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 we're back and we got a special guest we've been on fire with guess lately. So we had we had we had Austin from Lambda school. We had Harley who's the president a shopper?
And now big shoes to fill so Josh Helman is here. Josh is in the house. You can give your kind of like, I don't know you could give your resume a little bit better than I can but I'll give you the highlights. I'll tell people what I think about Josh about every two months or so now I call Josh for some combination of Life advice career advice, whatever because it's guys sort of had like kind of a miraculous career in Silicon Valley. So LinkedIn Twitter Facebook, Robin Hood was a VC and investor and just
so he's been doing growth in Silicon Valley for a long long time growth of products. So Josh, what did I miss or is Zazzle? Where were you
at earlier in your career? Look I started my career at realnetworks 1997 with the idea of like we could put audio video on the internet and real was the company that could have grown up to be YouTube plus Netflix plus everything else, but that's sort of been the pattern of my career real was sort of one of the companies that didn't make it all the way through but it's always been we get this thing, right? It could be so much bigger for the world. LinkedIn was 15 people.
Showed up we turned into the world's largest Professional Network Facebook was like 500 people and they got to work on the platform and we thought we get everybody to log into websites and apps with their Facebook ID and launch Facebook connect. And now that's doing it Twitter was like 80 people. We got it from like ten to a hundred million users when I was there to like tune into daily information. That's kind of been my kind of pattern is I have jumped around a little more than I thought which is part of why I thought I'd be a VC for a while to I really like just building products and getting into it.
With teams and making stuff that matters how many people worked at Facebook when you so LinkedIn. You were number 15 Twitter your 30 said 80. I forget he's 80 in the 80s and Facebook. Facebook is like 500 something a little bit bigger. Damn. So you have a good hit rate.
Yeah. He's a good picker. We had a good conversation before you came on. It was like, oh, well we talked about and I thought okay, there's you know, the normal brain storming of cool ideas that you're actually pretty plugged into like consumer in a way that most people aren't so I think we will do
The other thing I thought was interesting was this career path you have which was like something in between like not the founder and CEO but not employee number 2500 like Senior Management, but lit way later you have this like awesome kind of get on the rocket ship while there's still, you know, some seats available early enough where you could be like, hey, I didn't just join a ready-made success but late enough where you weren't like two guys in a garage just scratching your balls trying to figure out what's going on. So talked about was that intentional was that accidental that
you went on that career
path looking back. It was clearly accidental that it turned out as well as it did but I think my instinct was always to go jump on those things that I just thought could be a lot bigger for the world, you know in college I intern in Microsoft the summer of Windows 95 which is ancient history now for most people but this was like the launch of really personal Computing in the home and it was already a giant company in 1995 and I was like, you know what this is too big to work at it.
And on the smallest piece, I worked on custom charts within Excel and I looked around and there was you know tens of thousands of other people working on other miniscule things that added up to this giant Microsoft, but the next summer I interned for a 10-person company then called kartoffel soft and it didn't quite have product Market fit and it was trying to find its way through and I was like that's almost too small. Like I want something with a little bit of momentum or like where I'm not where I can tell the story to myself of why it can be giant for the world.
As I started after graduation and just thought about this my career, there's always like what is that thing that's working enough that if I can go be a part of helping it really grow big. I can both have a huge impact on the company an impact on the world because they'll get to see this product like audio video on the internet or professional networking or helping your social identity go with you across the web and still look if you get in early enough to company becomes really big you can still make an outsized money versus just taking a
Larger company salary on a yearly basis. What's the growth and the absolute threshold of like this can be big so it has to grow by this much and it has to have the potential to be what in order to keep your interest. So in my mind it has to be able to get 10x bigger 10x bigger and users revenue or market cap with a shot at a hundred X. And so I do that math in my head which is like why I'm joining the company over the next three to four
years. Do you remember having that conversation with yourself either for Twitter or Facebook or something?
At the time like you take us like do you remember what your thought process was then it might have been off. Do you remember what you talked about then?
So Facebook when I joined in early 2008 a lot of people had already written it off as giant Facebook had caught 70 million monthly active users. It had been valued at 15 billion by Microsoft a few months before I started so it wasn't like I was a genius for joining Facebook when it was a couple of college kids and just networks on College. I still went back and I said look at 15 billion, I think.
Can be a 10x I think it's a hundred fifty billion dollar market cap company and so my sock will grow 10x at least and the user base can easily get to five to seven hundred million people. Is it really connects? Everybody worldwide and it's going to be the dominant platform and I was working on the Facebook platform specifically and I was like every app every consumer product is going to need to run through Facebook over the next three to four years in the same way that they all have to run through Google and care about SEO. I was like we're going to go from
um kind of mattering to like this is just the way the internet works and I just saw that possibility which of those projects that you mentioned or ones that you didn't mention. Did you make the most money off of
I was going to ask the same question because accompanies all had different outcomes, but you know, depending on when you join who you are you might personally benefit more from one that wasn't as big of a success as the other
actually have averaged out about the same amount from LinkedIn Facebook and Twitter in each one the time that I got in was either early or later. I got a little bit more senior, you know LinkedIn. I was really
Much earlier in my career but as 15 people. So even though I had a small Grant like it worked out. I was more senior by the time I got to the Facebook and then even more by the time I got to Twitter and so I got slightly larger grants than what you get at that time, you know, and Facebook was worth. I think I got in in the my common stock was worth about 4 billion and it Twitter not not my personal share the company, you know evaluation and it Twitter it was right around a billion. So, you know, I got to see, you know meaningful upside.
Each of those but it's funny. They kind of averaged out to about the same
and you probably have made more in this path. Then a lot of Founders who you've invested in even who hit success is right because you had four different career Journeys where you were able to get that 10x or more even a few hundred thousand dollars of stock turns into a few million dollars every single time. That's more than a lot of Founders make when they succeed.
