Learning From Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover - Julien Smith

Julien Smith is the CEO of Breathe, a startup founder, investor, and an author. Elon Musk is trying to buy Twitter so I wanted to ask someone with experience of the startup world to explain what this tells us about Silicon Valley's modern approach to business and their obsession with growth Expect to learn what is unique about the startup mindset, why Elon might be poison pilled by Twitter's legislative documents, the difference between founders in startups and regular businesses, how not getting discouraged and just keeping going can count for a lot, why being first is a disadvantage as well as an opportunity and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Follow Julien on Twitter - https://twitter.com/Julien Check out Julien's website - http://juliensmith.com/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #elonmusk #siliconvalley startup - 00:00 Intro 00:19 Elon Musk Buying Twitter 17:41 What is a Hostile Takeover? 21:55 Free Speech Alternatives 26:21 Advice for Startups 38:31 Angel Investing 44:48 The Skill of Innovating 56:15 Where to Find Julien - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You know what Mark Zuckerberg used to call Twitter way back in the day when both companies were private, he called it a clown car that drove into a goldmine, a company filled with schmucks that nobody knew what they were doing to barely keep it going.

• 0:15Chris Williamson?

  Julian Smith, welcome to the show.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 0:19Chris Williamson?

  Elon Musk's tried to buy Twitter, Julian. What the fuck's going on?

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Oh, man. So I think I'm on the other side of what everyone else, everyone's like, this is catastrophic because of course I'm reading Twitter about this. I think, you know, there's this weird because Elon Musk is not the founder of Twitter, excuse me, of Tesla. He's not the founder of Tesla. But he did take Tesla to from where it is to where it is today. And, and, and so there is this, there is this stagnation. I'm a small Twitter shareholder. There's this stagnation inside of Twitter. It's like everyone's wanted an edit button is like the manifestation of this, like no one, everyone wants an edit button, but they don't want to give an edit button. It's like a manifestation of a stagnation that occurs inside a company when a kind of sometimes when a founder doesn't run it

• 1:08Speaker 00

  properly. So I actually believe Twitter is one of the greatest, most amazing things on this, on this earth. And so I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I'm for it. I'm for it. I'm for.

• 1:22Chris Williamson?

  Who's against it?

• 1:23Speaker 00

  Dude, everybody is against it.

• 1:25Chris Williamson?

  Ah, dude, your Twitter sphere is completely wrong. Look, let's give for the people that don't know what's going on, I'm going to give you the breakdown. Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter to take it private. This is from the New York Times article, Elon Musk Offers to Buy Twitter Live Updates. His takeover bid at $54.20 a share comes just weeks after he became the company's largest shareholder. Here's what you need to know. Twitter's stock price suggests that the markets aren't convinced by Musk's bid. I don't think I agree with that. The New York Times is probably trying to spin it. So Elon Musk has launched a takeover bid for Twitter, offering to buy it for $54.20 a share just weeks after he became the social media company's largest shareholder. Mr. Musk said that this was his best and final offer, representing a 54% premium.

• 2:10Chris Williamson?

  Over the day before he began investing in the company in late January, in the filing, Mr. Musk said, I don't have confidence in management and that he couldn't make the changes he wanted in the public market. So at that point, I mean, that's a pretty damning comment from somebody who's kind of just just arrived in the house, hasn't even taken their shoes off and he's sort of curled a big fat one out in the middle of the carpet in front of everybody.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  I don't like what can make him for dinner. Let me take over.

• 2:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  We're getting a proper dinner this way. Otherwise I'm leaving.

• 2:43Chris Williamson?

  I didn't know, because he's actually posted the tweet that's gone super viral. I bet that this is the the most accessed SEC document of all time.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Of all time.

• 2:55Chris Williamson?

  By far. So he's just tweeted saying, I made an offer linking to an SEC filing, which presumably, does that have to be made public? Is that the sort of right? Okay. So this was out there in any case. And rather than him just letting somebody find this, he's decided to get out ahead of it. But it's got in it. It's got some exhibits. And I don't know how common it is for this sort of stuff to be shown there. In it, he says, this is him to Brett Taylor, chairman of the board. I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform of for free speech around the globe. And I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy. However, since making my investment, I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal

• 3:37Chris Williamson?

  imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company. As a result, I'm offering to buy 100% of Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash, a 54% premium. My offer is my best and final. And if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as shareholder. Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it. So presumably, you might be able to explain this better. But presumably, what he's doing here is he's saying, all of the shareholders in Twitter, I'm going to offer you a 54% premium on when I started, a 38% premium on the day before. However, if you don't do that.

• 4:20Chris Williamson?

  Not only are you going to look like you've been cooked to your own shareholders, but I'm going to withdraw my, I'm going to dump 10% of my stock back into the market.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  All of my ownership and then the, and then the stock will tank down again to wherever it was before the Elon Musk thing in the first place. And so it is, and by the way, you'll note that the 5420 number includes the, the, the number 420, which he also did whenever he said he was going to bring Tesla private at $420, like maybe a couple of years ago, back when it was worth much less than that. So he said, I've got a private buyer for Tesla at $420 a share, always this number 420.

• 5:01Chris Williamson?

  Why is that?

• 5:01Speaker 00

  And why the number 420?

• 5:04Chris Williamson?

  He's not memeing his way through.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  I mean, are you sure? Because.

• 5:09Chris Williamson?

  Are you kidding? Are you trying to suggest that Elon Musk is using 420 like blaze up day as?

• 5:16Speaker 00

  I, all that, here's what I'm suggesting, actually. Here's genuinely what I'm suggesting. I'm actually not sure that he's not doing that, but the reason that I think that this is so interesting is that, is that so much of, of what you do as a founder, as a CEO, as all of these things, really in the public sphere, so much of what you do is about telling a story and people believing in you. And honestly, if I can be, if I can be super clear, I, again, being back to being early at on every, on everything, when I was, I bought Tesla stock really, really long time ago and, and since it's like the one thing I wish I had put like all of my money into, but didn't. But, but what happens is you're looking at a company that effectively was insolvent

• 6:00Speaker 00

  and wasn't going to succeed unless he was able to get people to believe. And I'll tell you what he's really good at is getting people to believe in something. And then that allows kind of like that story to ride out and become dominant. And he's good at that like over and over and over again.

