freaking dentist. Right dentist that great people to like lend to the great people to not give credit but you're not you're not letting them money so they can buy your service at a no. No, this is John. It's raining thing. So like I'm setting up a new dental practice. I need to expand it like I need to
They are whatever there's lots of these kind of situations that happen again, like there's an underserved element, right? If your new journey of these businesses almost impossible to get loans from
Santa Fe saying is he saying he's guilty there's companies giving I got it gentle software provider a way to give it to the
dentist. That's pretty cool. Is this so it's lymph flow dot IO seems pretty neat. What's the comparable for this? It's been happening for a while right square has Square capital and they use that data stripe on stripe Capital. So it's just previously being like you need to be
be a 40 billion dollar company or something or at least a five billion dollar company before you even think about it and all of those companies that have done it are like pill often take place in the first place. So they understand how to do it. I don't know. What is a comparable doing I'll give you an example certainly existed before
there are companies that basically go to games and they say, hey don't you want your users to chat with each other but like you don't have to build chat like we give you chat that you give to your customers right as a additional feature in the game or video chat. This is a pretty common. There's a bunch of companies that just
Do the zoom type thing and they just let you put it into your app. So you're building an education app cool. Now you can offer video calls or you build your intercom you offer customer support. Now, you can offer video customer support intercom doesn't have to go build the video chat product to do that. They just use one of these other
providers. I think it's cool. It's pretty obvious that it's going to at least be mildly successful, right? Yeah. I mean, it's not just interesting and ending like I think this the concept of like embedded fintech is gonna happen across like almost every Financial
Product like it's whether it's like lending or credit card or even like depository. I think for the kinds of businesses. We do like there's still one something like Mercury which is like a fairly thin and deepen in-depth product, but for like maybe simpler businesses, maybe Freelancers like, you know, you just want to have like somewhere to store your money and like have a debit card. There's no reason that can't be embedded in a sub stack. For example, like maybe some stack just instead of making a payout to your bank account and they make a payout to a sub stack account and you can just like spend the money straight away. And yeah, it has like
Hooks attached to it kind of thing that I like very intricate
which right now twitch has millions of craters on the platform. We have I don't know I can't say the exact number but tens of thousands of Partners who are under contract earn money every month and so they could roll out a debit card for example, or a product like that that would help the Creator's while being a potentially a little you know, Revenue small Revenue driver as well per
Channel. Yeah, and they could even you know, maybe give you enough money to do that mortgage from your Twitch revenues. All right like it right I think an old
Like tied together potentially inside these platforms when you invested in these guys lend flow. How early were they? Well made me invest I've seen a yeah being infant act like I end up seeing like quite a few pictures like this and this guy just like I don't want to like steal too much of his story, but you basically like dunno raise money and he got this thing to actually work which is really hard and fintech like normally you have to raise a bunch of money to like build something and he just like went out there. He just felt this like using his own kind of money like almost bootstrapped it to reasonable success.
Like he was doing like quite significant revenues like again, I don't want to give away too much. We like more like yeah significant like significant seed round kind of revenues is very hard as intact. As I said, like I've done a ton of like seed round companies and fintech. Normally, they're like just building the product right? So I was really impressed that he did that and he had like a very thought through thesis about why this would work and how monetize and and he was also not taking like I think a lot of the time lending companies don't work out because they have to use their own money to do the
lending like he built up like a bunch of like partners that were doing the actual lending which makes it like much more of a scalable software play versus like, you know, now I have to like worry about defaults and like underwriting and all of this kind of much more complicated stuff how many engineers and how much time did it take for you to get Mercury at work? So we started in August 2017. And the first Alpha user was January 2019. So a year and three months before we had any Alpha users and even then it was pretty crappy. I would say when we
In April 2000 19 which was this gear and a half from start. That was when it was good. For most of that time. We had eight people working on it including me six Engineers one designer one kind of product and BD person. Yeah, it took a long time partly because we had like a overly ambitious thing that we wanted to like Bank startups and be like a complete replacement for your bank account, which meant that you had to do all the things your bank account does like we had to do International wires. Also really wanted to support like
Foreign impound is like immigrant Founders because I'm an immigrant from the UK and I didn't want to like make a bank that wouldn't like support like people like me. So we had like probably like unusual levels of like requirement. So it took a long time and another side is doing the bank Partnerships. We ended up doing like to bang Partnerships. We actually integrated all the way into One Bank partner, which thank God we ended up switching away from because it's BBVA and they just like shut down all of their Challenger Banks. So we missed that only just so that was a dirty.
