All right, it's a new year, but it's the same old us. And we wanted to do something for you guys. So, we wanted to do a mailbag of fan questions. So, people have written in questions. We are going to answer them. You ready to jump in, Sam?
All right. Here we go. Question number one. What is the biggest mistake you've made in your business that you have not spoken about publicly yet? And how has it shaped your decision making?
Man, I've got a great one for this. Tell me if your experience has been with this. So, I tend to hire ambitious young people and I take chances on them. And I hate to say it, but the majority of the time that is a horrible plan. And it's significantly better to hire more experienced people and pay them a lot more money and I get way better results.
So, uh, when was this mistake? Is this like I've been making this mistake forever or this is forever?
Man, look, this is like my mistake. It's like the American dream, you know, like give me your broken, your weak, and your like ambitious young...
Yes. And like I always want to do that because I'm so, you know, I'm into the romantic idea of that. And just I recently, you know, at our at Hampton, we've hired like significantly more experienced people and they cost like two or three times more than a young and upcoming person, but the results are like five or 10 times better, right? And I just make this, I always, I get so emotional and I always find the people say hire high agency people or hire these people whose growth rate is really high, but in general it's just kind of better to say, hey, you already did this at this other company, do it here, please.
So we were just going through a hiring process. I wanted to hire somebody on my content team and we found this kid who was great and he sent in this like wonderful video. Like he made this video application that was super funny and it was well done and I was like, yes, this is my kind of guy, young, green. Yeah, he used to do this, you know, he just graduated, but like this video is amazing. I got to talk to this guy, talked to him, I like him, good dude. And right before we hired him, you know, we asked a very simple question which is like, so we want this to go well, right? We want this to be great and we want this to work. And so like does it make sense to just go with somebody who has never done anything even remotely like this or are there people in the world who have done very similar things that we could go talk to first and should we not like lean in that direction? And as soon as we had that like very simple sanity check, because I'm like you, I fall in love with the sort of angel investing in people idea. It's like the raw up-and-comer, never done anything, found this diamond in the rough. Why do I like that? It's not for generous reasons. It's because it's like I feel cool that I found that thing, right? It's like finding a needle in a haystack, the diamond in the rough.
Um, but that's it. I have such a low hit rate with that, right? By definition, you're going to have a low hit rate with that strategy. And if it matters and if there are people who have done it before that are way more proven in this category, like why are you not going in that direction? So, I've definitely had that same mistake sometimes. It can work. And when it does work, it's the best story. It's the best. But like check this out. This strategy that I've been doing, it's been working well. So, I love hiring consultants and agencies, but I'll say, 'I'm only going to hire you for 2 months, and you're going to do the work for the first 30 days, but then the second 30 days, it's just you teaching me what to do.' And so I have found experience of like getting like a young, ambitious, high agency, green person and teaming them up with an agency, and I have had some results with that. But in general, just hiring more experienced people and paying them more money, it's just typically the way to go. And that sounds so duh, but that's the biggest mistake that I've made.
Well, most of business is just figuring out what are your own leaks in your bucket. And then of course to other people who don't have that leak, they're like, what, I mean, obvious, right? But you have to know what are my biases. And in your case, your biases are like I like to be cheap as hell when I build my companies. This was like how you were before with The Hustle at least. It's like, of course, get the cheap office, put the, you know, get the free desk off Craigslist. You know, our dog will be security and, you know, like you're like, I'm going to build this the frugal way. And then secondly, what if I found a guy like me, just a lovable [__] who could be fixed? And it's like, you know, so those are biases that would lead you too far in that direction. It's not to say you never hire a junior person, but too often defaulting to that. And so you got to know your own biases.
What about yours? Do you have one?
I wrote project selection. So my theory is this. If you are hardworking and you are sufficiently talented, then the only variable that matters is project, what project you pick to work on, right? Because if you're going to work really hard on it and you're talented, then either you're going to be a 10 out of 10 person working on a two out of 10 opportunity or a 10 out of 10 person working on a 10 out of 10 opportunity. And I think I have picked some real dog [__] projects in the past. So, I tried to start a sushi restaurant chain, which like restaurants are one of the worst businesses. Sushi would be one of the worst types of restaurants to do. And by the way, that makes no sense for me as a person to do. The second one, I tried to make the next hit social media app. I tried to make the next Twitter, the next, you know, Facebook, the next Snapchat, and I spent six years going after that as a project to select. And God, that is hard to do.
