Yeah, actually call him right now and put on speakerphone
Yo Preston your live on the podcast right now All right, we're live Sean.
I've got a weird thing for you do remember like 12 months ago I told you about Craig Fuller.
You know who Craig Fuller is yeah He's a Freak waves right yeah, so freight waves it's a data product for people like guests who are freight brokers something like that And they're pretty big for some reason if you go they run their company like they're publicly traded and that you can Google them and see all their revenue and profit and so I don't know the exact numbers But you guys can just Google a freight waves revenue and they put out like quarterly statements, which is interesting But it's like a large like 60 or 80 million dollar a year software business or subscription data business anyway Craig is an interesting entrepreneur and I told you about how he bought this thing called flying magazine And what he did was he was a big fan of flying and he's wealthy on paper But I don't know how wealthy is liquid and so I think this was like a big deal for him, but he bought Flying magazine and then he also bought a seven million dollar like 300 acre plot of land in Tennessee and was turning that into basically a flying club where you it's kind of like a country club Where you like an own a home on a golf course except now you own it around an airplane strip and an airplane hanger and they use the magazine to sell plots of land it was like a neighborhood and basically they were like you could buy a house It's gonna be it's you know the middle of this neighborhood is basically the air strip So we're gonna be able to take off if you if you like you know for either flying your own plane or private private flights And so they were like we're gonna that's the vision that's the field of dreams We're gonna start doing this and I think it was working extremely well I have an update.
I will tell you how it's going So Craig has now acquired 30 or sorry 44 different magazines and They are gonna do roughly 50 million dollars this year with 18% EBITDA and it's his prediction by 2030 this side business that he started he says I think we can get to a billion dollars in revenue with 30% profit margins And so that's an update on this guy what he's doing and he tweeted out recently his quarterly revenue I think last quarter Q4 of 2014 was 15 million in revenue and he's doing it profitably and here's what he does So we find an old title like an old magazine Where it's around a expensive hobby?
So I think he has a boating one.
He's got I think he is even looking at like RC planes and RC cars and things like that So where there's an expensive hobby and he uses this thing that he calls negative CAC meaning people pay for the magazine And so that is how he acquires a customer all of course They are paying for the magazine not him trying to advertise to get the the user and then he goes I want to create commerce products to sell to the audience and so the media businesses pay for the company They pay for the audience creations and then they help bootstrap other businesses like and sell to this audience and at this point He's buying companies for three to five times EBITDA which is I think that's pretty cheap But it's a dying it's a dying medium.
So maybe that's not that cheap.
It does require some sophistication in order to like turn them around But it's really fascinating that he's pulling this off and this is his side like his side hustle This is his side business his main business is freight waves All right my friends.
We're gonna do a quick meditation break take a deep breath in Now slowly exhale You feel that calm feeling in your body right now That's how I feel when I use HubSpot They're all on one customer platform takes all the chaos out of business and replaces it with one powerful platform for all of your teams Generate better leads for marketing close more deals for sales earn more five star reviews for service and take the chaos out of your life So don't hold your breath any longer visit HubSpot.com All right, the breathing session is over back to the chaos Well a couple questions.
So he bought this personally not this not a part of freight waves No, it's its own thing So that's why I said it was like kind of a big deal for him because I don't know Craig's personal situation But I don't think he sold any of freight waves other than taking on venture capital to build the company This is wildly impressive.
So first of all it's called firecrown So firecrown.com and you could go to their brand section You can see all the things that they bought firecrown great name.
They've got 44 brands. You write basically It's a bunch of things about private flight.
It's a bunch of things about boating and sailing and fishing and yachting and wakeboarding And then there's things like classic toy trains garden railways Trains.com and then some like astronomy stuff as well looks like so this is a lot of things that he rolled up he must have found a Kind of repeatable rinse and repeat models has here that he buys them for three to five X ebit as this typical range and And was he using debt was he using revenue from the business?
What was he? Our cash flows from the business.
How was he buying these I think he got a bunch of friends to invest But I don't know exactly he's gonna come on the pot I asked him to come on to explain this strategy, but what he did was there's a bunch of companies that own tons and tons of magazine titles so Meredith corporation owns it owns like Martha Stewart magazine and then I think there's like Rodale and then there's bonner and there's all these companies that are like old family companies that have been in business since the 30s or 40s Whatever and they've got these publications are just sitting there and they're like Just take them and and so he could buy them like five or ten at a time or you know I think he's tweeted out that he's bought like 13 the other day, and so he buys them in bulk a little bit I mean this is super impressive the side hustle that's now 50 million a 50 million a year profitable Really really specific You know expensive hobby magazines and then basically has a better business model sounds like right?
So it sounds like the old business model was it's a media business so we make money on the media He's like no, no, it's a media business so we're gonna use media to acquire customers for a much more valuable Business model, you know for example with the flying thing, you know They're selling these homes on this plot of land for like a couple million bucks each So I think you said what seven million bucks to buy that that 300 acres of something like that.
Yeah, so Roughly, you know Let's even round it up 10 million bucks to buy the thing, but then they're selling each home a two million bucks.
