Mike & Kass Lazerow - From Zero to $745M | The Simple Truth About Growth

There's nothing worse than being an entrepreneur and it's awesome. There's nothing better. Best entrepreneurs just love to suffer. When I look at the where people find their purpose, where they find their passion, it's an entrepreneurship. They're not just partners in life, they're partners in ambition, strategy, and growth. Mike and Cass are the duo behind one of the fastest growing coaching brands in business and lifestyle mastery. You were in a marriage dating whatever it is. You have to have the big conversations. Why are you doing this? You just have to both know why someone's doing this. Co-fronters have the same morals and values. I think are real winners. If you want to build a real venture company, you have to have the opportunity to reach billions of people. Together, they've helped thousands turn confusion into clarity and ideas into thriving, predictable income. Their partnership isn't just about success, it's about the journey, the grind, and the transformation that happens when two minds commit to excellence together. If you're brutally and radically honest with everybody, including yourself, pivoting is part of every entrepreneur's life. If you can constantly explain what you're doing to the teams around you, then those pivots become easier and easier. If you do the right thing every day, we month quarter, you'll be successful in some way. Money does not come with that. Line something that you really are passionate about and put all of your energy behind that. So Mike, you write that entrepreneurship is awful and awesome, suffering that you wouldn't create for anything. So help me understand why anybody would choose this life. There's nothing worse than being an entrepreneur. Nothing. You get up, you get hit in the face, things go bad, clients cancel, employees go rogue, and it's awesome. There's nothing better. It's why the book is shoveling shit, a love story. It's our love story to each other, but also to entrepreneurs. And the best entrepreneurs just love to suffer. They realize in order to get to where they want to do, where they want to go, it's just going to be full of obstacles and shit hit in the fan. And so when I look at the where people find their purpose, where they find their passion, it's in entrepreneurship. So if you talk to an entrepreneur, you say, how's it going? Oh, I'm killing it. Then you're like, well, are you really like tell me a little bit more? And it's like, well, no, like I'm stressed. I'm running out of money. I'm doing all this stuff that's not fun. But at the end of the day, you ask, well, would you rather do something else? Would you rather have a job? Would you rather have security? No way. I'm doing exactly what I want to do. And it's miserable. And so we tried to capture that in this idea of shoveling shit, a love story. Did either of you have any idea what you were getting yourselves into? I don't think anybody does, really. You mean becoming an entrepreneur? Yeah, becoming a non-no with yourselves? No, no, no. Maybe that's a whole other part that I'm kidding, but just becoming entrepreneurs because you started working together before you even were married, correct? So you were working together 30 years married for 25. So something was working out in the business that you said, okay, let's not only be business partners, let's be light partners. But what was that sort of inflection point in when you were dating when you said, let's build a business together? So I had this idea to build golf.com. I was in a kind of recreational golfer, no money, like didn't belong to a private course. And back then, you had to go to these public courses and go to the same machine to enter your USGA handicap. So when I had this idea, there was no one else I wanted to do it with, other than Mike, because I would come home, even from the day job that I had, which was at a big agency. And I would ask him questions about like business models and monetization. So he would come home from his job, he actually was running his company, you are and talk to me about like operations and execution. So I think we were lucky that we figured out that we have no overlapping skills, like none. And that's a good thing. It's really important when you're co-founders because you don't micromanage each other. You don't have this like paralysis of decisions. And it just was a natural fit. So obviously I had a recruiting advantage. We were living together. So I just literally said to him, when are you coming on board, when you coming on board? And then finally he did and things went from there. We can talk about business strategy all day, but I think that what's even more important is figuring out like when you build a business with a partner, what are the things that you have to think about so that that doesn't ruin the relationship? We definitely have to have the uncomfortable conversations. Just like you were in a marriage dating, whatever it is, you have to have the big conversations. Why are you doing this? And it doesn't mean that the answers have to be the exact same. You just have to both know why someone's doing this, right? So that there's no resentment that gets built up later on. I always ask the question like, how do you, like what refills your cup? I always want to see founders who know the emotional side of their co-founder so that if they decide I'm going to play golf one day, they know A that they are at their end of the line here and they're getting really stressed out and B, they're not resentful. So uncomfortable conversations. You got to have the same vision. People who have that co-founders that have the same like morals and values, I think are really winners. What do you have to watch out for when you're building with your spouse? Just so that you don't, that you don't let it ruin everything. We think it's a superpower. And what's ironic to us is people will say, I don't want to work with you, but let's have these three kids, right? And kids are so much harder than companies. Primarily because you can't fire your kids. You can't pivot your family into something else, right? And so if you can have first, we had a dog, it went well, you know, cookie and Chicago. Baby steps, yeah. Baby steps. And then we had a business and then it's like, okay, we like this. Let's start having kids. We were young. I was 22 and I met Cass and we were very different, but we had the same foundation. We worked hard. We looked at work as kind of a virtue. It was centerpiece of everything that we did. We had friends and family and everything, but work was like really important. And so it was just felt so natural to do it. We didn't overthink it. I think where you get into problems if you don't think about it enough, or you overthink it and you try to overanalyze it. If it feels good, it usually will turn out well. I'm not talking about good the first time you talk about it. Let it sit. Have conversations. How hard do you want to work? Are you full time? Are you going to want to sell it or play the long game? You know, what's your philosophy on investors? Do we want to bring on money? Do we want to bootstrap it? All these are conversations that we outline in the book. You know, a chapter called Saying I Do, which is a marriage. Once you get, you know, you can change markets. You can fire employees. You can do a lot of stuff. What's really hard is changing co-founders. So make sure that you spend the time early on to do it. And we protected our time as a couple by always having date nights. So even when we had newborns, we had two date nights a week. And I remember in the early days, because we had three kids under five, we were exhausted, and we were working, I don't know, 12, 14 hour days. And even if we didn't go out, we would be there just trying to connect. And I think that helps. I think there's a lot of entrepreneur couples out there that don't do that. And you need to do it. And yes, you're still going to talk about some work stuff. Because it probably will be the only time you're only meeting just the two of you. But everyone always used to say, like, how do you work with them? Well, I never worked with him on a daily basis. That's the key. Like I, so you knew what you were good at. Yes. And we outsource it. Yes, implicit trust. You said that Mike shakes the trees and you pick up the mess. So I like that. I was really true. Who did you? Who did you tell that to remember that? It was on one of the podcasts. It was on one of the podcasts. But I love it. I like that. How do you identify? First of all, what does that mean? But also how do you identify who's good at what? And again, this is talking about you as a married couple, but also this is an important lesson for founders that are just founded with somebody who they're obviously not married to. Right. So I think in those like beginning conversations, when you're like, Oh, I have this idea. Do you want to come work together and do this? You have to decide what you're going to own. And the best founders literally say, Okay, that's yours. This is mine. And I'm never going to pick at it. Right. I'm going to not micromanage you. For Mike, I