You try to make a hit social media app, which frankly, you don't really use social media. You used Twitter, but like seldomly to be honest, even though you're good at it. And two, you eventually made a streaming video game like or that's who your market was. Neither of us know or play video games or like streaming...
Or had ever streamed a video game in my life, dude. I made a craft beer app for craft beer enthusiasts. Dude, I can't spell beer. Like, you know, like beer is gross. It makes me burp. I don't know. Like, I don't like it. So, I just picked all these terrible projects that were bad founder fit, just weak market opportunities in general, right? So, this is like very poor projects. I started my e-commerce brand, it's a clothing brand. You've seen...
Clothing. You love clothes.
And that one worked, but it's such a grind because ecom and fashion and apparel and inventory. It's like, dude, one of the worst projects you can select. I think I've been together just those projects I just mentioned, and by the way, those are just the ones I remember just off the top of my head. There's some other doozies in there. Those are 10 years of my professional life. I've only had 17. So, the majority of my professional life has been spent on really poor project selections. And everybody who's talented knows opportunity cost is the biggest cost. So, every year I was working on one of those, it was a year I wasn't working on something that was a better fit for me.
The good news is, Shaan, that even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. And you've taken enough swings that it's worked out.
I've talked before about the way that I know how to make money, about how to build a money-making skill, about how to leverage your time and energy. And the team at HubSpot actually went through the video where I explained all that and turned it into a free downloadable cheat sheet on my four rules of how to make money. Now, this is not, you know, get rich quick advice. It's just core principles, foundational principles about building wealth, things that I wish I knew when I was, you know, just getting started. And so, if you want to download it, it's in the description below. It's totally free. You can go get it. Thanks to the folks at HubSpot for doing the research, making this document, and making it available to all you guys. All right, back to this episode.
So, this is from Dan from LA. I've been a fan ever since the pod was promoted in The Hustle. I think that was four or five years ago. I'm dying for another Sarah's List episode. My wife currently works at [company], but time to jump to the next 5 to 10xer. I'm tired of waiting. Throw a brother a bone. Give me one company that you think would be perfect for the Sarah's List. Now, let's tell the listener, here's what Sarah's List is. So, my wife Sarah was looking for a new job, and we came up with this idea where let's see if you can join a company that has something like a thousand employees. So you can make a great living in terms of like work-life balance because there's some stability presumably and you can make a pretty decent salary, but even still there's enough growth left where your stock could 10x and hopefully make you worth millions. In her case it worked. She did that with Airbnb. She joined Airbnb when they were, I mean, it was a huge company. It was like an $18 billion company with I forget, 4,000 people and it grew to be a, I think, hundred billion company and her, you know, $250,000 a year stock grew to like a million dollars a year stock, something like that. And so Shaan and I have made maybe three different lists where we've predicted what the next Sarah's-style company are. So...
We love this because you want to be a millionaire. Everybody does. I don't know. I haven't actually met anybody who doesn't want that. But not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. That's huge risk. Not everybody has the winning idea. Not everybody wants to be the brilliant investor who finds the gem at an early price. And this path was basically like, no, you're not like the hot shot exec getting this insane package. You just join as a normal employee into a clearly good company that's already in a stable position. You're going to get healthcare. There's like, you know, there's systems in place. There's a nice office to go to. So, you didn't make any of those crazy sacrifices, but just by even if you had a $50,000 a year stock grant, right? So, let's say your total comp was going to be 180k, 150k, and of that, you know, 120 is cash and then the rest is stock. And you get that every year for four years, normal vesting cycle. Well, over those four years, that $200,000 of stock could become a million dollars of stock just by the company naturally growing at the rate it's already growing at. And I thought, what the heck. When I saw that you said that Sarah did this and that you guys were somewhat intentional about what company to pick to go to, she worked at Facebook, then Airbnb, we decided to christen this as Sarah's List.
I think we came up with 30 companies. A couple of them were home runs. So I think Rippling, Figma, Anduril, I don't even remember, Cursor. There's been others. Yeah.
Now the question is, why haven't we done this again? I have an answer which is my prediction, and I think you're going to agree, it's so much harder to predict what the winners are right now because compared to Airbnb and Uber and Lyft and Rippling and these software companies, they were fairly steady growth. With all these new AI companies, it's impossible to predict what's going to hit and it's impossible to predict are they actually going to have longevity.