• 6:18Chris Williamson?

  Surely if he's about to take this company private, his ability to make people believe from a value creation perspective now becomes irrelevant. People don't need to believe in Twitter as a platform. They already need it. The difference with him with Tesla is that he, his ability to garner belief actually then pays out dividends in terms of the share price.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's definitely true. It's a different story. The main thing that he's gonna, I mean, let's assume this is even real, right? Versus like it being some giant colossal joke and he's going to be sued by the SEC again, which he was when he did the 420 thing in the first place. I is then, I I think that there's a huge percentage of employees there to get to be like, I'm, I don't want to want to work for this company anymore. And so you could see how it like could completely tank the number of people that want to work at that company. But it's true that Twitter has a gigantic amount of a a a common square, a a common, a what a commons value that is in fact not properly unlocked, like, and I don't know why it's like people, you know, you know, Mark Zuckerberg used to call Twitter

• 7:24Speaker 00

  way back in the day when both companies were private, he called it a clown car that drove into a gold mine. A company filled with schmucks that nobody, like, nobody knew what they were doing to barely keep it uh going, and it drove into the one of the most valuable opportunities in the universe.

• 7:44Chris Williamson?

  That's hilarious. So there's a bit at the bottom. I don't know what this is. It looks like maybe a WhatsApp message or something. So this is again, this is in the SEC filing, right? SEC.gov slash archives, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, and this must be Musk. As I indicated this weekend, I believe that the company should be private to go through the changes that need to be made. So presumably he's teed this up at least over the weekend. Um, after the past several days of thinking this over, I've decided I want to acquire the company and take it private. I'm going to make you, send you an offer letter tonight. It will be public in the morning. Are you available to chat? And then there's a voice script. He says, best and final, A, I am not playing the back and forth game. B, I have moved straight to the end.

• 8:29Chris Williamson?

  C, it's a high share price and your shareholders will love it. D, if the deal doesn't work, given that I don't have confidence in management, nor do I believe that I can drive the necessary change in the public market. I would need to reconsider my position as shareholder. This is not a threat. It's simply not a good investment without the changes that need to be made. And those changes won't happen without taking the company private. Finally, my advisors and my team are available after you got, after you get the letter to answer any questions. There will be more detail in our public filings. After you receive the letter and review the public filings, your team can call my family office with any questions. Can you imagine for a second that you are? Whoever it is that's received this particular

• 9:10Chris Williamson?

  letter at Twitter last night, you know, it's a quiet, easy Wednesday in the middle of April and out of nowhere, like WhatsApp message from Elon Musk and a voice note. And you go, all right.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  Hold on a second.

• 9:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I wonder what this is. Oh, Elon Musk.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  I know it's date night, baby. I gotta, I gotta look at this.

• 9:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, just wait there. Oh, Elon Musk's offering $43 billion to take my company private.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  Like I said, I own like, not a lot of Twitter shares, like not, I don't know, 10K worth or some number, you know? And like, I just want to hold on to them just as a relic. I want to put them on my wall. You know, there's like a, I didn't, I never got a certificate. I don't think you get certificates anymore.

• 9:56Chris Williamson?

  Should have framed it.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Put them on my wall. You're like, wow, I knew that, I knew, knew about this when.

• 10:01Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so he said, what happens next in Musk's Twitter takeover offer? This is from the New York Times. Elon Musk offered $43 billion. Here is what will or could happen next. The board reviews the offer. The board will work with its advisors at Goldman Sachs to review Mr. Musk's offer. They will have to consider amongst other things, whether the deal fairly values the company and whether Mr. Musk has the financing to cobble together a deal. The board cannot simply decide it does not like Mr. Musk as a suitor, but they can come up with reasons why they don't like the bid, like, for example, his ability to fund it, said Stephen Davidoff Solomon, a professor at the School of Law, blah, blah, blah. The board announces its decision. The board will likely take up to a few days to review the offer. If it rejects the offer, it can go in one of several ways. It can put in a defense mechanism known as a poison pill.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:48Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Okay, so the details of the poison pill is, well, the concept of it is if you, if you consume the poison pill, it will kill you. And so if I understand correctly, it is, there are, there's a huge amount of these in Twitter's bylaws, maybe. And by the way, you know, I, I'm not super familiar with it, but there's, in Twitter's bylaws, there's a ton of poison pill provisions that effectively said if A happens, if B happens, if C happens. I this this this, I guess, software or this this public good, so to speak, is protected.

• 11:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  It's possible, and I don't remember what the poison pill provisions are, but they exist in a number of of different companies, um, bylaws. And at Twitter, my understanding is there's a huge amount of poison pill provision. There's more more than in most tech companies.

• 11:38Chris Williamson?

  It's wild.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  Because they're trying to protect it.

• 11:40Chris Williamson?

  It's wild that that's what it's called, a poison pill. It says, "The poison pill limits the ability of Mr. Musk and every other shareholder to buy up Twitter shares in the open market. Once it does, it could still decide to sell itself, but without the pressure of Mr. Musk, blah, blah, blah. There are reasons Twitter may opt to not do the poison pill," which, again, I can't believe that that's even a term. Uh, "May be wary of potential criticism that a poison pill is deflecting the concerns of a highly vocal member of its community. Likewise, Mr. Musk, who's reported stake incentives, blah, blah, blah. The board potentially looks for a white knight. Twitter has been looking for a sale ever since it went public," says Howard Birkenbilt, who leads the capital markets firm at blah, blah. Uh, "Mr. Musk's latest activity: most likely heightened interest in Twitter's amenable to a deal. Some private equity firms may be put off by Twitter's

• 12:23Chris Williamson?

  limited cash flow, but a number of technology companies may take a look, given heightened interest in the social media giant's power and reach." Um, looks like the stock price hasn't, it's it's bumped about 10% in the pre-market and then pulled back a little bit today. It's 15% higher than when Musk first revealed it, but is still down from a $77 high February 2021.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  Keep in mind, like, like Snapchat went public, sorry, that my timeline's a little weird, but let's say six years ago or something like that. And it has, I believe it's even like less users, but is more profitable and is trading better. And and by the way, like, and I I hate Snapchat and I hate Evan Spiegel and all the people that are associated with Snapchat, just just on principle. But but it's somehow, despite the fact that it it went public five years ago versus public, uh, Twitter, they went public much longer over a much longer timeframe. Like Twitter still cannot get its act together. I like, I don't know if if you personally believe that this is. I have, I have always thought of this company. And by the way, there's a lot of people on Twitter's board that are

