# How To Create Your Own Luck With Julien Smith

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=791aJiIg1kg
Duration: 1 hr 4 min
Language: English
Words: 12229
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/791aJiIg1kg

---

[0:00] no matter what happens to you you stay in the arena you're not always going to win but you're always going to try and so long as you get smarter you will have good things that happen to you even as good other good things pass you by and it's kind of like a mindset that you have to have if you're going to be in not even just in tech just in entrepreneurship probably [Music] all right greg to start this episode i'm gonna need a story on this hat if you're not watching on youtube uh greg has a very interesting hat selection for today's today's show greg i went to joshua tree with some of my

[0:44] closest friends and they made me a hat called what would greg do wwgd and i just remember wearing this hat blowing out the candles 30 30 candles on my birthday and just feeling like feeling like i've made it because if you have a hat that says ww oh oh julian's putting on a hat is that a wwjd greenhouse julian dew also a green hat i don't know if i have a green outline okay that's that's another hat that you can wear that you sort of made it if you're wearing a spreadsheets hat but greg's hat your hat has a avatar of you on there and that avatar always

[1:32] cracks me up because it's your old twitter picture and i remember like because of your avatar most people that were following you thought you were like a 55 year old man and when we launched this podcast in what was that like november of 2021 and we filmed our first episode and put it up like half of the replies we got to the first episode were literally commenting on the fact that they thought greg was 55 and it turned out pretty much a younger guy people thought i was like a you know mid 60s wall street journal journalist um so i really confuse people you kind of give off those vibes

[2:09] well look we're um julian so so excited to have you on today man this has been a long time coming julian smith um we're going to get into a lot of who you are so i don't want to like fail to do you justice by trying to define you with like a one-sentence blurb at the beginning so i'm gonna actually just refrain from doing that um but you are a you know personal friend to both of us um you know someone we both admire a lot as a as an entrepreneur and as a thinker more broadly and so super excited to have this discussion with you and get to

[2:39] share it with everyone so that we can spend a little time getting inside your head and just having a having a little bit of a jam session here yeah thanks for having me did you know that one of the top reasons startups fail is bad hiring decisions people can be unpredictable and developers can be unpredictable as well let lemon.io take care of hiring your software engineers why lemon.io they test and interview every single specialist before offering them to clients unlike many other sites offering remote software developers lemon.io is sure they offer you experienced and verified devs it's like hiring someone after your best friend's recommendation but even better why

[3:24] because even the best friend can't offer you a replacement of the candidate in 48 hours or less if something goes wrong but lemon.io can you'll be working with hand-picked software engineers from europe they'll be a part of your team lemon.io staff never intrudes on your communications unless you ask them to minimum bureaucracy maximum efficiency that's a win-win combination for developers and clients so hire high quality verified vetted engineers from europe with lemon.io and be stronger than 90 of startups on the market go to lemon.io room and get 15 off for the first four weeks get there before your competitors will check out lemon.io today if you're anything like me your

[4:14] portfolio is a mix of the usual suspects stocks bonds and mutual funds maybe you've even dabbled in some alternative assets like crypto but those investments can be incredibly unpredictable you know what typically isn't unpredictable apartment buildings rental homes industrial facilities places we go every day to work eat and live that's all private real estate and thanks to its historical stability as well as its reputation as a reliable income stream these investments could be a valuable addition to your portfolio this is where fundrise comes in fundrise is changing the game when it comes to real estate investing and making this powerful asset class easily available to investors like you and me

[4:59] their easy to use app lets you build a real estate portfolio tailored to meet your goals it's a great way to benefit from real estate's many perks while adding some much needed diversification to your portfolio so join over 250 000 other investors building a better portfolio with private real estate signing up is easy just head over to fundrise.com room again that's f u n d r i s e dot com slash room to get started today so i i was trying to think about like where to start on this conversation greg and i were chatting yesterday as we had done our research and we're thinking about

[5:40] like what's the right way to frame this up with julian because you are as i said many many things um and i think probably a lot of people know you for your entrepreneurial pursuits arguably more interesting than your entrepreneurial pursuits is um your path and kind of how you formed your map of reality to get there um and greg was the one that alerted me to this that you um and kind of sent me your website and some of your old blogs and the books you had written so can you just walk us through a little bit to kind of set the stage on like who is julian smith like

[6:11] you know you were you were born now you're here uh what happened in between yeah i i had to figure so regarding the map of reality uh it's important to state that i was brought up super working class my father was a a coach like an exact coach but really before that he was a teacher in a one-room school in saskatchewan canada and my mother was a secretary and so i i i think a lot of people in tech they were like quite well connected maybe at the very beginning or they went to some cool school or some other thing like that uh foundationally in my in my life i i'm an

[6:51] underdog which is which is someone that believes that no one is going to pay attention that uh no that i don't that like i'm never going to get a break that no one's ever going to offer me a job which is still really true actually even now and that i'm going to have to really really work hard for all of the things that i have to do now that said at the same time i'm also a person who has gotten super lucky very early on in my life greg and i share like a few things i don't know how much like i've been so there's a number

[7:22] of episodes of this i've listened to i don't know if greg has ever shared like for example things about affiliate marketing which i also share early on in my history which is like these weird breaks where like you know previous to our generation you couldn't have like some 20 year old kid that's like yeah i made a couple million dollars online kind of doing nothing and then i went on and did some other thing but i i was one of those people and um and and so just for people who don't understand that what what is that what is affiliate marketing like it's it's new to me

