Big Entrepreneur Lessons From Partnerships, It's Time To Double Down, Fascinating Data From Meta's Lawsuit, When You Feel Like You Are Getting Beat

In episode #2957, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss the critical lessons learned from partnerships in entrepreneurship, the importance of choosing the right partners, establishing checks and balances, and aligning core values. They also shared how to navigate challenges in business and the necessity of resilience during tough times. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES(00:00) The Importance of Choosing the Right Partners(03:36) Lessons from Successful Partnerships(08:38) Core Values in Partnerships(13:14) Navigating Challenges in Business(16:57) Resilience in Tough TimesPrefer single topic episodes? Head over to our YouTube channel. To suggest a topic, go to https://www.marketingschool.io. For more content from Eric and Neil, check out Eric’s Leveling Up with Eric Siu YouTube channel and Neil’s Neil Patel YouTube channel. Connect with Us:Single Grain << Eric's ad agencyNP Digital << Neil’s ad agencyX @neilpatel, @ericosiuInstagram @neilpatel, @ericosiu Drop Us a Review If You Enjoyed the Episode!

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:39Speaker 00

  All right, so let's talk about big entrepreneur lessons from partnerships. So who you end up choosing, not only for marriage, but also in business, is ultra important. And Neil and I have had our handful of partnerships. And we're just talking about, you know, some situations that we're dealing with, that we have dealt with. And so I think we'd share some stories here, because you guys like the stories.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, Eric and I have been partners together on a few different ventures over the years. I remember one venture we were in, someone stole even money from a corporate account of ours. And the reason I bring up this one is in partnerships, no matter who your partner is, how close they are, you should always have checks and balances within your bank accounts. And the easiest thing to do is require multiple signatures for money to be spent. Even then, you can still have fraud. You like, a great example of this is, in one of my entities, we have multiple signatures. Someone pulled out 900 grand-ish, I believe. And when you look at like, the 900 grand, that's a lot of money. It's not

• 1:42Speaker 01

  going to break, or, you know, hurt us. We can pop in more money from one of our other entities and just, this was an international entity, and just fund it with more cash. And then you just go through the normal legal routes, and go after assets, and grease people's assets, you know, file criminal charges, etc. Typically, you can recuperate, but just checks and balances. And then what we've learned over the years, is we try to get people, at least on the money end, onto our banking system. And then when you have multiple transactions, anything over a certain dollar amount gets triggered to another person, and you start having more things in place, where it makes it harder for people to just ever take money from you.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Also, multiple, I mean, you need multiple signers, but also you need checks and balances in terms of approvers. So you might need two approvers to to let it go through and you you because you have that set up with Chase, right? That's what we do with Chase.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  We have multiple signers and then it then I believe someone gets a phone call. Over a certain amount, my co-founder, I get a phone call to approve it. Internally, even if there's two signers, our CFO typically gets a call for approval as well. Over a certain amount, not like five grand or 10 grand, but you know, larger amount.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  I I think a big thing too is when I think about you and Mike, for example, like Mike, I know is a good person, but a lot of people in the world are good person. You can't you can't partner with them just because they're good people. He's a good person, plus also he works really hard. Um, and I look at it as so they have to work really hard. They also have to be good people too, and they a lot of the values have to align with yours. It doesn't have to be picture perfect, but I like I at least those things need to align, right? And so when I think about you, I don't need to worry about you working because you're just gonna be working all the time. When I think about like by co-founder on the software side, I know it's gonna be working all the time. I know if I'm messaging at 10 P M, he's gonna respond. You message at 8 P M, it's good, message him at 5 A M, he's gonna respond, right? That is very hard to find in people.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  And if they're good people, like Warren Buffett likes to talk about, you you want to find people with integrity, intelligence and energy, right? And but if they don't have the integrity piece, the other two don't even matter. And so you and I have had situations where we've worked with people where the integrity is not there. Or you can say the humility is not there and they start to think about them, them, them, them, them or. And then that ruins everything because when they start to become selfish or entitled, that ruins everything. So which is there's a whole nother discussion we can have. I could talk about a like a little Y P O dinner I did yesterday. But let's talk a little more about these lessons from partnerships and how to pick the right parts. Because I think you had a great partnership with Heaton, even though eventually you guys went your separate ways. You guys are still you guys are still family, right? I think it was still a really great partnership. So maybe there's some other lessons you can. Share before we move on.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll share one on that one in which you want to pick someone who complements you. So like if you look at Heathen, he understands engineering, product, usability. He's better at innovating than I am. Uh, I'm better at marketing and sales. If you look at my partnership with Mike, he's better at operations, recruiting and sales over me. And people, he's much better with people, you know? And then the other thing I've learned from partners is you got to be careful where they're located. A great example of this is you and I are both in California. If something goes wrong, the court systems, we understand. Like when I was giving the example of like the 900 grand being pulled from me. It wasn't checks and balances.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  I learned from the lesson that we had when we lost money from our account years and years ago. So I haven't really had issues in which people taking money other than the more recent one of 900 ish grand. But you're talking about in a country where there's corruption. So when you have partners in other countries, even though technically they shouldn't have been able to do this. You got to deal with people bribing others and things like that. It's just like Sequoia. Sequoia picks amazing companies or bets on amazing companies and picks amazing partners. Cause I look at the people they invest in, they are partners to them. And they're writing checks of billions of dollars in, in aggregate. And what do they do with China and India? They pulled out.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  It's no longer Sequoia in India and it's no longer Sequoia in China. It's rebranded to something else. They had a lot of corruption issues in both countries in which people were faking numbers and all this kind of stuff. That's an example of picking bad partners, but sometimes it's hard to vet them. And what makes it really hard is when you're dealing with other countries. Cultures are different and the way people operate are different. And the laws aren't as black and white as they may be in the United States.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Is there anything you would have, you would have done differently with this recent partnership?