Why did they do that because I got a notice from as low that was like hey our bank partner decided to turn us off and they're just like that's it end of the business. It is like stopped and it was like the most even that you know, normally do like here's what's gonna happen to your account. There's nothing they just put up the memo. That was like unfortunately bbbs shut us down. So, why did BBVA do that? And do you think others are going to do that? What I did
that mostly this is so as though and simple will wholly owned subsidiaries of BBVA us.
S so these are not like startups that were independent. I could like switch you to another partner Bank like Mike we could or whatever they were.
Like it was the future of
them. It's just part of like this big thing that was happening. Basically PNC bought BBVA USA thankful, 20 billion or something definitely more than 10 billion between 10 and 20 and as part of that. They just didn't want to worry about these kind of digital Banks, like even though they're growing the reason like all of these Challenger Banks exists is because Banks don't care about deposit customers. Like that's like the fundamental
In banking where like they think of depositors as like cost center because it cost them a lot of money to like have someone walk into a branch like sign up for a bank and then like worry about all the stuff my way. They make money is lending. So they think of lending is their revenue and depositors as a cost center. So when they look at like as low simple like all they see is cost like they don't see potential like I think the future is like Challenger banks are just going to completely dominate these incumbents, but they don't understand that and if they did like we wouldn't have to win.
So what's the way?
A you guys think about if they think about it that way, how do you think about
it? I think there's two things that we think differently number one. You know, how do we get the cost of servicing customers like near zero right to me? It's a software problem. Right? We're moving bits around if the products good enough. There's no reason they should contact us and there's no reason we can't like give a great product without having a massive cost to flex servicing. So that's one aspect. The second aspect is we think about it a little bit more like a freemium thing. Right? Like we have thousands of customers that don't really use it too much to have a few.
The Nikon maybe you don't make some money on that but we also have like hundreds of customers that have more than a million dollars in their bank account because we're servicing startups make a ton of money on those bigger guys. And if they can subsidize like thousands of the small guys. Yeah, that's easy Maps like you can do the mat. So we're excited. Where's Banks don't think like that. They're trying to monetize like a hundred percent of their customers, which is in the right mindset. So that's one aspect of that. I think the other thing which is like something banks are missing is historically there's no really been a reason to switch bank accounts.
Right. They all kind of sucks like switching from Bank of America. Chase is there's no big reason. I mean, maybe they give you some reward. So some small percentage of people will switch. I think the reality is that I think the Challenger banks are like such a better experience that there is I mean, it's already happening like we're growing exponentially chime is growing exponentially eventually that's going to be like all of this like depository base that they thought was like very safe is going to be now sitting in Challenger Banks and at that point like you've basically got like this long-term relationship you go.
All this data you can lend against and really like that's the touch point for business customers, especially that's a touch point that people touch like every week so you can build the rest of the bank quite easily from that starting point. It's much harder to go the other way where you just like a loan provider and you try to build like a long-term relationship because loans are like commodity, you know at the end of the day you want to get the cheapest learn whereas the bank is like something you use every day. If we want to have the best product. I think we only have a few more minutes, but what else is interesting you at the moment
get us some of your radical ideas either Infinity.
Take or not because you're I know you're pretty like creative guy. And I know that you also have been in Silicon Valley for a little while. Now. You have a very good network of interesting people like I bet if you just look at your friends from 7-8. Where did you poop Silicon Valley like eight years ago Townsville something years
ago 15 years ago. So if
you just look over that time scale, I thought you've just seen people like try fail try fail try and now like home run, you know talk a little bit about like kind of like what you've seen in that time.
Like just your batch of friends and like where are they thinking? Where are the smart people looking and thinking about what the future looks like?