They sold 50 homes Right, so you know just rough numbers.
I don't know how many they sold but they sold enough that it's worthwhile And it's a beautiful place piece of land and on flying magazine there There also if you follow Preston Holland.
He's the CEO of flying magazine.
Yeah, he's broke Jets he's selling jets.
He's like Yeah on Twitter he goes we've got this jet for sale.
It's $7 million $7 million.
He's a good dude. We text all the time and I'm like he almost gets me to buy a plane like I'm like dude Do you stay away from me, man?
I'm not gonna buy a plane just cuz you you know you made a funny joke in this day Dude Nick Nick Hubert.
I'm gonna do it. This is a Hampton plug Nick Hubert and Craig are in the same Hampton group They bought a plane they bought a plane together and so they now Nick owns a plane.
I guess they like I don't know how you buy a plane together if they did it But they but Preston selling these like 10 million dollar jets online.
It's on Twitter. It's crazy Nick shared the economics of buying these small planes by the way We should we should ask him for permission to to share the numbers like we bought it for X Here's how much it costs to do each flight here's how the rules work because it's kind of a time share It's like him in six other guys or whatever bought the plane and And so you pay for like the pilot in the fuel when you need it But then you just pay like an ongoing basis, but then you got this tax benefit of buying a plane and so how how does it what it All work out to what is the cost per flight ultimately work out to he's he's shared the numbers to be before so we should We should do a second on here talking about that But isn't this crazy that this is this guy's side thing and how amazing it is It's pretty it's like it's about to be his main thing is what I'm hearing well What's crazy here's kind of a takeaway which is all right?
So most people couldn't imagine this being their main thing when you get into business like him and you have some success With freight waves and you start seeing like how things work It's like you get these like weird like unlocking moments where you don't see certain things as risk So I've never bought a business before I see buying a business like that's really risky But he's like no like I've done it enough times that I know how to unlock value and I don't think this is risky because we're gonna Do this this this and this and it really is a confidence game as much as it is a knowledge game But it's pretty amazing how he's been able to pull this off I'm super impressed by this is one of my favorite kind of like Businesses that you brought to the to the pod to the people's attention and Really really impressive what he's done.
So where do you think this goes?
What do you think he's gonna do?
And what does he do for the boating ones like is he doing the same thing?
He's selling boats or what is he doing to make the business work out of those?
I don't know I mean I don't think he knows yet.
I'm not sure he hasn't shared it publicly But I guess you could do similar things where you have a marina I mean have you ever like like my parents use have boats and I know that they would spend like 500 to a thousand dollars a month on it on a Boats librental and it became it became a community where we would hang out and stuff like that Something like that.
I'm not sure what he's gonna do selling boats.
I mean, I'm not sure how he's gonna pull it off But there's like plenty of options.
Should we call this Preston guy right now?
Just get him on here to to explain this.
Yeah, actually call him right now and put on speaker phone Yo Preston you're live on the podcast right now What's going on Dude we are talking about flying and we're talking about firecrown and I'm blown away I didn't know about firecrown.
I only knew about flying and Sam is telling me about the the growth of this thing I got two questions for you Number one when you guys started this Was this the plan or you guys sort of stumbled into oh wow this might be bigger and better than we thought So when Crent called me in In 2021 it was a lifestyle side help basically side hustle is like hey you want to come out?
We run this I asked him I was like why about a magazine?
And you know, I can't tell the last time I read a magazine and He's like well, it's just gonna be kind of like a side hobby freeways is really my business But yeah, keep it small and But if you if you know anything about correct as a person you can't eat that's not in his nature So all of a sudden it you know we started rolling stuff up as we saw opportunities and you know now it's pulling up and yeah We're 257 employees but there's the side also has 250 employees are amazing and Tell can you can you give a little bit of the peak of the Because Sam has a bunch of numbers of firecrown because I think correct tweeted out But can you talk about the thing you guys did where you basically bought the land and then you started building a neighborhood on top of it?
So really what we did was we let the content inform The commercial decisions that we made right so We had an idea to kind of build an airport.
We like that be cool You know, we there's it's hard to find hangar space around Chattanooga and so you know as we're looking I always tell myself that too.
Where's the where's the hangar space in Chattanooga?
Yeah, we're at exactly well So we've got three airports and each of them have a wait list of like seven to ten years long And so we're like well, I guess we're gonna have to build a airport I sure we're gonna be able to get hangar space for any airplanes you know that we Get on demo or whatever build we wanted to build a Media Center on the runway and you know every airport was like yeah good luck.
I was gonna take at least ten years So we said hey, let's build her and runway to build a runway.
We should you know do something unique These flying communities are interesting.
I was writing about it and realize that like there's really high performing content like User you know from from a Google Analytics standpoint.
It's like you know We could see that the content Being engaged with it.
We're like okay people actually care about this they care about air parks So we said okay.
Well, let's let's go ahead and let's build an airport.