• 6:19Speaker 01

  The only thing that I would have done differently is, and I, I, I started doing this with NP Digital. You can now end up. It costs quite a bit of money, but you can end up having like, we use Bank of America for a lot of our global bank accounts. For US, we use CIBC combined with Wells Fargo, but we mainly use CIBC. And CIBC has been a great partner. I would have been using Bank of America internationally much more. And Bank of America is a US bank, so people are probably wondering, how the heck is Bank of America in other countries? Well, what they do is they partner with local banks in every single country. So you can log into your Bank of America interface and control everything. And you have access to everything with a click of a button.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Between countries, you can transfer money and we do all this kind of stuff. But I would have set that up from day one versus setting it up years later. Cause I could have saved a lot of money from people dealing stuff like you can go into a bank in a different country. And no joke, even if you own all of it, they'll be like, oh, they're fighting with each other, you know? Just listen to this guy, because that guy's local. And I'm not saying people are bribing each other, but you have to deal with that. Like when we were talking with the police, you know, people are telling me like, oh, we have to get to the right person so that way they can't be paid off. And I was like, huh, what I never guessed, this is still problems in today's world.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it's human nature. I think it'll always be a problem. For for at least the foreseeable future. But so are you saying? If you do Bank of America internationally, they're partnered with all these local banks and then, but these partnerships, they Bank of America says, hey, we still want our security features and everything.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  And you go through Bank of America's interface for their, you know, treasury accounts.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  Bank of America will cover you. They'll protect you.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't have to worry about anything.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  But none of these other banks do it. Chase doesn't do it.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Chase does do it.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have to imagine.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Wells Fargo does not do it.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  I can see that.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  US Bank does not do it from my understanding. There's not too many actually options for global banking.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, but going back to what we said too, I think, um, you know, sometimes I think it's harder to vet these international partners, which is why I think if you're going to partner with someone, you have to meet them in person. And I do think this is a situation where you have to wine and dine them and meet their family and everything and spend extended time with them.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Dude, I've done all that.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  Even then, it's not enough, right? Ideally, it's what someone that you've known for a long time. So like, I've known you for a long time. Or like this other guy that Sean, I've partnered with, I've known him for a long time too. So you, over a long period of time, people show who they are. Over a condensed period, even if they meet you for 24 hours or whatever, you can put up a front.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we've known each other for a long time. We've had businesses with other people that we've known for a long time and we still had issues and like stealing and stuff like that. People may not see it as stealing, but in theory, taking money that is not yours is in essence considered theft.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you know, at least we know now. So it is what it is.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay. Well, that's, that's, that's good.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  And, and I, I would go back if I had to reemphasize one thing on picking right partners to double down on what you said in the beginning. You have to pick people with the same values. You and I work a lot. If one of us did not work a lot and then we wanted a partnership. One of us would grumble, the person who's not working is going to be chilled, but the person who's working a lot is going to be pissed off eventually.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  That someone.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Cause there's resentment.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  There's resentment.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Dude, I, I, okay. I'll give you another example on partnerships. So I, I had partnered with, actually I've tried partner with a, a handful of high school friends, like different high school friends. So nobody can pin this on anybody. But I remember one time I was working on a software with, with a high school friend and then this was when Snap was a big thing, Snapchat, right? And I looked at his Snapchat and I noticed he was, he, he wasn't working, but he was making meatballs. And I got so pissed. I was like, he's bragging about his meatballs and he's not working right. And I'm here busting my ass. And there's a handful of, and I realized these partnerships didn't work out, not because these people are bad people, but they didn't want to work hard and that's okay. Like much less than one percent of people want to work that, right? And so you have to understand, and, and by the way, we have our core values at our company. Do you know what your MB digital core values are?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  I know some of them.