[7:56] relatively new as a concept so like what were you and greg doing in those early days you know the little montreal mafia of like 16 year old that were somehow making bank on the internet while i was like [ __ ] around doing god knows what at age 16. caught up so it's okay it's it's uh what greg and i mean i he he'd speak to his experience we didn't know each other then but in my my background where it came from is i was one of the first podcasters in the world that's not necessarily a thing you should be that proud of it's interesting but because of that

[8:27] there was no way to monetize podcasts back then except for coupon codes and as a result of coupon codes because you could say a coupon code on a podcast right the result of that which i've see i've heard you do is an ability to attribute a sale to a podcast and so i got really really really good at hustling coupon codes back in 2004 uh when i was uh 25 or 26 or 27 or something and that is how i switched from having like a real shitty job going back to the history like like no college degree dropped out like five six times working a customer service job

[9:07] to recording a podcast and all of a sudden i had an online income out of out of nowhere and and so to back to the map of reality is like it's kind of like i'm going to have to keep working hard but if i keep working hard i don't know where the breaks are going to come from but i'm going to get some right it's kind of like how i think about what i do yeah it's like the um it's like this whole idea of like creating luck um which i've written about and talked about a lot it's you know one and one form of that is

[9:37] i think noval has written about this in the past but you just like move around enough and create enough motion in your ecosystem that you're just bound to get lucky because you're like you're literally if you're like an atom entering an ecosystem and you're just like shooting around banging into things like shooting or you know crashing into stuff somehow some way there's going to be some lucky thing that happens to you as a result of all that motion you're creating and it's i always love that as like a generalized mental model around these things um especially for young people because i think it's like it's something that anyone can do um you

[10:09] know you don't have to be an expert at something yet you can just create a lot of emotion and figure out your expertise as you go that's true the the other side of that is it means that you're going to miss some you're going to you're going to you're going to go out and it's like one of the things that you used to take really take those things really personally it's just be like oh i came up with this thing and then like but a good early example is is is being very early in podcasting so early that i was obviously too early right and so it's like we used to talk about ah

[10:39] it's gonna kill radio and it was my first job i got hired my my podcast ended up on sirius satellite radio in 2000 i feel like sixth or something like oh my gosh that's a big break but it's such a big break in such a small ecosystem back then it turns out it doesn't [ __ ] matter and so being early is the same thing as being wrong right yeah exactly and so uh and so you're gonna you're gonna get some lucky breaks presuming you know the hamster wheel keeps going and you keep staying on it but at the same time you're gonna miss some and when you miss

[11:09] some you you have to just like take the l and move on yeah the question is how painful those misses are and like if they damage you or if they compound in the long run i've always thought you know there's like um something i've thought about recently is like you know if you're using like a fighter example if you're kind of a fighter and you take like a glancing blow you know someone like almost knocks you out but it like kind of slips off there's like two types of people there's the person that is like oh phew i'm good don't worry about it like he missed me

[11:39] and then there's the person that's like what did i do that exposed me to that like what did i learn from that situation right there why did i take that glancing on how do i avoid that in the future and the second person is obviously able to like compound on the positive experience from taking the glancing blow where the first person is just as likely to take a knockout blow on the next punch because they didn't learn from that first one um so it's an interesting thing i think like what you're talking about as you as you learn as you create that motion what are you

[12:06] doing to learn from those l's and actually build upon them rather than just have them be you know some l on your score card it's difficult because when you when you do this when you take them you also all of a sudden realize your own vulnerability like like i remember the first time i went out surfing way too far way too early and as a result of doing that like i almost drowned at least once right and so that's when you're out there and i remember this happened it's like a critical moment in my life i'll never forget it i was saved well i mean there were a lot of surfers

[12:37] around me so i probably wasn't going to drown but holy [ __ ] that i ever feel like i was going to drown and uh and so what it does is it it creates this kind of vague ptsd or maybe acute ptsd uh from from something that traumatizes you it could be a business failure or it could be very visceral like what i'm describing right now and and the hardest part as you get older and you have more like experience under your belt doing these things is to retain that kind of fearlessness right and and it's that's why peter thiel who by the way like all of these people who

[13:11] we used to like just quote without any repercussions now we quote them and we're afraid to do so because they're they've they've gone off the rails in some cases i don't agree with everything he says but i he would be like no no you don't want failure people in startups talk about failure and and and really embrace that to a degree that's true but at the same time the fearlessness is so incredibly valuable like breather i would never have started such an ambitious company as a second time company because it takes so much balls to be able to do that to do this crazy radical off off

[13:47] the wall thing that nobody had really even conceived of existing as a startup that's really hard right i was going to ask you guys this as like both of you you know are builders and you've tried tested failed succeeded with a variety of things over your careers and lives do you think that there is a common thread of like having that almost like irrational optimism or like degree of arrogance like the willingness to go out way deeper than you should have surfing and the version of that that is in work you know you mention it with breather like greg have you experienced that as a builder consumer

[14:20] social is like the ultimate example of that i think anyone that goes into consumer social to build has to have that type of like boundless irrational optimism to some extent or like i want to clarify the the you know sort of where we came from and how that impacts who we are and i think this is relevant to anyone not from new york and not from san francisco uh you know a lot of our friends that we grew up with and clarify if i'm wrong julian but they're not doing big things at all um a lot of them don't even work and they don't it's not like they're not

[15:01] working because they're on the beach they're just like barely working part-time jobs you know consulting one day a week chilling out

[15:25] and where we came from is high and there's a cost associated with that as well and because of that i think people like julian and i kind of like you know our role models were people and books and people that we watched on tv like there's a reason why julian was reading like a book a week or something like that and ended up writing you know new york times bestselling book and there was reasons why you know i was you know traveling a lot and and sort of spent a lot of time there the point is the the other thing is the cost the cost of

