This Entrepreneur Makes $100M+ With A Portfolio Of 10 Businesses

Shaan Puri

You own a holding company; I think Gridley Enterprises is the name of it. Within it, you have a bunch of different things. So, you own stuff as funky as a fireworks company called Alamo Fireworks. You also own a software roll-up called Dura Software. You have a coffee chain, I think, is that right? You have a drive-through coffee chain that's got like 3 or 4 locations or something like that. Then, you incubate a couple of projects, one of which I actually used recently.

Sam Parr

michael what up dawg sean where are you are you in tahoe

Shaan Puri

I'm in lake tahoe yeah

Sam Parr

how is

Shaan Puri

it it's amazing yeah this place is great

Sam Parr

is it just a getaway from crypto

Shaan Puri

No, it was a Father's Day trip. So, you know, I came out here with my wife's family, and yeah, it's been cool. It's been like at the lake, in the pool, all that good stuff.

Sam Parr

that's awesome who who so yu sean you wanna introduce this guy

Shaan Puri

Yeah, okay, great. So we got Michael Girdley. Is that the way you say it? Yep. Yeah, Michael's here. I've been following you on Twitter for a while, and I think you almost bought our NFT for the 5 minutes of fame, but you got outbid at the last minute. Is that right?

Michael Girdley

Yes, I had a whole plan about it. I was actually going to shard it and then try to make a profit from it by selling it in 15-second increments. But some really rich crypto person came in and swooped it out from under me. So, Sam loves sharders too. I had a huge plan.

Shaan Puri

And, but you... it worked anyway! You got on the pod without it because you're a pretty interesting dude. I've been following you on Twitter, mostly because you tweet about Chili's a lot, and I'm a big Chili's guy—a huge Chili's fan. But you also kind of fit into this sort of Andrew Wilkinson bucket, which is like you run a holdco, and you run a pretty big holdco. So let's just give people kind of like your rundown. Here's what I know about you: you own a holdco, I think Gridley Enterprises is the name of it. Within it, you have a bunch of different things. You own stuff as funky as a fireworks company called Alamo Fireworks. You also own a software roll-up called Dura Software. You have a coffee chain, I think, is that right? You have a drive-through coffee chain that's got like 3 or 4 locations or something like that. Then you incubate a couple of projects, one of which I used recently called Near, which is an easy way to hire people in Latin America. I found this awesome dude—this is not a plug for Near necessarily, but it did work exactly as intended. I found this awesome operations guy for my e-commerce business there, Nico. So, yeah, that's what you do. And I don't know, Sam, where do you want to start? We can go into the kind of high level, or we could dive into any of the details. Where do you want to start?

Sam Parr

He put together this really good document that explains all the different businesses. To summarize, it looks like there are about 8, 9, or 10 of them. So, I understand the size: it's over $100,000,000 in revenue and over 750 employees for all 8 or 10 of these businesses.

Shaan Puri

Yes, whenever I hear people say, "Okay, yeah, my kind of accumulation of the businesses that I own, some percentage ownership stake in, is worth over $100,000,000," or like a real estate guy will be like, "You know, I have a $1,000,000,000 real estate portfolio in my head," I'm sure there are a bunch of listeners who are like this too. They're thinking, "So what does that mean? Are you a billionaire? Are you super loaded? How do I think about that number?" Right? Because, you know, if I get a salary, that's the money I keep. If I run a business and I say top-line revenue, that's not the money I get to keep. So when you own 100% of your holding company and your holding company owns businesses that add up to over $100,000,000 in revenue, does that mean you're just a big balla, shot caller? Are you paying yourself like $10,000,000 a year or more out of the profits of these businesses? Or what does that really mean?

Michael Girdley

Yeah, well, I mean part of the way I set up the structure is that I wanted to be very flexible in terms of strategy. So, there's some stuff in here that's just like compounders. For example, Dura. We want to be the next Constellation Software someday. So, like, I don't... that's just compounding the money I put into that and the effort and time that I put into it. I don't get cash flow from that stuff, but that's by design. I'm just a long-term player, not a long-term person on all this stuff, you know? The things we went through, just kind of the 10 big holdings that I have, those are all things that I have 50, 60, 30, or 40% of the company. So, it's not like I... I totally am with you. Like, I felt stressed being like, "Okay, well, I don't want to be the guy coming in and bullshitting about a bunch of numbers." But also, like, I'm from Texas, and I have a hard time bragging and being like, "Well, okay, here's what my net worth is and here's how much money I make," and all that kind of stuff. So, I'm trying to balance it out to where we can actually get there without getting past my comfort zone.

Sam Parr

How do we... let's not balance that out. Let's just go to the other end and make it incredibly uncomfortable. Tell me your net worth, your checking account number, and what it felt like when you lost your virginity. You could make one go now.

Michael Girdley

really drunk 4 and yeah

Sam Parr

Yeah, let's really get into it. It's like, "Oh, you don't want to reveal your penis size? That's fine. Just tell me about your net worth, then we'll settle for that."

Shaan Puri

But in seriousness, there's a mental model for these businesses, right? Some businesses, like you call it a compounder, are structured in a specific way. If you go into a business like this, you're going to put up a certain amount of money. It only takes X dollars to start, and then it takes Y years to kind of get to some good outcome. For example, I'll give you a venture startup. I come from the Silicon Valley venture world. In that world, you put $0 of your own money up, but you're likely going to raise somewhere between $3 billion from venture capitalists over time. You shouldn't expect to see any big money until you exit, which is on average 7 to 10 years. So, that's the profile of that. In contrast, my e-commerce business took, I don't know, I put in $600,000 to start it. That was my first kind of year commitment. But we can take quarterly profits now. You know, after a year or two, we could take quarterly profits if we wanted to. We decided to roll that into growth, but we think that by year 3 or 4, we should be seeing pretty healthy quarterly profits that will pay for a sweet lifestyle. So, that's just to paint a picture of what type of business you're getting into. Most people don't know how the holding company business works. So, give me those sorts of details: what does it take to start, how long do you have to wait to get a payday, and how big are those paydays? Are you playing a software game, like a VC software game? You can make a billion dollars in e-commerce—unlikely to happen—but you can pretty safely make tens of millions of dollars if you do it right.

Michael Girdley

Right, yeah. Well, I mean, I think my theory on stuff is that it's been incredibly difficult to find good opportunities over the past five years. So, I've structured things in a way that I want to be able to take advantage of any opportunity that comes through the door. The danger is, say for example, I run across a fun idea to work on that maybe is in the roll-up space. Well, that's going to require outside capital. My partner and I, who started the business—he's the former head of support for Rackspace—he's the CEO of the business now. We put up our own money to do the first acquisition, and then we started running out of money right after a couple million dollars. We had to go out and raise money. That's playing that kind of VC compounding game that I talked about. You know, other stuff, like the coding boot camp that we started, pays me money every month. It's similar to what you're talking about. The thing I like about those kinds of cash-flowing LLCs and stuff like that is, you know, the upside isn't as good. You can't have a billion-dollar exit in that stuff twenty years from now, but you could start cash flowing really quickly. So, I like to have a blend of all those things because you can live on appreciation.