• 10:21Speaker 00

  The, here's the thing, like what I want to call it here is I know the core values of my company, but not necessarily my core values are going to align with Neo's core values. I'm going to give you my core values right now. Right? So the company's core values are to learn relentlessly, which I think you do have just in a different way. I do think you talk to a lot of people, right? That's one. You agree?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can pull them up right now. It's on our page.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Well, let me, let me finish while you, while you pull it up. Okay. A bias to action. I actually think you have that. So I, I need to do things, right? Like I, I like, if I hear something, I just want to do it. The third thing for us is to, to be unreasonably resilient. Actually, I think you have that too. So it's like, you can take a beat down, right? And then the fourth one is to make bold, long-term bets. I think you have that too, just in different ways. So go ahead, name yours.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  So we have three values listed on our website. These are already new, but I know we have more values than the three that are listed on our website. Because in our old office, pre-COVID, we would have stickers everywhere of our values. The first one that's listed on our website is think big, self-explanatory. We want people to really-

• 11:19Speaker 00

  Do all of your people think big?

• 11:21Speaker 01

  No, there's no way. When you scale an organization to more than maybe like 500-ish, I would have to guess, is when we started hiring people, not necessarily who didn't believe in our core values, but you need to fill seats sometimes in certain roles. And you're, you know that someone may not align with everything, but they're in a position where it doesn't matter. Like, they may be just an assistant. I'm making it up, right? Where you don't need them to have all these specific values, you just need to do one thing really well.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  The line you said, I think, is true and it holds true today. I hope the line that you said does not hold true in the future. I hope it doesn't. We'll see.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  And it gets worse as you get bigger. Like, I hate to say it, we're a thousand plus. There's no way everyone has the same values. And it, I'm not saying we did a terrible job of it because of that. I think we can, of course, do a better job. But there's no way everyone at Facebook or Microsoft or Apple, you know, believes in their values. A lot of them just go with the stock. Stock does well, they're happy. Stock goes down, they're sad.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  We'll finish. Okay, that was the think big is one.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Our second one is own it, right? So this one I'm really big on. So is Mike. You do something wrong, own it, learn from it, improve. Don't make the same mistake over and over again, right? Have fun. If you're not enjoying what you're doing, we believe that you shouldn't be working here. And the reason being is the people who enjoy what they're doing, and this also goes back to partners. If you both don't enjoy what you're doing, or including the business idea, you're not going to spend the time and effort. And we believe that when people have fun and they enjoy working, they'll put in a ton of energy and they'll work non-stop. Like, for example- My team and I, a lot of us were up at three something in the morning today. I wake up at four, so three fifteen wasn't a stretch, but I had to put on the alarm for three fifteen.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  And it was because we're terminating someone within a country and they had a major role. And I had to send out an email to everyone within that country, letting them know. Then you got to deal with email and security and people aligned. And it's just like, cool, everyone had to be up in the US just to double check that nothing's happening wrong within that country.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  Anybody flying over there?