Sustain, yeah. The hot companies today are like...
They're so proud to be the fastest growing, fastest $100 million in ARR, but it's like, dude, that happened in four months or five months. Like, that's not the same like sure footing that you could stand on. It's not a stable foundation, whereas you could see these things that have been going for seven years just compounding steadily and you could predict that the next seven years will probably be more compounding steadily. But I do have an answer. Do you have an answer for this for Dan from LA?
Okay, so it sounds so boring. There's probably two of them that I would predict. One of them, I heard Scott Galloway make the same argument, so I'm just stealing his. One was your alma mater, Amazon. I do think that you can get incredibly wealthy still. Yeah, Amazon. Yeah.
That's a crazy pick, dude.
No, they've underperformed the market. They've underperformed the market.
But you're saying it's currently a $2.4 trillion company. So, you're saying it's going to be a $10 trillion company, the first ever?
Yeah, because I think that when I use my Alexa, it's still so stupid. Like it doesn't understand AI or when you like use Amazon.com and like search for stuff, the AI is still horrible.
Well, I don't know. What else do you have?
Okay, here, I have two for you. I thought you... There's one, a layup. We're both investors in this one company.
I thought you were going to say that.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That one's pretty good.
Okay. So, I'll give you mine and then you can use that one to...
I don't know if their valuation is public, so careful what you say.
No, I think it is. It was. Okay, so my pick would be Neuralink.
Okay. Why Neuralink? Well, first I think if you're going to join a company, maybe join the company by the greatest entrepreneur ever of all time, which is Elon Musk. Undisputed at this point, I would say. And so the Elon index of companies has just performed at this absurd level. Whether it's Tesla, it's SpaceX, it's xAI now is now like a ridiculously valued company. Neuralink is what's next. So Neuralink is one of these companies that is doing something that very few, like there's no competitors to this. There's like five competitors total in the world and they're all way far behind. What is Neuralink doing? They're putting chips in your brain that today help a quadriplegic person be able to use a computer just with their thoughts. And by the way, this isn't just like a pie in the sky idea. Like there's a guy you could watch him streaming himself playing video games on Twitch using his mind as the controller. And it's pretty insane. They've done it in like monkeys now. They've done it in, I think, two humans now. And it's just getting better and better where it's becoming less invasive. Also, I think now he just tweeted out there's like a, I think there's like a more surface-level implant that they could do that rather than going so deep into the brain.
Can you even work here? Like, can you go... like, how do you get a job?
So Neuralink, I think when I initially said this on Sarah's List, it was like a $2 billion valuation. It's now a $10 billion. So it's already had one Sarah's List jump of 5x. It's going to have another. This is going to be a huge company. Like if you think about computing, so computing went from computers to laptops to mobile phones and the next one is probably some version of glasses or a watch, some version of that. That's what's coming next. And then what comes after that is the computer in your mind, right? Like just attaching yourself to the computer so that you can literally just think and you have access to the internet just from your thoughts. Now some people will say this is dystopian. Some people say they don't want this. Guess what? Once the first people start to have the chip in your brain, you will be the equivalent of like a turtle if you do not. And so the game theory of this is that we're all going to end up with this because if anybody does it, they're going to be a god amongst men, right?
Dude, you're like one of these guys... I think you're like, you don't like taking... I'm going to make a prediction. You never said this. Are you the type of guy who doesn't even like taking medicine?
I don't take much medicine. No.
Don't take any supplements. Don't take medicine.
That's exactly what I thought. The guy who doesn't even take medicine like Advil or something like that. You're saying you're going to be putting a brain chip in your brain?
Again, you have to, right? Like, well, I already basically have the computer attached to my hand if I'm honest. It's in my hand eight hours a day. It's in my pocket, right? It's attached to my body at all times. If I don't have my phone on me, I kind of panic, right? So, it is in some ways already a third limb. But we're, you know, once this goes to the point where I can just have it, you know, in my mind again, it's not really going to be that much of a choice because the people who have it are going to be like walking around like gods compared to the people who don't. And by the way, he's doing the Tesla model. So the Tesla business plan was you first do the really expensive sports car, high cost, low production volume, sell it to just rich enthusiasts who want something cool, a cool toy, and then the cool toy becomes more and more mainstream and more and more, you know, eventually you get to the Model 3, which is now like a mainstream car. With Neuralink, he's doing it where first it's going to solve the problems for people who are quadriplegics. The next one he's going for is people who are blind and, you know, like people who can really improve the quality of life and eventually it'll get to it's kind of like a phone. It's like a consumer device we all just do for fun, right? But it's inarguable that you should not be helping people who are paralyzed, you know, have more function because of this technology.