Sam Parr

How much profit does the $100,000,000 make? Or I think you said over $100,000,000, but let's just say it's $100,000,000. How much profit does it actually make? And let's say that you own 30% of one company that makes $10,000,000 in profit. Do you say, "Alright, we're going to take out of that $10,000,000, we're going to take out $3,000,000 in profit"? We own 30%, so we get $1,000,000?

Michael Girdley

Yeah, well, I typically find that the stuff in a portfolio for small businesses like this is going to end up running at 15 to 20% EBITDA margins. So then you do a calculation and say, "Okay, well, based on that, like free cash flow potential margins..." You know, you have to pay off debt service and all that kind of stuff if you have it. Then, is it better for you to take the money out, or should you reinvest it inside the business? By and large, most of these things are reinvesting because I don't have better places to put the money.

Shaan Puri

money than reinvesting in assets and new acquisitions and all that kind

Michael Girdley

of stuff assets and new acquisitions and all that kind of stuff which business is the best cash cow

Shaan Puri

Is it like, you know, the fireworks company where it's open for like 3 months a year and it just prints profits for those 3 months? Then we don't have to think about it for the other 9? I don't know if that's true; I'm just saying that out loud.

Sam Parr

which business is the best one and why is it fireworks

Michael Girdley

Dude, fireworks! Here's why I love fireworks: it was the first business that started my whole platform, and I was the CEO of it. It is the hardest business in the world to run. The cash flow sucks. We aren't even open yet for the 4th of July; we open in two more days. We've been spending money to get ready for it all the way through since January 2nd. You have to predict what's going to happen 6 to 12 months ahead of time. Then, you have to put up all the cash for it, buy all the fireworks, and get all the locations out. We have 200 locations across the state of Texas. Wow! Then, we open them all up, and we really don't break even until about 7 or 8 PM on the night of the 4th of July. When I ran that business, that was where I cut my teeth as a CEO. It was the hardest business to run. I went to these other businesses, and people would pay you before you delivered the service. For example, when we started the coding boot camp, which was the second business, I was like, "You mean they pay us before we teach them the classes? This is amazing!" I thought it was the greatest thing ever. So, every other business feels like it.

Sam Parr

how much revenue does a fire one do fireworks

Michael Girdley

it's multiple tens of 1,000,000 yeah

Sam Parr

No shit, that makes, let's say, $20 to $40 million selling fireworks for two weeks.

Michael Girdley

We do it twice a year: for the 4th of July and then again for New Year's. In Texas, it's warm enough that actually New Year's is more pleasant than in any other place.

Sam Parr

Golly, that's amazing! And that's quite profitable if you do well for the remaining three hours. In those three hours, you make all your profit.

Michael Girdley

All your profit comes from the fact that everybody shows up at the last minute. That's the other part I didn't tell you. Nobody buys anything until the last day because consumers have this habit of not doing things ahead of time.

Shaan Puri

So, that business is actually kind of an ugly business. You have to predict things, and I don't know, the world has been very unpredictable the last few years. You have to predict demand and operate really well under a very tight time crunch. All your demand gets squeezed into this tiny pipe. You're putting up all the cash upfront, so you're taking some risk there. Did you, being a clever guy, come up with any clever operating hacks to make that business suck less? Are there things that other firework people don't really do?

Michael Girdley

Yes, we have a bunch of those. I didn't come up with any of them. The thing I realized, and this was about 14 or 15 years ago, is that I actually really suck at optimizations. I want to live at like 80,000 feet with big ideas and strategy, doing what we're doing right here. I want to live in an idea space. What I realized about six years into running that business was that I am precisely the wrong person to run this business. Because what you're talking about is just like a game of ventures, where you have to be optimizing stuff all the time. I find that incredibly boring. That is the most boring thing you could ask me to do in my life, along with accounting and HR. What we've done is a ton of those kinds of optimizations. That business has exploded in the past five years—no pun intended—through just getting the right people on the field. It means me not doing it because I absolutely am the wrong person to run that business. But we do a bunch of different stuff, like we brought digital...

Michael Girdley

Of sale to that business. It used to be handwritten for a long number of years. Some pretty basic stuff that you're like, "Really? It took that long?" But yeah, we've done all that kind of stuff. But it's the royal "we"; it's not me.

Sam Parr

How much money did you... you said you started this thing with $2,000,000 of you and your partner's money. Is the rest like a fund that you raised?

Michael Girdley

So, Dura was something I started. We began with our own money for the fireworks business. I got that the old-fashioned way; it's a family business that I inherited. So, that's why you're asking how I got into the fireworks business. I was told I have a fireworks business now, and it's great.

Sam Parr

What about the other things? Did you have to raise money for each one? Is each one like its own? Do you raise money for each one if you need to, or do you just use your own money?

Michael Girdley

Yep, just if I need to syndicate the deal, I syndicate the deal with other people. You know what I've learned? I only do it if I hate raising money for stuff unless I'm putting my own money in it. So, I'll put a substantial amount of my net worth into new stuff. Then, when I go out to raise money, I feel like it's not yucky. Otherwise, I feel yucky.

Shaan Puri

Which of the businesses... Okay, so we thought maybe the fireworks business is the best one. It turns out that's kind of a pretty gnarly business. Which of your businesses would you say is like the most in the cash flow category? Like, it's just so beautiful because it works. It just worked right away. It didn't take a ton of money. It's profitable, and it's not like this brutal business to operate. Which one do you like the best?

Michael Girdley

The coding boot camp is the best one. It's all services, low capital expenditure (capex). The thing I like the most about it is that it actually helps people; it changes their lives. And that's not bullshit, by the way. You'll notice a theme in all this stuff: I really enjoy helping people. It's a life transformation thing when people go through that and get a better job.

