One thing that I don't think anybody really talks about, it's kind of touchy-feely, but every single successful person I know has a story like this.
I feel like I could rule the world and know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days are on a road.
All right, Sam, I want to do a short episode that is about one specific topic of levers.
So a lot of founders I know are interested in getting investors, getting advisors, I'm sure you hit up a lot in your email for either, hey, will you invest in this, will you advise in this?
So I think everybody needs somebody in their career, usually in your early 20s, that believes in you more than you believe in yourself at the time.
They just have an irrational belief.
You're a penny stock, but they see you as a blue chip and they want to buy up all your stock.
And they do that by spending time with you, by spending effort with you, sometimes investing, you sometimes advise you, but it's not the advice, it's not the money that actually now in hindsight when you look back is what mattered.
The thing that really mattered was, this person believed in you more than you believed in yourself at the time, and that they were, they almost trick you into believing in yourself or to just going for it and overcoming that initial like hesitation or doubts to just get going, to where finally your evidence will start to catch up.
And eventually you're fueled by your evidence and you're fueled by your own self belief.
But it's like jumping, jump starting a car.
There's people in your life who do that.
I've never talked to you about this.
I know a couple of people in my life that did this.
I want to hear, did you have this?
I had this with a couple of people.
First of all, my wife, I felt like she was like, you're the same thing when I met her.
She was like, picket stocks.
And she picked a good one, I hope.
Yeah, I had two. The first one was Scott Belzky.
So Scott Belzky currently is the chief product officer of Adobe, soon to be CEO, I think.
And he's probably a billionaire because he has started and sold a bunch of companies.
And I called the email to him when I first started my company at the hustle, I asked him to invest.
And he said, no. And then about six or eight weeks later, I, he was on our daily email.
And I got an email from him in particular when I was having a horrible day.
And he goes, these emails are just so good, I have to join.
And he gave me like $15,000 or something like that.
And I only met with Scott in person one time.
And like, because Scott has always been, he was a big deal back then.
He's an even bigger deal now.
And he had one meeting with me where he taught me, I had never heard the word steward.
You know, steward, like you are a steward of this capital.
You are a steward of the brand.
And he gave me this pump up talk.
And he's like, you are so like, I could tell, you are gonna be a steward of the hustle and a steward of my money.
And anyone else's money, your customers, you have this.
And I remember thinking it changed my life.
The fact that Scott, fucking Belzky believed to be, and he used this word steward, I was so into it.
The second person was Tim Farris.
So I have told the story before, but basically I met Tim Farris because he lived near me in San Francisco and we would walk our dogs at the same time and just talk about neighborhood stuff.
Well, a few weeks after we first started talking, I get an email from Tim saying, hey, I know what the hustle is, it looks really cool.
Could we meet and get dinner?
And I can ask you a little bit about email because I wanna start a newsletter.
And I was like, yeah, sure, let's do it, man.
And so we go out to dinner in our neighborhood and I get down to dinner and he goes, oh, you are the dog owners guy?
Like you are the same guy and I was like, yeah, man, what's going on?
Because I never told him what I did for work when we would walk our dogs together because I wanted him to think, I didn't wanna bother him because he was like a celebrity to me and I didn't wanna ruin that relationship.
And it was awesome the fact that this guy wanted to meet with me and he was like, what you guys are doing is so smart, so innovative.
And I was like, it's not that interesting.
He was like, no, it is. And he like bought into me and he believed in me.
And that was such a big deal to me that he gave me the time of day, just even just a dinner.
It was like game changing where I was like, I'm the man, I'm the man, I'm the best.
Like there is no one better than me.
And I had that like energy because of those two meetings.
Hey real quick, you know, one of the cool parts about what we're doing is that people have reached out and told me that they've built actual million dollar businesses made their first million off an idea they heard on the show.
That is crazy. That's why we wanna do the show.
And we wanna see more of that.
One of the questions we get asked over and over again is is there some kind of idea, database or spreadsheet where we list out all the different business ideas that we've talked about?