We announced it on the land 1500 acres 45 minutes outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee and through advertising in our own magazine and said all right Well, this will probably be like a five seven-year project before we get started you know kind of underwriting and We had we basically met our three-year kind of pro forma in pre-reservations in like the first three months So we're like all right.
There's there's definitely debant here and so So yeah, so we're set to break route.
We just finished Some regulatory stuff that the government lost to tell you where water should go and so we just finished that and Our set to break ground probably here in the next 30 days.
Can you give us a sense of the numbers?
What can you share on the numbers?
So like you know how much you guys buy the land for how do you finance this whole like big construction endeavor?
Yeah, for sure. So the We bought the acreage around $1,500 1500 one five in in a car So it was really cheap land.
It's also been an opportunity zone So there's a lot of tax incentives for making investments in that area and then we are We've taken 25 million dollars of pre-deposites So that is people basically sending us a percentage of the deposit You basically funded it through the pre the deposits kind of like how Tesla grows with the trucks and all that before they before they build the trucks They they take the deposits and they use that to basically finance the the manufacturing Now if you if you've got those deposits it proves to the banks you can go to the bank of basically say okay, look we got You know 25 million dollars of These lots pre sold to like you know that represents future cashals of 25 million dollars and they say okay So let's say you know using round numbers.
Let's say round one of infrastructure costs on a ten or fifteen nine dollars The banks gonna go.
Oh, okay. Well, you've got 25 million dollars represented of future sales So that you know 10 to 15 million dollars of phase one infrastructure is a super low risk bet for that Nice, and then are you guys Bootstrapped or did you raise money to buy all these magazines?
How did you do it? Yeah, so we have we've been really fortunate, you know since we've got some private account behind us But if patient, which is really key, right?
It's not venture. It's it's more, you know Patient capital that says okay, you know, we're gonna take up 15 year time horizon 20 year 30 year time horizon And then actually go and grind things we got some capital behind us, but we didn't have to go raise, you know venture Or you know private after you're anything like that.
That's kind of yeah We don't have a ticking time basically.
We don't have a ticking time bomb We didn't trust sell in seven or ten years that had hundreds valuation is that you know You talked about the Google analytics is this actually a print business or is it it's a online You know a media site a blog that has print as like a vanity piece which what what is the business actually?
So now when we buy these when we buy these media assets What we have to do is we we go in and it really is a shift in buying set and a shift in Product velocity and a lot of these companies we are we tend to buy Print magazines that happen to have a website where it's like okay We take our print content and then we post it online And so you know when when you go in your fire these you kind of have to you know kind of level set with everybody and say look You know digital is its own product And it's kind of you know we split out the P analysis right so digital has a zone P and L and print has a zone P And we make you know we know we make print a product as opposed to The core business that makes sense So it's like and the other thing here's the thing and it's and look We came in you know Craig and I day one we're like all right, we're killing print because like And I don't know Sean Sam.
I don't know if you guys have a lot of print magazine and it's for like I didn't I don't have I don't have a lot of print magazine subscription.
Let's just you know not I'm 30 years old like I view that that's not how I consume media And so you know we went in to shut down print But there's something about being in print and Neil Vogel talks about this at Doc Dashmaredes as well that he's had a similar experience So it's not you know, this is not a unique perspective like we're not the only ones that are thinking this but There's something about having a long a feeling of longevity and a perception of longevity in having a print product Whether that's with advertisers or it's with audience or readers That you just don't get with a blog you don't it doesn't feel and and you know you think about a brand like dwell Uh, it's a great example like they have a print magazine and it for some reason feels or legitimate bad architectural blog xyz.com right because it hasn't baggy So it's like we use it as kind of a staying power, but you know, we also recognize the world's going to show Yeah, you also mentioned you like you leave the you you hustled your way to get the magazine in every like private charter plane right just to get get the right rich people to be reading the thing because you like left it on the table in those planes Is that right?
Yeah, exactly so we we send them on the non solicited Uh to a lot of that views across the country So in the arcelistic it, you know, there's about 1800 or so that arcelistic it that we've got an agreement with the distribution company Uh, but the other ones are not solicited, but they they feel like we've created a product that has so much value That they feel as though it's something that they want to display on the tables people don't think about And I mean we've had conversations with You know some pretty wild folks that were like oh yeah, I was in the FBO and I read your magazine and I want to collaborate on your real estate project And so it's like Okay, like how do you how do you quantify like an ROI on that like and you know hard to like do last touch attribution except for like Oh, yeah, you read about our project in our magazine that we put in the FBO and now we have you know really cool partners Uh, you know on the real estate project Yeah, yeah, well fresh and you're the man.
This is a crazy business.
Thanks for uh the on the on the spot call in Yeah, man, I'm listening first time caller so First first ever caller we've ever had first ever caller actually all right man take care You met that was awesome All right, we changed the show um that was cool.
I like him. Uh, all right Well, I mean we got our information.
That's awesome. Congratulations to Craig at Preston I'm happy that he was transparent.
Yeah, really cool. Uh, all right.
What else we got? You got one you got one.
Yeah, let me do one. Okay, let's stick to the print.