Sam Parr

clearly you've never had a bottle rocket fight man because those are pretty amazing too

Michael Girdley

how big

Sam Parr

is the

Michael Girdley

please don't do that

Shaan Puri

please don't

Sam Parr

do that

Michael Girdley

that is that is low 8 figures

Shaan Puri

that's amazing

Sam Parr

and very profitable

Michael Girdley

that runs kinda consistent with what we're talking about that 15 to 20% even emergence

Shaan Puri

And so, you got a bunch of these. I like your Twitter because you talk about a lot of things that I think most people aren't discussing. My feed is very... I don't know, my Twitter feed is just filled with the same crypto people, the same Silicon Valley people, and then there are like five people that are just different. I want to read you a couple of tweets, and I want you to just kind of riff on them—explain what you mean there. What was the kind of golden insight? You had one about going to touristy places but doing non-touristy things. You were tweeting out like you were in China, and you tweeted about a paper recycling mill. You were asking, "What happens to waste paper from the U.S.? Where does it go once we recycle it?" You found out where it goes in China, and it was this gnarly factory. So, I don't know if you can talk about that or just this idea of going on vacation or visiting a touristy place but then hitting the non-touristy parts of that country. Talk a little about that.

Michael Girdley

Yeah, well, that was a... I mean, that was a business trip. I was there training the team and helping them learn how to buy fireworks. We were just driving down the road, and literally, the process of going to buy fireworks is like a Silicon Valley of fireworks. It's in China, about a 2-hour flight from Hong Kong in the southeast of China. You go to this place, and it's the same thing every day. The Chinese take you to a fancy dinner, and there's always the same restaurant with the same food. Then they take you to a factory, and they shoot off some fireworks, and hopefully, you buy them. That happens for six days in a row.

Shaan Puri

to drink a bunch of nasty biju right

Michael Girdley

They just... they have like Budweiser, Chinese Budweiser. They serve you, and it's pretty fun.

Shaan Puri

ching down yeah yeah

Michael Girdley

It's pretty fun, but yeah, after like the fourth year of doing that, I was there with the team. We were driving along, and I was just so sick of going to yet another fireworks factory because they all look the same. It was just like the same little old ladies doing the same thing. And all the fireworks workers, by the way, are like 70 years old. They can't hire young people to work in fireworks factories. It's just crazy. I was like, "What is that over there?" And they're like, "Oh, that's the box factory."

Shaan Puri

and I

Michael Girdley

Was like a box factory. Let's go over there. So they pull over to the side of the road. The driver goes in, and the Chinese seller takes us in for a tour of this box factory. For me, it was just an opportunity to kind of push a little bit and really get underneath and understand how a culture lives and functions. He told us, "Look, they're having a problem making boxes now because they can't put the wastewater directly in the river anymore." I was like, "Oh, this is why things are so cheap in China." But yeah, that's it. You just kind of start wandering, and then magic happens. So that's one of those...

Sam Parr

Type of trip was that where you bring a bunch of Texas firework workers to China? I just imagine, like, "What the fuck is this soy sauce shit?" You know what I mean? Just imagine that conversation. You must have had a blast hanging out with a bunch of Texas firework guys and a bunch of Chinese fireworks guys. You guys really got brought together there on that one—our love of blowing shit up.

Michael Girdley

Yeah, well, I mean I'm somewhat worldly. The guy that we took on the trip, actually the COO for the business, is a former senior military officer who's Romanian and lives here in San Antonio now. He used to work for Aldi, and they didn't know what to make of him. They were just totally confused why we had a Romanian with us, like going through rural China. So, it was pretty good times.

Shaan Puri

Have you had any of these other experiences? Have you intentionally gone off the beaten path? Because I feel like when I look at your Twitter feed, you've sort of accumulated a bunch of random, disparate business knowledge. A lot of this comes from, like, seeing a guy selling something on the street and thinking, "Hey, what is this? Where does this come from? How do you do this?" Can you share any other stories of, you know, intentionally stumbling into interesting things? I think more people should do that, and I want to hear some of those stories.

Michael Girdley

It's a really good question. I need to think of a good answer. I'm glad this is being edited. When have I done that the most? Yeah, we went down one time, and this is super interesting. Our business, Dura, has some employees in Medellín, Colombia, you know, where Pablo Escobar is from. So we went down there to just kind of start wandering around, meet our employees, and understand if we should outsource more here. We just started going around with a guide and asking people questions like, "What do you think of Americans? What is it like here?" You just start to see random stuff. I mean, the reason I started the coffee business, by the way, is that I was riding my bike around Arkansas. I was just riding outside the Walmart headquarters because I'm a business nerd, staring at the Walmart headquarters. There was this drive-through coffee shop there, and it was COVID, so I was bored. I just sat there for an hour, and these guys were just printing money. I came home and called my buddy, who I'd wanted to work with for years, and I was just like, "Hey, we should start a coffee business." He said, "Why?" I sent him the pictures and was like, "Look at all these people. They're just printing money." So it's just kind of this idea of, for me, the way I build ventures and find them is just by stumbling around like an idiot. Then you end up in front of the Walmart headquarters and watch some guy selling a million dollars' worth of coffee. So yeah, that's another story.

Shaan Puri

And you went to the Berkshire Hathaway summit, which I think is kind of like a pilgrimage for business people and entrepreneurs. It's like, "Oh, you gotta go visit the Mecca," and you see the old kind of religious leader, you know, the 90-year-old guru sitting there. Is it worth it? Should I go?

Michael Girdley

You definitely gotta go at least once. I mean, I’m 47, and I always regretted not seeing Jerry Garcia before he died. That was the way I felt about seeing Charlie and Warren. It's one of those things where I was kind of happy to be there because it felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The people-watching is amazing! It's like the combination of cash, investing, and a NASCAR race—it's perfect. I just had so much fun doing it. But it's also kind of bittersweet. I feel like going to this event, knowing that Charlie and Warren are getting up there in age—92 and 98, respectively. In the morning, Warren spent a lot of time just trying to find his words, but then he got into a rhythm, and it was like he was his old self again. It was pretty awesome. I mean, if you're a capitalist, you gotta go at least once. You just have to experience it because it's such an insane experience seeing these people so devoted to the company. They’re dropping $250 on a pair of Roper boots or Justin boots, and then walking over and drooling over how they can buy a Sunbeam boat. It's just the coolest thing. So, you gotta go at least once!

Shaan Puri

sam have you been

Sam Parr

No, I was invited to go. I think you and I were invited with Siava and Sully, and I didn't go. I guess I would go just to see it. Dude, those guys are old, aren't they? Like, isn't Charlie Munger like 93?

Michael Girdley

98

Sam Parr

Oh my God, yeah. I guess next year would have to be the last one, maybe.

Michael Girdley

You gotta go just to watch him and see how much peanut brittle he eats in a 4-hour setting. It was unreal! The guy ate like £4 worth of peanut brittle. When I live-tweeted the thing, I was like, "I can't believe you're still eating this much peanut brittle!" I'm 47; there's no way I could do that. He was just sitting there pounding it the whole time.