Yeah, I would say if you're a Founder who manages to sell your company for over 25 million dollars and still hold a meaningful share.
You start to catch up to what I was really fortunate to do but you some new company for 25 million dollars in still, you know, not being totally diluted down to like nothing but that's not easy for most Founders. I have a lot of other friends that started companies raise 25 million from VCS and ended up making a lot less personally because they weren't able to find a great outcome. I have a friend who sold his company for nine hundred and ninety seven million dollars. He walked away with three million bucks. He spoke at hustle con.
I'm someone could probably Google that I'm sure they will but it's pretty crazy piggyback off that my wife works at Facebook and a lot of people ask her because of my job like so would you ever start something and in my head, I'm like, no don't do that. You like you're gonna cry or sorry. She works at Airbnb now used to work at Facebook and I'm like no. It's like he's on the fast track to get paid a lot of money probably as an executive. You had probably have way less stress. No, so I think the path to wealth a lot of people said, I always say it said like starting a small business and not raising money.
Becoming a salesperson or climbing your way up at like a Fang a Netflix or a huge tech company. I think that's true. And I think that's what's really changed over the past decade because ten years ago actually the salary difference to being at startups or other things was much less than it is now. I mean that the fangs now I have friends who make three to five times more. Annually than what people at startups take home with hopes that Equity is worth it, but when Equity has to make up
Up a three to five times Gap in like cash take home. It's even more different than it used to be. So I agree with that like those are exactly the ways that you can make the most money at the lowest stress level and there's always stress
Josh give me the companies. Okay, you're if you were out the job market today and you're looking for okay you were looking for your next one. That's in that same sweet spot, right? They have something figured out but they still have that 10x hundred X potential that you know, you don't know if it's gonna come true rattle off.
He's on top of your head that you think would fit you'd be looking at you say okay. I'm gonna take a look at these. I'm gonna kick the tires on these companies to I think they have that but
I get Sean we get asked this all the time.
I know and we have really shitty answers. So I think Joshua like, I don't know.
Yeah, so I'm first going to tell the honest truth, which is this is harder than it ever was because the companies have gotten funded all the good companies have gotten funded at valuations that are the three to five times higher than what they would have been 5 or 7 years
ago. It's already priced him.
But you're
getting more of that multiple priced in but if we just talk about the companies, I think can really go public and still be really meaningful. Like Roblox was just rumored today. They're filing for an IPO. Like they're a company that is connecting kids around the world and play and I think that they have huge legs to be a much bigger sort of metaverse Greylock where I used to work as an investor. So just in case there's I don't need to have any conflicts, but I figured I'd say that Discord where I'm on the board. So even more conflict I think is just one of the few consumer companies that's growing and Light.
Things up in just the way they connect people around these sort of shared spaces and shared places, which is one of the biggest Trends in fintech Robin Hood coinbase and chime are the three companies that I think are going to come out of this wave and just the massive outcomes and then internationally, I'm quite bullish on revolute and transferwise as two companies. I think that will still be very significant and then when you get into Health, this is an area. I wish I knew more about that if I were telling
Somebody to go pick a new trend that's going to generate these ten or hundred billion dollar companies in the future. I would tell him becoming an expert on digital health and genomics because I think that that's actually the category that the fangs aren't going to own. There is so much invention in transformation that's about to happen. And the biggest outcome of this pandemic is going to be us just refresh young and re looking at how we handle health and biology and data and information shown are you an investor in that levels company? No, so
- have you heard of the levels everyone a lot of people talk about it. Yeah, it's one where you just like trick yourself for that's called a continuous glucose monitor. I got an A on it. There's Sean's thing. I haven't gotten my knee. I need to get it. So I think that's pretty cool that company and it aligns a little bit what you're saying. Another company that I think is interesting is zapier, you know zapier. Yeah, they spoke at hustle con two years ago and back then I would have said 100% if you can get a job somewhere to get a job here. I still think there's a ton of room to grow but I'll bet money that they'll have an atlassian.
Style exit and then I would also add that new thing. Have you seen bubble the no code tool bubble? Yeah, very interested in that. Is there any that you would add Sean?
Well, I said Flex Port last time and you were lying now. It's not here doesn't count. It's out to Josh's criteria does which is can it become ten or a hundred times bigger and I would say yeah, if it's I think was valued at three billion last I had heard if you told me that becomes a 30 billion or hundred billion dollar company, I'd be like, oh, yeah Freight forwarding becoming the sort of software stack around Freight forwarding. Yeah, isn't that boring to bring up everyone knows they're off.
You know, they're awesome. A lot of people don't know that they're awesome. Let's see what else I'm a look at the apps on my phone.
Well, we we had Lambda School come and I wasn't convinced. The guy Austin was the guess. I was not convinced. That was an interesting idea. I actually have changed my opinion. I think that is quite interesting. I don't know how expensive. Oh how big the company is now five billion to become 5
billion call it a 5 billion is where it goes Paul Graham tweeted this out over the weekend and had a bunch of people talking about it, which was he goes. All right, you know the resemblance there, too.