Let's stick to the print idea Uh, but take a different angle so The New York Times The New York Times when you think about it you think this prestigious Paper it's all about the news they'll they want you to think it's all about the truth.
That's their marketing The New York Times has more in common with Zenga than it does the truth The New York Times is a games company and This is the numbers behind the New York Times and their gaming products is pretty amazing So I don't know do you ever play their games?
I'm a supply-cap, paid subscriber to their games Well, I know they have Whirl and I played that one they bought Whirl um The guy had made like the guy like made Whirl for his girlfriend or something like that And then it took off and then they ended up buying it but like I have a 22 days 22 days streak going right now on the crossword puzzle on the mini crossword and I was okay.
I think it's like 699 a month or something and what's the revenue on that?
Take a guess a hundred million dollars Uh a lot more than that So the New York Times just in q4 their digital only subscribers was 289 million which is almost all their games It's a little bit of their cooking product as well, but it's like mostly their games revenue And so that's 300 million in the quarter Uh, they're they're gaming basically is push their annual subscriptions over a billion dollars a year for the first time ever And they released this chart that was basically like the New York Times bundle so you have The news you have their cooking section their cooking product you have the athletic which is their sports the sports thing They bought and then you have games so take a look at that that chart right there You could see that games, you know Few years ago few years ago games was roughly 15% of time spent Now it's over 50% of the time spent in their bundle is on the games product Which is pretty wild that's more time spent on games than on news it has overtaken news And so you have this thing that is Um just fasting it was like, you know, they used to in the newspaper have a little crossword section a little sudoku section And what they did was as they transformed the product they unmondled it They made it a standalone thing and what's cool about it is almost every game on my phone is just trying to like it's like Needy is that how do I take all of your time and all of your money and the New York Times thing is works way different It's you have one a day There's one mini crossword a day one crossword a day and one um, you know one word of a day You do that every day Every day me and my daughter do it together.
We play world together and then I did the crossword on my own The crossword the mini crossword literally takes under one minute like my average time is about 57 seconds to finish this thing So it's a very short game and so I'm able to like play a game and have that dopamine hit without it like Taking away from my life by being like oh great now I'm the hours on this.
Hey baby What's the starts with an e what's the disease that brought down Chipotle in 2009?
Oh, you're right e-baller.
That's it Yeah, well she plays worldle with the and she gets the type and then I come over the words and um, and so you know these the games are really fun It's a really well done app and it's shocking to me how successful this thing has been and so I want to just read you a couple things So it says basically a few years ago the time spun off cooking crossword offerings to standalone products Meaning you could subscribe to either without being a New York Times new subscriber seemed like an odd choice Because the internet already had millions of games and millions of free recipe apps But what they did was they just digitized decades of old crossword puzzles and old cooking recipes that they already had So this is kind of like reminent inventory that they weren't using And they took that stranded asset and they turned it into like a viable asset a live asset And then they just like modernizes they put it in an app they made it like work really well and Super simple happening basically breathe new life into the company the company has grown like crazy So now there's like over one now between crossword and cooking check this graph out.
So we just start calling the New York Times a gaming company Yeah exactly Yeah, you guys run those great games and you got it like a sick blog that you talk about like the Trump trial I love that too side hustle.
Yeah, I love that little bloggy guys got good to have over and this was in 2020 So this is years ago they had 1.3 million paying subscribers that paid on average, you know, $40 plus a year On the on the games and cooking product which is mostly games and they're not alone.
So that so that's the New York Times Then I saw you know, I opened up the YouTube app.
I don't do you use the YouTube app because I opened it up And I saw some very easy use that.
Yeah, did you see their new games product?
You look at this if I open up YouTube Oh my god, and it says play now and you don't have to download anything right?
So it's like I click play and now I'm just I'm gonna be in this game And this is a popular mobile game this this thing called states It's like a little like risk type of game And so they have like 20 of these games.
It says instant games no no downloads So YouTube's doing it now and then linked in the other day announced LinkedIn games that I have three games on top of LinkedIn There's like a word ol variant.
There's like a whatever.
There's like they they took popular games They just kind of made their remix of it and And if anybody needs engagement like a real engagement.
It's linked in right LinkedIn's got a billion users And you know, but like There's not a lot of good content on on linked it to do But this is cool because they basically made it where they have their sadoku they have their trivia They have their word game and basically you can cut you can see how other people in your company do So it's like they already have the social graph of who's in your company and who are you connected to?
So when you play the game you can see how you compare to people you already know Because they already have that social layer built in of like you know kind of competing amongst your who do you think they stole this from because like imagine Imagine like The the meeting where they bring this up.
It's like hey share and you got any ideas.
What if we Call it LinkedIn influencers and we get famous people to post Yeah, I've been there down there and then the other person like hey Charlie What do you got what if we just put like risk in the feed of LinkedIn?
You know what I mean like how would you justify doing that?