always knew he was great at sales, client facing, fundraising, money, business models, vision. And it happened to be everything that I'm not good at. We overlap a little bit in marketing, but anything that has to do with a daily grind of like hiring people, operations, finance, accounting, marketing, legal, like I just pick it up and I run. She's an incredible operator. Now I was just going to ask if you agree with that statement. No, 100%. And we've seen it. We've done over 100 investments, primarily tech, but also like liquid death and you know, some CPG companies and she's just the best operator I've ever seen. And when I say operator, it's not only how she operates the business and executes the plan, but it's how she lays people off. People get laid off by cast and it's like the best day of their life. Like literally she tells them here your strengths, here your weaknesses, here's where you fell short. Here's why you're not a fit for us, but where I think you should go. And it's kind of like, man, I just got like a life direction. I go to lay people off and they get a raise and more money, right? Like it's just, I'm like conflicted verse. So it's like we've settled into something that works for us, but it really is the model for all businesses that you should bring someone on board who one plus one equals five, right? That you're both moving in the same direction where we've seen a lot of issues is if you have two technical co-founders arguing about stuff that doesn't matter, tech stacks and code that are so in the weeds and they both are the experts and they both have the complementary yes skill sets. It took us a while. So I would kind of chime in on operations and after like a few years and losing like every argument, I'm like, okay, I get it. Like as an entrepreneur, especially as kind of a man, we're not very self-aware. Like we're very optimistic. We don't always listen well. We're not always present. I don't want to like, it's not just a female male thing, but I tend to see men are little less self-aware, less open to talking about emotions and over communicating. And so after a few years, I was like, yeah, I am kind of an asshole. Like I got to like slow roll this. I got to be present. I can't. I got to put my ego aside. And I think that's why the first business was successful. We sold it for 25 million after a few ups and downs. But why we really gotten a groove by the time Buddy Media came where we went from zero to hundreds of employees, 50 million annual recurring revenue and basically three years because we had, you know, we were in our lanes. So when you started Buddy Media, you've already sort of figured out how to work together at this point, right? So after sort of going through golf.com, 25 million dollar exit with that, you're starting Buddy Media, like sort of what's the what's the game plan for for day zero? So the things that you wish that you had known when you're starting golf.com that would be useful for you, but also use for founders that are just starting out. So golf.com was a relatively small market. So if you look at the golf space, yeah, it's like 80 billion dollars. But like most of it's like travel and owning a golf course. So golf media was really small. I saw social media. I say I because a lot of the vision comes from me like the areas we attack, you know, I've been one of my superpowers have been getting there early, whether it's internet, social, you know, AI, you know, whatever we're doing. And so, you know, at this point, Cass is having our third kid. She's in the hospital, you know, delivering a C section. And which means just means I'm it's an operation. I'm on my blackberry. And Facebook launches. And I just thought it was a huge thing for the internet. Internet up to that time was a one person player game, right? You would shop search for information. There wasn't really a social layer. I saw this as the opening of the social layer. And so Facebook Mark Zuckerberg on stage. And this was May 24, 2008. Yeah, it's his F8 event announces their platform, which basically invites developers to build social applications out of this game Zingha and game companies, right? You could play games against friends first just games against yourself solitaire. And I just knew it was going to be a huge market. And so the biggest lesson we learned from the early businesses is focus on a big market. Focus on something that's like if you want to build a real venture company, you have to have the opportunity to reach billions of people to sell it, you know, to tens of thousands of companies. And so we picked the right market and we got lucky. That's really was the lesson there. How much? Okay. So how much was luck? Because everybody who's listening to this is going to say, yeah, for sure, pick a big market. But then you have the blue ocean versus red ocean. Like, so when Mike picks things like any literally things like, okay, this is where we're going. It's not like we didn't pivot five times, right? So if you think about our business model, I think the other lesson is, can you pivot to survive, right? And do you have the self awareness to know when things aren't going well? And you pull the plug, right? Because a lot of entrepreneurs they dig in when things aren't going well. And then they try to convince themselves and they think that they tell them so stories like, oh, the board, I sold this idea on, you know, to the board, like I can't change all the employees are going to think I'm a fruit loop if I change now. And the key is that, you know, if you're if you're brutally and radically honest with everybody, including yourself, pivoting is part of every entrepreneur's life period. And so then if you can if you can constantly explain what you're doing to the teams around you, then those pivots become easier and easier. So yes, like we jumped at, you know, this social, you know, industry, whatever that was going to be. But we pivoted until we could find recurring revenue. You pivoted until you could find recurring revenue. Okay. So before so you did a four plus pivots, um, we started with something called ace bucks. I can't even say it with a straight face. It's like the worst idea ever. But she didn't veto for the right. It was a bad idea. Nobody knew at the time. No, you just said, I had a baby literally that, you know, two days. Yeah. And then you then you started the ace box. So you went from ace box to the building custom apps. ace box was so that you knew I want to it shows how much of a pivot you can actually have before you become successful. So yeah, even the name of the company you, you know, we we sold to sales force, basically the largest social media management system software that helped very large brands, not out of the top 10 global marketers manage all their social media marketing paid earned owned across Facebook and Twitter, which was called at the time YouTube Instagram. And it was a business that was a software business. You never started out called buddy media, right? If you think you're going to get there. So, you know, we launched this web wide currency ace box with the ideas that you earn at playing different applications on Facebook and elsewhere. And you burn your points or spend your money. That's how these things were as Mike's motto. Yeah. Then you could burn for buying like iPods. And we had all these like different like, you know, it's kind of like you're going to chuck each easy. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. But just say that we're not economists like massive inflation. It didn't work. It was like stupid. And then, you know, we started talking to brands. And I think one of the biggest things that we did is we got the customer in the room. We said, listen, we got this ace box thing. And you know, you could let's take MX points and exchange them. And we're talking to all these companies. I remember with MX in particular, they're like, that's like so stupid. However, we've heard about this Facebook thing. Can you help us? Right. And we're like, and you listen. That's a business. That's key. Right. You gotta be able to listen. Okay. They're trying to figure it out. So we started with like custom apps. Like let's build an MX reward system on Facebook. And eventually we're building the same types of apps for all all these companies. We productized it in a drag and drop type, you know, no code development system that also let you post your content and run ads. It was a, I would say not a difficult decision for you and me. But I think our, the sales people were freaked out because they were making a ton of money on custom apps, right? They were going to L'Oreal and Unilever and everybody. So you had a business that was working? Yes. It was working. Yes. And we had probably two to three million in sales. And Mike's like, who's going to tell Jeff who we named co-founder or third co-founder at the end because he's just so great or head of sales? And Mike's like, not it. I'm like, okay. And it was the one and only fight Jeff and I ever gotten to. And it was a screaming match because he had so much on the table. He's like, you're going to ruin this business. You, you're, you're literally giving up. And