Sam Parr

dude that that peanut brittle from seas is fire I feel that it it is pretty amazing

Shaan Puri

These guys have the most success, and they do the opposite of what every success coach and motivational entrepreneur tells you to do. It's like, if you go on Instagram, you see posts saying, "Oh, I need to wake up at 5 AM, meditate, do my ice plunge, then do my CrossFit workout. After that, I need to do my daily gratitude journal, figure out my priorities for the day in my hyper-focus chamber, speed read, and listen to my podcast on 2x speed." Meanwhile, these successful individuals somehow became some of the richest people in the world, living until they're about 100 years old. They wake up every day, eat McDonald's breakfast, consume a bunch of M&M's and Diet Cokes, and then read and play bridge all day. They also go for walks, and that's where they get their ideas from. I think there's something to what they're doing. I believe they're still alive because they're low-stress despite what they eat. They're smart thinkers because they don't overload their brains with information, which I'm guilty of, and I think a lot of people are too. When you're hooked into social media, you're just constantly consuming information.

Hubspot

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Hubspot

Woah! I can see the client's whole history: calls, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days ago that I totally missed.

Sam Parr

HubSpot, grow better. What of your portfolio, which company, besides the boot camp, are you like, "This is just the greatest thing ever! I'm so happy we own this." I feel more people should know how straightforward this business is. It feels like I'm winning in easy mode.

Michael Girdley

Yeah, well, I think the Near business, so it's higher with Near.com. This is the apex of what I want for Girdley existence to be. I want to go from starting businesses myself and working in them, to starting businesses and having other people work in them. This is one that has started basically with me doing no work, but I have a substantial amount on the cap table. It's the apex of Girdley automation. I'm always scaling stuff. So, the Near business... we looked up and, like, I'm in a CEO peer group, and none of my peers could hire people. The past couple of years have just been such a mess. I would ask them, "Have you considered hiring overseas?" and they would say, "I don't know how to do that. How would I do that?" So, we basically... I took one of my associates and said, "Hey, we should go build in this direction. There's this huge wave and here's this problem. Let's go try some stuff and see what happens." I like that business so much just because everything seems like it's on easy mode. Everybody's offshoring; everybody wants to do this. It was that way when the economy was going well, and now it's even more so when the economy is going poorly. I've personally hired three of my associates out of the six that work overseas. I've never met them in person. It's like the best!

Sam Parr

and you partnered with someone to make this according to the about page right

Michael Girdley

Yeah, so Hayden started as an associate of mine. I hire these people; I call them associates, and it's basically an entrepreneur-in-training program. I mentor them through it. I pay them a salary, and then I help them get out of the 12 bad ideas that every entrepreneur has to deal with when they're 27 years old. I help them think through all those ideas, and then we work on a good idea together. At the end of it, they can either start a company with me or go take a job or whatever. So, Hayden and Franco were two of the guys in that program. I'm on the cap table with them; I put up the money and have been guiding them through it, but they've done all the work.

Sam Parr

When you're hiring CEOs, how much equity do you give them? How much do you pay them? And how do you incentivize them to want to stay with you for a long time?

Michael Girdley

Yeah, so it totally depends upon the situation. You know, obviously, if a business is much more established or if there's someone who's like much more mature, that creates a situation where oftentimes you have to come up with more. My best situations are when I can partner with somebody. So all this stuff I'm in, while I have significant stakes in it, I have other people on the cap tables. That's one of my superpowers; I can just maintain partnerships. I have a 100% success rate on partnerships with people. So the absolute best way is if I can get somebody like Paul at Dura to be a co-founder. The absolute best scenario is if they're a co-founder, they put money in like me, and then they make that their job. That's the absolute best "skin in the game" kind of outcome. But, you know, you can have anywhere from a 27-year-old who will make $60,000 to $80,000 a year plus benefits, to some of these people who are much more senior. Like our coffee person, he worked 25 years at Circle K, and he's running that business. He obviously needs to make much more money than that. The equity really depends. It totally depends on the opportunity, how much skin in the game they want to have, what level of commitment they have, and how early they're coming into the venture. But it could be anywhere from 40% to 20% to 5%.

Shaan Puri

And why does, let's say for Dura, your partner want to give you, let's call it, 30%? I don't know what you have; maybe it's 50%, maybe it's a little less. Let's just say 30%. Why does he want to give you 30% when he's day-to-day in it but you're not? So how do you think about that? Yeah, like value exchange when you're not going to be the operating person and then they are.

Michael Girdley

Yeah, well, I mean, you're asking that question from the same lens I have, which is that being an operator isn't our dream. Most people, their dream is to be an operator. They're excited when we're able to work together and create an opportunity for them to be their best self, right? That's what I see as the benefit. In a situation like that, you know, oftentimes I'm part of the very early figuring out what the idea is going to be. I'm putting up a substantial amount of money; I put up more money than the other partners did. We did some debt to do the first deal, and I personally guaranteed it. The last thing is that great teams have these complementary things, like how...

Sam Parr

much money would you use to fund a new business

Michael Girdley

so that one was like a couple million and then some of these are like 50 to a100

Sam Parr

wow okay

Michael Girdley

so that's

Sam Parr

fantastic put up a lot of money

Michael Girdley

Yeah, so, **skin in the game** matters. That also helps me not to try to do too many things. I could just be like, "Okay, I've put real money in this; I better really believe in it." But, like, the last thing with these operators is that a lot of the things I feel I bring to the business are strategy insights, best practices, and connections. Those are things that they're happy to have somebody along on the journey with them who has the same level of commitment and wants to be a board member. I don't want their job, and I wouldn't be good at it. So, you know, I think that's the partnership I end up having with these folks.

Sam Parr

sean have you heard of this guy named kevin ryan

Shaan Puri

only through you he's like a media right is that is that the same guy

Sam Parr

yeah so michael have you heard of this guy kevin ryan

Michael Girdley

I'm googling him

Sam Parr

Alright, so I think there are, Mike, there's probably a billion Kevin Ryans. So, like, maybe a baseball player.