So I don't know if they acquired a company that was doing this or if they um Or if there was just like I imagine some product manager that looks like he's just got back from NAMM And he's like I had an idea and I got it through I got them I got them I got my manager to approve my manager's manager I got went all the way up to the product org and went through the committee and it happened they all said yes I get to launch this thing and like in six months it's gonna die But I actually think this is actually a good idea of opportunity I think that if somebody built the third party LinkedIn games app like I don't know fully I haven't explored the LinkedIn API and like what's all possible But if you can hook in and if you can build a game on top of LinkedIn That's just like a total greenfield opportunity and LinkedIn will buy it if you do a good job if you build the actual games product that's getting engagement there and You don't have to invent the games just steal the games and you're basically just saying proven game And new new social graph And that's that's the whole business model here That's pretty insane I did not see that they were doing this and that is actually quite smart LinkedIn is the behemoth that somehow always works and so it's quite wise that they're doing this You know the one that the one that I don't believe in is Netflix is doing games I don't know if you've ever seen like they have a games thing in like there's a trivia game You can play in Netflix But also if you go to the app store and you search Netflix as the game producer They have like 50 game titles is like pretty insane how many mobile games that they have I don't understand this.
I don't think it's gonna work.
I don't understand the tie between this But you know basically secrets out.
It's like you know games make a lot of money and people use it all the time Um, maybe we too should be in the games market and that's wild And that's what they're trying to do Uh, that's awesome kudos to those guys.
I've not seen that. I will um let me do a quick thrill of the show I want to I want to promote something.
I'm gonna try and make it extra thrilling Have you ever thought while you're building stuff you think to yourself?
Am I doing this right like I remember being in San Francisco and I thought well, you know Sean's got a fancy office.
Therefore we have to have a fancy office or You know this particular CEO said you have to focus on this one thing.
So I have to focus on this one thing So to grow Hampton we came up with this podcast called money wise and money wise is basically like a personal finance podcast But for high net worth people and I've done eight or nine of the episodes as like the temporary host And I want to tell you what my biggest takeaway which is to get wealthy Or even to spend the money when you're wealthy There's no one way that people are doing it There's a lot of different ways that people are doing it And I've already like recorded I think 12 or 15 of these and I had to do nine already for the the um first season Dude, it's it first of all it's insane that people reveal all this information So we basically what we do is we have people come on and they reveal their income their expenses Exactly what their portfolio looks like and then like we'll dive deep on one topic like parenting or Are they anonymous or they put their name on it?
I haven't listened to it half and half So sometimes they're anonymous and what we do is we change the name and we actually change the voice And so there's a bunch of people who you who you know of that have been on but they changed the voice But then sometimes like the guy from simple modern came on and he's completely Uh open about it and he'll say here's exactly how much I have in my bank account here's what we have in my index or my portfolio Here's how much income I have it's insane that people reveal this amount of information.
It's almost scary and so My big takeaway is one there's no one way to do it to I'm shocked that people reveal all this information And number three the more money you get the more intentional you have to become because these people will make literally a hundred million dollars And they don't spend any of it and they're like I don't even know what to do with this money what's been a Lesson learned either in probably in the spending side So how what's up?
What's something somebody said about how they spend that you were like oh that's a good idea That's a cool intentional way of going about this we talked about giving money away last time you can't use that one Use a different one so I firmly believe that owning more than one home is a massive pain in the ass And that's a dream that people want to have they want to have a second or third or sometimes fourth home that a lot of these people have I think that is a huge right pain in the ass place the word home with problem.
It's like I have a second problem in Tahoe I have a third problem in Florida that I go visit once a year Nice problems Dude, it's such a pain in the ass is to have that and and unilaterally people seem to regret having multiple homes And so being intentional about spending money Uh seems like a huge deal one rich person one of the very few rich people things that I think is totally worth it flying private I think that is the one thing where actually might live up to the height when people I think buying a plane Sorry, Preston.
I don't know if that's worth it But I think charging a jet as much as you can would absolutely worth it And so we're doing this podcast whatever it's called money wise you got to look it up.
I'll tell you quickly quickly I uh, I had this premise to make a hit podcast I think you need one or more of the following you either need great production.
You need great delivery You need a unique perspective So unique perspective is like LeBron James talking Great delivery is typically like comedians and then great production is like serial or Whatever like these like wandering things My gap in the market that I wanted to exploit was the first one I think you and I do number two and number three and I wanted to do number one and so so far it appears to be working um, so if you're a creator those are the three the three ways I think to do a podcast And that's my little pitch on money wise Congrats.
That's good good thrill of show.
I liked it um All right, let's do let's do some other ones.
Do you have another good one or can I do my AI camera one real quick?
Do your AI camera one because I have something funny to tell you all right AI cameras So I play in this basketball league in San Francisco Shout out to Rubin Torrenberg who who hosts this leagues been hosting it for like 10 years and um It's basically it's called SF Tech Hoops.