I'm like, just watch. Just trust Mike. That's tough, though. That's very, I think that also, I think you were fortunate that, that it wasn't as big a deal for you because I feel like most founders, their ego and their identity is wrapped up in what they've built. And, and this is always the difficult conversation. And I, maybe you can help me have like a clear answer for this. There's always two conflicting schools of thought. It's like stick with it for an unreasonable amount of time until it works versus to quote Kevin and O'Leary, like when you take it behind the barn and shoot it, right? And, and how do you decide which one is the right answer? And I don't know. Well, for us, I mean, if you really look at what we did over the past 30 years, it's a series of pivots all the time. And those pivots could be many or big. And you, we always know now when something's not going well, not only from like customer feedback and data, but we can tell that our ego's talking to our gut, right? And your gut knows what's right. Your gut knows what's happening. So like Mike loves this V2 mom, you know, we learned it from Mark running off at Salesforce. It's the framework by which you can come up with a plan, know what your obstacles and measurements of success are. And so as entrepreneurs, we tell ourselves stories, right? We're really good at it because marketing is a big deal. That's how you get off the ground. And as Mike says, you have to have a big ego, right? To do that. But then you need to look back at something to say, okay, am I actually executing and did I hit the measurements of success that define what I've already sold to the board or to your investors? And I think that's where founders get caught. They're like, well, I did these projections, but they weren't real. And we're always kind of like, well, but I'm, but I'm kind of like, well, you said you're going to get 10 customers and you have zero. So what are your customers saying? That's, that's the friction right there. And so if you can get, you know, entrepreneurs to really focus on, here's my plan. This is what I'm going to execute for this quarter or this year. Make sure you also write down the success measurements because otherwise your brain's just going to keep saying to yourself, oh, this is working. This is working. We got it. We got to wait one more year. We're going to do this one more quarter. It's going to be great. Well, it's not if you look at those success metrics and that and V2 mom is just a way, it's a framework to figure out if it's working or not because when you're running at like two or three million dollars in top line, there's things working. But because you have a framework, you know that it's not working as well as it should be working. And also like when you, when we thought about like custom apps and we were going and doing this, I start to look at, okay, how many teams, how many people, how many resources do I start pairing per custom app? And so I start projecting out, wait a second, this makes no sense. Like we can't keep up economics. We're going to be an agency and that that's not really where our expertise is because we were getting people wanting, you know, very custom, brand oriented, you know, heavy graphic, you know, that kind of stuff. It just was in our expertise. It also points to like how to run businesses, I think. And I think we've gotten lost as just definitely in this country, but potentially everywhere else where a lot of young entrepreneurs think that their democracies, right? They want to get feedback and everyone has a vote, everyone has a voice. We believe in this benevolent dictatorship because no one has all of the information, you know, other than the founders, the people who are looking at everything, who see everything, who know everything, who know the investors, know the clients, know what people are working on. And so we would listen, but it was always our decision. So when we went to Japan, we said, we're doing this. It wasn't an effort to get him over. It's like, we're doing this. And here's why. And we will take responsibility if it works or not. So definitely on us, if it doesn't work. But here's why we think it makes sense because it's a more scalable business model and compensations everything. And so if you're doing two things and you have like this new development platform and custom apps and the salespeople make commission on both, but it's easier to sell the custom apps. They'll just sell custom apps. And so you have to take that out of their toolkit in order to kill the business. If you let them sell it, they'll sell it all day because they just want money, right? And it feels good to close deals. I mean, your background sales, my background sales, I love closing deals. And you always wanted to sell the easiest thing to close. Exactly. But like if you up level yourself, right, you have to focus. And it's what you've done so well with your company now, like your focus, hyper focus. You can do anything, but you can't do everything right now. Quick question. What's your go to when you got 10 minutes before a meeting or a workout? 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That's NetSuite.com slash Scott Clary. NetSuite.com slash Scott Clary. Bringing people on board for the journey is important too. So yes, you have to be a benevolent dictator and you know all the information. But sales is easy because sales is driven by compensation. So you could make the argument saying, okay, well, this is this is how much money you're going to make over here. And I'm going to make sure that you can sell it. But to bring everybody over who's not on board with a new vision or the new idea, when you have, you know, 10, 5th, I don't know many people you had or maybe a few less for two, three million dollars, probably not 15 plus, but you had a few people in the organization. How do you get them on board with a new vision? Because this is this is investors. If it's not working, it's very easy to get them on board with a new vision. You say, if you want to return, we're going to go in this new direction. But how do you get everyone else on board? So we had this belief or maybe I came up with it that we should share everything with the employees that they were just like the board and investors. And every quarter we would have a quarterly all hands meeting, fly people in. When we were doing custom apps, I think we were growing to 30 people, which is why I said, like, this isn't working. We shouldn't have 30. A lot of people, 30 people, you know, like this was too much, too many people. So when we got up to even like 350 people, everyone was flying in. They were mandatory. And part of that was getting the leadership team to give a presentation to the employees as if they were the board. So here's the new logos. Here's who we didn't win. Here's the red accounts that we lost that churned, you know, from our head of client success. And you kind of go through that and you educate. We also gave out financials, right? And we showed everybody how we were doing. Good, bad, and ugly. And because we were truthful all the time, and we never, I never hid anything, like whenever, like because you can see it on people's faces, right? And that's what if you don't explain things, that's what builds the cracks and companies. And the reason why cracks are awful, it's not just because people jump ship. It's that when you have to make a big pivot, they won't follow you because they'll panic, right? So if you've always been constantly, you know, truthful and honest and shared everything, then when you have to do something difficult, they will believe and trust you and they will go along for the ride, especially not especially everybody but the sales people, because the sales people like you said, it's easy. You've spoken about creating a cult like culture, like a good version of a cult, and within buddy media, a positive cult. So this is sort of, this is leading into that conversation. How do you do that? Because I think that's also something that a lot, like listen, we're talking about different companies at different sizes for sure. But I think a lot of people have a hard time getting everybody on board, not just getting everybody on board, but getting everybody excited about what's going on in the company. So how do you build this, this cult like culture? I mean, it starts with rituals. It starts with like the very first touch points. So I, every time we hired someone, like we did a ton of personal research. Like what were their hobbies? What was everything? So when we came on board, we already knew them very well. And we made sure they were like a culture fit. And then it wasn't just like, oh, you're going to have like a lunch that day when you come on board. There was a whole program that I did across the company so that they would really be exposed to what was the purpose of their job and their impact. And I think again, you, you, you couple that with radical transparency and communication. And then you reward people and you make a big deal about it. And we never forgot to celebrate little wins. So if, if we had a little win, like the tech team released something, like I had