• 13:36Speaker 00

  that probably align with this Elon Musk philosophy of the founder or someone with a great deal of of value, a great deal of of of vision. Can take it over and make it better. Brett Stevens, who's the co-CEO of Salesforce, I think that's his name. Drew Houston, who's the founder of Dropbox. I forget the founder of DoorDash's name, but another dude who's on the board of Twitter. And so along with others, Jack Dorsey, the current CEO of Twitter. So that's like a bunch of people probably aligned in the direction of like. Okay, but what's he gonna do? And there's another that say, well, maybe this is good. We've been looking to do this. So who knows? I mean, the the 21st century is weirder than we've ever, than any of us could possibly imagine. I think we could agree on that.

• 14:20Chris Williamson?

  Twitter's board met on Wednesday, according to a person familiar with the situation, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly. Hours after Elon Musk's offer to buy the company, Mr. Musk turned down a seat on the board over the weekend. Leaving board members who had recently welcomed him into their ranks to weigh a proposal in which Mr. Musk said he has no confidence in the management of the company. But what I found out was that the reason he turned down a seat on the board is because he couldn't have put in a bid to take over the company 100% if he was on on the board. So that was one of the reasons that, you know, Twitter a while ago. And then think about, you know, the other game that may have been played here. When Elon first purchased his 9% stake and then Twitter goes. Oh shit, Elon's probably got the wealth that he might try to take us over.

• 15:05Chris Williamson?

  Why don't we offer him a seat on the board? Because if we offer him a seat on the board, he can't take us over. So they're playing the game because originally everyone was like Elon's whatever a silent partner. He's not contributing in the way that everybody wanted him to, which really isn't, no one gives a shit about what he does financially with Twitter. Everyone's bothered about what he does operationally, culturally, in terms of the branding and its policies and stuff like that. And um, yeah, man, I I was talking to Dan from Drinking Bros about this literally a couple of minutes ago. I was like, it's so wild and kind of cool that we have somebody on the planet who has the resources and the. Motivation to do the things that everybody else daydreams about doing.

• 15:46Chris Williamson?

  You know, everybody in tech has an idea about what they would do to fix Twitter, which is the platform of tech in any case.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree with that. Yeah. And we also like, like founders are younger than ever with more power than ever. Right? Like, keep in mind that that ascent is more and more rapid than it ever has been, the acceleration. And so for me, the person who really exemplifies this or the pair that exemplify this the most is Patrick and John Collison, who run and founded Stripe in, it must be 10 years ago or something. And it's since become a $100 billion company and it's still private. And then they're like, yeah, we're going to try and solve carbon capture, which is like another, obviously really meaningful problem for the earth. And, and so you have these people that still have their, still have a certain amount of

• 16:36Speaker 00

  optimism and still have a certain amount of, of like feeling like they can still contribute and they can still do something. 30 years ago, 40 years ago, and before that, it always, it may be different to you, but like, it felt like all the people who had this power were old and cynical and were just trying to do like, like hold on to their cash and get it to become more valuable and nothing else.

• 17:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, how old is Elon Musk age?

• 17:04Speaker 00

  Literally.

• 17:05Chris Williamson?

  50 years old, bro. So, I mean, Elon's, Elon's not a young guy, you know, he's like slap bang in the middle of what you would expect from somebody of, that's doing this sort of stuff. The difference is that he has quite a young spirit with him. You know, he's got that very sort of contrarian heterodox fuck you to the man, dog going to the moon thing. And I, dude, I'm, I'm in for this. So, you know, moving beyond what's going on here, there's some stuff about Salesforce tried to purchase Twitter and the sale went through and some other bits, you know, everybody can go and read the New York Times article if they want to go and find out a little bit more about this. But I think, actually, first question, is this what's considered a hostile takeover?

• 17:45Speaker 00

  That's a great question. I think the answer is, yes, what a hostile takeover is strictly like legally speaking, I'm not clear on. But the the understanding is that it is a hostile takeover in the sense that it is being done without the permission of any anyone else that's that's involved. And it's effectively like backing all the shareholders and then the board maybe into a corner.

• 18:11Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. So I'm looking at some of the biggest replies, some of the highest replies here.

• 18:20Chris Williamson?

  A man who's willing to spend forty one million dollars for free speech is a good man that I can admire. Someone replying said, if you're paying billions, you're buying speech, it's not free. I don't know. I mean, what is it? The thing that I don't get is people's aversion to Elon Musk.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  They have they have a very strong one. It's interesting because like people often make those comparisons with Jeff Bezos too. They're like, oh, like, how rich is he really? And they show like an ant and then a skyscraper. And they're like, let's this is you. And this is how rich he is. And they show these crazy comparisons of wealth accumulation that are admittedly like out of proportion with the past because of because of tech. And again, that acceleration that was able to happen. It happens faster than ever. But then there's this automatic assumption that all they're trying to do is accumulate like like money is no longer valuable to these people. And so then you could think, well, what's the next thing? Oh, is it power? That seems simplistic to me. It really feels like they want to make the world.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  You know, maybe the languages, neutral languages, like in their image, and that could be some good and some bad. But I don't know, like, space travel feels pretty good to me, you know, and electric cars feel pretty good to me. Like admittedly, one of the stories of Elon Musk is he, I think he made some money from his previous company Zip Something before PayPal or whatever, and immediately went and bought a one million dollar McLaren car and crashed it on his first ride out. So we're not talking about a normal person, but we're still talking about somebody that has more vision than the average Twitter shareholder.

• 19:56Chris Williamson?