Well, the answer is finally yes.
The fine folks at HubSpot have dug through the archive and pulled out 50 plus business ideas and put them into a business idea database.
It's totally free. You go to click hubspot.com slash MFM and get the database for you.
All right, now back to the show.
And did you use that as, I guess like, it wasn't just like a temporary high that fades, you know, 30 minutes later or do you feel like that planted some kind of seed in you?
It planted a seed because then I would look at Scott and Tim's other endeavors.
You know, they did some amazing stuff and it felt good.
You know how when you go to a website and you see someone who puts your logo on their website to brag that they use you, you go to like hubspot.com and like Nike, it says like Nike uses it.
And I felt so much gratitude that I was one of the logos on their websites.
Do you know what I mean? And I remember like taking that.
I'm like look, like this person picks a bunch of winners and I happen to be part of this basket.
I feel honored. And so I would use that for a long time of like go to his crunch base profile.
He lists the hustle as an investment.
I remember thinking like I was so special and I used that for fuel for a long time.
Dude, that's a great story.
Have you done that for anyone else?
Do you think? Yeah, look, you and I, you and I have done it together on this podcast when we call people out.
And I think like for example, Michael from our future, this kid who was probably 20 years old would he cold emailed the UNI to make videos for us and we loved his energy.
But I think that like UNI both bought into him a little bit where like your energy is so good or same with Dylan and Henry.
Like yeah, I think UNI have done it together.
Who bought yours? So I'll give you three quick examples.
The first one is a woman named Lisa Keester.
Lisa Keester is a professor at Duke or she was at the time.
I have no idea what she's doing now.
It's a good reminder to look up and drop a note.
I took a class my last year at Duke.
I was a pre-med student.
I had taken the MCATs, I was ready to go to med school.
And my last semester I said, I should take a class with my two best friends.
It's crazy, we're friends through college.
We lived together, we've never taken a class together.
And we decided, let's take the easiest class we can.
I was so burned out from studying for the MCATs.
I just wanted something that was like the easiest class.
We looked it up on rightbackprofessor.com and it was like the easiest class is a class called Getting Rich.
That sounds good, good title.
And she was just clickbaiting us.
Like it was a personal finance and entrepreneurship class, but getting rich sounds a lot better.
And she was a woman who, she had a crazy story.
She graduated from Duke with a degree in Mandarin because that's what she was interested in.
She just followed what she was interested in.
And she remembers, she told us, she was like, I remember at the time feeling completely clueless what the hell I'm supposed to do with my life because all my friends were going to law school, banking, whatever, I didn't want to do those, but it just felt like school was just giant like pipe.
They'll just dump you out in New York or LA or San Francisco in one of these tracks.
And I wasn't on one of the tracks.
And I felt bad about myself.
And I realized like, you know, people are like, what the hell are you going to do with this Mandarin degree?
And they're like, good luck with that.
And she's like, I bet I can figure something out in China.
And so she just moves to China one way to get, ends up building a great business.
They are connecting Chinese companies with American counties because she spoke both languages.
Anyway, she got super rich in the process.
Retires by 30 comes back to Duke to teach.
And so the reason she bet on me or believed in me early, well, she was not an investor, she really wasn't even an advisor.
She was a believer. We had this terrible idea to start a sushi restaurant chain.
We were like, why isn't there a Chipotle for sushi?
And we were like, we'll do it.
Even though we had no restaurant experience of sushi experience or nothing.
And everybody I talked to, every adult, every grown up that I looked up to was basically like restaurants equal fail.
Doing a startup versus going to med school.
Like, I don't know, man, like are you sure?
Like you just gotta, you just gotta get accepted in like you should just go.
And she was the only one who was like, this sounds awesome.
You guys should totally do this.
And at the time I took that as she believes in our idea, we have a good idea.
And I wish I could say that she believed in us but she didn't even really know us that well.