Uncanny I got them calling it now stripe is the next Google Sam. You're already react to give me that it's so boring like it's a big. Yeah, duh. That's so it's such a easy way to sell your missing his point to his point is it doesn't matter if it's already picked. The question is can it still grow a hundred X from here going to still grow, you know 10 X 20 X 30 X from here because all that matters is your entry in your multiple. It doesn't matter if it's five that becomes 50 or 55 because 500 it's the same thing
whatever great I buy into that up. It's just like it's just such an obvious answer
so this
The investment is too early, but I think it will win is this company called Duke on which is basically Shopify for Indian shopkeepers and that company is growing faster than anything I've ever seen and so I'm pretty sure that if I was going to go do something like if I was 25 right now and not like married with a kid, I would be in India. I would have been working for him for the last month. I'd be like give me whatever job title you want like I'm gonna be a right-hand man. Let's take this thing to you know to billion three billion because I think it can get there in a few
years Josh. You said the trends that interest you and Sean chime in whenever
never you find your list, but you said that the trends that interest you are some what did you say genome stuff is a genomics and sort of all that we're going with digital health and
data. So tell people what's going on in those spaces. That's if you give us some examples because I think most people here will hear genomics but like most people listen to this don't meet any genomics companies any day of the week. So give us some examples of what
school so I think a lot of where the interesting company started like Grail, which I'm not sure if you guys follow just got bought for like seven billion dollars by a health company like Dave,
under them started by like we're going to sequence the genomes and we're going to be able to go and like figure out strains of cancer and people's propensity to have certain diseases later in life and could take like precautions against them color genomics is another company that I think is really interesting and the space they started with me if the detect breast cancer Gene and be able to help you do that with much cheaper test with their own lab the challenge with like companies like that is it had to go make their money by convincing companies to buy this as more like a medical
f it and buy this is way too like lower medical costs. And so they end up becoming these like challenging honored Enterprise sales companies around these categories where I'm interested in stuff that starts more like levels or starts more like you would get your own no genomic test and all of a sudden it would just help you like change your lifestyle just a little bit start eating this a little bit more than this or start just doing this type of exercise that or this and you'll like levels where you're doing this continuous monitoring all of a sudden now you're paying just a little bit of money.
On a consistent basis for this sort of like dr. Coach that's giving you very very personalized advice. What in there that that's easier though. When I think of what's easiest I would think hiring a sales force would be far easier than dealing with millions of customers. You know, I think my brain and my whole career has been scoby to see that to me the Salesforce is sort of like you called straight boring. Like I call that sort of boring and straightforward and to convince companies to buy something as a benefit becomes very much a cost-benefit scenario. Well, they either be able to track better employee.
Over they lower their medical costs. I actually get much more inch to like can you actually change the lifestyles and millions of people just if you can do just that a little bit you can create a huge business for yourself.
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We had heard about this new thing called Square. This is back in 2011. We heard about this thing called Square and I still remember getting you know, getting our mail and they had this sweet looking envelope. I love I'm a sucker for good packaging. They had this sweet looking sort of unfolding box and inside was the tiny Square Reader. And so it's kind of amazing. We were talking to the folks from square and it's kind of amazing how most people just know them for that little Square card reader, but it's become so much more you can do online. You can create an online store you get a debit card to get your money instantly.
They have, you know contactless payments. They've built so much stuff pretty impressive and pretty inspiring for anybody who wants to start small start with a really simple business and then build it into something pretty
Epic.
You said that one it's not like you actually had a few more that Intrigue you. I'm really interested in what some people are calling to metaverse or the third place or basically, where do we go actually spend time online. I think right. Now a lot of our online time is spent solo. We are looking at Netflix or were viewing our Facebook feeds or our Instagram feeds and we think we're interacting but we're not and we're just starting to see the rise main gameplay is obviously a massive phenomenon Zoom calls, just aren't it?
Even though that's what everybody's doing right now. So I think these places that we spend meaningful time together online is about to grow substantially and even though we're all going to get back in the real world soon and be able to hang out. We're still going to realize that like our time at home where we're just scrolling through Facebook or Instagram can still be much better spent together. So Roblox Minecraft or teaching kids to do this young gameplay, whether it's Among Us which is the hot game now or you know League of Legend says that for people who have figured that out, but I think this is now going to become much more
Everybody have it. What can I bring to up that are off of that which is the first I saw it last week and I think and it blew my mind. It was called replica. Have you guys seen replica? Yes. I was going to mention them.
Oh my God the second are you using? It's a more you just saw the concept you got
excited. I'm using playing with it. It's crazy fascinating
quite explain it first. And yeah, so I was what your experience
has been I put as crudely and basic as possible, which is basically it's like an AI online.
Girlfriend or online therapist they call it like you're AI best friend and say oh
it's smarter child for those AOL, you know people back in the day
and I don't know if they're just using what's that GPT three thing they cut this off from scratch. Wow, that's pretty crazy. So basically you login you message you make your person a girl or a boy or non-binary whatever you want to make it and you could like pick your the Avatar and then like Megan or whatever you name her him is going to become your friend and you could talk to them about yada.
Yatta, and the reason why I think it's going to be awesome. It's because I think that Americans are going to be similar to Japan where they just have less sex and the guys get addicted to this type of stuff and they and this is like the becomes their online girlfriend. I also think that online therapy is booming right now and for a lot of therapy you could use this as your therapist and I think you can get kind of an interesting benefit from it. I also think you could use it for group Theory, but your entire group is fake except for you. And I think that Sam let me ask
you a question if you took all the guys in
I say the United States. Do you think there's more sex
happening or masturbation masturbation easy particularly by a
factor of what like would you say 2 X 5 X 10 X 20 X. What do you
think? It's more? Well, which generation I think that gen Z is having significantly less sex than
okay. Let's say, you know our age and under what would you guess is it
two or three hundred percent less?
Okay. So you think it's a 2 or 3x difference? I think it's probably like a 20x difference. I think there's probably 20 x more but let's say we're still somewhere in the middle and you would think right somebody would say. Oh the real thing is better and
Is all these reasons why the real thing is either unavailable or it's not better. It's not it's less convenient. It's less, you know, there's less emotion involved all these reasons. So maybe the same thing happens just with relationships like we that's kind of the the that's the bull case for what you're describing which is why would I want to be going and getting a girlfriend hard having somebody who is you know High convenience who doesn't cause all this drama or emotional entanglement. Maybe this is just the easier way. And so maybe there's two to three or Twenty times more people who want a relationship that is
the equivalent of masturbation but masturbation is to sex. Maybe there's something like that to having a girlfriend. What do you think about
that - you answer I mean, I don't even I'm so you're trying to get my opinion shaped around it.