[15:59] like us failing was is you know felt i don't know it felt smaller um you know when when i could have gotten an apartment for 500 a month instead of 4 000 a month in san francisco or when all my friends you know when i started a company thought i was crazy um [Music] i don't know i felt like being from a place where there's less success stories you just feel a bit more fearless because you think that may be kind of invincible it's we have a lawyer that we collectively have shared in the past name his name oh they just say his first name adam is the

[16:43] name of the lawyer and he i i brought breather to him by the way like literally nobody thought that this was a good idea like and i mean it like literally no one maybe greg like i was like here you should like which does this and and maybe he was the closest thing to maybe accepting that this could be a company right and so and so uh we i bring the lawyer to breakfast in west mount some of you care about this most of you will not any and and the lawyer the lawyer brings a um a sort of real estate like management firm dude and both of

[17:17] them were like you should not like you have you have a successful thing going you like you got a new york times best-selling book like you're doing speaking gigs like don't do this with the general attitude of like don't [ __ ] up your life right and so it it's it we and that's one of the hard working ones in in general it's like you know i always think about this this paul graham thing about like a city is telling you something the city itself is not telling you something but the ethos of that city is saying things to you and in where we come from the city is

[17:52] just like yeah hang out like everything's cool you're gonna be all right you don't need to work that hard and and so it makes it it makes the cost of failure low because nobody cares anyway i versus let's say in new york where everyone is richer and cooler than you or whatever the hell else but the other downside of it is that you have no support and and when you have no support you become incredibly like galvanized against other people saying things that like they don't agree or and like like literally nobody like you know i remember being in the first ten thousand users on twitter in 2006 like

[18:31] as you know you just went through your my history of things and and you discover that i've been around for a long time and so i have and and just i would i would come back to like people around me and be like hey here's this thing meanwhile it was on oprah or whatever whatever was happening with twitter back then and everyone and everyone around me was like this is dumb you are dumb if i go back to high school it's just like there was a lot of that back then as well and this is when it really i started becoming galvanized against ultimately rejection it's just like

[19:01] like i had no choice but to kind of like rise out of the ashes of this [ __ ] like way of being was just like okay wait nobody agrees with me either i'm dumb but i don't think i am i feel like i got something maybe these people just don't understand me and you just get stronger and stronger and stronger as you do this right and so like that's like the thing about growing up up in this different type of ecosystem that that values different things it seems like there's also a common thread in what you guys are saying of just like realizing that the worst case isn't that

[19:35] bad um i've always like greg i've talked to you about this recently like i've had these deep-seated fears of certain things um one of my deep-seated fears is like people calling me an idiot like people people realizing that i'm an idiot you know like an imposter syndrome thing of like oh my god they're gonna figure out that i'm an idiot and that i don't belong here and like for the longest time i've just been like oh my god really careful about everything that i say everywhere because i was just worried about that and then i kind of got dragged on the internet for something that i said which you know was

[20:06] probably like not really well thought through um and probably naive fair but like a lot of people called me an idiot all at once and i texted greg and i was like you know there's sort of this funny feeling of like once it's happened you realize like oh i'm still here um like i got punched in the face a whole lot there over and over and over again by like my biggest fear like something i really deeply viscerally did not want to ever happen to me and i'm still standing here and we're still having this conversation i still have friends like people still care about me it's okay um

[20:38] and i think that there's like a common thread there as well of just like that realization with entrepreneurs that the worst case you know you fail like the thing you thought was gonna work is not and you kind of pick your pick yourself up and like american law has great bankruptcy laws and you can you know like make your way and re you know reset the clock and figure out how to go do your next thing and take another shot at it and there's plenty of case studies of people who have had that happen and then had their amazing success on turn three four or five

[21:05] that it's very true and at the same time you were always thinking because you're you're watching the media in not the media with capital m but you're watching various forms of like info that is being pushed pushed back at you and the media is driving this narrative of you're young probably you your parents are rich probably uh you have a reality show probably you're thin and successful and like all of these other things and you're like you look at yourself in the mirror whoever you are it doesn't really matter and you're like but i'm ugly and stupid and and so um uh and it doesn't matter

[21:49] how many successes you have on your belt there's still a part of you that still try to fight that i was listening to your josh wolfe thing the other day and i it was incredible the transparency of someone who's obviously done really well and who's well respected but who at the same time i get uh it it allowed him to be even more clear about what his weaknesses are and i really respect that because it takes even you know it's it takes a lot it especially takes a lot as an entrepreneur because as an entrepreneur it is especially like this this the culture of we're doing well

[22:30] i'm doing well is so consistent and pervasive but as a second time entrepreneur i will tell you something that i really learned in my first company venture back company i really was like we're doing well everything's going great i really i did this i trumpeted this attitude of positivity now what i do is is i say here's the things that are going well here's the things we need to work on and and i think that that that that understanding that there's still something to work on first of all it gives an impression to me that of me that people are like oh he actually knows what he's

[23:06] doing he's not just like relentlessly trumpeting optimism all the time and then the second one is i get to then like normalize the [ __ ] ups which is like yeah we don't know this yet and we don't understand this yet and we don't understand yet this yeah versus saying one thing and believing in other and and having that that difference between the outside world and the inside world uh cause you like [ __ ] have anxiety attacks or whatever it is yeah you talked about a lot of this in um one of your blog posts like when i was going through and reading some of your

[23:42] old blogs to get a better understanding of you prior to the episode um you're one of your like best blog posts is is called the complete guide to not giving a [ __ ] okay and it's so good like highly recommend people go and and read it because it's amazing and i just super super thoughtful um can you talk a little bit about that piece i mean like people know this concept because of a book that came out although i'm checking the date stamps on it your piece came out april 2011. that book came out in 2016. so i'm going to ask you about that as well