She was actually just such a good believer that like if you just do the most interesting thing and like the most exciting thing and ambitious thing for you in your life at the moment, shit works out.
She was just a believer in the path or then even us.
But at the time I interpreted it as she thinks we can work in a win.
She thinks this is a good idea and this is gonna work.
And so even false belief will work.
It'll fuel your engine for a while.
Not only false belief, but just her one conversation with you, which she does not remember.
And at the time she was like, what I'm saying is not important.
This is no big deal. And conversations like that make such a big impact every once in a while.
You know what I mean? It's like when your kid draws something and then they show it to you and it looks horrible but you're like, this is awesome.
Oh my God, did you, how did you think of this or like whatever?
Like are those two colors that is that because of this?
And you make them feel like they're a fucking artist.
She did that for me, except I was 18 years old.
I was 22 years old or something, 21 years old.
And she looked at my shitty business plan and she was like, that's awesome.
You could totally do this.
And I, it fueled me. And so at least the case, there was the first one.
And she, it was genuine by the way.
There was no like BS in it.
I think she genuinely had that level of enthusiasm and excitement about it and it was contagious.
They cannot be faked when somebody's genuinely excited for you.
Hey, so you're listening to a business podcast which means you're probably like business and you like podcasts.
And because of that, I've got another business podcast and you need to check out.
It's called Marketing Made Simple.
And its host is Dr. JJ Peterson.
Again, Marketing Made Simple.
Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly, make it work.
One of the episodes that I think you need to check out, it's called Get Your Audience From Don't Care to Buy Now with Better Copy.
And he basically just breaks down all the biggest mistakes that most marketers make when it comes to their audience in respect to copy, which is obviously a topic I love and I talk all about.
So you guys need to check it out.
Marketing Made Simple.
You can get it wherever you find your podcast.
The second person was this guy named John Prendergast.
So we got into some accelerator.
You're supposed to get assigned with a mentor which is like the most fake way you can get a mentor is like it gets assigned to you.
And this guy put in a request, he goes, I want these guys.
And it was because he himself, although now he was doing some fintech company.
His first business was he was a franchisee of Boston Market.
And he was like, oh, these guys are doing a restaurant thing.
I can help them out. And he helped us out in two ways.
The first was he gave us real talk.
So he took us into the, he came to his office and he was like, so what's the plan?
Are we told him the whole business plan?
We give him the pitch, we had practiced a million times.
Then he goes, is this should gonna work or not?
And just him asking us that way, like, Jardry.
And I was like, I have no idea, which is like, not what you're supposed to say when you're pitching or investors or employees or anybody, really.
So it's just say, of course, it's gonna work.
Here's the research, here's the studies, here's why it's just a plan.
I was like, dude, I have no idea.
And he goes, so you probably shouldn't sign a lease, the personal guarantee and a 10 year lease, right?
If you don't know if this concept's gonna work, he's like, yo, so how can you figure out if the concept's gonna work?
He just asked a better question.
Like instead of where should we launch, like what, what locations should we go for?
He's like, how do you figure out if this is even worth doing it?
People want this. And he got us thinking, he got us to eventually do it like a cloud kitchen.
And so he helped us that way, but the thing he did afterwards was much more valuable.
After we, so he talked to us for about an hour.
And the bad news was we were done.
The good news is we knew we were done.
Whereas there was a lot of 21 year olds who were dumb, but they think they're smart.
We had the one asset which was we thought we were pretty dumb.
And so when somebody told us a good idea or somebody seemed smarter than us, we actually like took them up on it.
And so he told us to do these three things or think about these three things.
So we just immediately went and did those three things.
And then four days later, we were like, hey, John, we did those four things.
Here's where we learned, here's what we're gonna do next.
And so he was like, these guys are great, which is now that I'm in the position where sometimes I give people advice, that never happens.
Like it seemed like the obvious thing to do, but actually that rarely ever happens.
Rarely do people ask you a question, genuinely want the answer, then take good advice and act on it and come back and say, here's what happened.