I think it's called and basically it's like people from the tech industry that like to play play basketball and for a long time Rubin basically he runs the league with some real heart and I really appreciate that meaning He makes the teams he has the league that there's the table stakes what you expect teams jerseys referee scoreboard great But then what he does is every week he writes an email recap with gifts and whatever and he bases like team one to con team three They were led by Sam par he scored 13 points and he had a great buzzer meter of blah But then in the second half this is what happened And so he writes these great updates from the commission So he writes his own like internal newsletter for the thing the second thing he does is he Films it he used to film it basically put two tripods with the iPhone on each side And he would try to afterwards go through and cut a highlight and highlight is a really generous term because you're talking about Out of shape tech dudes Like I made a game winning shot last week and in my head And if you asked anybody that I talked to afterwards this was fucking Jordan against the calves in 89 or whatever.
I was I was flying through the air You know hit the shot at the buzzer.
It was amazing. It was like just And then I watched the clip and I was like Like you could literally we couldn't fit a book under my feet where I jumped I was like this is ridiculous.
This looks slow. This looks terrible.
This is like a game loser not a game winner So highlight is a little bit generous, but either way he puts the you know The TLC into running this lead So he just bought this new thing that Is a game changer and he bought this AI based camera call.
I think it's called VO There's a man.
There's a bunch of these.
There's like four companies doing this, but V.E.
Oh check this out Basically, it's one camera that you it's a like a smart camera that you post on a tripod And it does a couple of very basic things things that sound trivial, but make a huge difference So he used to have two iPhones because you needed a record both sides of the court and basically for one iPhone half the time when When everybody runs to the other side of the court It's just empty and so then you could never have like a full video of the game because you couldn't get the camera to follow it Right?
You'd have to hire somebody to manually like swivel their head and do this But now with AI basically it's one camera that just tracks the ball at all times So this works in soccer or works in basketball works in football.
It's just just tracks the ball in the players And just keeps everything in the center of the frame without having to have a human doing The second thing it does is it uploads it all to the cloud The third thing it does is it livestreams it all which is cool because now people can watch your games Which is like you know friends family can watch games Um, the fourth thing it does is it could try to cut highlights So it can basically try to identify a cool moment and then cut the highlights or keep track of stats It's just getting better and faster.
These are all software updates from here The hardware is just camera with the same with enough you know enough of a chip inside that can connect it to the internet Connected to the AI software and so these companies are crushing it like people it raised over a hundred million dollars in funding And it's like some European company Um, there's four or five competitors all of them have raised raised a bunch of money And I think they're all doing really well.
So I noticed this at our game Um, and then my brother-in-law who's got a kid that that plays like competitive soccer She's like you know seven years old and I was like dude Have you seen this thing?
He's like, bro. It's on every field like this is like you can't go to you soccer now and not like every single field has one of these And so I think the same way that you know Steve Jobs had like the vision I think it was jobs or maybe it's Bill Gates, but it was like a computer on every desk I think it was Gates is a computer on every desk was the goal a personal computer And I think now it's gonna be basically a camera on every field All right, it's like every single high school every single middle school every a you game every You know travel team They're gonna use these things because why not well somebody's gonna make the investment one time They're really it's not one time so uh, all right So for the the most popular version It's a thousand dollar one-time expense and then it's a hundred and thirty dollars per month Yeah, the most expensive one.
I think there's like cheaper ones than that I don't think you have to get the the crazy one, but yeah like It though that price is gonna go down like the thousand dollar hardware is gonna go down But the you know hundred a hundred bucks a month is gonna stay there But if you're like a team or really you don't even have to buy it per team It's like the league needs to have right?
So it's like the the venue needs to have it and I just predict that every venue is gonna have these like they will get Whoever wins is gonna get these into every single field every single court and it'll just be that way tennis Wrestling like every fringe sport There's people who want to watch.
It's the family the friends the athletes themselves and their coaches and There's enough motivation to do this Their website is so good that it makes me want to play soccer.
It's sort of like It's sort of like GoPro where I like The footage is awesome that like I got to get into snowboarding right now Just so I can go and like live a life for a third recording.
That's how it's open You were talking about the magazine stuff.
I was like yeah the wind blowing through my hair my hair as I'm on this boat Yeah, maybe I do want that lifestyle.
Yeah, do I want to be a bowter?
That's how I feel when I when I go to their website.
This is a this is awesome Be I'd shocked at how large this is.
I guess it's not a surprise But it's sort of is a surprise that there's multiple companies that have raised nine figures to build this I think these are doing you know 50 million plus a year in revenue minimum You know the leaders of this space.
I don't know the exact numbers, but like ballparking I would I would be surprised if it was under that This is absolutely insane.
I never in a million years would have thought that this would become a thing I have the opposite opinion which is This is an obvious idea It's obvious that it's working, but it's not obvious that like no, I think this is obvious before dude when Like you started Well because the idea this idea has been around for a long time.
So for example in NBA stadiums They there's like an enterprise version of this called second spectrum and There's a company called synergy sports that basically there's like cameras that they install in the um in the NBA vaniere that tracks all the players and all the motion and it keeps track of certain specific advanced stats for the teams and so this idea of like oh wow couldn't you either install cameras or use computer vision to To track stats that's that's interesting then there was flow flow sports Which is basically live streaming niche sports like you know Jiu-Jitsu competitions wrestling competitions and they were doing tens of millions a year in revenue Yeah, there are offices here is in Austin and I've been to it and it's sick It's really cool.
