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 your your broken, your weak, and your 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 uh recently, you know, uh 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 and and I just make this I always in my 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 do it here please.
So we were just going through a hiring process. I wanted to hire somebody on my content team and um 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 cuz I'm like you I fall in love with the the sort of angel investing in people idea it's like the like the raw upandcomer never done anything found this diamond in the rough why do I like that it's not for generous reasons it's cuz it's like I feel cool that I found that thing right it's like finding a needle in a hay stack the diamond in the rough. Um, but that's in it is like 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 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 I'm going to 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." Uh, 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 I 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 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 bone biases.
What about yours? Do you have one? I wrote project selection. So my the 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 on a two out of 10 opportunity or a 10 out of 10 person working on a 10 out of 10 opportunity. And uh 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. 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 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 mark market opportunities in general, right? So, this is like very uh very poor projects. I started my e-commerce brand is a clothing brand. You've seen...
clothing. You love clothes.
And that one worked, but it's such a grind cuz ecom and fashion and apparel and inventory. It's like, dude, one of the like 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 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 the majority of my professional life has been spent on really poor project selections. And 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, Sean, that even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. And you've taken enough swing that it's worked out.
I've talked before about the way that I know how to make money, about how 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. Uh, I've been a fan ever since the pod was promoted in the hustle. I think that was uh four or five years ago. I'm dying for another Sarah's List episode. My wife currently works at Whimo, 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 let's tell the listener, here's what Sarah's list is. So, my wife Sarah uh 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 uh 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. Uh 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 a $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 Sean 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 I haven't actually met anybody who doesn't want 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 the brilliant investor who finds the the the gem uh 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 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 a heck. When I saw that you when you when 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 uh Sarah's list.
I think we came up with 30 companies. A couple of them were home runs. So I think Rippling, Figma, Andre, uh I don't even remember to cursor. There's been others. Yeah.
Now the question is is why haven't we done this again? I have an answer which is my pred my 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 a 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 they're so proud to be the fastest growing fastest 100 million in ARR, but it's like, dude, that happened in 4 months or 5 months. Like, that's not the same like sure footing that you could stand on. It's not a stable foundation where 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 uh Dan from LA?
My Okay, so it sounds so boring. There's probably two of them that I would predict. One of them, um, I heard I heard Scott Galloway make the same argument, so I'm just stealing his. One was your old your alma moater. Amazon. I I do think that you can get incredibly wealthy still. Yeah, Amazon. Yeah. Uh...
that's a crazy pick, dude. They've been...
No, they they've underperformed the market. They've underperformed the market. And I...
But you're saying it's currently a $2.4 trillion company. So, you're saying it's going to be a10 trillion company, the first ever?
Yeah, because I think that um 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 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 I'll give you mine and then I'll then you can you can use that one to to...
I don't know if their valuation is public, so careful what you say.
No, I think it is. It it it was okay. So my pick would be Neuralink.
Okay. Why Neurolink? 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. UN 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 um XAI now is is now like a ridiculously valued company. Neurolink is what's next. So Neurolink is one of these companies that is doing something that very few like there's no say no com no competitors to this. There's like five competitors total in the world and they're all way far behind. What is Neurolink 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're do they've done it in like monkeys now. They've done it in 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 surface more surface level uh implant that they could do that rather than going so deep into the brain. Um...
can you even work here? Like can you go like how do you get a job?
So Neuralink uh 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 this is going to be a huge company. Like if you think about um 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 uh 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 this is the 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 you're like one of these guy 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 cuz 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 the Tesla model, 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 um you know, eventually you get to the Model 3, which is now like a mainstream car. With Neurolink, 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 but it's inarguable that you should not be helping people who are paralyzed u you know have more more function because because of this technology.
They have a cool um 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 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 Freedmont and um Austin and their jobs page is pretty cool. It says you don't have to be a braid surgeon to work at Neurolink 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 that 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 um 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 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, the person who my friend who introduced it said, "By the way, this is the 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 a incredibly strong recommendation." Within like 10 minutes, the CEO uh 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 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, Sean, 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 uh potential, right?
Or products, features. If they don't have features, they'll talk about potential. And it's basically like the latter of proof of like what do you actually have? And I can tell you what you have because I base it on what you choose to reveal. And so similarly, a founder that just says, 'Here's the last three investor updates,' was it was just like, 'Oh, let me just show you I have 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 here's another gigantic number. Here's how much growth we had just this quarter or this 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. Um, 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 like so basically Owner, Owner serves small uh 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 cuz 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 had we did have some churn and that is part of the bad news.' And it 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 it was 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 to cuz 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 you want to go to?
Let's do this one. I 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 you put Sam on the hot seat. All right, next one. All right. I just watched the Jesser episode and Sean 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 It's a Spanish way of say I don't know. The city of Mexico. Sorry, Dave. I didn't get it right.