[24:14] and it's ironic that i was i was an author of book them like at that time when that piece was written at the same time right i hadn't started a company i i so so i don't really talk about this because i it's one of the things that i sort of move past but i'll talk about it here with all y'all because we know each other and so on and it's like whatever but but i definitely i don't want to be one of those people that is like but look at this thing before it because you know what happens in tech as all these people are like but i invented twitter

[24:43] before five years before and you're like no you [ __ ] didn't you [ __ ] invented a stupid thing and so here here is the story the story is in 2011 uh i guess i published this this blog post which you can look up and the reason it was so successful is because from an seo standpoint my website was excellent and my uh and my affiliate marketing business was based in seo and so when i wrote this piece all of a sudden i ranked number one for years for how to not give a [ __ ] for years and so 10 000 visits a day or some [ __ ]

[25:26] would go to my website with this idea of not giving a [ __ ] right if we should think about it as an incredible like a thing that lots of people want and so uh i i did write a book then which actually is which was extremely well read at that time and even today that that still i i get a message about called flinch which is about this idea of of uh making sure not to to um to to shirk away from things that you're afraid of and then i wrote another book which is portfolio penguin which is called the impact equation after those three books i went and i

[26:01] started breather but alongside that happening probably what happened is that and this is this is the part that i kind of try not to talk about because i i don't want it to seem like sour grapes well i asked about it so yeah i know i understand yeah typically i would not bring this up is this thing continued to rank number one for complete my guide to not giving a [ __ ] for literally forever and then along the lines some kind of thing happened and then it became a book and then i started seeing in bookstores and i'm not saying because i haven't read this book and by

[26:33] the way i have no intention of reading it ever but lots of people have read it i went to italy one time and i i saw somebody reading it on at that next to the pool and i was like man this is really weird and i and but i this is one of those things about staying in the arena you no matter what happens to you you stay in the arena you're not always going to win but you're always going to try and so long as you get smarter you will have good things that happen to you even as good other good things pass you by

[27:07] and it's kind of like a mindset that you have to have if you're going to be in not even just in tech just in entrepreneurship probably so i appreciate you sharing that because i know that it's not something you've you've shared publicly before i have read the book um i thought your blog post is better just for what it's worth don't don't tell the uh don't tell the author of the book um but uh no i i mean look it is um it's another example of like one of those you know one of those moments in your career that you know at the time feels damaging and

[27:42] and you wrestle with and you know you're like everyone talks about this is something i just think about a lot we all talk about like oh failure leads to growth or like dark times you know darkest before the dawn like there's all these cliches and adages and i'm just as uh you know responsible because i spout them on twitter all the time but the reality is that like dark times failures whatever they just [ __ ] suck and like no matter how much excuse my language like no matter how much you know you like read those things and say them to yourself whatever when you're in

[28:12] it it's just dark and sometimes it just stays dark and you're just like down and you don't know when it's gonna come out you don't see a path to it being good or green and you're just like it just sucks and there's no way around that you just have to kind of be in it and go through it um and this seems like one of those moments but on the other side of it obviously was a lot of uh what is what it encourages you to do is you get better at suffering which is a crazy thing to think about but it's like the first time

[28:40] that you suffer you're just like wow this is terrible but so long as you persevere and by the way we're talking about entrepreneurship we're not getting we're not talking about like torture right and we're not talking about war yeah we're not talking about real starvation we're talking about it you have a thing you're trying to make something of yourself you're some random person in a corner you're trying to build the world to a degree in your image more than it was before which was zero and so uh and so like so like just stay on the treadmill and just keep going regardless of what happens and then as those bad things happen you

[29:23] actually you become much better at handling them this is why i don't have to say like my actually my company is doing quite well thank you by the way you've both been uh a part of the last financing and that's awesome and thank you for that i i the um the even though my company is doing well i don't like overshoot it and assume oh and then we're gonna make and then the next financing is gonna be like this and then we're gonna have this much in in revenue and like i'm just like i work on today i work on today regardless of what happens whether that day is good or bad

[29:58] and it it's actually incredibly clarifying to do that and and it's like if you are working on projects like this whether it what it does is a little bit as if whether you are succeeding or failing kind of becomes beside the point it's and i will say like in entrepreneurship like because i coach ceos right because practice the company that we're talking about here is isn't it is a a software platform for coaches to run their businesses and so as a result of that i coach first-time ceos and when you see the inside of their business it's like it's not [ __ ] easy out there ma'am

[30:37] and so like to anyone that's listening to this is like these guys seem maybe they seem to have it figured out or something we truly do not like we're just we're just really doing our best one day at a time and and maybe we have a lot of suffering behind us so we've made it i love the we suffer less because i think that's so true i remember 2011 2012 coming from montreal to san francisco put all my money into this video discovery startup i was running called five by and i was literally like reaching out to anyone who would talk to me and i went for a hike with this

[31:13] entrepreneur and i was telling him what i was doing and he was like oh dude like that sounds exactly like insert famous consumer social app person uh is doing it sounds and i showed him the mock-ups he's like dude it's literally like pixel for pixel the same and i was like could you put me in touch with him and like you know that feeling like your heart sinks um that's how i felt yes put it put in you know we get in touch the next day we're having coffee um he shows me the platform and it's like a it's like not only is it pixel uh for pixel better or pixel perfect the