balloons, I had cupcakes, you name it because it was a big deal. And we weren't just going to go past it, right? And we had, you know, if you got through a year with me and I didn't like fire you, we had you had the biggest trophy I could do, which was a custom bobblehead, which if you think about it, even when we were at the very young stage, it was like $400 at that point. You can get them a lot cheaper now. But like $400 gift to employee doesn't really scale if you think about it. But I wanted to show people that like you made it. You understand why this is so important. And you understand that we're always going to take care of you. And it was visual. I mean, it would be on their desk. And I think, you know, cast built the culture. I kind of participated and watched or do it. And looking back a few things that I'd recommend to others. One is like this idea of symbol and rituals. So like what are the symbols in your business, including your origin story, right? That people grasp onto what are the rituals, you know, like every religion, every like organization has these like, you know, a cadence of like whether it's holidays or meetings or get together. And the third is, you know, cults, like real cults that are like bad, right? You ask how do these like people join as like crazy, usually guy cult leader. And the reason is because it's friends recommending it to friends. You got to come here because it's transformed my life, not knowing they've been brainwashed, right? We always thought of that for the good, which is like, how do we get our employees to get their most talented friends? And there was our biggest growth year we added over 100 employees. The, you know, 70% of them came from referrals and, you know, employees, people, they won't recommend their friends if they aren't great, if they aren't easy to get along with. And they won't fit if they don't fit. And so it's, you know, when we talked about the culture we built, it quickly became in our mind, wow, we created this cult through rituals, symbols, recruitment. And we had like that year, I remember, we also had zero people leave in a whole year, which is amazing. And when we had this referral system, refer a buddy, right? You could make, I don't remember, it was like 1500 or 3000. That's the five grand. Yeah. But during the quarterly meetings, I would put up the leaderboard of which employee was referring the most. And so there's one employee who made more money recruiting, like engineers and friends, then salary, then salary. And we love that. That's healthy. That's very healthy. At the healthy set up. Mike, you said that there are three reasons companies fail, co-founders fight, they're not focused on the right thing or they run out of money. So obviously, that's usually talking about some of the investments that you've done in you, and what you decide to put money into or not. But I'm curious, which one of these were the, the came, that came the closest to killing buddy media out of those three things. So buddy media was, you know, the right company at the right time with the right team. And so that was a company that we pivoted, but we do we're in the right market, and we'd never doubted that we'd figured out. No, run out of money. No, run out of money, because by that point, you know, we're very lonely at golf.com. We didn't raise a lot of money. We had partners who we didn't necessarily choose. So like a New York head to New York hedge fund people, like one who owned, you know, a big Vegas casino, Phil Ruffin, who wasn't like the nicest guy, and I was like scared of him. I set out to put together the best investors I could, and I reached out to, you know, Mark Pinkis, who was doing Zinga. He was in the ecosystem. Peter Teal was one of our investors. He was on the board of Facebook. I thought that would be important. And Howard Linson and Roger Ehrenberg and all of these people who invested before we even launched. And so, you know, buddy media went really well. There were no co-founder issues, which was awesome. There were focus issues. We needed to figure out what to do. And by this time, we knew that we would need money. So we always raised money when we didn't have to. And so- And we also pivoted when we had money in the bank. So there wasn't like a really low moment when buddy media was operating as buddy media. Correct. But however, like we sold golf.com, the company we sold it to went bankrupt. We had to buy it back and then we grew it back. So we'd been through like some issues of like losing investor money, losing family members money. And we didn't want to make the mistake again. So we kind of, we raised 100 million. And eventually and people were like, why do you raise so much? Well, people seemed to employees want to get paid cash. Like, and we needed to build software. You have to invest before you reap it. But also, I think a big point here is you asked earlier about pivoting. We pivoted when we had money in the bank before it starts tanking. So it wasn't like this stressed out. Right. Like panic. Yeah. Decision. At what point? Okay. So there was a point where you had hundreds of employees. You had over a hundred million dollars raised. And then you hired a business coach named Tammy Jersey. Oh man. Oh man. Like, there was just a whole bunch of you getting involved in things that even even after this is after a hundred million raised after hundreds of employees. So what was going on at that point? Because you had already had early stages in your career understood that there was things that you should do and shouldn't do. I think I was ill prepared at the time, you know, in my early 30s now to run a global organization. And I was CEO and Cass was doing all the work as COO. We now had hundreds of employees. We had offices in Singapore in London all over the US. We had customers everywhere. We had to be there because that's where the customers were. And what I would learn is that your job as a CEO is like hire the right people focus the organization and let them do their work. Right. I would go and talk. I love engineers. So I would go down to the engineering floor. Right. We were in which I banned eventually. We were in Soho not far from where we are. It's actually like, you know, probably a quarter of a mile from here. And I just like shoot the shit. Right. Like, hey, what's up? Like, wouldn't it be cool? And all of a sudden one conversation, one conversation where I would say wouldn't it be cool is like 10 engineers like stimming out and going to build something. And then the head of engineering Patrick Stokes getting word of this and being like a fucking asshole. Like he's coming down here. He's getting my team on focus. We've all these deliverables. It was happening on the sales side. You know, green lighting deals, you know, without talking to the head of sales. And basically, I wasn't listening. And I was kind of like a bowl in the china shop and Tammy Jersey cast brought in as a coach, as a coach, quote unquote. First thing she did was like interview, do a 360 review, right? Like interview all the people who I work with. And what came back was like, it was awful. I reread it. You know, it's part of the process of writing the book. And I was like, man, this is like, I would have fired this founder. Like if I were on the board, right? And it, it just showed how self at lack self awareness, really lack of confidence I had in the team. And you know, I wasn't at the same time. I didn't know how to handle this. You know, I had gained 40 pounds. I'm not working out. I'm not particularly pleasant at home. You know, I'm traveling to Singapore. Like 19 hour flights for like two meetings and coming back. So it's like, I wasn't great across the board. But this was like evidence. It's like, oh, I got to change or else. The lesson from that sort of period and body media, like when you're working with a new founder, how do you make sure they never get to that point? Or is that a, is that a person? Because like, I mean, you were successful in spite of that because you had the right people around you. But how do you make sure that like somebody was just starting out? Because I feel they don't start out micromanaging or losing themselves in the business. But I mean, we, we tend to get portfolio companies who want us as investors because they know that we're going to give them some of the cheat codes that we share in the book. And one of the biggest things that we tell them is radical transparency. Number one, make effort. I don't care if you're a remote company, then, then the founders travel. And you should have that as a line item for like expenses. So that your employees are actually getting face to face with you. And the third thing is that you need to develop in a lot of founders do this the wrong way, but a leadership team. And they it's not like 50 people. It's probably like six. And you have a weekly meeting that can't be missed unless there's a wedding or a funeral, like period. And that's where decisions are made. No where else are decisions made, not outside of that. So when I get wind of like mic going and hanging out, the next meeting and Patrick's upset, like we look at it as family, like this is