Michael Girdley

oh he's the alley corp guy

Sam Parr

might come up so yeah so listen to this guy so early in his career he worked like in the newspaper business nothing particularly exciting and then he worked at this company called doubleclick and he was like the 30th employee there and then took over as ceo and then doubleclick was sold for like a 1000000000 or many 1,000,000,000 and it eventually became adsense for Google so like pretty big thing he told me that he had made like very low digit 8 8 figures he was like it was enough money that like I'm set but like I still wanted to like create stuff and so him and this guy named dwight who I think he worked with at doubleclick they started alicorp and their whole thing was we're gonna fund companies with 200 to $300,000 and all of the ideas are gonna come from us all of the ideas are only gonna be back of the envelope math and we're gonna hire someone to get it off the ground and we're gonna give it 300,000 6 months to prove if this is a good idea or a bad idea and we're gonna do it a bunch of times a few of their successes that they've done this with are mongodot mongodb which I don't know what it's at now but in the range of like a 20 to $50,000,000,000 market cap publicly traded software business the second one is business insider which sold for 600,000,000 I think but it's like a big company now the third one is gilt gilt group which was a clothing company that was huge it it didn't actually work out but it was huge for a little while and I think the 4th one there's another oh the 4th one is zola you guys know zola it's like where you go for wedding registries I believe that that's a unicorn and there might actually be 2 or 3 more of these companies that alicorp has like founded and basically he was like yeah so me and dwight just sit around and we come up with like a cool idea like I go to a wedding and I just ask people where they bought all the gifts and like he's like I just had this idea so I knew someone who worked at gilt group who mentioned she liked this type of business I hallowed at her I go hey here's 300 k if you can get this going and you get a small portion but we get most of it you wanna try it and that's how it worked it it's a he he's pretty amazing

Shaan Puri

speechless

Michael Girdley

that's impressive it's like yeah I was like yeah those guys are really good

Shaan Puri

There's this holdco model that is in vogue right now. To me, I worked at a startup studio for a while, and I think that was the thing for a period of time. It probably still is a thing where you build one company, run it for a while, and then sell it. Great! Now you have cash, but you still want to do more entrepreneurial things. So, you self-fund a studio where you're like, "We're going to work on a bunch of ideas," and then you try to find new winners out of those bunches of ideas. You know, I worked at one. That's how I got into tech. Mark Pincus, the guy who created Zynga, then he created one. The guy who created Uber created one. Kevin Rose created one. It's just a bunch of serial entrepreneurs who create these, and they've actually had a pretty poor track record of success. Then we see that the holdco mafia is sort of the same. You have guys like Andrew Wilkinson, who has Tiny, and then you have a bunch of other people doing their own holdco versions of that. Whether they buy boring businesses, sweaty businesses, software businesses, or whatever, you're kind of in that boat. You're in that boat too. What do you think? How do you think about that? In terms of who do you think should be the type of person who should do this? What are some of the misconceptions or traps that people fall into when they go down this path? I'm sure you've seen a bunch.

Michael Girdley

Yeah, well, I mean, I think there are two bad things going on with holdcos right now. First, there's a whole group of people that are doing them, and they actually think it's not that much work. I talked to them, and I'm like, "So why are you doing this?" They're like, "It seems really easy." I'm like, "This is really hard." The second reason that it's super hard is because this is exactly the opposite of operations. Everything that you do and all the habits and skills that you learn when you are a CEO running a business—which is where most of these people are coming from, or if you're a senior executive in a company—everything you do in a holdco is exactly the opposite. For example, when there's a problem, you don't rush in and fix it for your company. You actually say, "Man, that really sucks. What are you going to do about that?" Those are two entirely different approaches. So, I mean, it'll be interesting to see what happens with all these people who think holdcos are really hot. As I talk to most of them, I don't think as many of them are wired to be holdco people as they really think they are. Like the Mies, the Xavier Helgensons—we're odd, we're different people, and there's a reason for that: we're not operators. It'll be interesting to see what happens with some of these people.

Sam Parr

what's so hard about it

Michael Girdley

You know, I think it goes against people's nature, right? So, take me for example. I love to live in this idea space, right? I have a relatively crappy memory, which is why I have to write stuff down like crazy. But that's different for other people. A lot of the people that I partner with as operators look at what I do as insanity because they just couldn't imagine letting go of the vine of these particular things going on. So, it goes against human nature. A lot of times, for example, those people see a problem going on in the business and they want to sprint to that problem. They can't imagine even stepping away from it. So, it just goes against, in my opinion, who you are as a person and makes it almost incredibly difficult or impossible.

Shaan Puri

For the many people, yeah, you say that, but at the same time, I'm like, "Oh, everybody I know is like, 'Oh, I like to operate at a high level,' you know, the 10,000-foot view." I'm an ideas guy. I don't know anyone that doesn't think they're an ideas guy. Maybe I just run in the wrong circles, but you know, I don't know a lot of people who are like, "You know what? I like to grind. I like to operate, do the day-to-day optimizations." Versus, "I like to be the idea guy who helps just get it started, and somebody else goes and does all the hard work." You know, that seems like there's a ratio of 100 idea guys to every one guy who just truly loves executing.

Sam Parr

you ever heard of excel dawg that's my jam

Shaan Puri

oh

Michael Girdley

No, no, you... I lived in the Silicon Valley bubble too. I fit right in; I was great there. Then I came back here to the hinterlands of San Antonio, and I started to see these people. I've got buddies who, for example, are senior executives at the largest private grocery chain in America, H-E-B. Have you guys heard of this company?

Sam Parr

yeah I love heb it's like my favorite grocery store

Michael Girdley

It's insane. You should see how optimized those guys are when they're running at 3 or 4% EBITDA margins, and they think it's great.

Sam Parr

tell me everything

Michael Girdley

about heb yeah what what do you wanna know

Sam Parr

like what what why what makes it so great

Michael Girdley

It all comes down to the philosophy of the family that owns it. You have Charles Butt, who is the majority owner, and then his relatives are the rest of the owners. There’s also a percentage owned by the employees, but it's like 85-90% owned by these guys. They'll do crazy stuff. For example, when they heard that Trader Joe's was coming to San Antonio, HEB is located here. There's an anecdote that they just packed up all the senior executives who were in charge of product selection, location selection, and interior store experience. They put them on a private jet and flew them out to California, saying, "Don't come back until you have the best of every single one of their products because we need to up our game." There's another anecdote when Walmart came to San Antonio. HEB went and lowered their profit targets because they were just like, "We're not losing to Walmart. That's just the way it's gonna work." That all emanated from the ownership. You didn't have public stockholders coming in and saying, "Oh, think quarter by quarter." You had these folks thinking, "We've been here for 70 years. How are we gonna be here for another 70 years and just crush it?" That goes all the way down to the culture. My buddy works there, and he said it took 10 years before people stopped referring to him as the new guy. Can you imagine that in Silicon Valley?

Sam Parr

Of all the companies, it sounds like H-E-B is almost like a dream business. Well, not a dream business, but it's one that you look at and think, "Damn, that is cool! That is well run." I admire a few things about that. What other companies do you admire that most people don't maybe know about or think about? When it's like, "Oh, that's actually really neat for these following reasons."

Michael Girdley

Really good question. What other businesses are super sexy? I feel like I've talked a lot.

Sam Parr

About that too, but it's just like... things where it's like, "Man, these guys got it made." It's hard work, but it seems like it's pretty fun. I think that what they're doing has a lot of soul, and they're doing it right.

Shaan Puri

sam do you have one while he's thinking

Sam Parr

Yeah, I mean, it does seem like it's a lot of *Family Guy* stuff. I would say, do you guys know *Black Rifle Coffee*?