[31:54] same it's like 10x better and everything is just more thought out and uh he looks me in the eye and this is the craziest thing that you know it's such a crazy thing to say and he was like i wouldn't even sell my company for a billion dollars to google because he had sold his last company to google and i basically left that coffee meeting just like you know crying like honestly like i was just like this is this is done like but this is over before it's even begun and you're totally right like ever since then like every you know big suffering event has been like less and less and less

[32:37] um but if you're gonna sign up to entrepreneurship you are gonna suffer period if you're anything like me your portfolio is a mix of the usual suspects stocks bonds and mutual funds maybe you've even dabbled in some alternative assets like crypto but those investments can be incredibly unpredictable you know what typically isn't unpredictable apartment buildings rental homes industrial facilities places we go every day to work eat and live that's all private real estate and thanks to its historical stability as well as its reputation as a reliable income stream these investments could be a valuable addition to your portfolio this is where fundrise comes in fundrise is changing the game when it

[33:23] comes to real estate investing and making this powerful asset class easily available to investors like you and me their easy to use app lets you build a real estate portfolio tailored to meet your goals it's a great way to benefit from real estate's many perks while adding some much needed diversification to your portfolio so join over 250 000 other investors building a better portfolio with private real estate signing up is easy just head over to fundrise.com room again that's f u n d r i s e dot com slash room to get started today did you know that one of the top reasons startups fail is bad hiring decisions

[34:08] people can be unpredictable and developers can be unpredictable as well let lemon.io take care of hiring your software engineers why lemon.io they test and interview every single specialist before offering them to clients unlike many other sites offering remote software developers lemon.io is sure they offer you experienced and verified devs it's like hiring someone after your best friend's recommendation but even better why because even the best friend can't offer you a replacement of the candidate in 48 hours or less if something goes wrong but lemon.io can you'll be working with hand-picked software engineers from europe they'll be a part of your team lemon.io staff never intrudes on your communications

[34:57] unless you ask them to minimum bureaucracy maximum efficiency that's a win-win combination for developers and clients so hire high quality verified vetted engineers from europe with lemon.io and be stronger than 90 of startups on the market go to lemon dot io room and get 15 off for the first four weeks get there before your competitors will check out lemon.io today you guys are both entrepreneurs you've both been in the arena in that very real way um i want to talk a little bit about like that first kind of that first action like you know for julian for your first company like when you made the jump from um you know

[35:44] being an author speaking tour all you know to your point the lawyers told you like you have a great thing going why are you making this change what was it like what was the insight and what was your first action step when you were gonna jump into it i think a lot of people would benefit from hearing that because there's a lot of people who have the ideas and then don't take the action and it's like how do you combine the two what was your kind of moment and and how did you make that jump you know it's interesting i haven't thought about this in a long time but i was a big habit

[36:10] proponent back in the day and and um what i did was i was using a habit app uh and i wrote in it as one of my things work on secret project and it's and it's like remarkably simple right like i i knew i really cared about this thing i didn't know what it was at the time and actually it was like a shitty version of the idea probably back then but i i made an effort to work on it every single day yeah and and i mean that's how it started and it it sort of grew in seriousness it grew in series what did that mean to you like

[36:46] work on a project every single day like i just wanted to i just wanted to put i just want to push the ball forward in any way that i could i did not care what it was so long as i could check it off and i hadn't like you know i had a kind of intellectual honesty towards myself like i'm not gonna [ __ ] on myself about it and i said so long as i advance this i can see whether or not it was something and there came a stage where i just got an unbelievable crazy optimism and my like my crazy optimism was like

[37:19] nothing i'd ever had about anything and i was like i'm pretty sure not only did i believe that it was fundamentally gonna happen by the way i knew nothing about it i used to send greg emails about like i have no idea how to raise money i'm so like i have no idea what i'm doing these people seem so smart i'm so stupid i looked at these emails a few months ago it's ironic like when how it went since then right but like i i really believed that i knew nothing and that i had no path to doing it because i didn't know anybody like that

[37:50] like back to the network i had nobody in my world i don't even think i really even knew what entrepreneurship was but i i had a sense that if i could advance it just a little bit at a time every day it would become more real and then ultimately it did and that's how i learned to become a ceo and that's how i learned to raise all this money and and build a business and all of these cities and all these things as a result of just kind of taking and just for the listeners like this he was when he when julian's talking about raising all this

[38:18] money he's not talking about you know 500k or a million dollars you know he's just being a humble canadian here we're talking in the in the hundreds of millions of dollars lots of money in a short amount of time yeah yep about 200 million dollars so and this is a guy who literally didn't know anything about startups like i like like it's he literally did not and then like he was emailing me and i was like 22 at the time or something so and and we were kind of like going back and forth when we were in the arena together and just like sort of you know doing our best and

[39:03] seeing what julian had did from i want to say what like two when did you start breather 13 yeah so in a matter it's pretty inspirational because in a matter of a few years going from not knowing much about venture-backed startups to zero to one you know hundreds of employees hundreds of millions of dollars raised coming from a place that's you know he didn't graduate from harvard or whatever wasn't living in new york or san francisco had no existing network like he he bootstrapped it and he did it because he treated it like a job i i i'm looking at the emails right now and and i'm looking at them and it's

[39:47] literally me like kind of vaguely not like it's like an egalitarian relationship it's two people speaking equals but literally me going i have no idea what i'm doing do you know how to raise money because i don't and i don't know anybody that does and he sent me these shitty like decks from 2012 or whatever it is and i and i don't even know how i got over the hump to tell you the truth but i will say that we were lucky like like i was i was lucky because i would be able to for example i called gary vaynerchuk on the phone it was like a story i'll never