They have a cool... so the reason I was like, could you even apply to work there, is because I had never like seen their job openings. I thought it was like a project. I didn't realize it was like a proper company yet because if you go to the CEO's LinkedIn, he says like manager of a family office, but they do have a careers page and they're hiring for a bunch of roles in San Francisco or Fremont and Austin and their jobs page is pretty cool. It says you don't have to be a brain surgeon to work at Neuralink and then it lists all the open roles they have. So that's okay. Yeah, I'm...
There's a content creator role. There's a junior accounts payable specialist, right? You can work at these companies.
Dude, I talked to a guy who worked at Facebook in PR. I think he said he was the 400th employee and he was in PR and he said that they did things where, you know, at a large company Amazon or HubSpot had this too, where you get, I forget exactly, do you get a discount on the stock or if you buy the stock they match it or something like that as a perk like 20 grand a year, nothing like crazy. And he told me he did that plus he like just stayed for 10 years and he said he made $90 million.
So, if you're listening to this and you are an accounts payable person, this definitely looks cool. That is a good question.
So, I thought you were going to say Owner for your answer. So, Owner, which is valued kind of in the billion dollar range. I think the last round they raised was a billion dollars. I'll just tell you two things. One, when I got introduced to the investment for Owner, my friend who introduced it said, 'By the way, this is...' He goes, 'Hey, I think you should meet this company.' Why? Well, it's the best founder I've ever invested in and probably the best company I've ever invested in. So, I was like, 'Okay, well, that's an incredibly strong recommendation.'
Within like 10 minutes, the CEO emailed me. And now, this is normal. They'll say, 'Hey, love to set up a time to chat. Here's my calendar. Maybe we could grab coffee next week. We'd love to tell you about what we're doing.' This guy, Adam, is a savage. He goes, 'Hey, Shaan, great to meet you. I just forwarded you our last three investor updates so you can get a sense of how things are going.' And you know, like if you've ever seen that slide that says if they don't have revenue, they'll talk about users, right? Or like if they don't have profit, they'll talk about revenue. If they don't have revenue, they'll talk about users. If they don't have users, they'll talk about potential, right? Or product features. If they don't have features, they'll talk about potential. And it's basically like the ladder of proof of like what do you actually have? And I can tell you what you have based on what you choose to reveal. And so similarly a founder that just says here's the last three investor updates was just like, oh, let me just show you, I have a straight flush, so here's my cards. Because the investor updates will tell you all the numbers about the company because he sent me the last three. I know the trajectory of how fast they're growing across those three updates. I can see how the CEO communicates and I can see what they care about, what their priorities are. So it's like I made the investment without ever talking to the guy instantly once I read those three updates. And since then, every update is just like, 'Hey, so we're crushing it. Here's another gigantic number. Here's how much growth we had just this quarter or just this month instead of like what most companies do in a year.'
And check this out. This guy, Adam, I don't know how old he is. I think of him as like a 22-year-old because I'm...
Dog, he was born in 1999.
One time he like messaged me about his brother. He's like, 'My brother's looking for a project to do.' And I thought it was like a kid and he's like, 'Yeah, he's a content creator.' And like his brother has 30 million followers on TikTok or something like that. I don't know if you saw that, but then he wrote this update yesterday. I read his update yesterday. And I was reading it and he was explaining how the company was killing it and he was like, you know, 'We also had a little bit of churn in December and that really bothers me.' And I thought like, okay, he's bothered because the product sucks or something. He goes, 'I'm bothered because that means that these businesses likely went out of business.' Like these... so basically, sorry, Owner serves small restaurants. That's their customer. It's like an ordering platform for restaurants. And he was like, 'We had some more churn or some churn in December.' And it was all because they likely went out of business because that's when these restaurants tend to go out of business, I guess, is at the end of the year. And I read that line and it was pretty cool because he's like kind of a terminator. Like he says like, 'Here's where we said we were going to go. Here's how we exceeded it. Here's where we said we were going to go. Here's why we exceeded,' like constantly throughout each category of the company. And at the end, he was like, 'We did have some churn and that is part of the bad news.' And it's because they went out of business and that makes me... he goes, I think he said, 'And that devastates me. I'm so saddened that like these guys.' And that was really cool.