• 13:31Speaker 01

  No, we have a managing director on the ground. We have lieutenants there, but we have three people who have visas that are on standby in case they need a flying case. Something goes wrong in the next week or two, but we don't think anyone will need to. It's just a question of time.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Interesting. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson shows how modern brands grow by removing the friction in their marketing and customer experience that pushes customers away every single day, often without leaders even realizing it. Each episode delivers practical insights, real brand examples and conversations with marketing leaders, showing brands how to win with the new rules of growth, identity-driven marketing, cultural relevance and frictionless customer experiences. Listen to Frictionless Growth Marketing wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so that's, that's what we have around partnerships. Hopefully you guys found that helpful. Actually, I mean partnerships, what we're kind of talking about here is a potential lawsuit, right? Did you see the, the Meta lawsuit?

• 14:32Speaker 00

  So the, not the Meta lawsuit, but basically the, the government going after Meta.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, to split them up. And they talked about how Instagram at one point Meta was thinking about splitting up Instagram.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's just some interesting data here, so I'm just showing you. And so this post from Mostly Borrowed Ideas says lots of fascinating data points from Meta today. There, these are the ones that stood out most. Percent of time spent viewing content posted by friends. On Facebook, it's only seventeen percent and on Instagram, it's even smaller, seven percent. So these used to be about connecting with your friends. Now it just shows it's more of a social graph than anything, right? Which is what we've been talking about. And then TikTok ban. So once that happened, a TikTok ban, Instagram usage increased dramatically. So the first time it happened, you can see TikTok ban over here. That was whatever date this was. 2025? Oh, yeah, this is all the way in 2024. You can see the first time it happened. Usage shoots up and then the, I think, like, I don't know, a couple of weeks later, shoots up again. But it just shows the effect of like TikTok, like how big it is.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  And then what would happen to if it fully got banned? It would just move over to Instagram?

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, you saw what happened in India, right?

• 15:32Speaker 00

  No.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Because India fully banned TikTok.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  So then Instagram.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Shut up.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Exploded.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  And then a company called Versay, they have an app called Josh, which is a TikTok clone, and I think they got funding from TikTok in the past. Billions and billions and billions in valuation, right? They raised a lot of capital. And they exploded and they rode the coattails of TikTok being banned.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Oh, so they got to benefit from it. Sometimes you just have to be in the right place at the right time.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, but in that market, Instagram is crushing it because.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  They've been more known. Yeah, okay, look, so what percent of people do you think want to consume video today? This is Facebook US video time spent.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  I know it's more than 80% of the content consumed on the internet right now is video. I don't know the time.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Check this out. January 15th, it was 10% of Facebook time spent, right? Now it's over 55%. And this is Facebook. You and I don't, probably don't use Facebook. I don't really log in. This one I didn't really, really understand, but consumer surplus analysis. Only question is how many billions? So total consumer surplus is 38.5 to 110 billion per year, which I think is a very large.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Number.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  And so I don't really understand this. I don't know if you understand this, but I'm just gonna move on from it. But anyway, I think these are just interesting, interesting facts and, you know, we'll see how that quote-unquote lawsuit plays out.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think Facebook's gonna get split apart. And if they do get split apart, how does it look when Mark Zuckerberg testifies to Congress? And says, I get you want to split us apart, but before we bought WhatsApp and Instagram, we asked for your approval. And you guys approved it and you told us it was okay. What I think people forget about Facebook is Instagram would have grown to be a app that was popular, but it wouldn't have grown to where it is today without Facebook's network and reach.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Same thing with YouTube.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  And yes, YouTube and Google and same with WhatsApp and Facebook. So it's just like, yeah, they're really big, but they're really big because WhatsApp grew them. And now they're faulting them for growing these businesses when they're the ones who approved that they can buy them.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Just, I think just gets reinforced over time. People hate success. Like, no matter how I see it, people hate success, right? And so, anyway, I want to go back into, you have this highlighted over here. When you feel like you're getting beat, it's time to double down. And because this is interesting, I was at the gym today, I was listening, there's this great podcast called Operators, and these are all ecommerce guys, right? And I think they're all nine-figure ecommerce guys, they're just talking about how the tariffs are affecting them, and this is like another 2020 moment for them. They're not buying more inventory right now and like, you know, buckle up, right? But the general sentiment I get from them too is they're feeling like they're getting beat, but this is a time where you get stronger too. So go for, I don't know what, where you're coming from, from this one, but it just reminded me of that.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, when times get tough, keep in mind, it's not just tough for you, it's tough for your competition as well. So, for example, I genuinely feel beaten dog syndrome in my business for the last three years.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  I've never even heard of that, beaten dog syndrome.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we've just continually feel like we've just been beaten and beaten and beaten and kicked, but we're still growing. It's painful though. It's painful for our competition as well.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  By the way, being dog syndrome, while not an official diagnosis, refers to the behavioral and emotional consequences of dogging experiences after being subjected to abuse or neglect.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Continue.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Alright, so I learned that saying from people who are much older than me. I never heard it from anyone.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  The Indian saying?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  No, I heard it from people who are Caucasian. That's at least where I got it from. I never heard it before then.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  Alright.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  And they're much older than me. But yeah, I think when you're hurting, like if you look at agencies all around the world, they're hurting. I don't know, I don't care what anyone says. I haven't met one agency that's growing. Some people tell me like, oh yeah, look at this agency, they're doing 4 million a year, they're growing to 500 million.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  You're gonna meet a lot of agencies next week, 30 to 35% of the attendees.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Oh wow. And when people tell me that, I'm like bullshit, everyone's getting hurt right now. And I'm like, if everyone's getting hurt.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  This is the time to double down. And if I look at my business at NP Digital, when you have a thousand plus people, you're always in a lawsuit with someone, right? And so often that half the times I don't even know what they are. Like I just learned, we settled a lawsuit for $40,000 and I was like, what lawsuit? And they're like, oh, this company went bankrupt. One of our mutual friends, he had a pharmaceutical company and they were a client of ours. So they were trying to recuperate money, even though we have expenses, we just do it.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  And he was trying to recoup money?