They closed the loop and say, here's what happened, here's what we're gonna do next.
And so he wrote this blog post.
And what he said in the blog post, I don't believe was true at all at the time, but dude, that was like a gust of wind in our sales.
He goes, I've met these founders and I've met a lot of founders, probably a hundred founders and I've given a lot of advice.
He goes, these guys, they took what I said, they acted on it immediately, violent, but he goes.
One of the most important things for an entrepreneur is a high bias for action.
He goes, and these guys, in name to us, and he goes, they have the highest bias for action of anyone I've met in the last 10 years.
I didn't even know that phrase, kind of like you're talking about steward, like I didn't even heard bias for action.
That was not a phrase I'd ever heard, but I was like, fucking put that label on my back.
That's me now. I was a blank canvas before that.
I was an empty vessel and him giving me that label became kind of like calling cards.
Like, yo, I don't know what the right answer is, but I know that how I do things is I have a high bias for action.
So I'm just gonna take a shit ton of action and I'll figure things out that way.
And so he gave us like a real gift in that moment, which was again, not really true, but it didn't matter.
It was like true in my mind.
And therefore, he gave me something to strive towards, which reminds me of your Beltsky story.
So check this out. So John is a nonchuprenure, I guess.
I think he has a podcast too.
I found, I won't say too much, but I don't know if you want people to see this.
I found an old Sean website that is basically your resume.
And on your website, and on this website, it has references.
And you've got one from John.
I would bet on these guys in almost anything.
They have the highest bias to action of any entrepreneurs I've met in the past few years.
And it links off to this blog post that he wrote about you, which is insane.
In the blog post, he has a conversation that you guys had together.
And it's pretty funny. Exactly.
So he is, so that was the second one.
And the third one was Michael Birch.
Michael Birch, he was the guy who was what I wanted to be.
He was a Silicon Valley billionaire, built multiple successful companies, was living the life, had a cool office in San Francisco.
And I moved to San Francisco to work with him.
And so I worked with him, and eventually, he ended up promoting me.
He was the CEO at the time.
I was the junior guy in the company.
I was 24 years old, probably the youngest guy in the company.
And he actually promoted me to CEO, which is insane.
This is like an 18 person company at the time.
And it wasn't that he promoted me, it was the speech he gave.
He goes, it took me off site, and I thought I was getting fired, because that's what I had seen in movies, that they take you out to coffee, because they want to shoot you in the head out there, and not cause a scene in the office.
I texted my mom, I was like, oh no, he wants to meet off site, like I'll be home for lunch.
It's over. I had a good run, it was fun.
But whatever I was doing there, making it up as I went, I did something wrong.
All right, so listen to how ridiculous this is.
So I remember in the 90s, when I used to go to dinner with my family, which is a kid, and you get to the host's stand, and she would say something like, do you want to be in the smoking or non-smoking section?
And we look back at that now, we think, that is ridiculous.
I cannot believe that existed.
Well, I often ask myself that question now, which is, in 20 years, what am I going to look back?
And it's going to be sort of like the smoking versus non-smoking section in question.
And that, my friends, is why I love the A16Z podcast.
They look at how technology is changing so quickly, and how you can stay on top of it.
The podcast is put on by VC firm and Dresan Horowitz, who's one of the best firms out there in the world.
And so they're able to see all this amazing information that people like you and I, we don't normally get access to.
And I love hearing steps, opinion on it.
So they look at topics like autonomous vehicles, the science behind drugs, like ozemic and things like that, and the security behind LLNs, and how it's on all of our devices, and whether we should be freaked out or not.
So check it out, it's called the A16Z podcast.
It's hosted by Steph Smith, one of my favorite people on earth.
Again, the A16Z podcast.
You can find it wherever you get your podcast.
He sat me down and was him and his wife, and he goes, you know, when you meet somebody, sometimes you just know.
And I think he's talking about his wife.