It's a big company and for those those are for more official competitions like you know the Texas state You know karate championships or whatever not like you know little Susie soccer game Which like you know Susie's parents and grandma and whatever want to be able to watch like back in college I remember my my roommate Trevor he would always watch his little sister's basketball games And he'd be on his computer and he's watching this greenie footage And I'm like who the hell streaming this ninth grade girls Wyoming basketball regular season game and he's like He's like I pay for this thing because like we pay and then this guy films it and then he's you know He uploads it later.
It's not live stream But he pay uploads it later and I watched the shitty footage But like I really want to see my sister's play like that matters to me I'm willing to pay like my price sensitivity.
It's like I'll pay the equivalent of a Netflix monthly subscription But instead of giving me like all the world's best content I get my my nieces games And it's like there's an emotional reason to do that So this idea was around for a long time.
I've noticed this But it needed a technology inflection and it needed the AI camera where you don't have to hire somebody the quality is now good enough Where it's actually fun to watch you can live stream it record it cut highlights all that shit And so now I feel like the idea it's an idea whose time has come and We were I was talking to my buddy Luke about the AI like the AI wave He's in my like AI tutoring group where we we like learned about AI together every week once a week And he's like you know whenever there's a new technology shift he goes I always think back of what he was asked the question What is the restaurants on the menus on the internet of this wave like a menus on the internet What do you mean he goes well when the internet first came out the very first obvious startup idea was like Well, let's just take like restaurant menus and put them on the internet He's like before we could do door to action online ordering like all the next gen shit The first thing you do is you just put the menus on the internet just a picture of the menu And he's like for every tech wave.
There's always like the like very obvious It's kind of not where the thing is gonna go, but it's like immediate value add no brainer like Wave one of what people do on these apps.
It's like for for the iPhone Remember it was like the beer app the flashlight app the calculator app like that was the menus on the internet And now with AI there's some things like this that are like the menus on the internet version of what you can do with with AI All right Look the question that Sean and I get asked constantly is what skill set did we develop early on in a careers that kind of changed our business career And that's an easy answer.
It's copywriting. We've talked about copywriting and how it's changed our life's constantly on this podcast And we give a ton of tips a ton of techniques a ton of frameworks and throughout all the podcasts Well, we decided to aggregate all of that into one simple document So you can read all of it you can see how we've learned copywriting But you can see the resources that we turned to on a daily basis You can see the frameworks the techniques we use it's in a simple document You can check it out in the link below all right now back to the show So you're AI tutoring person.
It's now worked into a studying group Oh, yeah, bro.
It's growing. What is it?
I don't want to tell you it's like fight club.
It's like fight club with no fighting Just green sharing on zoom But is it like a group of you who meet and you just come like with the homework and questions It's Three of us who people I think are awesome that I wanted to excuse to hang out with so it's me It's Matt Mazio and it's my buddy Luke and I'm like I wanted to hang out with these people more anyways They're also in AI.
They're investing. They may be you know start companies in the space whatever And it was like hey, let's just do this together that way It's a little study group where you know You see something and then one person says something and then the other person pushes back He's like well, I don't know what about this and it everybody gets a little smarter for doing it What are your biggest takeaways now with AI then because I don't know much about it So Sam Altman recently said something he goes There's two types of companies in AI There's the companies that Can't wait for us to release a new model and there's this companies that can't sleep at night knowing we're gonna release a new model Meaning he's like we're gonna crush you.
They're not saying this But the way they've architected their business is If we make gpt5 better than gpt4 and we improve a bunch of capabilities the model gets smarter and gets better at doing all the things Is doing which is like by the way that's exactly what's gonna happen done like insane to bet against that He's like they risk being like you know You know blown up like they know there they become obsolete when that happens I pretty sure he goes we're gonna steamroll that yeah, he goes will they will do those companies will get steamrolled Yeah That is amazing so then the other companies he's like the other companies are begging us can't wait for the next model to come out Because it's just gonna make their product better So what's an exit so then the the group we were talking through like okay?
What does that really mean who are the companies that fall into group a and fall into group b?
There's an interesting discussion around that, but I'll just give you like a simple example Let's say you're some company that You do transcription translation and whatever in you know four companies That are calm But not rev.com so rev.com says Pay us rev.com is a good example of the steamroll type company So it's basically it's like got it pay us we do transcription really good.
We have human transcribers.
They're great It's like well, I guess what's gonna be better than the human transcribers gpt5 It's gonna be awesome.
It's gonna be way cheaper than rev.com.
It's gonna like drive your price to zero and be better So that's like rev.com is in trouble Um, then you have a company that's like cool.