• 20:05Speaker 01

  The lawyers.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  The lawyers, oh.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  The lawyers. So I was like, okay. So we settled because bankruptcy court, but you're always in something that or going through M and A or someone trying to take money from your bank account or having bad business partners. Or you even had someone in your organization at one point who's trying to take your customers and go do their own thing.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Right?

• 20:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  And it's just like when stuff's going bad and it's going bad for you and the competition, that's the best time to double down. It hurts more, but that's how you come ahead. Because at that point in time, no one else is really doing things like spending more in marketing or reinvesting or acquiring companies. And that's when you find the deals. It hurts more spending when you're hurting, but then when things start getting better, you start climbing ahead and growing much faster than everyone else. The shitty part is, is when you keep getting beat, you don't know when it's going to get better. So you have to be willing to take the pain for if you think it's a year, expect two or three. If you think it's two or three years, expect four to six, at least double.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. So here, here's the thing. So people right now are talking about how the Chinese are not going to respond to the terrorists because there's two words that are embedded into our culture. And it's funny, I listened to a podcast and it was like, yeah, these Chinese people use the two words. I'll tell you what those two words are. It's tsuku. Tsuku means you know how to eat pain, right? It's like, it's like you literally, it's, it's a thing like it's the resilience is beaten into you and we can hold out for so long. And that's why moments like this, I mean, in 2021, you knew I was going through a lot of stuff in 2021, even a couple of times, right? And I was, I felt like I was getting attacked on all ends. I mean, you have, you have these saboteurs internally doing all these things. And then you have, you've acquired these companies, you haven't vetted the people. So then you have like, it's like a clown show, right? And it was, it was thing after thing after thing. So, but.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  Never stopped in that moment. Even right now, there's, there's personal stuff happening in my life. And it's, it's like, but you know, these moments, there's gonna be chapters where you, you, you grow, but you're gonna get better over time if you don't give up. And that's why Warren Buffett just, and Charlie Munger, late Charlie Munger has said this, it's, you know, whatever tragedy happens to you, you have to keep going. You can't let one thing beat you down because you can't let one tragedy beget another tragedy. Same in business, same in personal stuff. You have to keep going. And I don't know that this is, I think it's probably the same for you. This is when I thrive. And so what I, what I mentioned before, I don't lose sleep in these moments. Like I look at my sleep metrics, like in with the business stuff, it's good, right? But when personal stuff happens, by the way, the sleep metrics get worse. But it's so it's interesting, at least for my, my observations. But it is time to double down and it is time to build resilience.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  But anyway, guys, I hope you guys enjoyed that session. That is it for today. We're gonna be recording in Miami. Using my DJ Osmo next week, Neil and I will be. And we'll see you in Miami.