- Duration: 63 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JE6WCTY36M1H2MKS6FBE1481 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JE6WCTY36M1H2MKS6FBE1481)
Transcript
[Ben Ornstein]: What’s up, how you doing? Pretty good, how are you? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Good. [Michael Houck]: Busy day. I thought we were going to have two GoStraighting clients churn, but neither one is churning, which is great. [Ben Ornstein]: That is good news. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’ll see how they go, but we’re at least good for another month, which is great. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Awesome. [Ben Ornstein]: How about you guys? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: What’s going on today? Not much. [Max]: Uh, I need to get to the ads this afternoon for viral examples. And, um, it’s more ad sales outreach just now. [Michael Houck]: So, well, I owe you the physically written one or the printed one or whatever it is with the pen. I’m going to find a print today and record that. Um, so I’ll get that to you tonight. Cool. Okay. So I’m opening up linear here on the fundraising explained video. Thoughts on it? Thoughts on, like, things we should keep in mind before we write the script? Do we have, like, a notes doc, Ben? I don’t know if you were starting one or not. [Ben Ornstein]: or how to pick who should be CEO? [Michael Houck]: Um, how to pick who to be, who should be CEO. We’re going to do for the newsletter this week. Fundraising explained was the video because we’re not going to be able to get the video edited by this Saturday. So this Saturday, um, we need a deep dive. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s not related to the video. Got it. Um, That was the research I did, so I misunderstood. [Michael Houck]: Oh, no worries. What was the you? You did for the newsletter. [Ben Ornstein]: I did the yeah, I did a bunch of research for how to pick who should be the CEO. [Michael Houck]: Great, I mean that’s valuable. We should go over that too. A little less urgency. I think to go over that, but we can do that maybe at the At the end, Max, do you have any notes on the fundraising explained? [Max]: No, I came up with new ideas. [Michael Houck]: We’re off to a great start here, guys. Okay, let’s do this. Let’s punt this meeting that we’re going to have to tomorrow, and tomorrow we’ll go over the fundraising explained video stuff. We can, during this time, then go over the newsletter stuff, Ben, that you did research for, and then Max, we can talk about new ideas that you came up with, too. And then I think there’s one other thing we wanted to talk about, too, over Slack, but I’ve been in back-to-back, so my mind is escaping me what that was. [Ben Ornstein]: I think I was DMing with one of you about it. Was it about the podcast framing? [Michael Houck]: Yes, that was it. Let’s go in that order. Let’s start with a newsletter, then topics, then framing. Okay. Okay, so let me, do you wanna share your screen, Ben? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yes, let me do that. [Ben Ornstein]: So we’re here. [Ben Ornstein]: So yeah, my bad. [Michael Houck]: Definitely, I should have double checked on that one. No, all good. [Ben Ornstein]: There’s a lot going on right now. Yeah. Yeah. Share screen. OK. [Ben Ornstein]: So do you see how to pick who should be the CEO? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yes. Perfect. [Ben Ornstein]: So started by doing the same kind of process that we were, the updated podcast process, where it was just looking for cool data points or stories that we can include in the long form. And the first one I found was a great Gary Tan video, where he talked about his pitch story. So there’s a whole bunch of good sources on that. There’s a couple of good stories, stuff from Ben Horowitz on why he won’t fund companies that don’t have a singular CEO. And so one angle we could take is more of things that founders shouldn’t do when they’re thinking about who should be the CEO. That’s one way, because that’s that’s and it’s actually not even something I wrote down at the end. But I kind of talked about like at the end what we should include and then things maybe we should not include. One thing that I commonly saw in terms of what not to include was everyone talked about how it’s so obvious at the beginning who should be the CEO and who first of all I don’t think that’s true. I imagine it’s not obvious who should be the CEO early on. How can you confirm that was not an easy decision? [Michael Houck]: I can confirm that it was an easy decision for all three of us and we all had different answers. Well that’s it. [Ben Ornstein]: Because there were people that in in multiple places that and I and I believe I have the sources above or the like, It’s so obvious who the CEO should be. I just think that’s crap advice. There’s nothing actionable there, even if it’s true. There’s nothing that can be learned where it’s just like, for aspiring founders, they’re gonna go into it saying, all right, well, everyone said it was so obvious, so I guess it should be really easy. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think an interesting angle we could take based on that is like, in the intro of the piece, just like, You know, everyone says it’s so obvious, but here’s how to actually make the decision. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. Another one that people are saying, or I also my other what not to include was the CEO should be the one who is experienced raising capital. Duh. Like, obviously, if you have a co-founder that has experience with that, especially if we’re talking about a venture backed company, then yeah, that person probably should be the CEO because they’re going to be the one that’s interfacing with investors. To me, that was another obvious one. And again, not all that helpful. I don’t know. Am I missing something there? [Michael Houck]: I agree that I don’t think that’s very helpful in the case where you’re building a venture-backed company and one of you has experience raising from investors. And the other or others don’t, I think that’s a strong data point in the camp of have that person be the CEO, but it’s not like an overarching 100%, right? Because like maybe the person who’s raised from investors before was on a two-person technical team where one of them just took on the role of CEO, but on this team, they’re better suited to be the CTO, right? Because they’re the non-technical person. So I don’t think it’s like a like a OK. If that happens, then the answer is this, but it’s obviously a strong data point in that in that camp, right? [Ben Ornstein]: So those were the like the obvious things that I thought shouldn’t be included. What to include any stories I feel like are always good, especially your writing style. It goes. Stories go quite well, so obviously I think the same structure that we did for the video that we posted on Saturday, where you kind of intertwined your own story in this. And the reason I think that’s so strong is like, that is a unique point that only we can talk about, rather than like, no one can copy that. So I love that style of including your personal story in there. And then some of the other stories like Gary Tan, Alex McCaws, where he talked about that two of his companies were destroyed by a 50-50 split. And I didn’t find more details on that. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Interesting. [Ben Ornstein]: But yeah, and I didn’t even put this here, but the 50-50, and it doesn’t go hand in hand with exactly what we’re talking about, who you should pick to be the CEO, but it’s the non-50-50 equity split is a interesting framing for when you’re determining those, the person who should be at more than 50%. Just if you can agree on that, or if that, if it seems obvious that one of two people should have more than 50, that person, person should be the CEO. That could be another frame. It doesn’t perfectly answer the question, but do you see what I’m getting at there? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, if, if you are doing a non 50 50 split, and I think, you know, YC says never do a non 50 50 split, but in my opinion, there probably are less cases to do it. If you are doing it on 50-50 split, it wouldn’t make sense for the CEO to be the person who has less. That would create absolute chaos because the CEO would say, here’s our strategy, and the other person could decide to just be like, actually, no. Right. [Ben Ornstein]: The other thing I came across a couple of times was people talking about, OK, if you have three founders, then if the first two that have the majority of equity agree or disagree, then the third one can be the tiebreaker. But that one has, that third founder has less equity than the other two. And it’s like, it’s just gonna lead to chaos. And that doesn’t really solve things either. So just another interesting data point on that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, non 50-50 splits or non-equal splits are very challenging. It’s almost just not worth it in some cases, say, let’s just do 50-50, move on with our lives, and just do that so that you don’t have to worry about the dynamics. But I think there are reasons to do it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: So another way, or another thing that we can add in there, is why co-CEOs don’t work. And it’s just the obvious answer is things are too slow. Every decision needs to pass through two people. And it’s, cause like, I feel like how to pick who should be the CEO in many cases is very specific to each case, like businesses. So, so that’s why I was kind of thinking of attacking the problem from all these different standpoints without actually fully answering the question may actually help get to how to pick who should be the CEO. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think. So I’m looking at this document and what I’m seeing is like, Interesting angles that we can take and then things that we like don’t want to emphasize or angles we don’t want to take below. I think what I’d want to see in here also is like the pieces how to pick who should be the CEO. I think we should have like, you know, data points or bullet points about like hey, okay, how do we pick who should be the CEO? What are the 10 or seven or four things that we’re going to say, these are the decision points about how to make CEO. Cause I think we can talk about how, you know, co-CEOs don’t work, but I almost feel like that’s a separate piece than how to pick who should be the CEO. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Right. [Michael Houck]: So I would say, I think there’s probably a lot of good stuff in these. It looks like actually a lot of the data points you’ve written down are actually super actionable and super useful for that. What I would like to see is as you sort of watch and listen to and read these, just bring it down into like a list of like, okay, give me an outline for how to pick the CEO. If I’m a first time founder, what do I need to consider, right? And any sources that I should be reading. And then I can give feedback on that. We can turn that into the actual piece. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Sounds good. [Ben Ornstein]: That’ll be the next step. [Michael Houck]: This is good though. I think First Round Capital also has a good co-founder dating thing. It might be a little old and played out at this point, but there might be some value in there. OK. That last data point you had there with the psychology of people thinking they might be better than they are is very interesting. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, there was a piece that I came across that included this very specific thing called the Lake Wobegon effect, the natural tendency to overestimate one’s capabilities and see one’s self is better than others. I don’t know. I thought it was an interesting piece to add. I kind of, how I thought about this was like a brain dump of everything related to this topic. And I guess I didn’t get to like the actual step that is probably most valuable in, all right, what are we actually gonna write? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no, but I mean, that’s interesting. I think highlighting unique frameworks and like mental models like that is something we can do. Maybe how we would turn that into like an actionable step for somebody when they’re picking the CEO is like, you know, like leave your ego at the door. And then we explain how this thing happens in these type of scenarios and how to avoid it and stuff like that. [Max]: Got it. Max, any thoughts? I’m just doing some quick research. I was trying to find some tweets I found this Read.AI, check out that Read.AI. It might have some good info, Ben. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I looked for, I looked for stuff and so, oh, that was the other thing I wanted to say. Surprisingly, not great content about who, how to pick the CEO. So many things, of course, how to find a co-founder and equity splits and all that, but specifically on how to pick who should be the CEO among co-founders, not much out there. And I spent a good couple, few hours looking for that. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I think that’s good for us because it’s an obvious question that I think people need to answer. And also people feel intimidated about answering in the moment. Yeah. No, I know. And right. [Ben Ornstein]: That confirms that this is, this is going to be a really good deep dive because there’s not that much else. There. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I wish this was a topic that we could easily turn into a video too, but I think it would be challenging, um, without more original video content from interviews to pull into it. But I think it’s very good as a, as a written deep duck. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: Oh, and that was one of the thing I, I, we, Dara in his interviews, as I brought up on the call, I think yesterday, he specifically talked about like how he chose his CEO, uh, who should be a CEO. If we had more of that we could make all video, but that could be included in the deep dive to then kind of link to, you know, link back to our other content as an idea. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Maybe we can have the clip wing team to turn that into a short, maybe horizontal video rather than vertical video clip. Okay. Yeah. Max, you finding anything on your end? [Max]: Just that Read.AI. Um, where’d you send it? I sent it in chat, the zoom chat, but yeah, there isn’t like, it’s kind of a hard thing to search Twitter for. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Did you send it as a DM? I think you sent it to the AI to take care of max. [Max]: Um, it’s in the chat. I see it. [Michael Houck]: You, Oh, you’re right. I hate that it’s people. Oh, yeah, um, that’s interesting. [Max]: It had it. It doesn’t meet. Okay. All right, cool. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Oh, cool. Some actual discussion here. [Max]: I saw a couple Read.AI posts. [Ben Ornstein]: I don’t actually know if I came across this one, though, which is good. There’s probably some stuff on Hacker News for this topic, too. I think I have a Hacker News source, I believe. Cool. Yeah. Okay. [Michael Houck]: So next steps here. Let’s just turn that into like very high level outline. And then I can give some feedback and we can turn it into a actual deep dive. What I’m going to try to do is get the, I normally write the deep dives on Fridays, but I’m going to try to get this done on Thursday. So that Ben, if you have any like interesting links, that you want to add, just to drive up our click through on the deep dives. You can add them in on Friday. So I’m gonna try to get this done on Thursday instead. Cool. Okay. Okay. Max, toss it to you on the topics side. You said you were ideating some new ideas. [Max]: Well, that’s what I thought I was supposed to come to this with. So I found this good. Channel that isn’t startup. Startup content, but it is similar about it like sorry it started in that right away. [Michael Houck]: I know that exact ad that guy’s voice ridiculous. [Ben Ornstein]: Spending so much money on YouTube ads is insane. [Michael Houck]: Wait, what company is it? [Ben Ornstein]: They do. They do advertising on TV. [Michael Houck]: It’s like a cheap way to advertise on on TV. It’s less expensive now. I think they’re called Vibe. Yeah, Vibe.co. It’s the one. [Ben Ornstein]: It’s crazy to think about. [Michael Houck]: Yes. It’s his voice. I hear it on like everything. [Max]: I don’t think I’ve seen that. So often. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I spend more time on YouTube, man. [Max]: I watch shorts, but I don’t watch a ton of online. So this I mean, this channel, it’s obviously sports, you know, breaking down the business of sports, but they’re just they’re good storytellers. And that’s what we need to become. If we’re doing long form video, we need to, you know, just tell good stories about the startup world. So, you know, like that one, I just sent how Louis Vuitton took over sports like we could do one. How Travis Kalanick was ousted by the board, or why all the open AI execs are leaving open AI. You know, like, I think one thing that I’ve learned in the last really just 24 hours. [Michael Houck]: So I posted in the social media channel that I was looking into these tools for like outlier research. And I watched a lot of videos on it last night. And what’s super clear is that the best way to just get videos that will perform as outliers or have a highest chance of performing as outliers is literally just to copy the thumbnail style and title combo from an existing video and then just make a good video behind it with that topic. So for example, how Louis Vuitton took over sports, we would put like how Y Combinator took over Silicon Valley. Like as comparable as possible, style, just put it in there. Any word changes can actually have a big impact, which is crazy. But YouTube is just like these exact formats, basically. Cool. [Max]: So, I mean, go to this channel, click videos and then click popular. Their best video, 8.3 million views. How Red Bull makes money. Like we could literally do how Google makes money. Because Google has dozens of different businesses and like revenue generators. Oh yeah. And maybe Google’s not the best company, but like, What do you mean? Maybe it is though. Cause actually like most people like, okay, they know Google ads. Like that’s, that’s, I think they’re, they’re cash cow, but like Google makes revenue from dozens of different ways. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, this is this channel is actually pretty good. There’s a lot of these very viral. I’m looking at the popular videos. Yeah, why athletes smoke weed because it could be like why founders, you know, I don’t know. Why Elon Musk does ketamine, right? [Max]: Like, I don’t know. Yeah, why Nike doesn’t want Neymar? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Why… That one’s a little trickier, I think. [Michael Houck]: Why this founder hates this investor. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Max]: Has a founder ever… [Michael Houck]: I guess a good example of why Parker Conrad hates Jason Kalkanis, but I don’t know if their names are Oh, also, if we want it to be timely, I believe this Forbes 30 under 30 just came out. [Max]: We could do why Forbes 30 under 30 predicts criminals or something like that. Yeah, I think all yeah, these are all good. [Michael Houck]: And this this channel, their formats look really easy to apply. And these are the timeframe we want. [Max]: These are for eight to 12 minutes. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yep, yep. [Michael Houck]: Not crazy hard to edit, put together. Their thumbnail style is clear and easy to copy. So what we really want though is outliers, right? So the most popular ones, what’s their average, their average views per whatever? Like they only have not so many videos on the channel. If I look at it, it’s like 124, but I think some of those are, I don’t know. But their lowest is like 92K views. So like the Holy Grail, and again, I was sort of digging deep into these tools last night. The Holy Grail is like a video that gets like 500K views or more from a channel that has like 10K subscribers or less. So we can still copy these kind of frame by frame. That might be a good place to start just to build the muscle. But I also think that we should look at, like, the highest likelihood of going viral are ones that are just like total outliers for that channel. It doesn’t make any sense. [Max]: I wonder if there’s a tool where you could filter YouTube channels. Yeah, so there’s three of them. [Michael Houck]: There’s a view stats, which is made by Mr. Beast. There’s Velio, which is made by a YouTuber, this guy who talks about how to grow on YouTube. And then there one of 10, which J Klaus promotes. And I’m sort of evaluating all three of them right now. I think Velio surprisingly looks like the best option, but I’m going to play around with them over the next like day or two. But what it does is it lets you save collections of outliers based on filters of like how this video performed versus the average on the channel. And you can note like, oh, this one tag based on the thumbnail, this one tag based on the idea or whatever. And we should just spend tons of time in there just making these collections and then using them as inspo. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, definitely. [Michael Houck]: But this channel is actually really good. I’m going to make a note of this channel because the how X makes money is particularly interesting. [Max]: Yeah, I’m trying to think what other companies we can do. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I mean, Amazon too. [Ben Ornstein]: We could do any of the big tech companies and like, because everyone wants to know, even if it’s relatively obvious, like if the ones that have ad revenue, it’s like, all right, well, there are companies that don’t just have [Michael Houck]: ad revenue. Which one is the most surprising? That’s what we, that’s what we need. Like what’s, there’s gotta be a company it’s like they make the majority of their or a good portion of their revenue on ads that you wouldn’t think they would or on interchange fees for credit cards or something. [Max]: Like, you know, what’s the what’s the the weird one? Yeah, I think. Amazon is still interesting because they started as just like e-com and then they stumbled upon cloud storage and It’s just a hundred billion dollar company out of thin air. [Michael Houck]: Let’s see, what big tech company has the most surprising revenue streams? See if we get any good answers for this. [Ben Ornstein]: I mean, the one that’s, I just did a quick chat to BT search. The one that’s always interesting that it’s not a tech company, but McDonald’s, like their biggest is real estate. That one’s a fun one, just because people who aren’t familiar with that are like, wait, what? [Max]: And the Starbucks one where Starbucks is basically a bank with their loyalty program. [Michael Houck]: Oh, I haven’t heard that one actually. Yeah, they just hold cash that people put in their reward accounts and they make money off of interest. And I assume they invest some of it. Yeah, that’s an interesting one. Yeah, I mean, this is giving me the common examples we would think of, like Amazon, Apple, because Apple’s services revenue is now pretty big. Google, Facebook, Microsoft. So we’d have to dig a little deeper to find. Yeah. [Max]: There’s a graphic that goes viral on Twitter where it’s like, AirPods are a bigger business than Spotify. [Ben Ornstein]: Those things go mega viral. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. [Michael Houck]: So that’s a good, I think, little treasure trove of framing and options. I’m going to make a note of that channel and we can come back to it for some ideas. Any other sources or any other things? Come up? I don’t think I have anything else right now. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. [Max]: I mean, this is good. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, my guess is that we’ll be able to get pretty good at this pretty quickly. I don’t think just based on what I’ve seen from like looking at these outliers, I don’t think this is rocket science. I think with our content instincts, we can put together some pretty good stuff. It’s going to be like a process to write the scripts and edit the videos, but I think we can have some hits relatively quickly. Especially because we’re seeing, like it actually is pushing our podcast interviews a bit, like more than I would expect. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Um, I guess the last thing was, um, the framing, um, for the upcoming recordings. Um, so Max, you can hop off if you want, Ben, I was just going to chat through this for recordings. [Max]: Can we do the, the meeting on Thursday instead of tomorrow? Yeah, that’s fine. [Michael Houck]: No worries. Um, I’m going to the time. All right. [Max]: So yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Okay. [Michael Houck]: So tell me what you got on framing. We got a bunch of recordings this week. Yes. [Ben Ornstein]: So for, I kind of, for, for the four upcoming ones, I did what the intro should maybe include, including like a hook, a thumbnail idea and a title idea or, or two. So that’s how I did this. So for Alexander’s I kind of, What I did for myself was went through like a shortened chronological order for the intro, because that’ll help frame how the intro should potentially be framed. I’ll get better at this over time, but I figured this was like a good starting place. So it’s like he had a couple of businesses. He stumbled into this business opportunity when someone reached out to him to find like a freelancer. He was so good at it, and they were so pleased with him that they sent all of their clients to him. And that became a business opportunity for him. That’s where he started