[40:22] forget on my life because i have the the some of the history that probably many people don't know is i have epilepsy i don't have a lot of seizures but i worry about seizures a lot and um and sleep really meaningfully affects whether i have them or not and so i'm sitting in the back of an uber back when they were just limos and i'm taking this call with gary vaynerchuk because i happen like we know each other from the book world right so i am kind of more networked at this point because i've written a couple books blah blah and so i i'm lying down like fearful

[40:56] of whether i'm gonna have a seizure or not which i don't obviously and uh and i'm like hey and i say to the dude like do you mind if i lie down in your thing in the back seat and i'll never forget what you say to me he says sir while you're in my car you are a king i was like wow i take the call from gary and and he he goes something like i don't have time to advise because i was just like i was like well he even like does he does he really know me that well is he and he's like yeah julian has been

[41:23] around a super long time uh yeah i'll definitely invest no problem and he just gives me my basically my first money right there so it's like we do have those advantages but at the same time like it required some happenstance for people to just give you a shot and that's the thing that i really never forget i and i remember talking to somebody about this recently it's like i will never forget people that give me a shout out greg to a degree as a person that gave me a shot really being willing to kind of like help me out and learning how to do this and as much as possible

[41:51] whenever i find smart people i'm just like i want to give them a shot yeah it's like you know the people that there's kind of two people that you never forget uh people that gave you a shot and people that were there for you in your darkest times um i like i always think about that like you can count on two hands the people in those categories for you and they are so so impactful and you never forget them like the person that is there for you i call them darkest hour friends but like the person that is there for you when [ __ ] is really bad um because it's

[42:24] just not convenient it's not cool it's not positive for them like everyone wants to be there when you raise a bunch of money and there's like the celebration of the round and everyone's going to be there for you julian we're going to be like yo this is sick let's go party we go to vegas you know you just raised 100 million awesome but like how many of those people are there when the [ __ ] goes belly up and it's not working and you know you're having to fire sail it like whatever it is like how many of those people are still there and it's it's very few unfortunately um

[42:50] but those people that are are the people that then come up over and over and over again in your life and that you want to be there with in the trenches with yeah and it's interesting because like i have to say i have these old friends of mine again from like back in the day that i stay friends with and i've been friends with them since high school or college but increasingly it's like you have your friends kind of have to be entrepreneurs it's not like universally true but they just like get you in a way that other people do not and there is this mutual understanding

[43:20] and again like i'm making these weird analogies it's like two people went to war we didn't we do not go to war not really but we have a set of unique experiences that are that really cannot be shared with other people that have never started companies before and have never like basically smashed their face up against the wall over and over and over again until like a brick fell out and then they were able to like squeeze their whole body through the brick somehow and make company out of that like those those people have done that yeah i'm i want to talk about this because and we we haven't talked about this you

[43:54] know privately at all so i'm just curious your perspective um i've actually over the last since covet basically have been spending way more of my time with the people i grew up with who are not entrepreneurs and increasingly spending more and more my time with those people and less and less time with entrepreneurs and and people like that and i've been i've been finding it to be really fulfilling because like these are the people these are your day ones and there's just something that's like wholesome and pure about it and i've really really i've been enjoying that uh experience that i've been having i felt with a family

[44:42] mostly like who you went to like elementary school with like i know you like in my mind i don't know if you want to talk about it but like you have this group of people that you you know share an experience with uh on a regular basis i don't know we can cut this out if you don't want to talk about like no no but what he's saying what what he's saying is he he he knows that i've been playing dungeons and dragons with the same people since i was about 10 to 15 years old that's what he's saying go ahead that's like stranger thing stuff i love that

[45:15] uh stranger things is the cool version this was way before that well i mean i actually really that's like what i respect about you one of the things i really respect about you julian is that you have both worlds like i feel like you spend time with people who um are are entrepreneurs who are building incredible things investors that sort of thing but you also even when you had raised all this money and you built this huge company or you're starting a new company practice and it's starting to scale you're still you're still making time for those day ones and that's really like i respect that and

[45:54] you you know that about me like too like i really resp like i don't i wouldn't want to lose that that wholesomeness and purity um i'm just curious your perspective on it yeah so i i mean i i agree with you i know that you have always been i don't know if the right phrase maybe it is family orientation actually i would say you're more family oriented than me but i have recently become more family oriented it just happened to be my father passed away like right before covet or thank god and uh and i was suddenly left with mostly my mother's side of the family and i found

[46:32] that i could bond with them in a new way which i've now begun to do and all of a sudden i feel like i'm part of the family almost like a like a clan in a way that i didn't think before but i was i distinguished that from these early long-standing friends of mine that i've had a really long time and they probably are the people that keep me grounded because otherwise my identity would have been too attached to i run a startup oh my god i'm you know like i'm the second coming and then when if the company is tanking then i'm tanking and i'm worthless

[47:04] but i had this kind of like separate ability to identify like i had a separate ego where i felt you know because of the fact that they never cared and even now i'm you know i'd be like oh yeah i raised like 25 million dollars and and uh seems to be going pretty well and i met warren buffett or whatever random thing they're just like i don't care i don't care it's incredibly comforting right because clearly around you yeah it's good to it's good to have people around you that just don't care at all about the thing that you know other people would be like wowed by it's just like it's grounding

[47:43] and humbling at all times you're totally right but but i think that to a degree people like us you kind of admitted it and i'm admitting it here like like we're trying to prove something to other people like maybe our own self-worth maybe we're trying to prove it to ourselves and so when someone doesn't acknowledge that then you're just like okay you like me for me like that's weird why i guess it depends on who on i guess it depends on who it is in your life like there are very few people that i think most people are willing to be 100 authentically themselves around and