But what do you think dude? That was I was a good theory. I thought I thought I'd put out a good
thief is my take is I don't think it's a replacement but I think it's the training ground. I actually think that it becomes the way that you get better. You can practice the skills that you want to have so that when you do encounter the real relationship you have that now the risk is
Get so good that you go to have real relationships and they suck compared to how good your virtual replica is, which is a problem
that people have with porn as well poor and creates this like idealistic, you know pseudo fantasy and you get some trained on that. The real thing is
like harder to deliver capacity. Yeah. It's like a Ukraine team when I went and researched them. They're not from America. Do you know where there
is it? Good though Sam. Is it like amazing? Like when you showed me your GP T 3 thing. That was like amazing. Is this amazing?
Raising not yet. No, it's really cool, but it is not amazing yet, but they have a Facebook group where a lot of their users are and their fanatical. So I went and researched all the Facebook users and they freaking loved it. So I think it's good enough to be big but no, it's not as good. I actually think it's the opposite of GPD 3gp T3 is amazing at the demo. It's not as great the tenth time you use it. Actually you replica is one of those things that gets better over time the more that you put in the more you get hook know maybe they like
Hundred or thousand time you use it you start realizing what I am talking to a robot. Maybe I'm going to detach actually think it's one of those things that ramps up much better. Whereas like I can blow you away with GPT 3, but then you ask me for like a couple of harder things and then it
just all stuff. That's how I am with the Oculus right? Like yeah. I use the quest. I was like, oh my God. Yeah that first hour was mind-blowing and now it's collecting dust over there because my going to keep doing this, you know, the tenth time that novelty is now worn off and now it's you know, just this fun.
Box in my house. Just do you actually use this replica thing or you talking kind of in theory? It's like it gets better over
time. I used it for a while. Is it like two months that I was having a lot of fun with it? And then I started to get to that point where I would have other conversations that it couldn't kind of keep growing with me. And so I sort of fell out I do know the team and they are in Russia as Sam was asking about I looked at investing early and have kept in touch with him. I really think they're onto something this is the closest company. I've seen this Samantha from her if you remember the movie her which I
Still think is the best movie to predict kind of trends that should make sense in the next sort of four to five years. I'm glad we're on the same wavelength that because me a lot. I've just my confidence level has just been boosted. Thank you.
Beverly got a new pep in his step here. He's like, yeah, I'm on to something. It's also like, you know another place where ideas is go watch Black Mirror and then like actually build the startup that does it there's a black mirror episode where I think somebody's her boyfriend or husband dies. And then she has this like synthetic replica to hang out with but it's like not
Quite the same but it's a pretty good Echo
and that key one of the origin stories of this company. Replica is the founder had a dear friend passed away and they used a lot of the text messages to actually recreate same bunch of that training
and there's another there's another company that just got like tons of funding that's like these X Apple like OG Apple people like they, you know, they forgot they like designed the iPod and like the back or whatever like the design Steve Jobs turtleneck or something. And so then they spun out now and they're creating like a new
And they raised like I don't know. What was that 30 million 50 million dollars or something straight out the gate and there's some patents about what it is and it's straight from a Black Mirror episode Black Mirror. There's one episode where it's like you have this wearable implant that basically records your whole day. And then you like have your memory as like a video. Basically these guys have this like wearable clip-on thing that you put on your chest that's basically kind of like always recording and you're able to go back and look at it or capture it or share it or do whatever you want from it, but I think there's a lot of Black Mirror technology.
He out there
Josh. You said something. I forget exactly how you phrase it you're talking about like things happen because of quarantine and work at home and where people spending internet. I've got one that I've been talking about. I've been talking about this since before covid and it hasn't quite picked up yet. But I just want to be on record as predicting it which is new browsers. There's two or three companies that are in this space. The first is called the browser company. I think it's called that the second is the guy who started mixpanel. He's got this new one called mighty mighty and there's
Be two or three more that are quite fascinating. What do you think about those? I don't know about those companies to be the ones to do it. But that trend is quite interesting. Do you have an opinion may I think there's grave to I almost feel like the browser is last year's technology or last decades technology. And so I'm like a whole new browser like you just takes so much Habit to change and it takes so much to change and then and then you end up monetizing off of search. And so you then end up beholding to Google Now that said there was
a rumor that the government is going to try to say that Chrome has to be sold by Google as part of all this and address stuff and if that happened then I think this trend is wide open because all of a sudden Chrome is a separate company looks a lot less interesting than Chrome is part of Google but I feel like it's more like that. Then we're all waiting for a browser that solves all our problems.
Here's the version of that that I like. I don't think anybody's doing it but there's this trend of multiplayer software. So, you know, you have Photoshop which is
Solo person in a photo editing thing and you get Sigma which is like hey, why don't we all be able to collaborate on the same thing and it's in the cloud and all this stuff and then you have the same thing for Microsoft Word. You have Google Docs and you have email that's a single-player experience and they have front which is like a team in a collaborative version of it. So taking something to solo player and then making it collaborative is a interesting thing. And so I wonder if somebody's going to do this with the browser which is today. My browser is my solo player experience and nobody's built the right social or collaborative.