Yeah. I mean one thing that's interesting is like the longer you go at it. I feel like the harder problems people tackle and I think something that I'm yeah, it's happening for a while now, but you know, I'm seeing like people raise like eight million dollars ten million dollars on like an idea which I think is crazy, but it does mean that people can tackle like much more ambitious problems, right and
That's fun. Right? Like I think there's a ton of things that are going to happen in space. Like I think space is going to be super interesting. You know, we've got SpaceX kinda like dropping the cost of like getting one kilogram to space to it's like $10. So that's going to open up a bunch of use cases and I think that's really interesting. I'm an investor in momentous space which kind of like moves things between like different orbits and it's like doing a spec right now. So that that's going to work out pretty nicely. How big is momentous momentous space like in terms of people after they do this.
Fact it's going to be a two-point bump. It's not finished yet in the market is crazy. So 2.2 billion or so if it goes off the car not someone's starting a company that put stuff into space. How does that even start? I mean is the founder of kind of a big shot already and they just go to investors from the get-go because like that's not even remotely bootstrap a bowl. Yeah. That's what I'm saying like you need there is a level of like ambition right now where people are willing to give ten million dollars to people who aren't not Revenue in the not going to make revenue for a while.
Like I'm a I'm also this an investor. So momentum space is just finished that off like invested in 2018 and it's like stacking now and raising two hundred million. So it's and I messed it at like seat stage, you know, and they've made some Revenue but it's like the goals are way further than like, you know where they are today, but it's like that level of ambition is like an exciting right? So I'm at also invest in this other company. So yeah, I would say like there is like some recycling of talent going on right like this people who work at SpaceX who want to do something new. There's people worked in blue origin.
I want to do something new. I don't think you can be like a maybe someone will pull it off but you can't be like a college kid. That's like hey, I have this space idea. I think that's like hard to do. You need to really learn and deeply understand that space and then you can like learn something. So this momentous face guy has like this crazy story where he was in Russia. He was doing his face company there and had to like leave because of like Putin and thank you. So it's he's got this like crazy story and the depth of experience that he got from that before he started.
A momentous. Yeah, I just think that's so interesting because I see there's a lot of interesting stuff going on like with that some of these trucking companies some of the space companies and it kind of boggles my mind because with everything that we do you can just do it with a laptop and one person can make a little bit of a difference but with that stuff, I mean it's all in and years and hundreds of millions of dollars until you see results and I find it to be incredibly bold and fascinating and it's kind of interesting to see how that actually comes to fruition.
Mindy's moonshots are hard to invest and like I haven't done too many of them like maybe 10 but it takes years. You know, I've been investing since 2016. I mean the whole SPAC thing is like changing it a little bit where you can especially like these moonshots facts that like there is this appetite and kind of these retail investors to have like access to these relatively ambitious early stage companies. I don't know whether that is a good thing in the long term because you know, some of these are going to die, so maybe that's good like
it's like when every mobile app
is just getting bought by Yahoo. And you're like, oh great. This is this window of time where you actually didn't need to be successful in order to get like a pretty nice exit and that's what's happening with the specs right now is just like a lot of it is. Oh cool. This this rhymes with Tesla or SpaceX it great. I will this, you know all the off chance. This is just like those. I'm going to go ahead and buy him, right and then there's like this self-fulfilling prophecy because right now all the facts are up by the specs of crushed it over the last year. So now somebody's like oh somebody's back in something on me.
Maybe I like specks you can't lose
when you have this kind of irrational exuberance. Like sometimes good things come from it. Right? Like if we can get a few of these face companies to become like a launch. Yeah, you know, maybe they'll be a trillion dollar company there somewhere and now be nice that we do investors get access to like these like very early stage kind of companies. Like it's it's a little unfair that like seed investors can see this in the private sector but like retail investors don't see the upside. Yeah.
Yeah for sure. The things about the ambition is percent, correct and this in one company, that's like a
If driving car literally building these mini self-driving cars like one person
via we talk about the guy we met at our Meetup. Yeah, and
I like the guy they've been working so hard but like my excitement about the company, you know, when I heard about it and heard the vision, it's like when you talk to the founders that are doing these really hard Ambitions business things. You're like take all my money. Should I just drop what I'm doing? I'm going to come work for you, but I can be your employee because here this is so inspiring like the world is going to change. I can't wait. When's the demo is it next month?
