💉 Lean into what’s weird
#5 Best of this week in BUSINESS
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What you need to know
💉 Lean into what’s weird
🏝 BONUS IDEA - Copy My Trip
👩🎨 Create your perfect hire
🚀 Moonshots vs lifestyle businesses
How to spot trends + bonus idea
My First Million, Episode 301, From Coder to Cartel Boss - The Jeff Bezos of Organized Crime
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Weird is easily dismissed. Most of us fall into the same old pattern: First you ignore something, then you laugh at it, then you fight it, then it becomes normal. We inherently dismiss things that we deem weird at the time. But, oh boy, how wrong are we.
I don’t have a nose for the next big thing but there are people who have that as their superpower
I used to make fun of those people because every time they did something weird I’d point out how weird it is and kind of laugh at it
I remember in college, a guy lived next door to me, I walked in and he’s playing a video game
He turned to talk to me and the game kept going. I was like: are you even playing? And he was like: no I’m watching the match from last night from Korea. This was back in 2006
I’m like dude, say 5 more lame things than that and I’ll give you $100
Fast forward 10 years, our company gets acquired by Twitch and all of a sudden my title is Director of Esports
I was making fun of that behaviour and sure enough it becomes a multi billion dollar idea, watching other people playing video games
Now when I hear something weird I’m immediately like: Let me pull up a chair, so tell me, why do you do this? Do other people do this? How often do you do this?
The weirder it is, the more I want to lean into that phenomenon because I know it’s just a matter of time until they discover this is a totally normal behaviour
Shaan Puri
Why it matters: The future is already here, you just don't know it yet. If you want to start or join a business in a growing market, lean into things that seem weird to most people you know. Find people who already live in the future and learn from them.
Between the lines: Reddit communities are a great place to find behaviours, wants and needs that can be productised or serviced. A few examples:
r/3Dprinting (1.2M+ members) 3D printing is revolutionising healthcare. Personalised prosthetics are now available if you’ve lost your hands, arms or legs, and a 3D printed medication is FDA approved
r/occulus (400K+ members) Futurists have predicted the dawn of VR for decades. Sure, they were a little premature, but virtual reality will likely become an everyday part of our lives
r/Biohackers (40K+ members) This subreddit is dedicated to DIY biology, pharmacology and grinding. Grinders are a community of body hackers - they enhance or change the body’s functions using cybernetic devices. Backstreet surgery, anyone?
Listen here:
My First Million: From Coder to Cartel Boss - The Jeff Bezos of Organized Crime on Apple Podcasts
Bonus idea: Shaan and Sam are known for their actionable business ideas. This one’s a gem. It’s called Copy My Trip.
Ok, so I’m booking a vacation right now. I want to go to Hawaii for example
I’m Googling which island? I don’t fucking know. Which resort? Oh God, I’ve got to figure out which resort
It matters. It’s going to change my experience if I go to the wrong place or the right place
My wife follows all of these influencers on Instagram that are mummy influencers
When they buy something, she’s like: that’s a good thing, I’m going to buy that thing too
I don’t get why they’re not saying copy my trip. You wanna go to Disneyland? Literally click this and here’s the full itinerary. I get their whole trip that I can copy
They can have a TikTok or Instagram story version that I can just browse and be like: Oh yeah, this looks fun, I wanna do this
I went on Expedia and was like: this is an awful experience. Here’s an overwhelming list of 100 options ranked in 5 different ways. I don’t know if the reviews are real or not
I think there should be something called Copy My Trip that anyone can do. It will create a profession of professional travellers. They go and find the best path on how to have a trip to Bali or whatever
Shaan Puri
This is a business idea that will be done. It’s awesome. The question is by who?
Sam said you can do it for weddings. What other businesses can you do ‘Copy My X’ for?
Bachelor / bachelorette parties
Engagement parties
Baby showers
Date nights
Staycations
Workouts / fitness regimes
Diets / meal planning
What else? 🤔
In youth we trust
Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman, Five surprising ways to rethink your hiring
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The hiring market is HOT right now. I’ve seen Marketing Executives with less than 2 years experience get competing offers for $70K. And that’s nothing compared to Silicon Valley giants. A software engineer straight out of college can earn up to $198K at Snapchat through base salary, stock options and bonuses. How on earth do you compete with that?