We do transcription translation in the context of This certain healthcare thing this workflow where doctors need to transcribe their notes on to go and it needs to be really high fidelity And today that transcription is done by a human, but like whatever and it's like they have a full like enterprise workflow And if the transcription capabilities get better they're like awesome a product got better But the product was like open a eyes never gonna build the thing that integrates in with the the doctors You know like whatever you know a healthcare record system that they use like They embed themselves in a workflow And that's like 90% of the product and the 10% improvements to the the AI the transcription the translation the whatever it is If those get better great our product got more effective, but it didn't make our product obsolete because we have this 90% that we've built around it That are that is really specific to a certain use case certain workflow and um And so we're we can't wait for the next model to come out Versus maybe other companies like rev.com or companies that are like we're like open AI But we're better at like you know, here's an example of a company.
I think is at risk You know um these companies that do voice text-to-voice so like you know 11 labs is one play HT is another it's like Basically, they're like we're better than like we can do AI you type in a thing and we can create a human sounding AI And we're gonna fine tune our model to do that But then open AI releases like every every month.
They just release a new thing It's like yeah, we have text-to-voice now check it out.
Here's the demo and the demo's awesome It's like it's only gonna get better and then it's gonna become a standard API for anybody to use to use text-to-voice It's like I think those companies that are trying to be like we have our own proprietary model our own fine-tuned use case They're gonna really struggle because I can't compete with the behemoth How are you taking advantage of this then uh from a business point of view or are you I would say On the investing side I'm much more Measure twice cut once right now meaning I'm not spring and praying a bunch of checks into a bunch of random AI companies I think it's really hard to figure out right now Which companies actually have legs also they're all really overpriced so I have this combination of really high price really low traction um product is really good in a demo, but not really good in production and I don't know if they're gonna become obsolete due to open AI.
So there's a bunch of problems there It's like actually a better bet was just like in the stock market just buy companies that have like a massive advantage when it comes to AI So go buy Nvidia buy Facebook buy buy a bunch of stocks that are Going to benefit from AI whether they're not just like A one random startup that I'm hoping is the one out of a thousand startup that becomes enormous Well, that's what uh mark and Stanley put up this report and they said um they go uh AI is gonna be a big deal Unfortunately we well not unfortunately, but we think that it's gonna impact big companies who are already established It's just gonna make them significant you're gonna get there's gonna be more value in making those companies better than there is starting new companies Exactly, and they actually said marketing and I the reason I thought it was cool is because it uh I own stock in a in a marketing technology company and they're like we think that marketing technology in that type of stuff sales force How's about whatever that's gonna be the biggest Sector that's gonna use this shit to grow.
Well, I think it's good.
I think it's a safer bet And it's a more obvious bet of the I don't I don't think that investing a starps right now is a bad idea.
I just meant no It's really hard right now and it's unclear to me and I haven't put in the time to get a lot of clarity on which which I don't have a bunch of stars.
I'm like these are gonna be winners in this space I just haven't been able to get that level of clarity yet.
So it's like measure twice got once meaning First I'm like let me just learn this at in more depth.
Let me use all these tools Which is what we do so like in these sessions We will just be like cool here's a tool that could do x and then I he's like you drive and I go and I start Trying to build a thing that's gonna be useful in one of my business.
Are you paying this person?
Yeah still Dude, this is so smart because we did it as a group Uh, like the sessions are more fun and it's like a pretty valuable network of people to be really tight with right like which is ultimately what you want You want the thing to be so mutually beneficial that the financial outcomes of the thing are so secondary Like the primary should be the session is fun and these people are awesome And I get to hang with these people these people I get to basically, you know iron sharpens iron with these people right now That's like what I wanted this to get to um, it's not feel really good about that.
Do that's so smart more people should do this I mean, I used to do this with book clubs, but if I had a very specific interest like you have right now And even if it's just a temporary thing that lasts six or 12 months, that's the way to go.
It's so smart That's such a smart thing for you to do Well, the smartest people I think always did this I can crypto.
I know people were doing this early on um, you know I remember hearing these like sessions about South by Southwest where I forgot whose room it was But it was like everybody used to go up to um, Garrett camps room And at South by Southwest was like 15 people that were all kind of like loose friends like this But like a lot of mutual respect and it wasn't like a paid party or some like event with sponsors It was like no dude like We're here to basically talk about everybody should have opinions about where they think the puck is going And then they would debate and that's how Matt Masio actually got in with Chris Saka Saka was like who is this motherfucker that has like really interesting things to say it's like he's an agent at CAA and Hollywood Like this guy should be in the tech world and he recruited him from there and this is where like you know They were there's a lot of the guys who invested uber early on like Garrett and Travis were in the room and they were you know talking about uber at the time and Gary V was in the room And there's all like this is legendary story I have no idea what actually happened I remember hearing these stories and being like I need to get into rooms like that What is a room like that?
How do I make a room like that?
If I either need to get in or I need to make a room like that What was the story of the room?
I just told you yeah Are was that the second time this episode Sean captain attitude with me?
Well, yeah, I'm like I told you the story you're like well, so what happened?
I'm like well, that's the side told you everything I know bro.
I don't know anything else The zoom have like a bitch slap animation that I can do.
I know they got a thumbs up Yeah, you know, we can do the thumbs up and it like starts bubbling hard behind you.
Do they got a middle finger on those?
Does that work? I apologize.
I'm a little sassy today.
I could be caddy on Wednesdays.