  I would say more vision, but the thing that's interesting is. All of the like New World Order accusations that get thrown at Bill Gates. But Bill Gates doesn't have as much wealth as Elon Musk, but for some reason, more people seem to be happy with Elon, at least from, I guess, like the center right side of the fence certainly seem to be a little bit more happy with him because he's kind of cool and young and hip and does like meme coin stuff. But I, I just don't know, I just don't know what it, I don't know what people's problem with Elon is overall. I don't think he's said anything particularly egregious, you know, I don't think he's got like a secret alt-right past. I might be wrong.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah, I'm not sure that that's, I don't think that's the case either, but there, there is this thing that happens and the general attitude in tech, right? And it's true everywhere. Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, like Jeff Bezos was more neutral. And by the way, people did feel this way about Bill Gates in the nineties during the antitrust lawsuits that were going on with the government, but it's sort of receded since then. And Bill Gates became this dude that is almost like John Rockefeller, senior, John Rockefeller, senior, his post-oil monopoly thing that he did is he went out and he spent a gigantic amount of money donating, donating it towards mostly medical causes. And his, his father was a quack doctor.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  And so he was like, oh, okay, well, medicine needs to be evolved and all these other things, essentially what Bill Gates has done. And, but these people are, these people are too young for that and, and they still have energy and they're, they're like, I can run another company. Cause when you run one company, I haven't run a company as, as big as that, but I have run, I've raised a lot of money and I've built companies that are meaningful size for startups. You're still like, I think I could do it again. I think, I think I could make it better and easier this time. So I bet he still has a lot of that energy in him.

• 21:54Chris Williamson?

  There's a bunch of replies from Gab. Are you familiar with Gab? Do you know what that is?

• 21:59Speaker 00

  I am familiar with the website Gab.

• 22:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay. So there's one set of replies, counter offer, sell your 9% Twitter stock, invest $2 billion in Gab, join Gab's board and let's take them down. You have to consider that bringing free speech to Twitter isn't as simple as buying it. Apple and Google do not allow free speech. So if you stop the censorship, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:19Chris Williamson?

  Dude, this is the equivalent of the guys on Pornhub that comment, that comment things saying. Oh, if she, if I got my hands on her.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  If only I was in that room.

• 22:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, dude, she wouldn't know what began. And all the people that comment on, you know, glamour models Instagram pages saying, looking so hot, sweetie. You go, look, dude, Elon's not bothered about buying Gab, you know?

• 22:45Speaker 00

  This is the thing is like, is anything off the table at this point? Like, that's the part that really scares the shit out of me.

• 22:52Chris Williamson?

  Homeboy's playing in a 50 million, 50 billion dollar hostile takeover of the largest town square platform on the world, in the world.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure.

• 23:04Chris Williamson?

  He, you know, Gab as a free speech alternative might be fun or whatever, but it just, it just seems to me like a really poor move. I think Rumble did the same thing when Rogan got popped by Spotify about, is he going to take episodes down and doing apologies and things like that? And Rumble were like, oh, we'll offer you 100 million bucks to go from Spotify to us. And you think, I understand that when you're sat in a boardroom, that it kind of sounds cool. But when you're everybody else watching on Twitter, you sound like the guy on Pornhub saying that you should come to, you should come over to my casting couch as opposed to the one that you're on right now.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, and because the plat, those platforms, like, nothing's gonna, but gonna become Spotify, like, no matter how much, like, that's been one. And so that's the same thing with Twitter, actually. The common square, it's just Twitter, maybe, I don't want to, I don't know about forever, but keep in mind, like, it is the one place where you can go say some shit. Well, maybe not everything anymore, I don't even know about that, but like, you basically go say some shit, no matter how stupid or offensive it may become. And it is public, which by default on Snapchat, because we talked about other social channels before, it is not. On Facebook, it is not. On a medium that's behind paywalls now, so you're not even there. On Clubhouse, I don't

• 24:28Speaker 00

  know if that even is relevant or even to compare.

• 24:31Chris Williamson?

  Instagram's got the equivalent amount of access, but you are, you are right. I understand. I think that overall, dude, I'm so down for this. I'm down for everything. Just burn it all to the ground, right? And let's start again. Let's go Mad Max, total scorched earth policy. But it'll be, it'll be interesting to see what happens. I'm going to be interested to see how this, and if nothing else, dude, the thing that I've taken away so far is it's cool to have somebody that has the resources and the motivation to actually go after this sort of stuff. It's, I, I enjoy the fact that we live in a world where someone at least can offer this out. You know, it's on Twitter, whether or not they want to decide to take this thing. Are there concerns about centralizing control and ownership underneath one person

• 25:12Chris Williamson?

  who, you know, let's say that Elon Musk gets a, a brain tumor in four years' time and decides to mean, say that, you know, make some ridiculous policies on Twitter and that completely destroy the platform. You go, okay, yeah, maybe that's not good. But you also have centralized control currently at the moment with someone who's going through obvious dementia that's got the nuclear football under his arm. So, you know, the centralized control argument, I'm not convinced really, really works. But I'm, I'm glad it's happening. I'm glad that he's there. And yeah, if he memes his way to owning Twitter, then that 420.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  You're right in as much as at least somebody, at least, at least some change, drastic change is possible. Right? Whereas like before, you know, I mean, the thing is that we say in tech is like, as soon as like a professional CEO takes over, that company is like, there's like nothing ever happening ever with that company ever. And so this is almost like a founder like move. And I'm excited to wake up to the news, kind of. I'm more excited to wake up to that than like somebody punching somebody on a stage or whatever happened two weeks ago.

• 26:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I agree. Paul Graham's got this quote, I think, I learned from you that says, don't give up and don't get demoralized. That's his advice to starters. Do you think that there's anything else that's missing from that?

• 26:32Speaker 00

  So that's that's part that's from a famous article called thirteen thirteen phrases about startups. And the two, the two ones at the end are like, don't get demoralized. And if you happen to get demoralized, don't give up, even if you are demoralized. And the reason that he says that is because startups are like not rocket science. Like so long as you keep going and you try, you're able to even raise a little bit of money to keep going. You'll be able to deviate your way to success. And so that's, that's actually like, that's why the clown car was able to drive into the gold mine from the conversation before. Because they were able to get enough money to just kind of deviate while the thing was skyrocketing.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  And so the, the number one thing that they say in startups and it's true for all companies is like, get someone to love you. And if someone like I just didn't know, we serve coaches for people in the context of, uh, of my, uh, that are just randomly listening to this. Uh, I run a company practice that serves, that serves coaches, lets them, help them run their business. And so I just on boarded a dude and he's like, my God, you just saved, you just like, solved so many of my problems and he was so excited, but you, you just want to have one person like that. And if you can get one person like that, there's probably two. And if there's probably two, then there's probably 10. If there's probably 10, there's probably a hundred, you have a company. And so it's really about, and I think he even says it in the same article.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  Instead of making 10 people or a hundred people ambivalent, get one person who's just like, I can't get enough of this to, to come out of the woodwork or find a person like them.