You often need candidates with a skillset that simply doesn’t exist. This is when you need to create the candidates yourself
Perhaps the most impactful example of this in Silicon Valley is Google’s Associate Product Manager program created by Marissa Meyer
Marissa was convinced that you could hire smart people and train them to be the colleagues you’re looking for
Marissa found her first APM hire, 22 year old Brian Rakowski
What project did Marissa choose to ease him in on? She gave him the whole of Gmail
This type of controlled chaos is a great way to foster innovation
The APM program solved Google’s hiring struggles and created the most sought after technologists in Silicon Valley
Reid Hoffman
Why it matters: Hiring top talent gives you the biggest long term competitive advantage. Assuming you don’t have an unlimited budget, you’ll need to mould your rising stars into future leaders. But, how do you do that? Controlled chaos.
Here are three ingredients for turning youthful chaos into controlled brilliance:
Hire for aptitude. It’s not a deal breaker if someone needs to learn a certain skill. The key thing is their rate of learning - how quickly can they learn new skills, software and knowledge?
Hire for attitude. This is a deal breaker. A candidate must be willing to take on responsibility and dive in at the deep end. You can’t push them in if they don’t have a desire to swim.
Build the right culture. Your company needs to create opportunities to thrive and embrace failure. Employees should feel comfortable asking questions, sharing ideas and challenging assumptions. Without this, you’ll stifle creativity and growth.
Between the lines: I used to think company values were a load of fluff. That changed when Mike Pallett joined Medicspot as our Chief of Staff. Values are the foundation for a great company culture. To scale, these values needed to be documented and integrated in everything you do. Here are a few things Mike implemented that worked wonders:
Less is more. Don’t have 10 values just because. We chose to have 3 so they’d be truly remembered and adopted.
Align with performance. Employees score themselves and peers against our values and associated behaviours every review.
Celebrate successes. Employees celebrate each other exhibiting our values. The top 3 employees every month get a gift card.
You can always make the right people if you can’t hire them. But to do so, you need the right culture for people to thrive.
Listen here:
Masters of Scale: Five surprising ways to rethink your hiring on Apple Podcasts
Show Masters of Scale, Ep Five surprising ways to rethink your hiring - 12 Apr 2022
Go big or go small
My First Million, Episode 300, Getting Rich Quick Sucks - Andrew Wilkinson Teaches You How to Get Rich Slow
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Tonight’s match promises to be a classic. In the red corner, we have the 800-pound gorilla, the Silicon Valley juggernaut ….. the VC-backed moonshot ideas. In the blue corner, we have David beating Goliath, the tortoise beating the hare ….. the bootstrapped lifestyle business.
Who will win? The $1B+ valuation or the $1M+ exit? Let’s find out.
I’m going to give you the devils advocate to the ‘don’t go for the big homerun’
I believe it’s true that a lifestyle business and a moonshot business will both take up all of your time - so you might as well go big
For example, I’ve run a restaurant and I’ve run a tech company
In both cases they were on my mind all of the time, I was working on it 5 to 6 days a week at a minimum
The restaurant was going to be able to spin off $150K to $200K from that location and the tech company could be worth $100M in 2 years
That’s a different size of the prize for the same level of effort
But the probability of success is better with a lifestyle business
Shaan Puri
Why it matters: As much as we try to force people into different buckets, the type of business you start and how you fund it depends on your goals and your stage of life. Me and Shaan both have 2 kids under 3, so we’re working on newsletter businesses. We value flexibility over impact.
IMO WeWork got many things wrong but they got one thing spot on: Do what you love. Their slogan stands the test of time. If you’re going to work hard to build a business, make sure it’s something you’re passionate about. It’ll 10X your mental health as a founder.
Between the lines: Some entrepreneurs adopt a third school of thought. They start with a lifestyle business and generate enough cash to tackle a moonshot idea. Think of it like a staircase. Each successful business allows you to climb to the next level.
Elon Musk did this on the grandest scale. He sold Zip2 for $307M in 1999, PayPal was acquired for $1.5B in 2002, and he’s now CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, worth over $1T. We’re not comparing ourself to the greatest inventor of our generation, but it validates the idea that in 99.9% of cases you need to take baby steps before fulfilling your moonshot idea.
Listen here:
My First Million: Getting Rich Quick Sucks - Andrew Wilkinson Teaches You How to Get Rich Slow o...
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