Yeah. I ignored that. I was like, I'm just going to think this guy's a terminator. I'm not even going to think of the human side of this, that he actually cares too, because you know...
He also, you know, this guy seems very likable. You know, you can't just have everything. I refuse to accept that. Let's do another question. Which one do you want to go to?
Let's do this one. I don't think you wanted to do this one, which is why I have to do it. Okay. Alex from Brooklyn says, 'Gentlemen, every culture has its quirks. The Japanese make you take your shoes off at the dinner table. The French chicks don't shave their pits. And My First Million is home for asking blunt financial questions. And Sam, you are the king of blunt financial questions. So, it's our turn to return the favor. I won't ask you for the number, but is Hampton over or under $10 million in revenue in 2025?' Alex from Brooklyn.
Uh, over. And that's all I will say because it's one of the businesses, it's my only company and I just want to shut up and just quietly build for the next decade and just keep on trucking and maybe after 10 years I'll come out and reveal some more information. But yeah, it's done really well.
There you go. All right. Good job, Alex. You put Sam on the hot seat. All right, next one. All right. 'I just watched the Jesser episode and Shaan playing the piano had me kind of wowed. It's nuts what you can do in a year. If that was your misogi for 2025, what is each of yours for 2026?' Dave from Mexico City. Yeah. Put some respect on an American living in, I don't even know what it's, CDMX. Whatever that is.
That's Mexico City. You hillbilly. That's Mexico City.
CDMX. How does that stand for Mexico City?
Uh, I think it's some Spanish like, I don't know. It's a Spanish way of saying, I don't know, the city of Mexico.
Sorry, Dave. I didn't get it right.
De nada, Dave. I speak Spanish too.
All right. So, by the way, did you have a misogi in 2025? Did you do that?
Uh, yeah. I trained. So, the point of a misogi, here's the thing people forget about a misogi is it's supposed to be so hard that you have a high chance of failing. And we don't talk about the failure enough, but yes, I trained for a 50-mile run and I just like [__] got hurt and destroyed my Achilles and I couldn't do it. So, I did it and I failed. Now, let me recap something. So, two days ago, Shaan put out this video of him going to Jesse Ller's house. You prefaced it by telling what you did. So, basically, Jesse, friend of the pod, amazing guy, you flew to his house in Atlanta and it seemed planned, but it was very spontaneous that you played piano for him and his wife, Sara Blakely, a very famous entrepreneur. They were in tears. You told us about the video and then it finally got released. It was awesome. But I have a bone to pick. Everyone's saying how amazing this is and all this stuff and they're like, 'You inspired me because you played this beautiful song and people were literally in tears.'
And earlier this year, you said you're going to start playing piano.
I'm pretty sure you've been playing piano for years and years and years. And like...
You did not just pick this up from scratch.
Uh, no, I haven't been playing for years and years and years. I did as a kid. My parents did buy a piano and they probably got us, I don't know, a couple months of lessons when I was maybe eight or something like that. But by the time, I'm like 38 now, I had forgotten everything. So when I started this year, I started from scratch this year. But yes, technically when I was...
But I remember us being somewhere and seeing a piano and you sat down and I thought you like played a song.
I did know how to play two things on the piano. So, I knew how to play the intro to James Bond GoldenEye, like just like a one-hand song type of thing. And I think I also knew the beginning of Fur Elise, which is like a kind of a classic piano song through muscle memory, but I couldn't, like, didn't know how to read sheet music, didn't know how to do the notes, didn't know like what the keys were called type of deal, right? I just had memorized because, you know, at some point my sister or somebody had showed me like, hey, watch, push white, white, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, white, white, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black, and like that'll sound like James Bond. Like that was the level I was at.
Well, it was very good. Okay. And so the question was, um, what was the question? What's your misogi going to be this year?
What's it going to be this year for each of us?
I have one. I'm trying to figure out the exact way to frame it, but I think I told you this. I deleted all my social media apps, all the consumption. So I said I'm going to go dark in terms of consuming. Like I basically was like, how do I trade consuming stuff that people put 20 seconds of thought into, right? Like a tweet, people put about 20 seconds of thought into it, to doing things that people put like 20 years of thought into, which is books. And so I deleted Reddit, I deleted Twitter, I deleted Instagram, I deleted Facebook, deleted all those apps. And instead I just, if I open up my phone, I want to kill boredom. I have to open up Kindle. It's like the only thing left to do on my phone is Kindle. And so I basically made a list. I was like, 'All right, here's the 26 for 2026, right? Like the 26 books I want to read in 2026.' And I have kind of a hit list. These are books honestly I've probably owned for years, have thought about reading, I've heard really good things about, but hadn't actually read. And so I started that a couple weeks ago. So that's going good. The only other one that might count here is I have this life bucket list idea of coaching a high school basketball team. And so like walking away from business, not focusing on business for a season, which is three months. And so I started that last month and our season goes till end of February. But basically there's like a local high school basketball team and I've become an assistant coach and it's like we want to go to the state tournament and win and that's the goal.
I know your first game you got spanked. I think you said the second game went better.
Yeah, we are. What are we now? Six and three. So, you know, we're doing all right. We're getting better as a team. And right now it's all about like, just can we improve? But I'm basically spending like, I don't know, I'm at this, I'm basically going to practices and games, you know, four days a week roughly. And just me, like I get my coach's whistle and my little whiteboard and I drive to this high school and then it's just, I'm doing it. I'm doing the actual thing. I'm like coaching this high school basketball team. I'm an assistant coach. I'm not the head coach.
I have a two-year-old girl and then I have a two-month-old little girl. And I have underestimated leading up to it how difficult it would be. And even though I have grandparents around and people helping out, my wife is helping and, you know, obviously running the show there, I have underestimated how challenging it was. And so, frankly, I kind of feel like I'm holding on right now. My goals are simple. I'm trying to eat 200 grams of protein a day and get out of bed at 6 a.m. So, I have pretty small ones because I've always been, you know, ever since I got into fitness, I've always been good at maintaining a fairly fit state. Right now, I'm at the lowest of my fairly fit era. And so, I just need to eat my protein. And going to bed early and waking up early, this is so rudimentary, but it has just had the biggest impact on my day's productivity. And so I don't really want to set a big goal right now because I am kind of hanging on.
Yeah. Although I do think those are big. I know a lot of people who have that goal and don't do that thing. That is actually quite difficult to do both of those things that you just mentioned. If you actually did those, those are high-leverage things. Also, I'll say two things. One, I think it's great to acknowledge the season you're in. I think people want everything to be constant. And there are seasons where you're able to be full out. There's seasons where you're in recovery mode. There's seasons where you're in, you know, nesting mode where you're just like, look, all that matters is like protecting the nest because there's like these baby eggs here right now and like that's all that really matters. I don't need to distract myself with a random hunt over here. I need to stay at the nest. And so, I think knowing the season and not beating yourself up about that is something that ambitious sort of type A people struggle with. It's like you got to give yourself some grace, you know, when you're so wired towards achievement of random goals.
You didn't do a good job of warning me, though. You should have warned me. I didn't realize how challenging this would be.
Well, everybody says the same thing. It's like, oh, it's man-to-man defense now. There's two of you and two of them. Like...
I did not understand. Like, sometimes it feels like my wife is my roommate and like I barely have gotten to know my little girl, my new baby, because I'm with the eldest, right? So, it's my job to take care of her and like you got to take her out of the house because she's going to grab the pacifier out of the mouth. You know what I mean?
It's definitely a second baby blindside for dads because the first baby is the one you think everything's going to change and it's going to be like, 'Oh my god, my life's going to get really crazy.' And then it's like, 'That's all right. I got this. This is not so bad. That's different, but not crazy.' So, you get this false sense of security and then when the second baby comes, it's like nobody... you had already given up. You'd already stopped worrying about it in a way. And the second one is the blindside, especially for the dad because for the mom, who you didn't realize how much she was carrying the team, but now she has to focus on the new baby and that means the existing kid is your kid and all of their needs and all of their time is like, you know, on your clock and that is very... that's a big wakeup call.
Just getting her socks on, like that can be an ordeal. Like just these small things that I just kind of dismissed. So, I'm frankly, I'm not drowning, but my cup is a bit full.
All right, here's another question. So, this is what is it? Gary Vee, it's the Gary Vee one. All right, so I like this one. 'Gary Vee wants to buy the Jets. Sam, you're working hard to grow Hampton now. Why are you doing all this? Are you trying to buy all the pawn shops in the US, brother? In all seriousness, what is the FU money purchase that you want if this is a home run?' This is Tar from the Bay. I guess that's the Bay Area.