a kitchen table, we're going to get everything out. Then we made a rule, Mike's not allowed to go down to the engineering floor. I know that sounds really ridiculous. But we also said, here's the product roadmap. We're never going to change it unless all six people in the room that represent sales, engineering, product and customer service. Because if we change it, even if someone didn't vote to change it, we all agreed on it and we know we all agreed on it and we can move forward. So we like to coach our companies to do it that way because it's such a great like succinct way of having the communication work and decisions so that you don't get to the point of someone's walking a hall and saying a great idea and rumors happen. And I would focus on like, it's a really good question because we've now seen so many founders, right? And so I'd never really thought about it like this, but as a founder, focus on your superpowers. So the reason why you raise money is you do something really well, whether you're an engineer, sales communicator, whatever it is. And then hire for everything else. And it's why kind of one of the best founders you've ever worked with is Mike Cesario at Liquid Death. He was a creative director for Gary Vaynerchuk and for some agencies. He's the best marketer we know and the most self-aware founder because he realized I'm a marketing guy. Like I don't know how to make like hundreds of millions of cans and supply chain and quality assurance and customer service. So he has built an incredible team that then lets him lean into his superpower. And I think everyone has those superpowers as entrepreneurs realize what they are and just be I'm okay with kind of offloading everything out. And when we invest in companies and I start doing the due diligence for teams, it's really like, am I going to get one of these founders who thinks he knows everything? She knows everything. I want to see founders who know what they don't know and be okay with that. Be okay with it and then say like, my next, if I get this money, I'm going to hire the people that can fill in my gaps. Let's have a conversation about health because something that has been important for me on this show at least is sort of highlight all while you're building and while you're trying to achieve some sort of success, right? People are usually trying to, you know, a lot of people listen to show our very entrepreneurial. And I don't want them to think that they can't sort of maintain not balance. I think balance is the wrong word. But I don't want the relationships to go to shit. I don't want their personal health to go to shit. I don't want all these other things to really degrade in pursuit of the goal. But I know it happens a lot and I know that I was I was listening to an interview with I hope this is correct and apology Sam if it's not but Sam par was talking about how when he was building the hustle, which he sold the hop spot. He had a really hard time finding time for like health and wellness and the gym. And I know that obviously you can talk about your story and I don't really know your your health story. So maybe go into that a little bit. But is there something you would do different? Is it just being cognizant of it? Is it something where for a period of your life, if you truly want to build something remarkable? I don't believe this but some people do. It's really hard to have balance. It's really hard to go to the gym and take care of yourself and make smart choices because you are all in obsessed with this this thing that is your baby that you're building. So tell some stories about your health as you were growing but also some lessons. So I am one of those people who believe you can only do one thing really great at a time. So it doesn't mean that everything else has to go to zero. It just means that the one thing you're concentrating is getting the majority of your focus and energy. And that even meant our kids just for the record for the moms out there. That was a little bit of a sacrifice. So when we were we were moving, we were we'd hit 50 million in, you know, ARR and three years, which was just unheard of. And we had so many different people like Mike said in offices. Mike was, as he said, 40 pounds overweight. I was having migraines after migraines. I've always suffered it but they were coming two, three times a week. I had gained 30 pounds and it was an undiagnosed thyroid issue which I didn't figure out for 10 years actually after that. And what we realized now at least I do is if you don't put something on your calendar, it's never going to happen. For instance, if I don't today, like I don't have a trainer today, if I don't put a workout inside the calendar, I'm going to tell myself stories about why I don't need to go workout. Right. And I'm going to say, well, you know what? I'm going to I'm going to say this. This meeting and this work I'm doing was a little bit more important than working out or meditating or taking a walk outside and getting sunlight. So we also tell all of our founders you have to put it on the calendar and it's okay to do it. So I look at wellness as kind of the fundamentals and then what you optimize from there. And I didn't understand this and it's hard. Like this is still a struggle for us. I've been on the road for the last two weeks. And I know it's a struggle for every entrepreneur who hasn't quite, quote unquote, made it, right? Who don't have resources. And so it for me, it came down to like drinking. So I stopped drinking because I was going to a lot of client meetings. We'd have steaks and like I'd get the we're in the enterprise software space. Everybody's drinking all the time. I wasn't sleeping because I felt like sleep was a weakness that, you know, if I'm asleep, there are other entrepreneurs up working. And so I didn't sleep that much. And that I think contributed to everything else, which is the third not eating well, right? So now I'm the time I was drinking. I wasn't sleeping. Big meals, grabbing stuff in airports or right, whatever it is. And it then came down to I didn't feel like working out, right? If you're like overweight, you're hungover. You're not eating well. You've no energy. Like, are you really going to work out little on have? And so I think you need to put on your calendar sleep, right? Like I am going to go to sleep at 10 o'clock tonight because I know I have a six a.m. flight, which means I'm leaving my place at 330, right? So you're kind of put it on exercise. I don't think you have to do it for two hours a day. But if you can find half an hour, 45 minutes, three days a week, it'll reset your brain. Like the neuroplasticity that comes from sweating and just kind of exerting yourself and you'll feel good. Do it first thing in the morning. You've accomplished something before other people wake up and then just make if you can better decisions about food, how whatever that means for you. Yeah, but it's like a flywheel to a degree. If you start with the sleep and the food and then we're even doing this book. So we did, you know, it was released in June. And I would say the quarter leading up to it, we were sacrificing health. I mean, I know we were because we were literally flying all over the place for the book. And we're very nervous that like a book about hard work would fail because we weren't working hard. Hard to ironic. So it was like, I'd be like, how'd you become New York Times best sellers? Like, oh, like there was no doubt that we were going to, you know, show up for everything that was going to sell 10 books that was going to get us over the top. But, you know, it was tough personally because we felt like we were back in the buddy media days. So I think that the issue is not that there's like imbalance. I think that if you, like you mentioned before, if you're building anything great, there's always going to be imbalance. Smarter choices sort of reduce the negative effects of the imbalance. Integration is what I guess. Yes. But it's also like, there has to be seasons of it. So if you go hard for three months, that's fine. If you're building something for 10 years, that can be a death sentence. If you don't take care of yourself for those 10 years. And that's what that was the lesson, the death sentence. Like Mike went after, you know, we were required and he started working at Salesforce for the urn out after you went to your doctor and he's like, literally, you're going to die. Like you're so unhealthy. So I have an artificial heart valve and I've had my heart rebuilt. And I'm my cardiologist. This is I think 2014. I'm now working hard at Salesforce. I'm chief strategy officer. I'm like, working probably just as hard because that's the kind of company that Salesforce is was definitely and still is. And my cardiologist said like, what's the point of like making all this money? I give three kids. Like you will die from if you continue on this. And I remember I then, you know, September 2014 called Rico Wesley who I've worked with. I'd already worked with as a trainer. And I'm like, I need you to keep me accountable. And we started three days a week. You know, he helped me with nutrition and eating and protein