• 28:10Chris Williamson?

  What's the difference between a startup founder and a normal small business owner? Because I'm friends with a ton of small business owners. Most of my friends in the UK have businesses of some kind. You're familiar with Johnny and Youssef from propane. You know, they've been running a company nearly as long as I have. I've been in nightlife since I was 18 years old. Everybody there was running their own company and hustling on the side, doing social media, doing whatever it was. Um, and yet there seems to be a step change between.

• 28:42Chris Williamson?

  There's something fundamentally different about a startup founder, you know, someone that's raising capital. Is it simply the sector or the industry that they're in? Or is there something else going on that's the difference between those?

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the main one is this, like, there was a period, and actually, maybe it's still true, where every company can refer to themselves as a startup. But strictly speaking, it's probably there's capital in the bank, and the capital in the bank allows an insane acceleration to occur. And so there's like, you know, we're talking about nightclubs, we could talk about anything. My fiance runs a pottery studio, okay? And so no matter how many people she gets to try to become customers of a pottery studio, like, there's only a certain square feet, so there's only a certain number of seats. And so then you have to start another place, and that's going to be expensive, too. So it's like, there's these costs. And so from the perspective of finance, it's about the marginal cost

• 29:38Speaker 00

  for the next person is almost zero. So a cost of almost zero to bring the next user in. It's true for Twitter, it's true for Stripe, it's true for, what's, Gab, it's true for all of them. And so the zero marginal cost for the next customer or user means that it can grow to infinity with relatively low costs, which means it is, there's a chance, a small chance, that it can become insanely successful insanely quickly. So quickly that it makes your fucking head spin. And that's true for Twitter, and I've run companies like that where it's felt like the wheels are falling off and it's growing so fast. So that's the essential difference, speed.

• 30:18Chris Williamson?

  Scalability.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  Speed and scalability, ideally.

• 30:21Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah. Well, I find it very, very interesting because, again, I wonder how many of the guys, I don't have that startup, I don't know whether it's that I'm not in the right circles, I've definitely started to be around them since I've been in Austin. But some of the people that I've met that run startups are total droogs. Like, these people couldn't hold a candle to some of the operators that I've had that have either worked for me or worked with me. And you think, like, the shrewdness that the boys have got, that I am, their executive function, their ability to be able to see and be agile and predict and charm people, all that stuff, right?

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:01Chris Williamson?

  And I really do wonder whether if we were able to switch roles for a little while and I could pick kind of a dream team of the people that I've worked with over the last 15 years and I could throw them into startups. And I'm sure that there's, you know, there's tons and tons of people who are unbelievably shrewd operators when it comes to their

• 31:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:19Chris Williamson?

  small plumbing company, gardening company that they're run, their dog grooming business, their online coaching, fitness coaching thing. And you go, okay, here's $100 million of seed capital and a pretty good idea. Let's see what you do. So it does seem to me a little bit like kind of first mover advantage, right place, right time. And then, and then presumably as well, a little bit of people having an existing

• 31:49Chris Williamson?

  reputation of being a person that is a founder that gets more opportunities because you're a founder or a startup or an investor or an angel or whatever.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  I agree with all of those things. The higher the margin of the customer, right, the more money, like the less costs you have per incremental customer, the more you can fuck up. Basically, straight up, that's basically the difference. So if you're running a business where you, where you make a dollar and you have to pay 90 cents back for that dollar, you've got a tiny amount of money to make, which means you have to execute incredibly well. The most, the most important example of that is a restaurant. A restaurant is an incredibly difficult business to, to run. You make 5% margin, 10% margin, maybe if your place is full. They're really hard, hard business

• 32:40Speaker 00

  to run. And if it's run improperly, you just die. So what happens to startups is giant amounts of capital become accessible, which performs, which gives you an opportunity to fuck up over and over and over again. You can become a good operator, but you just don't have the amount of, the amount of discipline that you need in real industries.

• 33:01Chris Williamson?

  Oh, because you've got more degrees of freedom to mess up.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  That's right. And so the primary reason that you need that ability to fuck up at the very beginning is because you actually don't know who you're serving. Typically, like online, Yusuf is a good example, online coaching business, you know who the next trigger mental customer is, you know how to get the first one. You're like, okay, you know, the referral business, like, maybe I'll get another referral after that. Startups are filled with ambiguity. We're going to come up with this insane idea. It makes no sense, but randomly some dude is going to give you 500K to go for it. And so that brings me to the other element. Not only they're probably, they're probably a poor discipline, and if they had real world experience, they would have had better discipline

• 33:44Speaker 00

  in the first place, right? But also, the other element is they having typically the CEOs have really good ability to storytell. And so they are able to go to any random dude, and I had to learn this skill, right? I had raised zero before in my last business, and I learned that my, that my book writing and my public speaking skills could be used to raise money. And I was able to raise 150 million dollars in my last business in order to prove that out, really. And, and so then you've got this incredible ability to try and build something that you just don't get in the real world.

• 34:26Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so let's say we use the pottery example. If you've got a pottery studio where you're, you're coaching people to do that, because the scalability is so effortful, because for you to go from one studio to two studios, you're going to need to find another place, you're going to check with building regulations, you're going to have to staff it and stock it and do all of these things. Being a good storyteller to unlock more capital to you still has a bunch of headroom that you're bouncing off, or a bunch of ceiling that you're bouncing off, because it's still very effortful for you to scale the business, regardless of how much capital you have. So this is one of the, okay, interesting. Because I have, dude, I have some people, you know, think about, again, going back to nightlife, my, my industry, some of

• 35:11Chris Williamson?

  the ways that our guys on the street that are doing PR-ing, I'm sure you've walked down a busy nightlife street, like Broadway in Nashville or whatever, like, hi mate, where are you going tonight? Do you want to come in? And they're trying to give you a wristband. Some of the narratives that they weave, they're very, very quickly able to work out, what is it that this person wants from the night out that they're going on tonight? Are they on a birthday party with the girls and they want to go somewhere that's girly and cute? Are they out with the lads and they really want to pull? Are they looking for a cheap night? Are they looking for a fancy night? They're very, very quickly able to work out what it is that they want. And then weave a narrative that tells them exactly what they want to hear, offer them a deal that closes. And then do the CTA like, okay, so you're going to go up there, you're going to turn right, you're going to blah, blah, blah. Show this to the guy in the front door.