So, when I moved to New York City, I got this like really big nice apartment and I love it. And I've gotten so much joy having family come and stay and be comfortable that I have my eyes set on... I do in the next couple years want to buy a huge like lavish, you know, $15 or $25 million apartment. I do. That is something that I definitely want. But more than anything, I saw this photo...
$15 or $20 million apartment is your goal?
Why apartment? $15, $20 million? Shouldn't you be getting like a city block?
Like you get like one of the brownstones at least. Like it's an apartment.
I don't want a brownstone. I've rented one before. I don't like them. I like having a doorman.
What's the dream building? Is there a dream building in New York that's like the cool one to be in?
Well, it's different flavors. So like there's like this thing called Billionaires' Row and it's like right next to Central Park and that's what a lot of the really rich tycoons like, Bill Ackman lives there and it's $100 million for a fancy apartment there. It's insane. It's just absolutely insane how rich some people are and how much this real estate costs. That's not my flavor. That's like opulent. I mean it's all opulent if it's $20 million, but that's like, you know, like you're the master of the world type of apartment and it's all clean and cool looking. But what I'm really working to do, I don't like Donald Trump, but I saw this photo of him working at his office and he had just left a meeting with a bunch of his employees and his wife and two kids, the boys, I forget their names, Don Jr. and the other guy. They came up to him while he was working. And the cool part was that they lived in the same... he owned the building and they lived in the same building where he worked and the kids could see him working and he was just able to do stuff and it was like total work-life integration. That's my dream. That's really what I'm working towards. I really want to do that.
Wow. I never took you, Sam, to be the penthouse kind of guy.
I'm not a penthouse type of guy, but... well, I guess I am. I just said I wanted to buy a penthouse, but...
Yeah, I think you just said that's your dream. Yeah, I think by definition...
You're like, I'm not a penthouse type of guy yet.
We used to have this funny thing on the pod where it was like, you know, we're just two entrepreneurs with big dreams. Shaan wants to buy the Lakers and Sam would love to buy a lake.
I feel like you were so much more likable then. Now, not like Manhattan Sam, you just lost like 30 points of likability with that answer. What are you doing here telling the truth over here, bro?
You know what it's rooted in? It just so happens that I live in Manhattan. But really, if I lived in like, let's say, St. Louis, Missouri, I would say I want the fattest house in the cul-de-sac that has like a soccer goal in the back and like a basketball goal and like all the kids play in my yard. Like, that's really what it is. It just so happens that I live...
Yeah, that sounds so much better.
It just so happens that I live in Manhattan. In order to do that, you have to spend $20 million.
But by the way, this Gary Vee buying the Jets thing, I've talked about this before. To me, this is like a masterclass in personal brand. So I always say like for a personal brand you want these five Ds. One of the Ds is what's the dream? And if your dream is I want to make so much money it's like crazy, I just want to be a billionaire, it just sounds greedy, right? So what Gary did which is brilliant is he's like, I want to buy the Jets. Now there's a lot of brilliance in this one. It gives him the air cover to go try to pursue a bunch of money without just seeming greedy. He didn't say I want to buy the Yankees. He wanted to buy this lovable loser, his childhood team, the New York Jets, that's never done anything and try to turn them around. And so it's like there's a nobility to the mission. There's this likability to the mission where it's like a turnaround project. Everybody likes an underdog type of deal. And it's something a lot of people remember about him, like something he dreams of doing. And so I think that Gary doing that is yet another example of Gary really understanding marketing and personal brand. Do you know how, so Shaan and I like the UFC and at the UFC after every fight Dana White does a press conference and he lists like five or 10 stats. So who got the fight of the night, who got the bonus, and then one stat that he always lists is how much money they made at the gate and it's supposed to mean like this is how many fans came to the fight. But the tickets are like two grand. Like I went recently and it was like $800 for bad seats. And it's pretty funny that he like is using that as like, look how many people are coming. It's like dude, no, this is just how you're charging so much money for a ticket. So you're like bragging. It's sort of like when Gary says like I've noticed in Gary's videos, people will be like, let me help you buy the Jets and achieve your dream. That's so much better than people saying let me put more money in your pocket and become a billionaire, net worth to $450 million in net worth. You know what I mean?