shakes. And it was also a dinner we had on if you remember this. We dinner with Gary, you know, very Chuck and Lizzy and he and there's just the four of us. And he just brought on Mike who's like would travel with them to work out and like would hand him like smoothies. And he's like, you've got and I'm and I remember he's like, you have to figure this out because you don't look good and you're going to like Gary was telling you this? Yeah. Yeah. To me this. And he goes, I have it figured out. I will help you like do it. And that's what got me on. I'm like, I need to write the same time in 2014. Yeah. It was exactly this time. And you have to there's something about being held accountable to things that you might feel are not necessary or like in the stack rank order of things at the bottom. And I don't know. I think it's because it's integration. So I think you're right that you have to minimize the negative effects of lack of sleep, lack of exercise and eating poorly and drinking and all that kind of stuff. But there's something to be said for like it's also a personality. Oh, 100% because you're telling me that your cardiologist is telling you this three years post acquisition at Salesforce is CSO. I get it. CSO Salesforce, whatever their market cap was at the time, very important job. But but I don't know if their whole C suite is having health concerns because it was probably you were putting 150, 200% of yourself into this job when you've done that important to the company. Like chief strategy officers like go talk to clients and wow them, right? Like you didn't have to be in that position. Yeah. Like Salesforce is not like I'm not the founder. I wasn't critical, right? But but this was going on. Let's just be clear. We see when when we see our founders suffering, I will step in and have a conversation about like mental wellbeing. Yeah, you have to. You have to and it's a big deal because it is lonely. I don't like being like, whoa is us like it's but it is. It's it's a lot of pressure and so that integration rule putting things on the calendar is a big deal. I also never had back to back to back whenever he has back to back meetings. It's a horrible day for him. You have to schedule breaks. Indeed is a success story partner. Now if you're hiring, indeed is all you need. Let me give you an example. If I needed to hire a new editor for this show, I'd go to indeed and be super specific. Not just can you edit audio, I'd say I need someone who's edited a conversational podcast for at least three years, gets our style and knows our software. Someone who's done this before and here's the thing with indeed sponsored jobs. I'd get people who fit that description. I'm not digging through resumes from people who've edited one YouTube video. I'm getting actual podcast editors who know what they're doing. People who've worked on shows like ours and can prove it. That's what makes a difference. You get people who actually are what you're looking for. 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That's why I want to put create like the greats on your radar. It's a great show. It's hosted by Ross Simmons, part of the HubSpot podcast network. Ross breaks down some of the greatest creations and creators of all time. What they built, how they thought, the actual process behind it, and he's not just talking theory. He's been doing this stuff for over a decade. What I appreciate is that he makes it practical. Like how do you actually systematize creativity? So you're productive, but you're not burning out. So if you like learning from history, understanding how great work gets made, and you want something that's easy to listen to, check it out. Listen to create like the greats wherever you get your podcasts. I want to talk about the founders you work with and betting on people. And just for context, like I know that if people sort of research you and listen to other podcasts, they've probably heard this story, but like one of the most famous people that you've bet on is Gary Vee, but obviously you can tell that story. It's fun, but then also let's talk about what you look for when you bet on people as business partners as now investments. I know you've done over 100 investments. You've probably had thousands and thousands of pitches. So there's a select few that you've actually decided to work with. So what's the personality of somebody you choose to bet on? I think it comes down to first, like do I like this person? Like is this someone because businesses take a long time? And in 10 years when things aren't going as well as maybe they hope, like will I still want to be in the trenches with them? That comes down to like, but I like having lunch with them, but I like having dinner, what I invite them over to Thanksgiving dinner if they don't have family in New York City. Which we did often. Which we did all the time. I mean, I remember one thing. I don't even know if you remember this Walter driver who started coming to called scoply. He was in town. I'm like, yes, come over like you know, to our townhouse, you know, in the city and we, you know, he was stressed out. He's thinking about around. He went on to and very humble. Nobody didn't know. You know, we provided some of the seed capital to that. They sell for $5 billion to another game company. And like that's someone who I miss working with. I mean, he's the best, right? So people were always like, you know, I remember early on, it's like that they deliver bad news or any news, but don't take it personally. And for us, it's like, oh, this is all personal. Like there's nothing that we're doing that's not personal. Like I don't know if you've noticed, I'm married to my co-founder and my co-investor. And so there's nothing that you can say that is going to stop me from taking everything personally. And so it starts with that. And then it's basically like, is it the right founder for this like opportunity? And that's where I come in and really dig deep and trying to understand who this founder is or the co-founders. And then really separate the co-founders in a call to try to see if they know each other well enough. And it's getting harder because as investors, we're now the old people and ventures like a young person's game. Yeah. And so why do you mean by that? Meaning like reinventing new stuff and a lot of the new stuff that's created is created by young people who don't know any differently. And also don't need as much as we did. Like we didn't, I mean. And they're just smarter because they've access to the internet and stuff content like yours. We didn't, right? And so I look at like, you know, Robert and Gavin two Harvard dropouts. They come for the crazy idea, which is we are going to beat Nvidia literally a few years ago. Now they invented a chip that's 10 times faster than Nvidia's fastest chip. It costs half as much and it saves 75% of the energy. And we're like, this is crazy, but I like them. Maybe we do it, right? Fast forward and like etched the company etched.ai is transforming the design of like chips, right? And it's now a thing. But when we met them and we, you know, like dug deep on them, they had even the, you know, like, okay, they dropped out of Harvard who cares. But they had the same, we like that. But like morals, morals and values, right? And they had the right foundation and they knew how to work together. Things like that are very. I'm like, I'm wondering how these guys like, they're smarter than that. That's where you start. It's like, is there like a, can you just enjoy like a coffee or a drink? Do you want to break bread with them? Yeah. And are they ballers and they're like, they're as good in like the math world. That's what it is. And chip design as Mike is in the creative world or Walter was an entertainment and games. And all of these like founders find the synchronicity, right? Which is this intersection of like passion, purpose, skill set, which is just great fuel to become really rich. I mean, at the end of the day, these are very, now very rich people because they found that synchronicity. What makes you, and you didn't tell the, the Gary V story about your, your, your boardroom. So I just find that to be funny because he always talks about that story, but I didn't know that you were the. Yeah. So Gary came to Mike. What year was this 2008? I think we just started. Yeah. We started the company in 2007. We had moved into kind of like a different office, which was kind of a big deal, right? Because we were still trying to get our footing. And we just had one floor of this kind of brownstone on 60th and Broadway. And somehow Mike and Gary come into my office. And Mike says, Hey, like no preface. And I obviously knew who Gary was because Mike had been following him on wine TV, wine library. And I was like, God, this guy's outrageous. And he's like, it doesn't tell me beforehand, which was a big no no, because I think he knew what my answer was going to be that I have, I'm going to allow Gary and his brother and friends to work out of the conference room. And I thought he meant just that day. And I was like, okay, okay, that's cool. Like I'll rearrange some things. I think I can borrow conference