D Alio, Dave, I I speak Spanish, too.
All right. So, by the way, did you have a a misogi in 2025? Did you do that?
Uh, yeah. I I trained. So, the point of a misogi, the 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, on uh two days ago, Sean 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 very um it seemed planned, but it was very uh um spontaneous that you played piano for him and his wife, uh Sarah 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 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 I had by the time I'm I'm like 38 now, I like forgotten everything. So when I started this year, I started from I started from scratch this year. But yes, technically when I was...
But I remember you I remember us being somewhere and seeing a piano and you sat down and I thought you like played a song.
buying your time. That's buying a nanny. That's, you know, getting a personal trainer or something like that. And the other is as a measuring stick. And I realized that like all the big money purchases, like the things you would need tons and tons of money for, they tend to be measuring stick things. Like I've almost run out of like money as a tool to improve my life ideas. You know, I've done a lot of the big ones. And so I guess I don't really want to switch into that gear of money as money as a measuring stick.
But you enjoy that penthouse, Sam.
I'm sure people will think you're very cool. All right, let's go to the next question.
Dude, do you remember the kids' house when you were younger where it was like the open door where it's like a campus you just everyone can like hang out?
I've aspired to be that forever. It just so happens that you have to spend a lot of money in Manhattan to do it. All right, let's do this one. Early on, you guys had a ton of friends on the show as guests. Give us OGs an update on the OGs. Where's Sulie? Where's Raone? Where's Jack Smith? Is there anyone else that I missed?
So when Sean started MFM, the first 50 episodes maybe, a lot of people don't realize this, MFM is at like some number between 700, 800 episodes, I don't remember exactly. The first some number, I don't know, 25 or 50, it was just Sean interviewing people and all those people were being interviewed. And also you and I, when it was just when I came on, it was just like 5,000 people listening. We basically just talked about our friends. And so for the OGs...
or we had them on and be like, hey, what's what are you up to? You know, like that sort of deal.
Before we were chasing clout, we were just hanging out with our buds.
Once we figured out the YouTube algorithm, things changed. But before that, we invited our friends on the pod a lot.
Okay, let's do an update. So, Sulie, do you want to talk about Sulie?
Okay. Sulie is Sulaman Ali. He's one of our friends. He's one of my best buddies. There's a question later that I think will be a good explanation of who Sulie is, but he is an entrepreneur. He built a company called Tiny Co, which was like mobile games. So think like Candy Crush, but he licensed the IP for Family Guy. So he made like the Family Guy mobile game, the Harry Potter mobile game, those types of things. Sold Tiny for a bunch of money, nine figures. He then helped his brother start and sell Native Deodorant. So the Ali brothers are prolific and they've both been on the podcast. Sulie did something that I really respect and admire, which was he was able to understand what matters. So he's like, Sulie's in his 40s. He's been super successful. And when you're successful, like winners have options. You get deals put on your plate every day, things you could go invest in and make a bunch of money. You have people who want to come work for you and, you know, start companies with you. You have more knowledge about how to win in the game of business. And it is very tempting to just go and go get more success because success feels really good and you're good at it. And it's very tempting to do that because there might be other areas of your life that you're not so good at where you're not getting that same feedback loop of I'm awesome and this is awesome and my results are awesome. And what Sulie did, which I thought was great, was he didn't make the mistake of just chasing more success. He started to look at those other areas. So first thing he did was he started working out religiously every day. Like I started being like, 'Hey, what are you working on today?' He's like, 'I don't know, but I scheduled my workout. That's the most important thing that I did.'
Dude, he takes more workout classes than like a 23-year-old Manhattan woman who works in PR.
And he takes the same classes that she takes also.
He introduced me to like Rumble Boxing and I think Michael's boot camp and...
So, he started doing that. Then he was like, I want to have kids, like that's the next chapter. I want to have kids. So, he just had a kid and he has resisted the AI wave to focus on having a kid for now. We'll see what he does. I think he wants to take a very big swing in the world of AI and robotics. We'll see what happens, but he's a first-time dad. So, that's the Sulie update. Ramon is doing a very cool company called Aphina. If you've ever looked in your house and looked at the tap and your tap water and you're like, I don't want to drink tap water. I want to drink clean water. I don't want water that has heavy metals in it, chemicals in it. You know, a lot of people don't even know the water supply in most cities is like very interlinked with the sewage system. Like it's a pretty gross thing to drink tap water, but we all bathe in tap water. We put it all over our naked bodies. And so Ramon has built a company that's around clean water for the home. And so it started with a filtered shower head. So how do you shower in water that's going to be clean on your skin and good for your hair? It's called Aphina. And he's going into other categories with clean water for the home. And so Ramon's basically gone back to what he knows best,