Coding Ninjas, which was the first iteration of the freelancer marketplace. And it worked, but only at a small scale. And he He was looking to grow and he did a Sean Perry masterclass where someone and a few people in that masterclass said, Hey, maybe you should start posting on Twitter. Um, could help drive revenue sales. So his brand blew up from there. He has a pretty solid brand on Twitter. Um, and he pivoted to kind of like early stage startups and that’s when he rebranded to Lemon. And the hook was, or can be, if we can make him sort of say, I found a startup opportunity by accident. I think that’s a pretty decent hook. What do you think on that? Yeah, I think so too. [Michael Houck]: I like the title. I think we can maybe make the title a little more concise. But I like the angle. The the sort of flow of the intro. I think there’s a lot going on there, hopefully. I mean, maybe we can fit it in, but I’m just trying to keep it to like 30 seconds and 45 seconds. So we’ll see if we get enough of that. But I like it. I think it flows logically. The one thing and this may be a question is, does the rest of his background have like like me to it? Because I’m reading that like it’s not a particularly unique story, right? And this is the material that we’re working with, but like, do, do you feel like it’s worth doing an episode with him? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: So he was an interesting one to research his background. At one point he was like head of sales at a, um, in a hundred person company. So dive into sales a little bit. Um, but let me go back to his, research because yeah, his was an interesting one to research. He’s one of the ones that is like, you know how we talked about we wanted like a mix of really good unknown founders or people that are a little bit more well known. So he’s obviously on the spectrum of like, we’re doing it because he has got a lot of reach is kind of how I see that one. [Michael Houck]: The problem with it is, and I’m just realizing this now, does he have a big audience on LinkedIn or is it just on Twitter? [Ben Ornstein]: I think it was decent. [Michael Houck]: Let me check that. Okay. Cause if, if he’s just on Twitter, that like limits what we can do right now until I get my account back. [Ben Ornstein]: Right. Right. Makes sense. Um, 20,000, 20,000, four 10. Oh, okay. [Michael Houck]: That’s worth doing for sure. Okay. So we’ll do that. I like the framing, I like the angle. I think as we do these, it would be, I think like when you bring these, throw like three, five, 10 ideas for titles or thumbnails, because my guess is that I’m gonna wanna tweak whatever we put, and so it makes sense to just have more sort of data points to pull that from But I do actually really like the angle you’re taking on this one. I think it makes sense. And my guess is that that’s what we’ll actually go with. [Ben Ornstein]: Cool. Yeah. No, and I like that we’re doing this ahead of time. This is exactly what Jay Klaus and his producer do. So this is definitely the right strategy. And I’ll get better at this, and we’ll iterate more, and I’ll add more to it going forward. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: No worries. I think it’s good. I watched a video with Jay this morning and his producer. They talked about it. It was like they were advertising the little man masterclass that you went through. And so it makes sense that, yeah, I think it’s a good process. Cool. Okay. [Ben Ornstein]: So that’s Alexander’s of the four, probably the least interesting. Yeah. Still a cool story. Like he, that he found the company by accident. He’s got a cool background in sales and, but, but yeah, so that’s that. We can make it a, we can make it a shorter episode, maybe in the questions. [Michael Houck]: We also, I haven’t looked to the question. I got to do that tonight, but maybe we can also look at like, you know, he’s building a, a human heavy business. Maybe we talk about that with AI and like, Oh, you know, the AI coders are coming. Um, I don’t know. Well, we’ll see. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, no, that, that could be an interesting angle too. I don’t think I fully talked about that actually. So, um, I talked a lot about like his content and growth. Like there are a few bullet points on that because like he did grow on Twitter. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. And Oh, one other interesting thing. He was actually, um, the first sponsor for founding journey. Oh, that’s cool. [Ben Ornstein]: Nice. [Michael Houck]: They bought a three pack of ads before anyone else had paid for anything. That’s pretty cool. [Ben Ornstein]: So you can definitely talk on that maybe. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Let’s, uh, let me make a note to throw that in there. [Ben Ornstein]: I didn’t actually put this in the intro, um, but his, his intentional way of rebranding the company was pretty fascinating. Unbelievably intentional about how or yeah, about rebranding from Coding Ninjas to Lemon.io. He had an entire process on that. [Michael Houck]: Oh yeah, as long as we have questions about that, that’s fine. Yeah, I remember one other thing is that. He he’s got like some backlash for some posts on Twitter. I think about. Like layoffs. He wrote a post on Twitter about how he had to lay people off even though the company was profitable and people tore him a new one because of it. [Ben Ornstein]: Do we have something about that? I don’t have that actually. But the problem was he was featured on so many podcasts as being a wartime CEO because he’s Ukrainian. [Michael Houck]: And so he was running- Like a wartime CEO. [Ben Ornstein]: Right, right. Literal wartime CEO. But like, so I kind of saw the opposite of that. People loved featuring him to talk about how he was running a company with a bunch of, you know, Ukrainian people. And so it was actually not focused on that stuff. It was more on, on the fact that, you know, it was just running a Ukrainian company during the Ukrainian war. So, okay. [Michael Houck]: Can you toss in just like, even if it’s just a link to the tweet in the notion doc, like the question doc so that later I can add something about that. Cause I think, you know, obviously we’ll do it in a sensitive way, but he obviously has strong viewpoints on something that a lot of people feel strongly about the other way. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: So we should, we should touch on that. Yes. [Ben Ornstein]: I’m writing that down right now. Okay, cool. Um, so that’s Alex, um, on Luke’s I did, I organized this by I think the dates. So Luke and Poojun are the fifth. Alex is tomorrow. Luke and Poojun are afterwards. So Luke’s story is interesting. Started a company before college. This was the education or the events company. I remember this. I went through all the questions for him. [Michael Houck]: So I remember his flow. [Ben Ornstein]: So, you know, the hook I debated for a bit, but I think the dropping out of college to do the Teal Fellowship is a cool angle because it’s like dropping out of college. So a lot of people are even today are still like, Oh, drop out of college. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Or like, or like Peter Teal gave me a hundred K or so to drop out. That’s even better. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s even better. Peter Thiel, wait, I’m writing that. Peter Thiel gave me a hundred K to drop out of college. That’s, that’s it. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know. I don’t know what his like speaking style is. We’ve only ever chatted through DMS, but I’ll get him to say something to that effect and we’ll, we’ll use that. Cool. Yeah. That’s really good. [Ben Ornstein]: So that’s the better framing there. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: See, I, these are the kinds of things I’ll pick up over time. It’s like, okay, that’s how we should phrase it. Yeah, of course. [Michael Houck]: Of course. Title-wise… [Ben Ornstein]: I tried to use the framing of the stuff that we have done, or the new ones that you wanted to do. I wasn’t thrilled with either of these, to be honest. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, they’re a little long. I think we need to hit teal again in the title. Okay. It’s a powerful note. So I don’t know what format it makes sense to do that in, but I think we need to mention either Teal Fellowship or Peter Teal and the 100K or the 27 million. We don’t need to have the 0.6. It’s fine. We can just say 27 million. [Ben Ornstein]: It’s either going to go up or down. I almost said 28 or 27. [Michael Houck]: Honestly, it doesn’t matter too much. I realized today that the 447 million number is because they thought that Dara had raised the amount of money that Adam had raised. [Ben Ornstein]: It’s just, it’s just like, I wish we didn’t have to triple check everything they did. But that’s why I messed up on half of these things. It’s I checked twice instead of three times. [Michael Houck]: We’ll get to a point, you know, when we have, you know, a couple thousand or 10,000 or something subscribers on YouTube, where we actually hire an in-house video guy, and we’re not using some outsource agency, and they’re more invested, they’re more skin in the game. So that’s why we need to go ham on the outliers in the meantime, so we can do that quickly. Because if we get one video that goes mega big, we could get to that point where we’re bringing enough ad revenue just from that video. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. OK. Anyway, I think this is good. [Michael Houck]: I don’t think we need to spend any more time on this one. [Ben Ornstein]: Yep. But June’s, um, his, the background for him is like his dad and his family has worked in the industry for so long in like the tax industry. Um, but for the hook for this one is a major legislation, a major ruling was, was the starting point for, for him, um, building this company. So there’s a few ones. It was like the 20 that I don’t think we should say the 2018 South Dakota versus where it’s terrible. But it was like, a major legal ruling started everything. That could be cool. Or the other one that’s very different from that is the LinkedIn post that he had, where it’s like, we doubled our valuation, dot dot in only three months. [Michael Houck]: That’s so I think those latter two angles are both good. We’ll see what he actually says. But I would imagine that either saying we doubled our in three months or something about how regulation enabled this venture-backed opportunity. Both of those are interesting in different ways. So I think both could be good. And I think for the thumbnail, I was most excited about this one. [Ben Ornstein]: He talked about how in the early days, him and his team, they manually did taxes to fully understand the problem. And I have a question about that and the research. And so I think the thumbnail could be like, if they could put, presume like actually manually doing taxes, like an accountant. I think that’s, I think that could be funny. [Michael Houck]: Okay. So if I look at our, if I look at our CTR for our thumbnail and title combos, the best two are actually our first two episodes with Tyler even. And they’re like a lot better. They’re like six where they were after seven days at 6.1%. The others are in the three to four range. The higher ones are Sam Korkos, Dara, Zaid and James, which I think are the ones with the like, well, Zaid is just his face and then says three million raised. The other ones I think all have the computer. And the two that are sort of the low outliers are Atom, which is weird because it got pushed to the most impressions on YouTube, but the actual CTR is lowest. I think it’s because it has the highest retention at 30 seconds. 66% of people are still watching after 30 seconds. But that one and the Andrew Young one, which I think makes sense that the format is and I don’t think as good as the other ones. It’s too much going on. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So with that in mind, I actually think we should keep the thumbnails relatively simple. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Cause like when we’ve done the tests, you know, the one of Zade with the graduating cap, that didn’t do well. And the one of Adam with the money tree, I think didn’t do well. So I think where we can, we should probably keep them simple, even though to me that’s worse. I think it doesn’t, it’s like intuitively it’s worse, but performance so far says otherwise. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: No, look, we got to go with what the numbers are telling us. So, um, so yeah, no, I’ll, I’ll keep that in mind for, for these going forward as well. And you’ve talked about that before. That isn’t the first time you brought that up. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: But I think it’s a cool idea. I wish we could do it honestly. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. And, um, I think either of these could work for title, but I still think, whoops, I think the first one is more, I don’t know, FOMO driven. Yeah, the first one is good. [Michael Houck]: We could also do it in a different way. We could do it like, what was the valuation before 75 million? What was the actual number? [Ben Ornstein]: I think it was 40. I think it was 40. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so 40 million. To 75 million in three months. [Ben Ornstein]: Do you want like the actual arrow? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Why not? Right. I don’t know. We can test it out. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. Yeah. And that can be interesting. Okay. So that’s last one. Adam Nathan, um, comes from a family and entrepreneurs. He had, he’s raised 45 million for this company called almanac, which was like a remote, remote async tool. Um, for, for like remote teams. Yeah. It’s crazy. I’d never even heard of this company. Um, so yeah, raised 45 million for it. They had, they had some of the largest companies in the world as clients, uh, remote teams, remote, largest remote teams, and, uh, saw an opportunity to build something for, for social media posting for small businesses, teams of one as they phrase it. Um, Um, and even though the company has served large, like large organization, largest remote organizations, they’re shutting it down to focus full time on blaze because they’re, the growth is insane. This is the guy that Tyler referred. [Michael Houck]: Yes, that’s right. What is blaze? [Ben Ornstein]: So blaze is an AI tool that helps with generally one click content generation for teams of one is kind Um, yeah. And they do all types of content and the brand. [Michael Houck]: Should we be using this tool? [Ben Ornstein]: You know, it’s crazy. Maybe. Um, I love their branding. He has a very specific reason for why he branded it like a comic theme. Um, it was because he likes comics. Um, and I love branding is sick. Um, I like it a lot. And yeah, he said like, The I think I have a specific question or. Yeah, I’ve always been into pop culture, which is why the brand looks the way it does. But anyway, yeah, we probably should look into the tool. I didn’t even think about that. But yeah, one click content generation for everything blogs. They can do a month of social media posts. From one click. Um, that’s insane. [Michael Houck]: Does it, is it good? [Ben Ornstein]: I have no idea that, that I don’t know, but his, his clients, he did talk about about a couple of them that have done well, but that’s starting from zero. These are companies that have never been online in the first place. [Michael Houck]: Some of his clients. So yeah, I’m going to, I’m going to look into this. Wow. Um, it doesn’t look like they have anything specifically for social media on the homepage. Page, or at least in the dropdowns, but maybe there’s something there. [Ben Ornstein]: You know, I, there was something that I saw somewhere where one click to create a month of Instagram posts. Oh, I see. [Michael Houck]: It says it’s called turn into. Yeah. I think he’d like a base piece of content and then they, they turn it into more stuff. Okay. I’m going to play around with this tonight. [Ben Ornstein]: This looks like, but yeah, so amazing that they raised 45 million for a tool. It’s actually going relatively well. It’s just not growing as fast as they like as they phrase it somewhere. [Michael Houck]: Well, we should, we should dig into that a little bit while, you know, being sensitive to the fact that he’s our guest and we should be like, what does, if he tries to give me some vague, like, oh, you know, this is just growing faster answer. Like we should, we should press on that a little bit and be like, oh, like, you know, what’s going on with, with almanac? Like, why is almanac not growing fast? How fast is it growing? Like, um, Yeah, just to just to dig in a little bit and get the real the real info, because I think a lot of people want to know, like, what are the conditions under which you abandon a successful company for another company? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Right. [Ben Ornstein]: Good question. That’s a good question. I have a question related to that for him. So, yeah, because it’s it’s interesting. They raise that much money. They started in twenty nineteen. So it’s not a new product. But that’ll be a good one. Um, I don’t know how much of a pivot this was or if it was troll truly like, of course they frame it publicly as like, they just came across this idea, uh, of being able to solve this. [Michael Houck]: Is it a separate corporate entity or is it the same investors? They just move the money over to the new company on LinkedIn. [Ben Ornstein]: It’s phrased as this is Almanac Labs’ second product. So I think it’s under the same. [Michael Houck]: Oh, they probably spun it up as a C-corp owned by an LLC, which owns both of them. And it’s called, the LLC is called Almanac Labs. The two individual companies are C-corps and probably had some agreement to let them use the capital and get the investors exposure. That’s interesting. That’s interesting. [Ben Ornstein]: Likely, that’s likely, yeah, yeah. I’ll ask you about that too. People wanna know that too, like what’s the corporate structure? Yeah, absolutely. But so, yeah, I mean, the hook could be like, even though, and this is too long, but even though we were working with the world’s largest companies, we’re shutting down. Yeah, that’s cool. [Michael Houck]: I like it. I don’t think that’s too long. I think if he says it quickly, that could work. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. The thumbnail, I tried to be too creative with this one. We know it doesn’t work. So maybe it’s just as simple as Almanac Labs’ logo with a 45 million in there with like an arrow to like the Blaze logo. [Michael Houck]: I mean, look, what we can do is we can do more tests, right? There’s nothing stopping us from testing more and trying to find formats that are compelling and work. So I think it’s fine to keep that in. For the title, I really liked the second one. I think it reminds me a lot of the Adam Ranklin one which has done really well. So I think this is a format we should lean into. What I would say is that what I was thinking last night when I was looking at all these outlier videos, we probably don’t need to say for remote work tool here. We can probably just say I raised 45 million but pivoted or something. Just like with Adam we said I raised 137 million in, but gave it back. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Right. [Ben Ornstein]: I guess that’s less important to talk about what the tool is. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It’s weird because like, I have the same intuition that you do that, like more unique details in the title while still being concise is, is good. But I actually don’t think I’m like, I’m like training my intuition on YouTube. I actually don’t think that’s how YouTube operates. I think it’s YouTube is looking for like one level higher, um, on like altitude. And so I don’t think we need that in the title. Um, like what they’re going to look for from our channel is just interesting stories about fundraising, right? From the podcast at least. Yep. Um, that makes sense. [Ben Ornstein]: And, and I saw that as a double edged sword when I wrote that was like, okay, people aren’t interested in the remote work tool. They’re not going to watch, but if they are, maybe they’re even and more likely to watch. Right. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I, I, I had the same intuition that we want to niche down in on each video, but I think the problem is we’re niching down on each video in different ways by doing that. And so it’s actually confusing the YouTube rather than like making it more interesting to people. Yep. [Ben Ornstein]: No, that makes total sense. Okay. I’ll, I’ll keep those in mind for both the thumbnail and titles going forward. That makes, that makes sense. [Michael Houck]: Sounds good. These all look really good. Um, Send this Notion doc over to me if you haven’t already and then I’ll prep for the Alexander one tonight. [Ben Ornstein]: Awesome. I will do that. And working on, I just started the Sahil Chopra’s questions today, as well as Raina’s customer support doc. Oh, okay. Two main things I’m working on. And I went through the deal flow already, so. [Michael Houck]: Oh, great. If you want to share that list with me in a separate message of the deal flow too, I can get started on that like tomorrow or Thursday. If we just get the email up by Monday, it’ll work. So no immediate rush there. Cool. Okay. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: So the empower sleep research, I want to get that done by, I’m going to get it done by tomorrow. I don’t, I think I’d be lying if I said I’d get it done today. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Honestly, don’t worry about it. Like I, my plate is so full right now that I’m probably not going to get to some of this stuff already on it. All like tomorrow night or Thursday. So, um, like no, no rush. Just, uh, yeah, all good. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: And sorry for the issues with the ghost writing. Um, I, I don’t make mistakes like that. [Michael Houck]: That one was crazy. Um, no, look, it happens, man. Um, I’ve, I’ve been there too. I once, um, way worse than this today was I once sent out thousands of dollars to Uber Eats couriers that they did not earn and we just had to eat it and it sucked and I thought I was gonna get fired and it was the worst thing ever but then later another time I uncovered that we had been paying them algorithmically over ten million dollars that they shouldn’t have paid and also not paying them over $10 million that they should have been paid in another case. So it’s, there’s good days and bad days with this stuff. It’s all good. It seems when it rains, it pours for me. [Ben Ornstein]: When I have a couple of bad things, they pile up and I find all of those things that I made a mistake on. [Michael Houck]: But I think, I think it’s just like, you know, there’s a lot on your plate. It’s all different stuff. It’s easy to move too fast. Like, It’s not a big deal. No issues are, you know, overly crippling the businesses, you know, relatively stable. Obviously we’re investing to grow it, but it’s a stable business at this point. So, um, you know, we want to get things right and, you know, I’ll be candid with you when we, when we do, we do this stuff, but, um, don’t beat yourself up too much over is what I’m trying to say. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: And yes, please continue, continue to be candid. Don’t if I, if I, if I have felt, please let me know. [Michael Houck]: No, I will. I will. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. It’s important to me that we get this stuff right for our reputation, for clients and all that stuff. So yeah, but all good. [Ben Ornstein]: And the last, the last thing was I told you that there were two uploads to YouTube. I uploaded the two incorrect Adam ones. I was uploading the third one and I was going through my downloads and I was moving it to trash as a safe space. It was at 98%. It wasn’t finished when I deleted the download from my downloads folder. So it didn’t fully finish uploading. It had been going for an hour. So I thought it was definitely done. And so I looked and I saw 98%. I was like, you’ve got to be kidding me. So there are not two things to delete. There are now three. And the fourth one is corrected and it’s uploaded. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. [Michael Houck]: So there’s a, this is like reminding me back when I was music producer, I would have like, I would have like a, the track name and then I’d have like the track name mastered. And then I’d like the track name mastered final. And then the track name mastered final reel. It’s the same, same thing. [Ben Ornstein]: I remember that came up when we were talking about the first intro audio and I, and I was ballsy and said, this is final. You’re like, I don’t know about, I don’t know about that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. A hundred percent. Okay. I will go through YouTube and do that tonight. And so my to-do list to do with like that and the email side too. So we get that all scheduled tonight. So we don’t have to worry about it tomorrow. Awesome. [Ben Ornstein]: But yeah, no, I’m feeling, I’m feeling better. There was a lot that I, I at least thought was on my plate and I’ve gotten through some of it. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, it was, it’s a good time for the case studies to be in a lull right now. Yeah. Those will probably pick up again in like two weeks, but with the holidays, who knows, we may not get a lot of those this month in general. [Ben Ornstein]: We’ll see. We have two that are out that I’m still waiting to hear back from So we still have two that we could potentially post over the next couple of weeks that are done that I just need to like final edits from [Michael Houck]: So nothing’s Sounds good, man.