Shaan Puri

I've heard of them but I don't know much about them

Sam Parr

I don't drink, so I don't really consume too much of it. I drink the black stuff because the other options have a lot of sugar. They're typically consumed by conservatives. They've done a good job of advertising on Fox, promoting the idea that "this is made in America" and "it's all about freedom." That's cool, but they're also sponsoring rally dirt race cars. I asked them, "Why?" and they said, "Because it's freaking awesome!" They believe in having this company to do cool things, like going to a rally car event and giving out their coffee. They also participate in mountain biking races and create all this cool content, doing the redneck version of Red Bull stunts. I think that's awesome! To me, I imagine in their heads they're thinking, "Yeah, we kind of care about coffee, but we really just care about living a cool, amazing life and letting people have fun." It just so happens that selling a bunch of coffee allows them to do that. That's a good example of a business I like. They took it public, and it's worth around $600 to $700 million, so it's really successful.

Michael Girdley

Yeah, they're located here in San Antonio. Have you seen it? It's super cool! You would think it's like a coffee chain, but it's actually just a lifestyle brand. You go into the stores and there's a little coffee thing on the side, and then it's all T-shirts and swag. It's good-looking stuff! I'm not their demographic, obviously, but it's super fun to go in there and think, "Man, these guys, I'd wear that," even though it doesn't represent me.

Sam Parr

I like them a lot sean do you have one

Shaan Puri

You know, I do have a couple of people I admire. I kind of think, "Oh shit, that's simple." I like when it's really simple and the person has a good life perspective. So, the guy who came on the podcast, Mike Brown, I met him through you. I met him at the Hustle office. He was just sitting there hanging out with you, and you were like, "This guy's great. You know what's great about this guy?" I think, Sam, you probably know the story a little better than I do, but what they did was go around to families in Texas that were basically living on a gold mine. They were living on some valuable deposit of minerals or oil or whatever. They would go knock on doors and say, "Hey, you know, you're living on this land. We'll pay you for the land rights in some way." Then, they would take those assets and never actually do the oil mining or drilling themselves. They would flip that to the oil company and say, "Hey, look, we got the title rights, you know, clear and easy for that are in the earth." They were making a killing. They were making, I don't know, almost $100 million doing this. Is that right, Sam?

Sam Parr

Yeah, I believe it was multiple 8 figures in profit a year with a team of about 8 people. And they're like, "Yeah."

Shaan Puri

So, it was super profitable, super small, and super simple. It's like, well, basically we go knock on doors, we call people, and we make them an offer that they can't refuse. You know, they're not going to do anything sitting on that land. To me, I'm like, this is so simple. You compete with pretty much nobody. Then I asked, "It looks like your brother's working the business. How's that working with family?" You know, some people say different things about that. He was like, "No, it's awesome. I love my brothers." He said, "My philosophy is you find the people that you love and you do life with them." He said that, and it kind of changed the way I operated. I was like, "Oh yeah, who are the people I want to do life with?" I thought about it and decided to pick the five people who are the most awesome and then find excuses to do life with them. That sounded really simple. It's like, "Oh, I love Sam. I'm going to do a podcast with Sam." And it's like, "Oh, our buddy Ramon's awesome. Cool, I'm going to go on vacation with Ramon." You know, like, "Hey, this person's awesome. Why don't you just come work in one of my businesses rather than just go work in your own job?" So, I really liked that philosophy. I admired the sheer profits of what they were doing and how simple it was. It didn't require, you know, genius. Honestly, I'm sure he felt like he was working hard, but it's not that hard. Like, it's not.

Sam Parr

Well, he used to say, "Everyone we hire, we make them get into cycling because we all like going bike riding for two hours in the middle of the day." He's like, "We all want to go workout."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so I kind of admire people who are part of the anti-hard work crowd. I'm more of the mindset of, you know, can you work smarter, not harder? And can you even, like, not feel like you're working? Can you turn it into play by having people who are awesome doing it with you? So I like that example. The other one is Bill Simmons, who started The Ringer. I really don't think media companies are a very good business, and, you know, ironically, he just started a media company. But Bill Simmons is *fucking awesome*, and he kind of changed the game for what he does. Every sports journalist did things one way; he just did it differently and built his following sort of unapologetically.

Sam Parr

and what did he do differently

Shaan Puri

So, he just wrote from the perspective of a fan. And that sounds... actually, that's giving it too much intellectual credit. What he did was say, "Alright, what are the rules if you're a journalist?" It's like, you need to be objective. He's like, "How can I be objective? Dude, I follow sports because I love the Boston Red Sox. I love the Celtics. I'm from Boston. I grew up; my dad used to take me to the games." He's like, "I'm gonna write as this die-hard fan. When my team wins, I'm gonna be so happy. When my team loses, the sky is falling." That, of course, was super relatable to a reader because that's who your reader is—it's like a tired sports fan. So, he didn't pretend to be objective. That was the first part. Then he would be like, "Cool, I'm also not just this flat thing that can only talk about sports." So, he's like, "Oh, you know, I love the Die Hard trilogy." He'll write a column that's like, "If NBA players were characters in Die Hard, here's who would be Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2." He would do these crossovers that nobody else really took those risks with. It sounded crazy. Like, Sam, you and I both watch MTV's The Challenge. He's a huge Challenge fan, and he'll talk about it. He has a separate podcast about it, even though the audience is kind of niche. But it's so niche that when it hits, it hits in a very big way. It has a high emotional score when he talks about something. You get that you're in on the joke, like the trade value. So, he's...

Sam Parr

one of your heroes

Shaan Puri

or the mailbag or

Sam Parr

one of your business heroes

Shaan Puri

And anyways, then he spun off to his own. He was doing podcasting before it was popular, before it was like an obvious thing. So when he recently sold the whole company to Spotify for like $200 million, I kind of admired that because it was like he deserves that. He was the podcasting pioneer before podcasting was a thing. Now, he has the number one sports podcast and he can cash out. All along the way, there was never really any plan you could draw up for how that podcast was going to make the guy $200 million someday. It was an unfathomable thing, but he did it. Again, it's kind of like your Black Rifle example. It's like, "Yeah, I'm just going to do it because I think it's fun and it's cool." I kind of believe in this magic, this philosophy that if you take a bunch of cool things, put them in a hat, and mix them up, something really good comes of that. You don't have to be able to draw it out ahead of time. So I tend to love examples like that because I want to live my life more like that, where I just do things without so much of a mind map of exactly how it's all going to pay off.