• 35:53Chris Williamson?

  So again, like it's just interesting how different industries unlock or enable different types of skillsets. And the only difference is that the guys that are working on the street are making a pound per entry.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  That's it.

• 36:09Chris Williamson?

  Or whatever.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:11Chris Williamson?

  Whereas the startup founder CEO is raising, you know, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars for every time that he sells his vision in the best way as well.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  And that brings us to maybe like another important thing that I actually, you know, I was brought up in a pretty working class way. My father was an executive coach, but it wasn't like a super lucrative business as far as he was concerned. And my father and my mother was a secretary. And so I grew up in the public, uh, regular school system. What I mean is is public in Britain, I think means a good, I grew up in a regular school system. And so I just didn't have the network around me of entrepreneurs and successful randos that a lot of these startup CEOs come from. And they come from these worlds where it is possible to look left and look right at like a dinner party that your parents are having.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  And you're like, oh, wow, there's this successful like CFO of a public company that my friend, that my parents are friends with. Dude on the street literally doesn't know anybody like that and literally has no concept of an entrepreneur, which I basically didn't have till I was 25 either.

• 37:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, the other thing that you don't have, even if you're in that room. So a good example of this, when I was in New York, I went to a couple of dinners that I was a new world, a bit of a new world for me. And I was sat certainly around people that have tons and tons of capital that they're prepared to invest in things. I've got nothing for them to invest in. They're not going to, they're not going to give me, I mean, I don't need half a million pounds to, expand my nightlife business because again, we're limited by the number of people in each city. We're limited by the number of venues that we have and licensing. There are real world constraints that stop us from doing things. So there's a sort of a two way street going on here. Not only do you maybe not have access to the people, but even if you did have access to the people, their money wouldn't be able to do anything for you.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  That's it.

• 38:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's, dude, this is, it's a very interesting way to look at things. It almost makes me think that everybody that's some sort of entrepreneur or is in a good position to have access to people like that should have some sort of startup in their back pocket. Just so that.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  Just that they can pull it out.

• 38:21Chris Williamson?

  Correctly. Yeah, yeah, man. You know, you're, you're sat at the right table and you go, well, yeah, actually, do you know what it is? I've, I've had this thing and we've been taken over for a while and it's blah, blah, blah.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  We're about to go full time on it. I'll give you the whole pitch.

• 38:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  We're about to go full time on it. And actually, we really believe that there's this unconquered market for random thing. And it's, we're actually just looking for somebody and a few people who will be able to give us the initial seed capital and then my team will come together. And we believe we can get it to like a million users or we believe we can get it to half a million in AR. You've got to know the code, the way to talk to people.

• 38:59Chris Williamson?

  What's the lingo?

• 39:00Speaker 00

  But immediately if you have that, what happens with, and by the way, this is true for Elon Musk to sort of bring this thing full circle, is people like Elon Musk, but less busy than him and obviously less rich, but rich enough are, are looking for, and this is like maybe an insight or a weird thing for some people, but they're, they have places, they're looking to put money and they don't know where to put it. They're literally sitting around with so much cash going like I did randomly. I'm not one of them. You're like, uh, I'll buy Twitter stock is like what some rando dude will say. But others have put all the money in the stock market that they want and now they're, they still have it. And they're like, I gotta give it to people and make it grow somehow.

• 39:40Chris Williamson?

  Well, think about.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  That's where, right.

• 39:42Chris Williamson?

  Think about Angel List, right? What is Angel List? Like Angel List is basically a, a platform for people who need money to access people who have money that want to give it away.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  Exactly right. And then syndicates. Are some dude, literally like yourself or like myself, who's like, I know a bunch of rich people that are on my list. And then I've got these entrepreneurs and I met them once and we're gonna give them two fifty K. That's that. I mean, that is what angel list syndicates are. And it and the amount of money that flows uh through the ecosystem is sometimes like that. And by the way, I've been in this. I've been a CEO, startup CEO for like ten years at this point. But even today, it baffles me. Uh, we had a really good lead investor for our last. We raised ten million dollars from a a a fund called Andreessen Horowitz, which is really good.

• 40:34Chris Williamson?

  Andrew Chen, Andrew Chen's been on the show.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay. Andrew's been on your show. Great. Yeah. So and so Andrew is my lead investor at Andreessen Horowitz. And the moment that Andreessen Horowitz became the lead investor, literally, I would get on the phone just like this, like a like kind of a Skype or or Google Hangout. And people would be like, well, you're in the driver's seat. How much do you want? And there would be no other conversation needed because this capital is just kind of randomly sitting around. So actually, this brings me to the core thing about startups, which is that really what the startup world needs is more good ideas. It doesn't need more money. It needs people, little Elon Musks. This is kind of, I mean, here we are talking about it.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  Little Elon Musk that are willing to do crazy things. And by the way, this is why Adam Newman of WeWork was so successful is he just spoke to this crazy, unbelievable industry, real estate, that nobody knows how to fuck with, but that everyone hates. And he's just like, yeah, he's like, you know what? We have billion dollar companies. And he was like, you know what doesn't exist? A trillion dollar company. I'm gonna make a trillion dollar company. And people would look back at him and they'd be like, I fucking believe him. I believe him. I and and.

• 41:53Chris Williamson?

  Here's the problem. Here's the here's the problem that I have with it, man. Like, I understand that somebody like that can give a compelling narrative. You know, I had a guy who wrote the downfall of WeWork on a about a year and a half ago. And that story about Adam Newman is is crazy and compelling. And I understand that he was a great speaker.