room from Yaxx was down, you know, downstairs. And, and then Mike pulls me inside and says, no, they're moving in. And I'm like, what? And he's like, yeah, he is incredible. Like trust me. Well, no one really knew Gary as a business person. He was like early YouTube. And he basically came very vulnerable and said, you know, I'm 34. I have never made more than 100, you know, thousand a year working for my dad. He won't give me equity. And we know his dad would love him. You know, Sasha, I love you. And I don't have money for an office. But in my mind, I'm like, this kid has it, whatever it is. And I say kid, he's only like two or three years younger than me. But whatever it is, he had it. And he also, his pitch was I'm creating an agency to do for brands, what I did for my dad's store at Wine Library, using social content to grow business. And I'm like, well, we have social software. But this wasn't really transactional. I just liked him and fast forward, like just that act of giving. We've gotten so much in return. We did a three-hour live stream. We created a holiday for the book called, you know, National Shovel Day on National Garden Day and, you know, the three of us live stream selling the book. But also we get to see, like the really cool part was to watch a close and personal, like the story of Gary and his brother, AJ betting on themselves and realizing they weren't going to raise one dollar. They were going to bring in clients. That's what they were going to do. And they did that. And Gary literally annoyed me five times a day, running into my office, trying to talk to me about deals, how excited he was and to play ping pong. That level of like passion and obsession. Do you see that with all the most successful founders? We see that like Gary, not like Gary, like there's a different level. Like 70%. You definitely see it in the industry that they're in. So Gary has this love of life and that energy that's just surpasses anybody. But yes, we see the passion and everything. But his enthusiasm, like he would drive, I'd be on like with like Amax, like talking about client, like issues they were having. He'd be like, gas, gas, you got to come in. We're going to play ping pong right now. I have this idea. And I'm like, oh my god, there's two of you because I would say the same thing about him. And we also like, what was great is we were young entrepreneurs in the same space. And I remember going with him, I'm like, hey, the NHL is interested in our software. Come with me. Let's sell them some shit, right? And that's fun. And I'd go on and he's supposed to be joining me in this meeting. And he takes it over. Of course he stands up. So he's acting as your best sales guy. Yeah. And he's like, listen, this is what this is where the world's going. And you guys you get set up with all the teams on buddy media. And then I'm going to work with everyone to get the best content. And it was just fun. We come out of the media. I'm like, I don't know what just happened, but I think we're going to get some money. And then he'd come back and he's like, I think Gary and I close it a deal. I think we did. Like, he definitely did. We get anything we'll see. You know, that's something though, there's something to be said for that, like just like the energy of a founder is so contagious. And if you're like starting out now, like, treat everyone as if they're the future Gary Vee. Like, ask how could you help? Because the relationship like the network eventually becomes your network. Like what we've realized is that our network built over the last 30 years. These are our friends. These are people we would do anything with. And you know, it's not a surprise. We own a pickleball team with Gary. We did empathy wines. You know, V friends, which is as latest, he's been supportive of every one of our projects. And there's probably like maybe 20 others that we kind of continue to just do stuff with. And a lot of the, you know, we find a lot of younger entrepreneurs are more transactional. Like, why should I spend time with this person? Like, what are they doing for me? And I would just shy away from that outlook. I like that. I feel that too. I feel a lot of that. Like everybody's like, what can I get out of this person? Right. How am I spending my time? It's a gross attitude. It is a gross. It's like, it's a very short term thinking. But I don't know where that came from. I just feel it. I feel it a lot. Well, it came from the immediacy that they feel. They want things when they want it. They don't want to earn anything. And it's just this transactional way of thinking. There's also when we started out, it was never about money. It was about freedom. You know, you wouldn't have started an internet company in 1994, which is the first one I started. If you liked money, you look good for your age, man. That's going back. 51. Yeah. 51 wasn't college. And like, there were 13 million people on the internet. So like people are like, oh, you got on the internet because it was like about the money. I'm like, oh, no, this is like pre Amazon. Like, there was even the Netscape browser forget, you know, like Mark and Jason's working on mosaic at University of Illinois. And everything we've done that was just for money has pretty much turned out awful other than just like passive investments, like real estate and stuff. Because like, when you optimize for money and the money doesn't happen, you just, it's a miserable. You give up. And you make bad decisions. So like, a lot of the transactional stuff, I think comes from this kind of keep up with the Joneses that you see on Instagram that like, you know, if I don't do this, I'm not going to have the Lambo. I'm not going to have. And I'll tell you that there is no kind of pot of gold at the end that makes you happy. Like you will get, if you do the right thing every day, week, month, quarter year, you'll be successful in some way. Money does not come with that. Your happiness will not be found in your pot of gold. Yeah. I was going to say, do you think that social media is ruining entrepreneurship? I've, we've talked about this. Mike and I've talked to us because like, we feel like, you know, we kind of helped like the evil part of social media, right? With our management system back in the day. I think that social media for entrepreneurs can help them get their story out and build their own brand. And I think that's a really positive thing because I think the amount of money you have to spend is less at the end of the day. In terms of how these young entrepreneurs see themselves compared to others, the FOMO that they have and the comparison, you know, which is the thief of joy, I think it, it does ruin their mindset so that they get to a transactional stage, right? Which in turn lost you ruined the business. The chance of them being successful. Social media has fundamentally destroyed mental health in this country. And that's proven. You, then it's not going to get any better with chat GPT and like AI, you know, therapists and agents and friends. And so entrepreneurs are not immune to that. And all I would say is the good news about entrepreneurs is you're really internally motivated. Like great entrepreneurs kind of are driven by this fire inside them that could come from like proving someone wrong or wanting to get somewhere, whatever you have not wanted to have a job. Yeah. And these social media, you know, sites which, you know, we're guilty as charged, help popularize. They're all about external validation. And so I would just make sure that you're optimizing for the right things like you want your employees to like you. You don't care about getting 100 likes on every post, right? So tune into what, you know, what really matters, which is personal relationships, what your clients think, what your, you know, is your, are you good son? Have you called your mom this week, right? Yeah. But also you have you with what you're doing too. I think that some people just like, they don't even pay attention. Like this is all the self-awareness thing. For sure, they're not even happy with what like their own life and their own business. And when they wake up, they're depressed and they have anxiety and they're stressed out. And which a little bit of that is normal, but you still have to figure out like, okay, if I'm waking up and I hate the work that I'm doing, why? Well, as an entrepreneur, you, I mean, that, then you shouldn't be doing it. Period. You've already lost. You've already lost. But you could be doing it because this is what Instagram says you should be doing. I know. And then that's, that's just the wrong equation. Things change over time. I mean, there's diversity when you start out. Like your job as a startup is to become a company. Start up losing money, trying to like figure something out, company, profitable employees, resources. That's great. Once you get like, once you're a company and you have like cash flow and you can like get yourself in the right position, you should be able to have a more, I would say an easier to live in balance life. It'll still be imbalanced, but you will learn to live with that because it's not, every day's not existential. And