Sam Parr

Dude, I love that! I think I saw this amazing quote. I'm trying to find it, but it was from Kanye. He was saying, "I despise people who do things..." I can't find the exact quote, but he's like, "I despise people who do stuff and they don't want it to be dope." He's like, "If I'm gonna do a clothing company, I'm making it dope. Even if that means I lose money, I'm making it dope. I'm making it awesome." He keeps using the word "dope." He's like, "I'm just gonna do stuff because it's amazing." And yeah, it'll probably make money, but for all the people out there who just do stuff just to get the money, but they don't want to make it awesome in the process, I think that's really weak and not cool and not dope.

Shaan Puri

have you heard that dave chappelle story he tells on like some late night show about kanye

Sam Parr

yeah tell it

Michael Girdley

my life is dead yeah

Shaan Puri

I don't remember the exact phrase. I was hanging out with Kanye, then Kanye got a call. Who was it? Somebody called him. Who was it?

Sam Parr

So, it was Kanye backstage with Dave Chappelle and Jay-Z. Kanye was just coming up and he was playing a Jay-Z song. When Kanye's verse comes up, he’s like the noob in the room. He goes, "Wait, stop that track! Rewind that and listen to that guy." He made them rewind it. Then they're like, "Dude, what are you doing, man? You're not the big shot here." Then he gets a phone call and says, "Oh, hello? Yeah, yeah, that's fine, but can I call you back? Yeah, well, I'm backstage watching never-before-seen clips with Dave Chappelle. Yeah, because my life's dope and I do dope shit." And then he hangs up.

Shaan Puri

yeah exactly

Sam Parr

I love that story

Shaan Puri

that is the best and also like that philosophy is actually kind of amazing first of all to believe in your own life being dope like how many people think that their life is dope that they are dope and they do dope shit and therefore they have a dope life like most people don't give themselves that credit and you know they're kinda waiting for dope stuff to happen for them to be able to say that kanye is the opposite right he's crazy in a bunch of ways but one of the good ways he's crazy is that he just declares my life is dope and I do dope shit and guess what you'll kinda live up to that reputation if you believe that about yourself right like if you say you know you know I take chances you know I'm I'm bold I take I take bold risks well guess what you're gonna actually take the next bold risk when the opportunity presents itself because you've kind of hardwired yourself to to have that identity when we were sam you'll like this at bebo when we hired this guy jason hitchcock and jason was jason's the best person you could hire because he will believe in you and the cause a 150% like he'll believe in you and the mission if you're like his boss and your manager or whatever like more than you believe in yourself and he'll believe that the company's gonna work even more than the ceo is gonna believe he's like I call him a kool aid drinker like he drinks the kool aid and he's not ashamed to do it and so he he because of that he's like the an amazing person to have at a start up when there's a actually a lot of people have a bunch of doubt and uncertainty in their mind and so one day I was talking to jason we were like the hustle con was coming around around the corner and I was like I think I'd messaged you I was like I wanna talk at hustle con and I think you were kinda like yeah like I'll I'll I don't know we got a bunch of speakers already you kinda blew it off you're like we know and and I was like alright fair enough but I asked and I was like I was like jason next year we're gonna talk at hustle con I was like in fact not just next year we're gonna talk at hustle con in fact everything we do this year I want you to think about how it's gonna play at your hustle con talk you're gonna give when you're gonna give this talk about how we grew from 0 to a 1000000 users how we took over the game in our industry like I want you to not just wake up and be like okay today I'm gonna send out a bunch of emails it's like I want you to think about how this could be part of your talk like how I landed the big fish through cold emails or how I you know growth hacked my way to do x and we used to talk about that literally on a weekly basis like this is part of the house of con talk and it was just to hype ourselves up to like do the more dope version of the task we were already gonna do because like imagine you're gonna talk about this on stage that means it must have turned out pretty dope or you must have done a pretty dope attempt in order to have that mindset and I I'll I still carry that to this day of like that's a pretty cool way to work

Sam Parr

Here's the quote, by the way. This is from Kanye. He said, "For me, dopeness is what I like. Most people who want to make things as dope as possible, and by default, make money from it. The thing that I like least are people who want to make money from things, whether they're dope or not, especially making money from making things the least dope as possible." I read that quote and I was like...

Shaan Puri

Yeah, we need to make that the intro of the podcast. Ben, find a clip of Kanye saying that out loud and let's make that the opening clip of the podcast. The other thing we did, by the way, that's in this bucket...

Michael Girdley

that I

Shaan Puri

I highly recommend that people do this. It's tempting to say, "We should do cool shit," and then, like, fast forward a month, and everyone's feeling tight about the budget or the deadlines, or the goal numbers are not being hit, or whatever. What's the first thing you cut? It's the stuff that doesn't easily map to this quarter's results. So we created a separate "do cool shit" budget. It was 15% of our total budget, which we put into a "do cool shit" bucket. The outcome of it had to be where we were at with our losses at BBO. I also tried to implement this at Twitch.

Sam Parr

where

Shaan Puri

Which was like, "Hey, whatever the number is that we have to spend, 15% is going to be on cool shit that we cannot... like, it doesn't have a measurable immediate payoff." So that's like the criteria. You can't... it can't be used in this much.

Sam Parr

like like making a flamethrower

Shaan Puri

Like making a flamethrower or, you know, I don't know if you saw this, but we did the Milk Red rebrand or whatever. I paid this guy to make this little video that's like a mock Apple commercial. It doesn't do anything. It's not going to drive subscribers; it's not going to make revenue. I mean, in many ways, it is arguably a waste of time and money to just pay the guy to do that and to even think about the concept and all that. But I've always had this with my companies, which is like I need 15%. At the very least, this is just to keep myself amused and engaged and like a fan of my own business. I know if I'm more engaged in my own business, that part will pay off. On the other side, I think your consumers, the customers of your business, also pay attention to that. If they see you doing dope stuff just for the sake of doing dope stuff, they kind of see you as the cool kid in school in a way, right? If you're always just begging for customers or users, or doing a discounted sale, or saying, "Please, please, please follow me," or "Please, please, please subscribe," you kind of are low status in a way. I think at The Hustle, you guys did a good job of this too. Do you have any examples of this?

Sam Parr

Yeah, like we did stuff early on that we kind of liked, but people got mad at. They were like, "You're gonna lose money, lose customers." I'm like, "Yeah, but it's hilarious!" One time, we wrote an entire email in Trump's voice. So, we were like, "Imagine if you read it and you were saying it out loud. Does it sound like you were Donald Trump?"

Shaan Puri

everybody loved it everybody's saying it's the best people are saying that they're saying it's the best

Sam Parr

Yeah, like that's how it was written. Then, another time—this was pretty vulgar but also pretty funny—we wrote the subject line: "Here's the only tip that you need to know for how to be productive today at work." You open it up, and it was just that picture of Johnny Cash where he flicks off the camera, and it just says, "Close this browser and get back to work." That was it! That was the email, and we sent that to 120,000 people. We didn't even send an email. Then maybe one final thing: this woman, Lindsay, worked for me, and she sent Tuesday's email on Wednesday, which is a mistake. She's like, "Shit!" She's freaking out. I was like, "Here, do this." I wrote in Slack, "Hey, I heard you sent the wrong email." She replied in Slack, "Yeah, my bad. It's really messed up." I said, "But we gotta talk. Until then, just fix it." She replied with, "Well, what should I do?" I was like, "I don't know, man. Just put the new email in and send it again. Just take a screenshot of this and put it in." She goes, and she replied with something funny, and that was just the screenshot that went at the top of the email. There was no explainer.

Michael Girdley

right

Sam Parr

And so we would do little things like that all the time. What about you, Michael? Are there any companies that you look at that kind of fall into this category?

Michael Girdley

It's super fun! Well, I did find one to talk about. Have you guys done Popsockets before? Have you talked to them?

Shaan Puri

we haven't talked about it no

Michael Girdley

Yeah, it's a crazy story. So, it's the little... you take the back of the case of your phone and you put the little ring on it. Well, that's patented, and they're called PopSockets. They're very litigious. The business started in 2014, and they sold 30,000 of these things. They were selling for about $10 or $12 each. But then they got really popular, and people in China started trying to knock them off and sell them on Amazon and all this stuff. It was a UC Boulder professor, and by 2017, they sold 35,000,000 of them. In 2018, they sold 60,000,000 of these things. All because they have a patent on this little way that, you know, teenage girls in Orange County want to grip their phones. They're just printing money. Supposedly, in 2018, they had $200,000,000 in revenue and $90,000,000 in profit, all because of a patent. It's one of the greatest... yes, I know this is true because I got it off of Wikipedia when I researched this a few months ago.

Shaan Puri

yeah that's that's amazing

Michael Girdley

Gotta be several hundred million at least. I mean, they gotta keep growing. Every lady I know has one of those things. You fit your nails in there; it's great.

Shaan Puri

Sam, you want to know a little realization I had today? When Michael was coming on, I was like, "Alright, what do I know about Michael?" I was like, he does that little Chili's shtick where he's always like, you know, "The only thing..." I don't even know how I would explain it, but you basically just find an excuse to name-drop Chili's and say how great Chili's is and why it's the best place for a meeting. You're just like, "Oh my God, you know, so happy for Mother's Day! I love my mother, but not as much as I love Chili's!" Right? You just come up with some way to integrate Chili's in. And Sam, I don't know if you've seen this, but I actually talked about this with Ben once. We were trying to build up my brand. It was like, "Alright, I got this podcast; it's brand new. I got a Twitter with a few thousand followers at the time. What should we do to build a brand?" So we did this one two-hour exercise. We just looked at people who had good brands and asked, "What are some common things that they do?" One of the things we found was that a lot of people early on in the tech industry—sorry, not early on in the tech industry, that's like in the seventies or some shit—but early on when I got into tech, I was following some people on Twitter. I saw this guy, Ryan Hoover, and he seemed interesting. He was blogging and started this thing called Product Hunt. Ryan would always talk about Philz Coffee and LaCroix. In fact, LaCroix kind of became a startup meme. I really give Ryan a lot of credit for it because he was always talking about LaCroix. Then when Product Hunt got popular, it just accelerated the LaCroix meme in the community as like, "You know what's low-key great? LaCroix." And then, I don't know, Pomp does this thing with Domino's all the time where he's like, "Domino's is the best!" I think he always says that. It's kind of this thing where you get this serious business persona in one way, but then you show this human side. It's like, "Oh, I just love this thing!" I don't know if yours would be like Topo Chico or something like that. You used to kind of promote those out. Michael's got Chili's.

Sam Parr

we gotta make ours cheesecake factory

Shaan Puri

Yeah, like I was thinking Chick-fil-A, Cheesecake Factory. We need something that's like our shtick. It can't just be false; you gotta genuinely have that love for it. The only part that's the shtick is that you talk about it, and you don't really talk about it. It's like you're serious, serious, serious about Topo Chico because it's like, you know, this makes the cut. It's that important to me.

Michael Girdley

it's that good

Shaan Puri

it is I'm that big of a fan

Sam Parr

You're like, "Michael, we had a great time. You know, let me know when you're in Austin. We'll go out sometime for some cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory and maybe get the chicken piccata. We'll have a great time!"

Michael Girdley

yes that sounds good is that on menu like page 14 of the menu or 57

Shaan Puri

skinnylicious menu so I

Michael Girdley

I think when you pick this thing, the thing I would recommend is that it's gotta be something that's... well, okay, so here's a story for you. I'm 25 years old and I'm finally figuring out how to talk to women in my life. It's like I had not figured it out until this point. So my buddy and I decided to start going to parties, and we would dress up in suits. This was when everybody was dressed in grunge in San Francisco, so it didn't work. We'd show up dressed in these fancy suits, and it was just odd enough that the women would be like, "Why are you guys doing this?" It's just slightly odd, right? So I think you need to figure out **peacocking**. What's it called? Peacocking? Yeah, okay. I could have been one of those pickup artist guys who needs to do this whole thing. I could be a pickup artist; I have the potential, but I could not do that. Anyway, I don't like hair gel enough. But anyway, I think you gotta figure out something that's just a little bit odd. You're like, "Why does this technology entrepreneur in San Antonio like chili so much?" So if the Cheesecake Factory is that, I think you're good. But whatever it is, it's gotta be just a little... like, "Why are they wearing suits to this party?" Yeah, like what's going on?

Shaan Puri

It can't be cool. Yeah, that's the first thing. It can't be cool because if you're just trying to say some fad that everybody thinks is cool, then now you're just hopping on a bandwagon. You actually have to say something that's not so cool. Like for me, the genuine one would be Cinnabon. I *fucking* love Cinnabon. Nobody even thinks about Cinnabon. So that's the corner for Cinnabon; it's open. I could take that corner, you know? That's a piece of land on the board that nobody's touching right now. I could just pick that up for cheap. But people do know it. It's kind of nostalgic and it gives people something to gift you, or a place they can offer to take you. Every time they go there or see one, they will think of you. Like every time I drive by a Chili's, goddamn it, I think of Michael Girdley. It's the same thing with LaCroix and Ryan Hoover; they own that mental real estate in my mind. So, Sam, we could do that with Cheesecake Factory. We could just make it so that every time someone sees it, they see...

Michael Girdley

us you definitely should do that that's a great idea

Shaan Puri

alright thanks for coming on man

Sam Parr

wait wait late he's got problems for himself what's his handle

Michael Girdley

at girdly on twitter

Sam Parr

sick well thank you thank you for coming on that was awesome