• 42:15Chris Williamson?

  It makes me feel very, very sad. There are, there are people out there who have that amount of capital, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, or if you're SoftBank's case, like hundreds of millions of dollars to be able to throw around.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 42:31Chris Williamson?

  And they're so stupid that they're prepared to do it based on some guy's charm. I understand.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  You've, you've literally, you've brought it to essentially what it is. And the reason that that's the case is because out there in the world, a lot of these people, most of these people have seen some crazy thing happen that they were not ready to believe. With maybe the most relevant example is one of them being Bitcoin. Like everyone is just like, it's called what? Oh, it's called Bitcoin. You're like, okay. And it became what? Oh, it's like one of the leading currencies in the 21st century. And, and, and so you've got these, these stories, these unbelievable stories that are out there. And when people miss these investment opportunities, they then go, well, I gotta fucking throw my money at the next one.

• 43:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. This seems to be kind of like a, um, this inherent ability, this sort of artistic ability to clairvoyantly see talent in someone, right? You hear these stories about, you know, I, I heard the founder and I just knew that he was going to make it work. And you go, well, this is, and that's the bit that gets me. I think surely the business fundamentals are more important. Surely the potential size of the market, surely the overheads versus the gross GP that you can make on each transaction, surely the liquidity, pick anything, right?

• 44:02Chris Williamson?

  Anything that isn't whether or not homeboy manages to keep eye contact with you during this conversation. Like that, that to me should not be the main determinant. And

• 44:13Chris Williamson?

  It just surprises me that people who have so much capital do not use any more rationality than the rest of us. And you'll know Jim O'Shaughnessy from O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, very good friend, met him in New York a couple of weeks ago. And he said to me, looked me in the eyes and he's like, Chris, it's idiots all the way up.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  Although this is exactly what I was gonna say. It's, it's literally, doesn't matter how high you go, that people are still dumb and don't know what the next thing is and they don't know what's coming. It's crazy.

• 44:46Chris Williamson?

  Man, it blows my mind. So we were talking before we got started about your perennial ability to be a first mover slash almost so early that it can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. Can you kind of lay that out?

• 45:02Speaker 00

  I, I, well, I mean, the, the examples, there's a lot of examples, but like, maybe the podcasting is now a gigantic thing. I've started one of the first podcasts in 2004, right? Many, many years ago. And I remember thinking, oh, the world's gonna get, gonna get transformed. Oh my God, this is gonna kill radio. The same things that people say literally 18 years later, which is wild to think about. And so I have a lot of examples like that in my life. And I've learned to, I've learned to, to push that, that characteristic of mine into be like, wait, wait, wait. Okay. But what's actually gonna happen in 12 months though? So that I'm not thinking that the future will so radically change. I'm now conscious of probably one of the top qualities

• 45:47Speaker 00

  of humanity, which is it just wants things to not change that much. And it wants things to change like a tiny bit. So when we innovate, we try to innovate 10% or 20% at my companies that I, that I built versus 50%, 100%. You can, you can innovate 50 or 100% five, 10 years down the line. But you gotta, you gotta give people a little bit.

• 46:12Chris Williamson?

  One step at a time. Yeah. So I've got a friend, Sky, a good buddy of mine out here in Austin, and he's trying to completely revamp the way that the advertising model works by using Polkadot, right, on the blockchain. And what he's trying to do is he's got this complex plan, which I can't really explain or understand. But it's, I understand he's trying to capture all of the area under the supply-demand curve for potential advertisers, rather than it being at one particular price point. Even if you have a dynamic buy on an ad on the back end, it only moves a little bit, right? You can't capture the entire area underneath the curve. And we've been talking about this, and he's like, dude, and I really, really appreciate

• 46:54Chris Williamson?

  his vision. And I have other friends that got this, they're super excitable, and they're so positive about things. And it's really inspiring, because I'm British. So genetically, that's kind of contrary to how I'm programmed. But we had a chat a couple of weeks ago, and he was like, man, I think I might be kind of trying to make too much of a leap here. I'm trying to basically reimagine the way that advertising's done. And the technology that I'm trying to do it on has only just been finished four months ago. I'm like, yeah. So that kind of speaks, I guess, in a similar way to what you were talking about, that people need to be led, cultural change, especially in the business world, especially with unproven products, especially with state

• 47:39Chris Williamson?

  changes and complete sort of shifts in the way that things operate. It has to be done one step at a time. People need to have proof of concept, which is strange, because in other areas, like Give Me Some Money, proof of concept doesn't necessarily need to be shown. But when it comes to adoption, it does.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  Yes. So the adoption needs to be, what do we do in the next three to six months? This is what the best entrepreneurs do. They're like, what can I do in the next three to six months? And then, but how can I sell? And how can I raise money on the 10 year, the 20 year vision? Or thought, you know, some, some people, we're going to build a hundred year company. Everything is a sales pitch. Okay. We're going to build the first trillion dollar company. This may be an Adam Newman, I don't remember. But those are like, those are the, this guy has a crazy vision. It's unbelievable, even though it's just words, right? But words have an incredible power more than I ever thought. I, when I wrote books, I was like, I was like, that's storytelling. Like, that's not a job. I would laugh at people. They'd be like, I'm a storyteller.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  But I was like, oh, my God, it's actually one of the most powerful jobs in the right space that exists. So if you're able to tell a story,

• 48:50Speaker 00

  that has incredible value in the right places. But then if you execute the way that a restaurant does, right? Super integrally, okay, what do we, how do we do the next thing? Really quick. Everybody has a job. Every job is well managed. Everybody knows how to do it. Everybody, everything falls into place. Now you've got a really well oiled machine. And that's the job of a startup CEO, actually, is to take that capital and then try to execute on de-risking that machine until it's incredibly well understood and you can put it in a spreadsheet.

• 49:18Chris Williamson?

  There's an extension on Google Chrome called Tweepy, I think it's called. And what it does is whenever you go onto somebody's profile, it gives you the highlights of their most liked tweets from all time. And one of the highlights that I pulled up from yours is something very similar to something else I tweeted the other day. So easy to dunk, so hard to build.

• 49:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:42Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean by that?