And then like six months go by 12 months ago by 18 months go by and you're like fuck this is hard just reading his updates. I'm like fuck this is hard and I'm like, this is a terrible investment. Like I invest in some random ass like SAS HR tool that's like, you know, I don't even want to hear the update because I'm like, I can't stand I don't want to hear about the space. It's like a drain on me, but you know, those are just better businesses and most of the time because they're not trying to like make science fiction turn into reality and build a great business at the same time. And I remember when I
My introduced and went to like five kind of like much more experienced investors to me and I was like, hey, I found this stuff darker be I think a really great. Here's this guy's background. It's a crazy story and they're like four out of the five were like, yeah. I've been burned so many times by this. Like, I just don't do hardtack anymore. It's just too hard right and like some people are getting rewarded handsomely when it does work. It just feels amazing. You've you're investing in a company that's like we're talking about it's worth backing is worth believing in is worth doing and then you make a ton of money and they're like, I think nine.
That and you're like, oh God, this is so hard. I can't believe I mean I invest in this,
you know, one of the reasons I invest is to like broaden my kind of experience Horizons and learn things you get that more from these like hot tech companies than you do from like appeal software play, but you want to just diversify right like a lot of I personally I'm like as you can tell by my freaking hundred eighty Investments. I'm a big believer in see stage diversification because like really what you really want as a seed stage investor is a hundred billion dollar company, and I don't care.
Oh good. You guys see stage investor? You can't tell when it's a ten million dollar company. It's gonna be a hundred billion dollar company, but if you can hit one of those like you can have a thousand Investments fail with like 100 billion dollar company and you're going to be like, do you have any better that you think are going to sway? Yeah, you know, my polyphony is mostly from 2016. So it's just early to get that big. I think I'm like super bullish on a table and I know when it'll be a hundred billion dollar company, but if they keep executing I think that could be I'm a fairly big ish seed in my Stead.
Rappy, which is like a combination of Postmates instacart and Pharmacy on-demand delivery for latm and they've grown like incredibly, so maybe they could do it and I know who knows maybe some stack to do it. Maybe Clubhouse could do it. You just don't know until you kind of have to let him ride for like ten years ask me in 10 years. Maybe Mercury will be there as well then none of these are the Investments that we need. Well, we appreciate you doing this Sean's anything else. You want to you want to go over you
should plug your stuff. We're camping.
Finds you well, check out Mercury. I literally right before this. Actually. I had one minute before the Pod was about to start and I had to pay a supplier and literally just like it was going to sound like a commercial but it was so good. I opened up my phone face. Id'd like, you know, everybody was like instantly logged into this to my bank account hit the pay someone button paid someone with my left hand not even my right hand and then we did the podcast one of the later and I was like the perfect setup for this podcast and I'm like, that's how banking should work and then like I've had so many headaches of
Three months with Wells Fargo and other stuff that you know, thank you for actually building something that's good. There's so so rare to actually find tools that like, it's like a pleasure to use versus like a
pain. Yeah. Thanks for saying that she wants a few if any one has a business. They want a much better Bank than whatever they using go to Mercury.com. It's all online easy to sign up. Hopefully you can get it done in like 10 minutes and then we've thought a lot about like all of these experiences. Like how do we make payments like three clicks and really smooth? How do we make like you
Can get a virtual card in there. You can set up your bookkeeper as a separate user with restrictive permission sir. There's a ton of like small things that suck at banks that entrepreneurs have to deal with every day. And we just spend a lot of time to make those smooth and then we have like some Advanced features, especially for start-up. So we have an API that if you want to plug in your bank details or pay someone automatically you can come integrate that we have a treasury product now where if you raise five million dollars and you want to put four million of it into money market funds like fully integrated and easy to use so yeah check that out.
It out and if you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm just Ahmad Imad. And yeah, I try to say interesting things about helping kind of entrepreneurs succeed and you get in on this hundred thousand Twitter for the thing that Sean's cooking so worry, bro. I
don't know behind me when I get there.