so your job is to go from like where you are today, start up to a company. And if you're still miserable as a company, figure out how to replace yourself. Like a company should outlast any one person. If it doesn't, it's just like it's your service provider. What would be the one thing that is an immediate red flag or a no about working with somebody or an investing in a founder? I'm turned off by like gross arrogance that every question there's an answer for there's no vulnerability. There's, you know, we have no competition, right? We hear that again and again. It's like, oh, you have competition. Like whether you admitted or not. And I love when entrepreneurs say, I don't know. We don't know what's going to happen. But here is how we know it's going to be working. Here's what we're optimizing for. The second thing is I ask a very simple question. It seems simple, but it's hard. Sometimes what are you focused on? And if they're not like product one sales to like, you know, customer churn third, whatever their version is, it's like, well, we got to do this. We got to do that. We're thinking about this. It's like, now they're lost. Yeah, they're totally lost. Yeah. So it's distraction and arrogance. We're not knowing. They even like a lot of founders are doing work, but they don't know what they're working on. Like, okay, great. Like, what are you trying to become? Like, even if you do this, like, where does that get you? So the last thing I want to speak about is something you talk about called the go gauge. So explain to me what this idea is and why it's important for an entrepreneur to understand this idea. Yeah. So starting out, we made a lot of mistakes in terms of like how we spend our time. And we really want to think about like, how do we green light ideas? And this is for investors also like, how do you green light an investment? And it came down to five or six things, which are really important, which, you know, I'm not talking about like you want to hang out the founder like a lot of that stuff is just like you have to figure out, but in terms of a business. And we write on one piece of paper, like, what's the product? Why is it different? So if it's not different like, you know, how big is the market, but we define the market by like how many real buyers are there and how much they're going to spend first like the golf industry is $80 billion. Great. But you don't own a golf course. So you don't own like, travel. The most important thing I think we've realized is the fourth question, which is sales marketing. Like, how are people going to find out about this? Right? Because there's so many good businesses that are just sitting on a shelf that people don't know about. So many great products, so many great services. And we're in a world of like information overload and filter failure. And you're not going to break through unless you have a really targeted way to get to your customers. How do they find out about it? And how do you sell to them? Is it product-led growth? Is it enterprise sales? Is it? So we spend I think more than a lot of entrepreneurs like focus on that. We feel like in a big market, we can kind of figure anything out. But it's all about like the business. Now we add number we added number five after liquid death, which is all about distribution, not marketing, but okay, like the whole supply chain and how do you distribute the product? If we knew what we know about the CPG world, we may not have invested in liquid death. It was really hard to like take Austrian mountain water, put it into cans, get it into trucks, to then get it to trains, to get it to boats, to get it to like more trains in the US, to get it to customers. We're losing money on every can at the beginning. And so we added that of like, oh, we should probably figure out like the whole distribution supply chain stuff. And number six is just like on the back of an envelope, do the financials make sense. We're very big unit economics investors and entrepreneurs, you know, was it take to create the product? What do you sell it for? Is there enough money left over for just general expenses? And it's why we've gravitated toward like virtual currencies, software, like stuff that's like very high margin, you know, telehealth and telemedicine. And those six things like for us have really helped because businesses usually crater around one of them or two of them. Like one of them you can kind of talk yourself into a deal. But if you're like, man, it's a tiny market. And even with that, like there's no way to get to those customers. It's kind of like our weeding, you know, like mechanism. And it's a filter through which we can really help a lot of entrepreneurs think, not just about whether they start their company, but any kind of product change or service change. It helps them to think through that framework. Well, it's interesting because there's like, there are five million businesses created this year. We think, you know, there's a little more last year. There are 50 million businesses that are in people's heads, right? So you're sitting at your desk and you're like, oh, fuck, I'm miserable. I wish I just had the freedom to do my own thing. You're most valuable asset as an entrepreneur starting out as your time, right? You may not have money. You may not have a network, but like your time is very limited. And so use the go gauge to figure out, is this worth my time? And a lot of entrepreneurs, I give that when I see it, I'm like, I don't think this is worth your time. And I had one entrepreneur recently, you know, came back and said, I caused her to start drinking again because like, I was really harsh to her. I'm like, no, like I just told you stuff that other investors would like bullshit you about. Like, I told you what I thought, if you didn't want to meet, then you shouldn't have met. But like, you're in a very small market. It's not going to be a big market because your market's been around forever. And so I was just saying that you're really talented. Is this where you should apply your talents? And I see so many entrepreneurs, they start a business, they get all excited. And then they're like, Oh, what did I do? Like, this is not going to end well. Like I, and they don't have to get out of it. Yeah. So like put the time in, sleep on it, talk to people. Yeah, a lot of entrepreneurs, I don't want to talk to anyone such as, you know, secret idea, like such a good idea. It's like, Oh, no, like that's going to be like, it's not about the idea. It's about the execution, right? It's going to say that's why it's so important to have this like personal board of advisors around you that that are not sick of us. Yes. Yes. Yes. What's the most common delusion that a founder has about their ideas? I think, I mean, we see it over and over that there's no competition. Like Mike said that that like their or their products better, they're going to be able to do something faster. Any kind of adjective or adverb that they put on things, we just kind of like, okay. Or it's so good, you know, it's so good that, you know, they'll just find me, like customers will find me. If like, if I build it, they'll come. I don't know why we love like creator businesses. Like we love businesses that have built in distribution, right? So is that a surprise that like V friends one or that prime one or that any of these businesses with like passionate, and I'm not talking about just like, I don't love businesses where some of them don't attach as their name. But like, when someone who has distribution really goes after something that they're passionate about, like, there's a lot of magic that's happening. It's easier than ever to market because of social media and all these tools. If people want to connect with you, if they want to, I'm assuming, so your book, shoveling shit, a love story, that's available anywhere you can get books. Yes. But where should they go? Where do you want to send them? You know, always DM us like, because we're actually on it. If you can imagine that, but you can go to info at Casamike.com. Or just Casamike on any social Instagram, Casamike.com. What do you admire most about each other that you've never set out loud? I think his ability to consume information and know what's going on. It's just remarkable because he reads, he listens, he networks, and he's able to synthesize all of that at such a rapid pace. I think it's just very unusual. It was very nice of you. I would say her smile, love her smile. I love her pace of aging. She's still super hot. At our advanced age, no one cares more. Like if you are in her world, you feel the love. And if you're not, you don't because she doesn't spread it far and wide. I think that that's, you know, it's pretty special. If you could, after all the things you've learned over your lives and careers, you can only pass on one lesson to your kid. It's the most important lesson. So what would that lesson be in a way? And both of you can take it too. Mine would be to focus, find something that you really are passionate about and put all of your energy behind that. Mine would be to always help those whom you love, to always be there, to lend a hand.