• 49:43Speaker 00

  Uh, so, I mean, this is, this is, for some reason, this is really, a really popular or offensive tweet to some people. But basically, it's like, it's so easy to, it's so easy to talk shit. About other people's things. It's actually one of the reasons when you're so early to things, right? People are like, that's fucking dumb. And luckily for me, I have friends, it's a funny thing to say, but I have friends that are like, that's fucking dumb, Julian. And they've been that way for so long that are otherwise really respectful people, but they will do that again and again. I write a book, they're like, I'm not gonna fucking read your book. So, so it gives you this really good humility, but also it gives you this incredible perseverance that no matter when people say no to you, you're just like, I'm gonna keep going. I believe, I believe.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  That internal belief is also like another element of making sure that the company works or that your vision comes true. You have to keep the internal belief while making sure you don't quite believe all of your own bullshit.

• 50:40Chris Williamson?

  I know that you have worked with Seth Godin in the past, and he had a thing that he said in his most recent book, where he's talking about, a lot of the time you need reassurance from the world, especially the first time round. And I really, really loved this insight, because there's this sort of belief that we're supposed to have an unwavering self-powered gusto that's just going to carry us through whatever the problems are that we're going to encounter. But the reality of this is that if you don't know that you're going to do something, having self-belief that you're going to be able to get through it with no evidence yet, is kind

• 51:21Chris Williamson?

  of the same as delusion. And after a while, I have a concept called imposter adaptation, which is the reverse. It's when you continue to disprove your imposter syndrome in the real world, and yet it persists. So that's when it's been too chronic. But on the first, on the first side of it, let's say that you're new to the market, or you've just taken a change in jobs, or you've just pivoted to some other sort of pursuit. Like, how do you know that you're going to do well? And with that in mind, it's a much more, I really like the idea of, look, the first time around, try and get people near you that are going to say, yeah, dude, I think that you can do this. This is doing well. Get some feedback from the market. Over time, what you can do is become as pig-headed as someone like Elon

• 52:04Chris Williamson?

  Musk, that believes that he can go out and buy one of the biggest, probably the single most important social media company on the planet in terms of how the platform's used. Because you have whatever 30 years of consistent daily interactions with people where you maybe weren't sure how you were going to get on and come out the other side. But in the first instance, you need a little bit of backup. I really like that.

• 52:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. And by the way, if you have that around you, like the younger you have it, the crazier you can become because then it's like, like if your mother thinks you were a little prince when you were young, you know, which I definitely have a little bit of that that happened to me. It's like, oh my God, I'm invulnerable. Then all of a sudden like you cut your hand. You're like, what? How is this possible? You know, and so you, you need to have some foundations. This is why executive coaches, to tell you the truth, for CEOs are so valuable. It's because it's someone internally that's going to be like, I will give you the self-awareness that's needed. I will help keep you on track. One of the things that people often believe about Elon Musk and these others is that these people are invulnerable and they're solo.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  You know, they're these just solo climbers.

• 53:19Chris Williamson?

  Individual spirit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  They'll climb Mount Everest by themselves with no ecosystem to surround them. But when you pan the camera out, what you, what you actually see is a gigantic like support system. It's just not visible when Elon is tweeting bullshit on the internet, but actually he's incredibly well surrounded. And so you need a combination of this raw, unvarnished pain from the market that really gives you a sense as to what, how reality is going. But at the same time, you're like, you need to be able to step away and do like self-soothing or co-soothing. Right? In order to keep the momentum alive. If you believe yourself too much, you might go on for a really long time

• 54:04Speaker 00

  about something that's fundamentally worthless. And actually, the more money you raise and the more.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  runway you have, so to speak, the more you might waste your time for like years.

• 54:15Chris Williamson?

  The deeper, the deeper that you're gonna dig the hole. Yeah.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. Famous example of Justin Khan, uh, who shut down his second company, forget the name in the moment, a legal company. But because his first, first company, first famous company was Twitch and he sold it to Amazon for a billion dollars. People just threw a hundred million dollars at Justin, right? And he was like, yeah, I'm gonna build a whole business. And there was like a hundred people and a hu- maybe even more. And then he was like, oh, actually, we, we, we never found anything that anyone liked. But he had spent fifty million dollars and a crazy amount of money because people just let him do that.

• 54:52Chris Williamson?

  I'm just looking at the market valuation of Twitch now. Um, it's got the users. What, how do, how is, why is this so hard to work out? Oh, is Twitch, is Twitch private?

• 55:05Speaker 00

  It's private and it was bought by Amazon.

• 55:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it was bought by Amazon for nine hundred and seventy million on August the twenty fifth, two thousand and fourteen.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 55:13Chris Williamson?

  And it's currently got in two thousand and eighteen, it had sixty two million users. So it's probably got.

• 55:20Chris Williamson?

  It's gonna have an absolutely insane number now. What's it say here?

• 55:25Chris Williamson?

  Two million average concurrent viewers on Twitch in twenty twenty. So that was two years ago. Uh, two, nearly two billion monthly watch hours. Uh, how many?

• 55:37Speaker 00

  All watching video games. Yeah.

• 55:38Chris Williamson?

  Why can't you tell?

• 55:39Speaker 00

  Well, not all watching video games, but mostly.

• 55:41Chris Williamson?

  I don't know how many users. Oh, there it is. Um, fifteen billion dollars, current market valuation of Twitch, according to some estimates. And that was twenty twenty from QZ dot com. So, yeah, man, I mean, uh, uh, thi- this whole world, I, I, I find very interesting. I had Jason Calacanis on the show, maybe like two and a half, three years ago, and I really just, I really didn't get it then, and I kind of still don't really get it now. But I'm starting to see at least a little bit of the framework of how everything gets pieced together. Uh, but look, dude, I appreciate you. I appreciate your time today. Where should people go if they want to find out more about what you're up to?

• 56:19Speaker 00

  I, you mean Twitter is the, is the public square. So twitter.com slash Julian. I was early to that too. And, and then my company, a software company that is manages stuff for solopreneurs, especially coaches, practice.do. That's about it. You can look me up. I got, I'm all over the place.

• 56:35Chris Williamson?

  So, I appreciate you, man. Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stalled, you freeze in there. That's what.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 57:01Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 minutes without parent.