And he goes, I bet a lot of people's Silicon Valley, I know now when somebody's special, and they're gonna do something special in their career, he goes, you're either gonna do it here or elsewhere, so I wanna give you the keys, have you do it here?
And I was blown away. You know, it was like an astrology reading.
Like it didn't mean anything, there was no evidence, there was no logic, there was no explanation, no rationale, let him just saying, you know, you're gonna do something special, you know, that fucking fueled me.
I then like failed for like six years straight right after that, which felt horrible, because this guy believed in me, and I just felt like I couldn't deliver this, like, you know, billion dollar company that I was supposed to, but that fueled me for a very long time.
Dude, this more than anything inspires me to give these speeches to other people.
Yeah, I'm just gonna go Willie Milley, baby.
Everybody's getting a fortune cookie from me from now on.
Can I just tell you one of the funnier things that I've seen this week.
So on Sean's, this looks like Sean is like a year out of college on, or he's 24 years old, on your website, which I assume is your resume basically.
You have your height and weight listed.
So it says Sean per 24 years old, six foot, 165, 167 pounds, a pure hustle.
Yeah, dude, I didn't know how they twisted steel and sex appeal.
Like you're just like, you've listed, you're high and weight on your resume.
And you said, I live on a stage, run on fumes, and I'm willing to take big risks.
Oh my God, that is so funny.
When you're the greatest founder in the world, they don't call you the greatest founder.
They call you Sean porg.
I didn't know how to make a resume.
I didn't know what yours does to do.
So I just thought from first of all, what would I do?
It's like half NBA draft scouting report, like my height, my weight of things.
And you could see it on there.
I did a thing that was like, you'll probably see this.
I did like a skills bar, like an NBA 2K, where it's like, this person is like, good at three-point shooting, bad at dunking.
Like, and I remember I did this, and the guy in the interview was like, so I looked at your resume, if we're going to call it that.
And he goes, hard work is only like halfway full.
Like what? Why would you say that you don't work hard?
It's like, well, true. That's why.
Dude, a lot of your stuff is accurate, by the way.
If you did, it's at 24, that's over 10 years ago.
Negotiations was high, design, medium, programming, nothing.
Public speaking, almost 100 out of 100.
You had attributes, son.
You knew exactly what you were on point.
Right. You had a high. This is such a funny website.
This is so funny. Yeah, organization under 50, like on the scale of zero to 100.
My organization's a 40, that's true.
You know that. Where's my hard work, my hard work ethic?
Okay, I gave myself like a 70.
Whereas like, you know, improvisation, I gave myself a 90.
This is like an accurate, at least I told no lies.
This is so funny. And then you have like a collage of all the stuff, where it says, hot off the press, and it's a collage of all the times that you've been mentioned in media.
This is awesome. It's actually cool to see.
I bet you're a lot of people who listened to this, which I go to.
When I did my final interview with the billionaire, he scrolled down to the bottom.
I had this little like motivational poster looking thing.
I mean, it's all cringe now, dude.
Like, hey, let's do the cringe.
It's not. It's all very cringe.
But I'm like, it's like proud cringe.
Like when you look back and you're like, oh, that was a geeky in high school, but like, you know, this kid's going places.
That's what I felt like.
I was going places. And I had one thing on here that they got reference.
I was like, you know why I liked Resmi?
The very last line under things that don't believe you're on bullshit.
I like that. And that like resonated with the, you know, the billionaire.
And I was like, oh, man, I was throwing shit at the wall.
This whole thing was like 100 possible things that might resonate.
You're like, I actually did believe my own bullshit.
And it worked. I did it from all this shit and it got me here.
That's awesome. I like looking at this website, by the way.
Yeah. Believers versus advisors.
I'm on board. Be a believer for somebody.
And if somebody believes in you, it's a good reminder to Jada to hit him up and thank for it.
That's the takeaway here.
That's it. I feel like I could rule the world.
I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like a day's all.
For the road, let's travel never looking back.