[48:21] you can say that you are that way around your partner spouse etc i would argue that most people actually still aren't they're still like presenting a you know better version of themselves because it's very difficult to be like truly open yourself up in every way um i think maybe with like your parents uh you're that way or with your probably not with your children but maybe with your parents you're willing to be that way um but it's like a scary thing right like i remember the big moments of my life like big turning points of like going to you know going to school and going from

[48:51] being like big fish in a small pond to going you know i went out to stanford to play baseball and i was like really bad at baseball relative to most of the players on the team and not very smart compared to most of the students in my classes and that imposter syndrome that i felt and that insecurity that i felt was like highly motivating but also like quite disturbing at times i mean just like dark dark feelings of constantly being stressed and like you know it's like the duck syndrome of everything looks fine on the surface and you look and you're like oh everything's great with this person i think we constantly

[49:23] do that by the way with entrepreneurs um you know we look at these people that have made a billion dollars or made a hundred million dollars and we say like their life must be awesome man that like so cool uh they must be happy all the time they must be great and the reality is that a lot of these people could best be described as tortured um i think i heard like patrick oshognes he maybe say that or tweet that about amazing people he had talked to a lot of these people like there's real downsides to um you know having this unbelievable ambition and drive to go achieve more

[49:55] and more and more there's a darkness on the other end of it that comes as part of that kit quote-unquote that um is very very real yeah you um i i often refer back to this whole story about um [Music] the john rockefeller senior who was the richest man in the world at that time and who uh was an incredibly incredible family man but also super stingy even inside of his own family like totally terrorized people like john rockefeller jr we know as the person who built rockefeller center and who was a cutthroat monopolist but at the same time i was able due to his monopoly of oil to

[50:40] to stabilize the price of oil and as such enable stuff to be built on top of it which could not be done when you add all of these oil fields that some of which were being built and some of which were going bankrupt and all these other things instead he silently bought them all underneath right and so you've got and by the way later on like was able to revolution revolutionize medicine as a result of all of the funding that he was able to give it and turn it into a real science many people say so you've got these people that like we just have to give up on

[51:14] them being normal like the idea that they we should just be able to cart wash think of them as being successful and they're just great and if you meet them it's gonna go well like it's not like we are close to these people you know it's interesting i i was once having a conversation with um because i was funded by one of uh peter thiel's uh venture funds called velour that focused on investments outside the united states at the time and i was having conversations and i would be like yeah kind of which i don't even know i should be saying this but it's like i was like

[51:49] peter thiel money and i was like we were very candid with one another it was actually a pretty solid relationship and i was like i don't know it's not like the cleanest money in the world like he's kind of a weird dude and because i would just say anything and he was the the two guys that run this fund were like you should see what's out there man it's it's it's not clean out there either he's like this is pretty good and so i think if we like we separate completely and i know it's very difficult to do that we separate the acts of success and the things that

[52:21] they have built completely from the person that way we'd be like that's super cool that you built paypal and then this and then this and then this and this and uh maybe you do drink people's blood like it is possible at this point you know i don't know so the if we do that i think that we'll be able to normalize uh this idea that uh that people are uh that they're special instead we're able to say they're actually not special they just work exceptionally hard and it doesn't mean that they're like paragons of virtue and it doesn't mean we should worship them we build statues about them

[52:58] all these things they did a really good thing they did a really good thing doesn't really say anything about who they are at all and i think that that would be very psychologically healthy for a lot of people so before we get to the end of our time i do want to just get into the weeds a little bit on julian on what you're building now and sort of like the indirect and direct ties to what you had worked on before so breather you know for people that aren't familiar was like um you know unique spaces like you could um you know book spaces to get a

[53:33] breather which like by the way it might have been early for its time and maybe there were flaws in it which you can talk about separately um but it's like a great concept right like everyone wants a breather um the idea of it makes a ton of sense um and candidly like if you're in a city and you can find a space to actually just catch your breath and like meditate for a few minutes or do a call or just get away totally makes sense um you worked on that you mentioned earlier that you know there were things as a first-time entrepreneur that you really learned um

[54:03] and that you're applying and approaching differently with practice which is what you're building today can you talk about that um transition from being kind of a first-time entrepreneur to a second time and how it's informed your building process for what you're doing today so i i will say this like i'll what i'll do is i'll maybe compare it to the uh the book business right and so when you're in the book business what happens is you have hits and misses and hits and misses it's just like well that book did really well and then that book that i wrote thought it would do well and so i'm just gonna kind of keep

[54:39] writing them and uh it's kind of a crap shoot and there's much more of that kind of like picasso effect i don't know if you've ever read this book it's called young geniuses and old masters and the book is about the two paradigms for how to become better one of them is you have a game-changing thing that you do early in your life like picasso the second type is the type like matisse and matisse who's just endlessly doing landscapes up until he's 95 and he's doing the same landscapes and he's trying to make them better and better and better and better and so even though i have had these

[55:12] moments in my like kind of like earlier years where i was able to do these kind of vaguely kind of young genius moments i have settled into a state in which i'm just consistent just working on the process to improve and so one of the big changes for me is i learned how to become a ceo through in a much more of a pressure cooker way than most people most people start a company and it kind of like goes somewhere like sort of and i don't know i learned to be a ceo by raising 150 million dollars scaling a team from zero to 250 plus people in

[55:51] under like three four years maybe uh and uh building a category or let's say a category entrant out of scratch uh from scratch and no literally having kind of like not that much mentorship around me and so i had this crazy ride but now i actually know it's this weird thing that i've kind of come to grips with recently i actually know how to be a ceo and run companies and i actually like am good at it so it's it's a different thing i've like found my place people ask me often will you write another book again i wish you blogged like i just loved your podcast like all