Native version of that where my team we all somehow share a browser. That's like some good experience. So that's where I'd be looking more so than what those guys are doing today. That's
interesting. You think someone's in a in you're looking to fund that if
I saw something that was doing that that I like. Yeah fun that because you could see this happening over and over and over again. And so any time you take a staple tool that's today used only single player. And if you actually crack the collaborative use case, it's a recipe for multi billion dollar companies. It's just keeps happening. So if I found that around the browser, I'd be excited
about it.
Browsers, we got to keep our eyes out on browsers. We both said our opinions. We're going to find out I think any year for right or wrong Josh. You said something earlier about selling a company for 25 million dollars as a bootstrapped or business or owning a lot of it a lot of people who we have on here as well. As a lot of listeners are people who have small businesses that they can hopefully sell for potentially tens of millions, but it's a very bootstrap e crowd my company where we've never raise Venture Capital, but everything that you've done is definitely the traditional like go big or go home type of mentality, which
Is neat wide have you gone that route versus the smaller business that can make 10 20 million revenue and maybe sell for a good interesting amount or use own all of it and pay yourself a lot of money. I mean why one over the other you know, I think for me my orientation has always been on sort of impact to the world over just a business or things for myself and I actually thinking I'm not sure where I got that bug. Maybe it actually was that summer that I worked at Microsoft where I did realize that like, hey this little
Thing that started up in Seattle on you know, I'd grown up the Seattle area. So Bill Gates was my hero. Even when I was in sixth grade, I would like who's your local hero? And I would always do projects on Bill Gates. So I think I always wanted to touch the world in that way. And so everything I oriented myself to was those go big or go home get to massive scale can this reach hundreds of millions of people which is also like the power of technology and local businesses can be amazing and can be incredible the profitable and lucrative and
touch some people's lives a lot. But I've always wanted to go for that home run. How old are you when LinkedIn got popular got was a base hit or home run or whatever it is for you personally went public in 2011. So I was 35 when we went public. That's probably 27 when I showed up there. My theory was like well, maybe you got like a base hit at a young age and you're like sick. I have what I need now. I can keep doing some of these moonshot ideas, but that wasn't entirely the case with you. I grew up that like weird version of middle class, which is
My parents had to take out massive loans to send me to college and I was really lucky to get to go to like Stanford, but they had to take out a massive loans. We couldn't get financial aid, but they couldn't afford it and it was like that really weird middle. So I had no safety net. My parents were like that's it you graduate. We're paying for college and then you're on your own so I didn't have any nest egg or safety net to build from but I also didn't have the sense of like I didn't grow up with parents who are entrepreneurs. They always just had good jobs. So I also didn't have that kind of entrepreneurial Grit.
That I just been part of my whole life. And so I also felt like I always just needed a salary. So I was like, how can I get a good salary? It's something that has massive potential as opposed to just going to the big company and selling out already but also not the confidence to go to 0 or the grit that I totally felt internally when you were at Stanford were you
there at the same time as like any of the kind of like Peter teal Max levchin Reid Hoffman like are all right. I'm not sure what the timing was.
So I was a little bit after their era but Marissa Mayer Who Benny
No, it's like a very early googler. And then was CEO of Yahoo. For a number of years was my neighbor and study date. So I was like right in her era in the late 90s and you know at that time Netflix right before I graduated from Stanford Netflix had just gone public eBay had just gone public Yahoo! Just gone public. Google hadn't even started yet and it was like right in that sort of middle zone of the internet blowing up all around
it and you could you could you have linked to her and be like, oh, yeah, she might just be the CEO of Yahoo
someday, so I'll be
Yes, like my luck when you're at a place like a Stanford and you still have the people who are literally 10 times smarter than you become their best friends. So many of them have gone on to be incredibly so I even had a class with Larry Page and I was an idiot who's urkesh seems like kind of a pompous. Jerk. I would sneak her in the back with my friends as opposed to how do I just like I'm a little undergrad he was a grad student. How do I just try to get on this team to do a project become his best friend
Ryan?
And then and you know, obviously change the world so you hung out with or in the same Circle Larry Page at a young age Marissa Mayer. Let's be clear. I was around
around physically in the geographically.
So you are 15 at LinkedIn. So you clearly knew Reid Hoffman at least a little bit knew him. You were 80 at Twitter. So you must have kind of Heaven Jack. Yeah, not really Jack and then you were early enough maybe where you worked with zuk.
Right little bit little bit. Why not? Well, those people along with some of these other like Titans these tech nerd Titans. Were there any similarities well and you're hung out with you know, the Robin Hood dudes. Those are those guys are Robin Hood dudes, you know Discord dudes. Everybody is incredibly thoughtful about what they do and they people always say like they make fast moves and they go fast and they make snap decisions. And the reality is I like to call it deliberate action, which is
They're really deliberate about just about everything they do whether it's a higher whether it's a meeting they're going to take whether it's a person they're going to spend time with but they do a lot of things. They're kind of voracious. They just are like non-stop accumulating information doing things. But if you ask them, why why did you do that? Why did you go here? Why did you think about that thing? Why did you say that? They actually always have a good reason and when something didn't work out they don't go they actually can tell you why it didn't work out they said
This is what I thought might happen and I still did it because I was looking for this kind of outcome. So they're really just deliberate thoughtful reflective and voracious. These are all some of the hardest workers I've ever been around that's stuck out as like whenever you meet someone that has this attribute you're like, oh man. I got a
best who or why did somebody remind you of them?
So there's one other thing that they can do that's really unique which is they can paint that picture of the success in five or ten years. That sounds really really compelling.
They can hold that version the future and sell it really well, but they can also ground it in and here's the next five things we're going to do and here's why and I have met a lot of people that can do one of those things really really well, but very few that can do both one example, when I'm at the founder of musically who you know, that's now become Tick-Tock which is massive. I literally met him over a video call / WeChat and in one meeting he was able to paint this incredible picture of what he was trying to
to do for creativity for the world and ground it in exactly what the product had today why I had all these flaws why he had to build this next thing and the next thing and the next thing to get there and I will tell you the fact that Tick Tock is now just this massive phenomenon is so much a credit to his original vision and yet you know, he still needed to get it there and even they didn't get it there on their own. They sold it to bite dance and were able to bring their Vision into all the things if I dance had to get Tick Tock to where it is.
Where's that guy now? He is now one of the he still they sold musically did he still have a
chance? So right now I'm at twitch and Twitter is probably like a know five to ten billion dollar company and Emmett is the original kind of founder CEO and has a lot of these traits you're talking about and I know that you know, every time I have an interaction with him, it's always like this heightened excitement, right? It's like, oh I'm going to show him something. I'm working on or he's going to ask me a bunch of questions. He's gonna Grill me and I don't want to like look like a fool in front of this guy and you know there is this kind of like
You know the king of the company type of thing and I can kind of vividly remember a lot of the interactions I've had with him or like when Andy jassy from AWS is on the call. It's like oh I kind of remember some of these. Do you have any memorable either in a good way or embarrassingly bad way interactions with succour Reid Hoffman or any of these guys do that. You can
tell us a story about I still remember my interview with Reid Hoffman at LinkedIn in the fall of 2003. You know, I was in business school at the time. I dropped out to join LinkedIn my
Just been in my first semester, but I was like, well, I could go to this link tinting and we sat down and it was one of the like most intense firing questions, but the question that he asked me was that I still remember I was interviewed to be a product manager and he said look most jobs have an artifact that you create. If you're an engineer, you're writing the code that runs in the final product. If you're a designer you were designing the mock-ups and the graphics and the exact look and feel that show up in the product if you're a business development.
A person your artifact is the contracts you create and then you get the contract details, right? They produce value for the company. If you're you know, like me, you know, it's the org chart its the financing plan for the company, but the org chart is like one of the main things that I own is that if you're a product manager, what do you actually do? What is actually your artifact and this way of reclassifying everybody's work and their job as the actual artifacts they produce and what that either means to your customers or means to the
any which is such a perfect crystallization of how precise read always thinks about sort of everybody's job and role in the network and then I asked him like explain to me how LinkedIn gets big and he replied to me with his theory called it growth then usage then Revenue, which I then called ger and he said first we're going to grow and become the largest Network and it's going to have utility for a few people and then for most people just belatedly there but we're going to use all the viral mechanics to actually capture the network and then we're going to focus on
On usage which is we're going to figure out how to get you using your network to make you a better professional more every day. And then we're going to focus on Revenue which is selling some of those engagement Services selling some of that search to people whether they're in HR sales Business Development or everything but the first thing we do is we just really have to grow and he said and when it works he then painted the picture of what linkedin's actually become which is the only Rolodex you ever need finally get to anybody you want get you information get you hires you.
House, and he was able to do that in 2003 when LinkedIn had 14 people and that was still the most like that probably the best interview in the luckiest one that I've ever made it through are there any other stories like that with some of these
folks? I love that story by the way, that's a good one. Yeah. I want more give me more. I'm at the campfire. My hands are warm from the fire and I'd love to hear another story. If you got one, you
know, I remember one with Zach when we were working on Facebook connect and we were really working on this very first version. It was a room full of
20 some people because it wasn't that often even if the company at that point it had you know, this is like and it's doesn't are middle of 2008 to come to you. I had eight or nine hundred people. So it wasn't like he could review every product every day anymore. And so it was you who are rare thing for this platform team to get to present him the thinking behind Facebook connect. There was kind of a whole walkthrough and mock-ups and showing the screens of what was going to happen in Facebook connect. When you go to another website you hit login with Facebook. It would say do you want to connect?
Facebook account with the counted like Yelp or the hustles website or something. So you do want to actually connect these two things and if so, here's the information that you'll share and he spent 20 minutes interrogating the designers about why would you put this icon here? How can we make it easier? How do we scare users last? How do we make it so that they really understand what's going on in watching the level of detail that he is this sort of CEO got to but every single element.
Of this thing and then he turned around to the rest of the room and he said if we get this, right this is going to be one of the most transformational pillars for our company. We have this moment that we can show the world how your identity platform can actually become portable safe protected. You guys have this mission where you have to get this right and I will just say that like I could see everybody in the room. They sort of like their spine stiffened up it kind of that up. They look proud they were like we got to go fight.
To get this right through one of the most important pieces that company and as I left the room, I realized he has a way to probably do that with every team that comes through right in order to make them understand why that thing they're working on is there and so but it wouldn't have worked if he hadn't been able to get to the level of detail at the technical level. He was asking the engineers at the pixel level of what he was asking the designers and he was going straight more to that, you know the product and would sometimes speak up they would actually turn and focus on the people.
Doing that actual work pretty soon those real artifacts to like Grill them and how needed to work. It was so impressive even at that stage of the company. That's a great. I feel like we could do a whole podcast on this. That's great something that Sean and I so we have this guy we have a Sean. I have a great friend named Andrew Wilkinson who comes on all the time and Sean and I are actually similar to him wear bra like pretty good idea guys are pretty good at doing the first consideration. But all three of us including a lot of people we have on aren't always the best at being the day-to-day operator once
It's past a certain stage, but you seem like a guy who is that guy you seem like an operator through and through have you seen that when I think of like read what's his name Reid Hoffman. I've never met him but I'm going to stereotype him. And I mean this as a compliment as this kind of like bumbling artist genius who like where's two left shoes and like mix match socks. You got to beat like he comes off as kind of like a genius who like well forget to certain things is that stereotype true with some of these Titans that we've kind of
Have discussed as you want to address the first part about me being an operator to because I actually have a really interesting take on what you said there. But I'll answer that question about people like read. No that's patently false. They are not bumbling Geniuses that all the ones who've really become successful. I will say everybody I've met who has become a billionaire with the exception of one or two who wrote somebody else's coattails and truly got lucky got there for a reason they got there because they had an Insight. They were for racial Justice. They worked incredibly hard.
And that Insight plus the hard work plus a whole hell of a lot of luck got them there, but they got there. I mean because you know, a lot of people have good insights and hard work and everything else but each one of them who did get their got there because all those things came together and it wasn't bumbling. It was an absent-minded as at all
Sam. I think you ask your question in a weird way. Is that what you meant? Like, I don't think you meant did he get lucky? What did you really mean Sam?
I mean an atom only thing which is but they're really specific about the future.
They spend time on and there's a lot of things that the rest of us spend time on like how we look what we want to eat how we feel wanting to get casual entertainment, but I will tell you that a lot of these folks completely skip over we agree then Josh because the eye Shawn's right. It was a fair criticism. I didn't ask that a good way. But what you just said agrees with what I said what I want to point out like if you wear shoes that door you wear socks. I don't Mash or you aren't like dressed nicely. That's because you just don't care about that important to you. Yeah.
Just caring about something. I was like, I don't care just like please handle it. So yeah, a lot of folks like that literally have food brought to them. They don't have to think about what to eat. They have closed set out for them every day or they just wear the same style of clothes every day because they found something to fits and feels good and they don't want to have to change every day and I've seen a lot of by the people in that group actually go that route so that the brain is more focused on the problems that matter that's such a boring life though, right? I mean can't that be considered like a pretty like at what point do you just say?
Fuck it, and you just have fun too. I mean, it's like logically buying a Ferrari is doesn't make a lot of sense. Of course, you always buy a Honda Civic but what point you just ball out and just have fun just for Joy sake some of those people they get different Joy. The joy is actually solving the world's problems having debates at the highest level of intellectual rigor. You know, one of the funny things people don't realize about Reid Hoffman is he and Peter teal were close friends in college. They always were on opposite sides of many things.
Much more of a staunch fairly liberal person Peter Thiel being a staunch conservative, but they're fun was debating things of how the world worked. Their fun was debating what might actually Change the World when they were students at Stanford and it turned out to be some of the most successful billionaires coming out of Silicon Valley.
I could definitely definitely see that. In fact, I think LinkedIn is a good example where you said something like they have a unique insight and Peter Thiel has a different way of saying,
Saying this is a little catchier, which is this like what's a secret, you know that other people few other people would agree with you on or believe you about and I think early on they had done stuff in Social like I think social met or whatever linked that whatever you did be pre Lincoln, right? He'd done the social network that didn't work or didn't fully work but was like, oh shit this whole like social graph Network effects. I don't know if they had the lingo at the time but clearly they knew that was important. That's why they wrote such a big check into Facebook, right? Because they're like, oh this kid has figured out that thing that we are doing.
It was important. He's figured it out over here. Hey kid, here's $500,000 and like, you know take it from here and then building LinkedIn afterwards. So from your interactions at that time, do you have any good stories either about that or just in general like being on the pioneering edge of like figuring out this whole the stuff that now is figured out and widely accepted like Network effects and viral growth that wasn't as widely known and accepted back then is that right?
No, it wasn't it at all. I mean it made logical sense when anybody explained it even back then if Reed would explain to
you what network effects were and why LinkedIn was going to capture the network LinkedIn posted their series beep hitch actually, which if anybody wants to read it. I was in the room helping Matt Kohler who's now over a benchmark and read make that deck but it actually goes and talks about how web 100 actually they Google was Network effects of the web better than Yahoo, which was a directory. Hey pal was Network effects of spending where you could detect fraud and move money around a much better way versus Banks and it was like LinkedIn will be
It's versus all job networks and job services. And so it did this incredible job of painting those pictures, but it took a while for everyone to do it. Like we were figuring out user growth by me writing a bunch of random queries into the data warehouse. That was a 24-hour delay snapshot of the database from the day before. I'm like, that's how I would figure out what worked what AP tests work but biomechanics worked today mixpanel an amplitude have a thousand times the power of my old
Queries running in the data warehouse for people doing growth today and yet you know and it's like so much more powerful but it's the same basic queries in the same analyses.
Do you think some of those same Secrets exist today are like, you know in 2020, what are the versions of those secrets that you've either heard or you believe to be true that that is not as widely accepted but 15 years from now, it's going to be like, ah obvious that was obvious if we have been thinking
about it. I think this secrets are how to get people to pay for things that they value and that like it's not that
obviously maybe it's already late for me to say that gaming companies have known this for a very long time and yet every other industry has said well just build an ads business will run Remnant ads and we'll do some direct sales and that's how we'll grow and you're just starting to see people realize that like actually people are willing to pay for things that they enjoy or that activate them or that motivate them whether that's coaching training good content subscribing to a specific writer who brings me that I wear every day, but nobody has figured out how to bring those
those lessons fully out of the gaming ecosystem. That's where I think the biggest untapped secrets are so that's an interesting say way for was going to ask. This is a very selfish question, but I'm going to put you to the test. So the hustle we have over one and a half million subscribers one of that Billy daily users. We've got Trends eight-figure over 10,000 paying users Shawn and I have this podcast that he started with has let's say millions of downloads. How do we 10 excess business the best way to 10x to business?
Is either get yourself on to larger and larger platforms? So has opportunities come to things with broader reach whether that's you know today TV still does have massive reach or whether that's other media platforms or you kind of can use those to keep growing your own unique audience. That's one way to do it. The key is everything you do has to be lead-gen to grow your own core unique audience, but you need to get on these bigger Platforms in order for you to then scale up become them. So that's one the second one is
Is you find ways to charge enough money that you funnel it all back into user acquisition paid user acquisition is much less of a dirty tactic than it used to be. And so you do that and the Third Way is you find a way to get lots of Cheaper Supply you get people to spread you virally because they want to be a part of it. So they actually will go and cause you to grow by spreading your message or by becoming a small part of your community, then lets you grow and actually manage the whole Community the
Just 10x businesses or marketplaces and networks because they do a lot less of the work and they're only the connective tissue that that's the other path. I asked that question and you kind of have like a little bit of a framework. What can I Google to what kind of the listener Google to learn where you learn? I wish I had time to write more. I learned most things from Twitter. I read a lot of great logs from and you know, I read more blog posts and more like quick content.
And insights from people that I do longer form books and that's kind of how I keep learning and honing it and I got really lucky to learn by doing come back to your question about operator. I am not a scaled operator, but I have been what I call the second wave at multiple companies which is take the thing that works Hood in the foundations and we'll just enough the infrastructure that people who are really good operators can come in and run the trains I think of it as like there were Pioneers who the founders
Found their way over the mountains and then there were people who came in and designed and laid the tracks and then there's people who run the trains to bring over the hordes and I was always that sort of track layer, but I learned so much by getting to do that and that sort of school is
here is how did framework for that which called Pioneer settlers and town planners if you've heard.
Yeah, that's how we became on I think because I tweeted out something like that Sean your quote. How does someone recruit someone like you so you you're probably you don't have to confirm it or not. You're probably
Really quite wealthy you've had a wonderful career. You probably could go to start your own thing. You probably could never have to work again. How does someone recruit you? They just pay you a ton of money? I mean, what do they mean? Like, how does someone get a guy like you you know, I think a guy like me isn't totally who you want. You actually want the me of 15 years ago for your smaller company, but for me now the chances impact, it's how can you get me to work on something at massive scale? But if you're recruiting the guy like me 15 years ago, you tell that story of why you leave your thing.
Will grow ten to a hundred X over the next five years and you figure out how to reveal enough of the secrets so that I go whoa. Oh, I really believe that and I want in do you think that these Founders have to come up with an idea that can ten or a hundred X or they have to recruit people who can figure it out? Like what comes first the ten or a hundred X idea or the ten or hundred X people that they hope to figure it out. I think what comes first is the thing that's working a little bit. I call that like finding product-market fit the thing that
Comes next is the insight into the ten or hundred X from the founder. And then the thing that comes after that is hiring people like me where the track layers the thing that comes first. It's finding that thing that you think is working. But it's that moment that you have the Insight of how much bigger it can be. That's where you capture all the value and I think Founders often think they need that before they get something working in the first place which isn't true but then a lot of Founders skip over that moment and like you guys are at that moment right now, which is hidden now, let's imagine. What is the
Your decks play and that gift and that Insight is the moment that you then have the chance to go chase it. I think that that's like an inside that I've had as a leader which is I'm like man in order to attract these baller people who I want to surround myself with people who are better than me. I have to have a big baller image. Like I have to have a vision that can equal the type of person that I want to attract. So it's almost like if you want to surround yourself with these people you have to be bold and you have to have this big vision and I found that to be an incredibly challenging I
That to be challenging to understand and grasp. I mean, I think that that's true on the other hand. You don't have to do that. You can also just build a great business. We are happy with it. It's that sort of like two-sided thing like the people who are joiners like me. I'm not a Founder. I'm a joiner. We want only join the things that are going to be that massive in the world because the other thing is by the way joiners never get enough equity that the company isn't that life-changing if it's not a multi multi-billion dollar outcome. So joiners are also looking for that your
Working right now or you are you chilling? What are you doing right now? What you gonna do next? I am chilling and one of the things I've been exploring is potentially going back and doing more investing but one of the things I've been exploring is going to work at billion users scale on some products that really matter for the world and being able to participate in building something that the decisions you're making in those rooms matter to a billion people as soon as the product rolls out. Okay, what are those? I mean they look there's
it's not hard to figure out how many companies have users
Apple Facebook Google
the Amazon Microsoft, you know, there aren't that many more that are at that scale and you know, if you look at my whole career, that's one thing I've never done is Benita joined Twitter dude Twitter like succeeds despite itself. I've already been there hard to go back cool
Josh. Thanks for coming on man. And where should people find you? So is Twitter the best way to place to follow you. That's where I follow you,
which is the best place. It's at Josh Helman on Twitter 1l and also I blog when I do blog on medium
and you have a couple good presentations, I think people should go check out there was one you did it.
Under startups called Weapons of Mass distribution your talk was about like how to successfully grow on another platform without like getting swallowed up by the platform and I thought that's a really specific topic that people should hear because you're like your company will grow and die if you don't get that, right
and it's like one of the best headlines I've read in a long time. I remember that very distinctly. I
don't remember the title, but that was a good really good presentation. I think you have one more. I don't remember there's one more but I would encourage people to go if they like the way you think of the framers to use around product and growth like you've put them out there.
There it's just there to find go search his name and find some of
those. My latest one that I've been shopping this year is on onboarding. It's longer onboarding always makes your product
better. Yes much to my chagrin is everybody's like, hey, we'd like to do an onboarding call for an hour and I'm like, oh my God. Can I just use your app and they're like, no the data shows us that if we do this it's way better and I'm like I could find
what's that one called? I'm gonna look it
up have you put it out or you're
tweaking it. The onboard is called make your product better throughout through onboarding. I think it's on the top of my medium right now.
That title is not as good as Weapons of Mass distribution.
Yeah. All right, that's a wrap. We're out of here, and we're back in a couple days. Thanks guys.