[56:30] these different things i considered those projects in a lot of cases that i would do for two or three years or some other thing like that then i would maybe get burned out on them and i didn't want to do them anymore whereas being a ceo i actually am good at and i can keep good doing for a really long time and this is this kind of like weird chrysalis like awakening moment when i it emerged from the lotus blossom or whatever and i'm like oh wow like i actually am really good at this and this means that i can impact a lot of people you asked

[57:02] me a little bit about the thread i call it a red thread it's an expression i got from tamsen mcmahon who is another author and it's this this sort of through line through your life and this idea of this through line through your life is like that's been sort of the the thing that has you have valued all throughout it and for me going back to the sort of the beginning and feeling like an underdog i always want to give people individuals more empowerment than they have been than they've had and so i did that a breather and all my books are about that and practice is really intended to serve

[57:36] solar printers so it's kind of the same thread all throughout and and i really i i realized one of the things you realize when you start a company is you kind of only have a shot of a couple shots if it's going to work well and if you it is going to work well like you've had for example alexis ohanian on the show it's like you don't have like 50 shots you've got like probably five to really make a difference at something and i thought well what is it that i really care and i went back throughout my life and i said what are the things that i

[58:05] cared about today at my age but that when i was 20 i still cared about so those are the through lines and i went through them and there's not a lot of them and i said those are the things probably the only things that i can start businesses doing because it's the only thing else they'll care about in 10 years and one of those was this idea of individual empowerment and being able to help individuals and allowing them to like become better and to get higher leverage and be more successful with little and so that's why i started this business and that's for me probably that

[58:36] that that deep care that i have and that my team has today is probably one of the reasons we're successful do you still enjoy it like do you do you feel a lot of energy around when you when you wake up yeah but i had to set boundaries for myself a lot of people like out there are like why would you start another venture back company it's horrible right like because we we talk like a bunch of us that have raised money before are like i'm pretty sure though are you talking about me but i don't i'm not talking about you in this case i just think about somebody

[59:15] else but there's a lot of people who believe that and i actually like i know that i'm entering into a contract in which i get extremely high leverage as a result of some weird like category risk which you wouldn't get if you weren't taking venture back venture venture financing and i'm conscious of that risk and i really embrace it as a result of being able to accelerate because when you what happens in venture back companies like every anyone who's here who's who started one greg knows i definitely know is you get this density of talent that's just unbelievable and you meet people you're just like holy [ __ ] and by the way

[59:53] one of the people is someone that you referred to me dude is that literally we were looking for an onboarding specialist we hired somebody and they were someone who listened to maybe that would that followed y'all's uh twitter feeds and listened to the show and his name is rahul he's been on our team for three months and just now right before this we were talking to him we were talking about him we were like i can't believe this rando just showed up and is so excellent at this stuff you just find these people right other people maybe will be jealous on my team because i'm talking about one

[1:00:22] guy we have a great team of people but this is one that kind of came out of nowhere and i love finding undiscovered people i love making them more excellent when i can and i love being able to build something with small teams of people really feeling like a tribe i love that so i actually like it way more than last time but i needed to set boundaries in order to allow that to happen there's so much that i'm taking away from this conversation like personally and professionally i mean one of the things that's been a big takeaway for me is like this idea of the red thread that

[1:00:56] you just raised um you know and like the through line through your life and being really thoughtful and introspective about that through line um you know you just mentioned it like your ability to reflect on each stage what you picked up what the just like painful losses were that really did nothing and compounded in no way um but use everything in kind of every little lesson and learning along the way to um you know hopefully ultimately lead you to a place where you're deriving a ton of energy from the things you're working on and doing um i mean i i'm coming away feeling uh feeling quite

[1:01:31] inspired around all of that greg my big takeaway is be like be like matisse like i had never heard that before and although um a lot of people including myself might be envious of being a picasso it's just way more consistent to become a matisse i think anyone could become a matisse if they just put in the work and sort of focus um and uh yeah i mean also what would julian do wwjd i should swap my hat i should stop swap yeah by that domain name and my um my last my last takeaway for everybody that um i had written down as we went through was that secret project that

[1:02:22] idea you've had find a small way to work on it a little bit every single day um and i love that when you said that because it was like it takes the intimidation factor completely out of it if you just think of it as like i'm gonna do 15 minutes on this thing a day i have this like 30 for 30 idea where you just spend 30 minutes a day for 30 days and at the end of that you know you have 900 minutes of accumulated effort on something it's bound to make forward progress during that period and that can be anything cardio you know workouts

[1:02:51] whatever it is writing etc but like a secret project if you just find one small way to push the ball forward every single day it's pretty amazing what you can accomplish in a short period of time so that was my one final um takeaway to leave people with uh this was awesome julian where where can people find you and and practice i practice this at practice.do at do i'm at twitter.com julian and uh yeah i mean you can just google me i'm all over the place but thanks very much for having me this is true this is true and if you are a solopreneur uh you know greg and i are

[1:03:25] both biased as julian said as uh as proud investors and julian and what he's building but they're building an amazing operating system and platform for solopreneurs to effectively do their work and scale and grow and empower empower them so um really proud to be investors proud to be your friend and excited for everyone to get to listen to this and hopefully take things away from it thanks man thanks so much for having me thanks so much for listening to today's episode if you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode email us at hi trwih leave us a review at apple or spotify to

[1:04:00] help us grow the reach of this podcast until next time we will see you soon [Music] see

---

About this transcript
Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com).
ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts.
Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools
How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt