# Info Diets, OG Content Creators, and 7-year Lifespans

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzGhozRPkQQ
Duration: 54 min
Language: English
Words: 9943
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/YzGhozRPkQQ

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[0:00] a lot of people in Canada they think they know what it's like to run a Silicon Valley business truly they do not they don't know what it's like to have worked at PayPal in 1999. as the economy was crashing they don't know what product Market fit feels like people all over the world read blog posts and Twitter and they take those and they say this is how a startup should be run and because they don't feel that there's a piece that they're missing most people feel like they understand what working at a startup is and what it's like to work in a tech company if they haven't been in one in

[0:33] Silicon Valley they really don't know what it feels like and they don't really know how to work that hard and I don't know what a product Market fit feels like Julian Smith friend of the Pod New York Times best-selling author probably raised a quarter billion dollars you can't see it right now but has more tattoos and I think I have hair welcome back to the show yeah thanks for thanks for having me on I appreciate it and I'm a fan of the show The VC Market is hurting right now especially with B2B businesses you know you have Enterprises just cutting back spend on things like software so I

[1:07] imagine the next wave will be b2c companies once consumers start tightening they're going to be the ones that are hurting it's already happening in Canada I saw an article today saying that the GDP the GDP of Canada is was a surprise and it's actually declining or it's Contracting as long as you don't run out of cash you're doing something smart you've extended your Runway because you're in Canada one US dollar is 135 Canadian so basically if you raised 10 million dollars you now have 13.5 million dollars how has hiring internationally help you run your business first of all I knew from the get-go even in 2019 when we were first

[1:54] ideating on this thing that we wanted to do it remote keep in mind my last company was an office space technology company and so because of that like there was no chance it was not going to be offices and there was no chance it was not going to be an in-person business and the world was different in 2014 to 18 when I was CEO of that thing and and so but I was I was really clear on my boundaries so my boundaries were I cannot be in an office every day and there were a lot of things I didn't like about that and and so I

[2:25] shifted like some of our friends that you know Greg right into a remote business they had a different structure that are really like that really results oriented environments and where people are hired based on Talent not really based on their geography necessarily or in some cases not even necessarily based on a common um native language we could have gotten together in the past either regionally or globally like all as a team and that really helps people gel together uh but I will say that if you know if people like on the internet like Keith Rogue and like other people are telling me to go back to the office legitimate

[3:03] currently like I don't know if maybe they think I'm a shitty operator I don't know I don't think that I'm a shitty operator clearly I've proven some things out at some point and so if if they uh if they want me to return to the office I would legitimately not be a CEO again so this form of collaboration has helped me become an entrepreneur and a better operator and run a business I think everybody needs it's it's running a business need to run it by their own standards and what matters to them and and so they need to run it by their own values right if they're becoming an

[3:37] entrepreneur they need to run it by their own standards of what they want out of the likes right whether they want a quote unquote lifestyle business derogatory term or they want a venture-backed business they need to figure out what it is that they want as an operator and as a founder and then go after that and actually actively exclude other things and so here there is a canada-based portion of my business but over time there was a set of hiring that happened International nationally and I would say it does present its own challenges but it is absolutely worthwhile the way that we've made it work is and the thing that's really

[4:12] mattered for us is we have driven towards a set of leaders in the business that are Silicon Valley oriented leaders like I think I prove myself out as a CEO having raised what I did the business that I did that even though I'm not in the Silicon Valley I'm Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley oriented by business is funded by Anderson Horowitz and lots of other Silicon Valley type investors then had a product is from like Zynga and a bunch of other businesses my head of technology is from Amazon and a bunch of other businesses of that uh that type so now what you have is you have a core of

[4:53] culture and with this core of culture because the Silicon Valley by the way Silicon Valley culture of whatever you want to call it it's not always super healthy as we uh talk in the middle of Burning Man right here as it's happening in uh Nevada uh Suka Valley uh orientation is not always super healthy either individually or culturally but I'll tell you that these know how to work and they know how to make progress and and there are people in like we have two people in Brazil there are people in Brazil that absolutely have just never had that dynamism before and have never experienced this type of business and

[5:31] them figuring it out alone is going to be way harder and them figuring it out when it's two three people that have run Silicon Valley venture back businesses before that's going to give the whole team a head start so that's how I think about it leaders from Silicon Valley ish adjacent team rest of the team can be anywhere and is the idea that the Silicon Valley esque leaders are teaching these non Silicon Valley ask people to bring them up to speed or are you saying it doesn't even matter like if you're a a designer or an engineer like as long as you do your job you know you don't need to be

[6:10] silky yeah let me think about it for a second so the first thing is it's like culture was absorbed right like if if you have I mean you were inside of it may be the in your cases it was a little unusual like you were inside wework I don't know how you would talk about that culture but I bet there's a bunch of things we could do over reverse underneath uh you were inside it's sort of adjacent to stumble upon which is an early Silicon Valley success and you were I mean you you lived in San Francisco for a while so you know what it's like to run a

[6:46] business in Silicon Valley now a lot of people in Canada and I have some coaching clients in Canada to give you a sense right like they think they know what it's like to run a Silicon Valley business truly they do not they don't know what it's like to work at to have worked at PayPal in 1999. as as the economy was crashing and they were like they we have so much fraud and we don't even know what to do they don't know what product Market fit feels like I actually actively ask people this I'm like do you know what it feels like to have product Market fit have you ever

[7:21] been in a business that didn't have it and then suddenly got it has that yeah if you've never had that experience before you don't know how to chase up you don't know when you have it so and then you can ask people the question do you have product markets in their business and they'll be like I think so and you'll be like you do not have it because it is such a uh a a crazy clear feeling when you have it that you're like oh this is it all right so I think a lot of people are in denial and they believe they run by the way you

[7:57] run a technology business whatever way you want I think I was thinking about a hugging face which I think is a French company that just got a gigantic round of investment from sorry it's like I'm live on the show and I'm kind of trying to remember like 200 million dollars from Bane or something like this because of their focus on AI and this is this is not a Silicon Valley company but they made it work so there's lots of different ways to make it work it's just that there's there's there's a model that we should kind of be following and lots of people are looking kind of like

[8:31] Plato you know what I mean they you know how Plato talks about the the allegory of the cave and he's like the the a man is looking at the Shadows on the wall and he thinks that the Shadows on the wall are reality and he's like oh yeah these Shadows on the wall look here this person's doing this this person is doing this but he doesn't actually see the people he just sees the Shadows of the people on the wall this is the allegory of the cave and so in Silicon Valley the way that this works is people all over the world read blog posts and Twitter I

[9:02] think we still call them tweets and they take those and they say oh this is this is how a startup should be run but they don't steal it in their heart and because they don't feel that there's a piece that they're missing most people feel like they understand what working at a startup is and what it's like to work in a tech company but when if they haven't been in one in Silicon Valley they really don't know what it feels like and they don't really know how to work that hard and I don't know what a product working fit feels like so they're kind of aping it without ever

[9:34] really having been in it before yeah I wonder where my head's at is if that culture and that way of thinking is a multiplier on productivity and high quality work I'm just wondering Beyond having great leaders and managers how else could you accelerate your team so for example you know when someone gets onboarded to your to your team do you like set them up with five podcasts that they should listen to you know do you say like here's here's a Twitter account with you know that's following 200 people that I think you would really benefit from yeah yeah it's interesting that you say that it's true that sometimes when you hire

[10:27] people and they're inside of the the sort of content bubble of tech that they start with a set of standards and that uh if if you if they don't like if they don't come from that world that you kind of have to you educate as you build and if you're educating as you build here's the sort of weighted that manifests itself you have to be like hey here's why we're going after this type of Customer because this type of customer will do extra this type of business and we could bring that to 100 million people or to 100 million dollars in Revenue here's why uh we need to have

[11:09] a higher priced account because a higher priced account means that these customers will are more professional have more money to spend and will be able to uh we'll be able to be with us for longer right and turnout less so there's all these different sort of like if you if you run a business at scale and you know somebody might say that this is just good business that's true but most people that have not gotten a business to product Market fit maybe that had Revenue the tattoo have been sass it could be anything like those they they have a slice of understanding of what what business is and I know that that's

[11:52] certainly true for me like when I started breather which as you keep saying I raised uh over 100 million dollars of venture capital while I was CEO like did I understand that I was really starting a low margin a lower margin business not really like I didn't quite get it I was just like there's a product and we're gonna build it and I know a lot of people are gonna like it I was right about a lot of things but at the core of it there were a set of misunderstandings about business that I did not have and when you haven't what you have in in

[12:21] Tech circles New York whatever it doesn't really matter where is you have this fundamental understanding of business that people in quote unquote the rest of the world don't have like there's a reason you drive down from San Francisco into to Mountain View or whatever like that you're seeing gigantic like Billboards for SAS companies that you've never heard of on Twitter and they're gigantic these are expensive they're maybe the most expensive full Parts you could possibly buy in America so maybe the world I don't know you know and and but like these people know things that we don't know like they think a lot more about net retention right nrr than we do and

[13:08] so like it's it's really something to uh uh to think about the fundamentals of business and just again they're so ingrained in me now I'm almost like a low-key like Finance bro and and I was not that way then and so lots of people who begin working at tech companies don't have those fundamental understandings and so they don't necessarily understand why a business would uh let's say try their hand at sales uh which we did a a short while ago and adding a team's product and they're like well wait hold on a second like don't we just serve people on the internet that just come in and we're

[13:47] like yeah we do that but then turns out that people come in with teams of 10 20 30 people and so we're going to serve those people as well and and so the change in economics that occurs there is not necessarily clearly understood by the rank and file designer off the street when you have 10 designers that you hire or something right and certainly not the average one in a texian in Canada so you know innovation in Silicon Valley it's ironic for me to say this because I will not move to San Francisco I I will not I don't this is I love California but I won't speak highly of it in a lot

[14:25] of cases what they do have is they have generations of innovators uh Walter Isaacson has a book about this called the innovators it turns out and so like it goes all the way back to Intel it goes all the way back from Intel to Fairchild semiconductor it goes back even further than that so we're talking about at this point the 60s so we're talking about generations of Technology innovators that have built layers of Technology on top of one another and so they're going to see the future much more clearly and that's why they get to create it there's the reason that openai has a billion dollars in

[15:05] Enterprise Revenue today out of nowhere quote unquote out of nowhere like these people are going to build the future and you necessarily have to want to be in the center of that but holy hell you better understand the center of that and understand how those people do things and why they make those decisions I definitely could not have done that at my last Venture back business was funded by Canadian and started by Canadians which honestly no very little business backing in my case very little business understanding in my case yeah being in tech for long enough like really changes you some people might say this is bad I think it's net

[15:41] good all things considered so Sam Altman although when we think of Silicon Valley we think of someone like Sam Altman now he's a New Yorker you know he's a New Yorker who Moved 992 Silicon Valley but he did surround himself with the Silicon Valley you know people right so I think uh you don't need to be from Silicon Valley to to to to get that as long as you absorb it and my thesis is you know with so many podcasts and YouTube channels and and so many people now tweeting you know you're the average of the five friends you spend the most time with but you're also the average of the

[16:22] five podcasts you consume I think that a really underrated way and a cheaper way frankly than moving to San Francisco or the Flatiron District in New York City uh is you just make it a point to load up with content and from these people in and I'm not talking about like listening to the all-in podcast which is like obviously a great podcast but it's yeah you know a big podcast uh thanks for Clara I'm talking about yeah I'm saying like what what is the niche podcast that you should be listening to that can really up level you that has a lot of these a lot of this DNA so for example you

[17:07] know Lenny richardsky's podcast who he spent you know 10 years in Silicon Valley and he's interviewing all these people and he talks to product managers and it's very specific to product managers Yeah it's you're right that you need to be absorbing all the time you know it's funny uh when I was a writer writing books for a living and doing talks and the social media space like way before I was ever a tech CEO uh convinced at the time by the way that I couldn't become a tech CEO and Greg Yuri instrumental in convincing me that I could become one so thanks for that I owe you one uh at the time I read

[17:43] tons and my my bookcase to the left of me here is actually filled with in a lot of cases garbage books but it kind of didn't matter I kept absorbing them and absorbing and absorbing and absorbing I was non-stop learning I will say it's been a great challenge of mine and audio really does help it helps a lot but it's a great challenge of mine too while working and being a operator of a business to also be absorbing as much as possible audio you're right is the right way to do it for me because you just can't absorb as quickly and you can't absorb passively like I think I'm reading listening to

[18:25] three audiobooks at the moment that are either classic or that are important kind of uh Tech books about certain things in some case sales in some case operations and other things like that like books that are known to people uh Phoenix project eat their lunch high output management these types of books that you could just sort of passively absorb that those are in some cases books about how heck happens and and you're right it you can you ideally you absorb it on the cheap the part that you cannot absorb on the cheap and both you and I know this actually and and we do it so it's important to

[19:09] actually to say it is that it it cannot create networks for you and so if you're at zero Network I got this question last week from out from someone I'd be like how did you meet the people at Andreessen Horowitz well holy I met Andrew Chan my partner today at Anders norowitz in 2000 14. 13 we did a deal in 2021 eight years later on a separate business like networks are built and you become a trusted person inside of those networks over time right not immediately so there's is a funny thing now where like like we can we can go remote and my company can become good enough have a

[19:52] great series a and I could I could walk into whatever Sequoia capital or whatever right I certainly get a meeting at Circle of capital and I can certainly take that meeting and they absolutely will consider it but it wouldn't have been the case in the same way 10 years ago so what happened then track record and you don't get a track record remotely and you and by the way a track record could involve failures but it has to involve smart failures and also Network being in the same places as all these people it's it being on podcasts right is is one way actually because people consume it and and also to be at

[20:32] parties with people and to go to these stupid Retreats like not lots of them are douchey but on occasion you are able to meet people this way and so like the the networking part and we I hesitate to call it that it's really just build it building a set of people that have an alignment with you and that you know them and they're smart and one way or another either you're going to work with them or you'll invest in their company or they'll invest in yours or or you'll spend time together somewhere who knows right like like all of those they they put you very tightly into an ecosystem

[21:09] system and if you're in one you will go the same direction as the ecosystem goes I'm a big fan of kind of staying quote unquote in the arena let's use a different analogy today so we'll use we'll use of getting as many at bats as possible and if you have a lot abouts look your batting average might be shitty but it actually doesn't matter you just need to be successful once and if you're successful once and it's enough of a big hit you're actually good you're good forever and so the way you get those at bats is by being in the ecosystem an ironic thing about being a

[21:42] CEO coach that I didn't expect is that I get access to companies as they are succeeding and in some cases I get a chance to invest in them and because of that I'm like oh wow here's this company that I would never have seen otherwise you know that I get a chance to be a part of and I get a chance to be able to be involved with and help and help have the the Sounders succeed and I wouldn't I just like you need to be in these conversations all that iron it's not easy to do that and you can't buy your way in so one school of thought is in order to get

[22:19] into these rooms you have to get on a plane and meet these people another school of thought is you create high quality content and you attract people you are an interesting person in this case because you're like OG blogger OG podcast person uh and and and and when I say that I mean like I'm on your blog right now like you you when Facebook likes were a thing and people were embedding Facebook likes on blog posts you were getting tens of thousands of likes onto your blog post pretty regularly like you were breaking on the internet back then and I did I did a few times that's true

[23:11] yeah and you know when I look at your post you know you had some posts you know I'm looking like 2013 2013 and then then you went to one Post in 2014 and then you had a two posts in 2020 then you had one Post in 2021 and you had two posts in 2023. so interestingly enough you did the content thing before content was cool you had a mega popular blog on the backs of that you created you know New York Times best-selling books and then you sort of retreated from content yeah and actually I lasted longer than most people I think there's a thousand blog posts on my blog over a period of

[23:49] what's got to be 10 years or more and it was my job for a long time and so there's two paths I think there's two paths to making content and having it continuously grow so one of them is be an operator and be able to hire someone so that's that definitely one way like for example when I the way I used to do it at breather I don't do it here today but the way I used to do it at breather is I would have a person on my marketing team and I would reach out to them I'd be like hey we're going to build a tweet

[24:21] storm and I would be like and I'm gonna say it to you and then you can write it down and you can make it into a tweet storm let me know when you've got it put it into a Google draw a Google Drive Doc and then I'll publish it once I've kind of consented and agreed that my ideas have been well presented by you right so now all that I did is the same thing that I did here which is to talk about my opinions and my experience uh it involved didn't involve sitting down in front of content in the same way what I discovered was me being the engine meant

[24:57] that I was the and by actually I will say I was the engine and the gas this is actually a this is an expression from Emily uh Emily my God I forget her last name it'll come to me uh from a marketing standpoint you need both engine and gas to build something in marketing and if you are the engine the engine is the mechanics of the marketing and how it happens if you are the gas you're the fuel you are the thing something is being pumped into it and through it and it could be content for example but when you're the engine and you're the fuel at the same time it's

[25:32] super easy for you to burn out I know like lots of people clearly it's it's I think it's the real you on this podcast that's like not fakeable but certainly someone could uh ghost write a book and they would never have really written a whole a word of it and and so the engine is their brand and and their maybe the their distribution mechanism but the the gaps the fuel is not really them in the first place in the same way you know the same way I was going to say well make an old and algae like John McCain let's make a new analogy uh whatever some

[26:10] politician might write a book right they didn't really write the book they sat in a room with someone else and they dictated the book to them and so if you are going to make content the thing that is going to get you in the room which by the way is so effective like let's just use it we'll we'll I'll ask you it as an example how many DMS do you get called let's let's say just ones that are are to some degree valuable per week per week I would say I get 40 DMS per day of which one is valuable per day right so that's a good ratio I get seven very valuable

[26:49] DMS per week there we are and so it it's taken you a long time to build up this content engine and it continues to build itself and and so clearly it's this stage and I can think of a few people like sahil like yourself a bunch of other people that you and I know when that I share as investors in some cases Lenny is one of them and and they their engine of content is so big that it's just gonna contain it's gonna keep happening they're gonna be able to hire people around it which probably Lenny as I haven't asked them but probably surely like like there's an editor making

[27:22] something and maybe some of his uh guests are are found ahead of time by someone else right so there's an engine that's been built around it in the early days you have to be able to get past that and I will say that in the early days of content going back to your point uh all of us that were trying to do this Chris Brogan my co-author on trust Asians when I published it in 2009 a bunch of us did not have proper engines around our contact this is actually a huge lesson some of us did Gary vaynerchuk is also from that era but Garrity had a machine

[27:56] around him and he had a clear business model at the time it was actually selling wine at the very beginning then it was he was the social media person and he built a social media agency so now he's got the machine the engine around him and he has a clear business that he's trying to drive now you can do that but like you know the way that I think about the the people that are making mistakes in this space it's my perspective by the way is like you you may you may remember lots of people remember a nerd writer from YouTube it used to be a huge amazing uh account

[28:31] with tons of visitors and viewership go lot two philosophical started writing books could not keep going at it and didn't make it commercial enough this is by the way I don't know them I'll just give you my perspective versus a Mr Beast that is very clearly like I'm I'm I just don't care like I will find whatever is the most compelling thing I have no aesthetic sensibilities you know I'm literally just gonna make a little thing that people love click I gotta that isn't works and it works essentially to Infinity so and and by the way Gary did a version of that and Gary is from that time and so on so the

[29:11] big book that changed my perspective on this was a book called The Big switch that I read a really really long time ago and it really made clear that either someone was in the engine or someone owned the engine so everyone is building little businesses inside of uh Twitter or Instagram or Tick Tock or something and they're building these little micro businesses and for a long time my focus was building a little micro business that was that had followers and but but the engine was the same and you could sponsor posts or you could uh you could you could build uh you know what we didn't call it them but like an

[29:54] influencer based business now my focus is build a machine that is a real business that can get to tons of Revenue with a really big set of users and the result is is you become influential as a result of your success that's really what I noticed the Breather I didn't talk about breeder very much but holy everybody knew that business and everybody use that what in one way or another and um and everybody knew that brand they knew that Brandon they maybe didn't even know me and so that was so powerful to realize that I didn't have to work on content to get influence and to get in the room all

[30:39] that I had to do was make something really interesting and that was enough yeah but I think the question I would have to push back is if you had continued with the content would that have added a multiplier on that trust and influence for sure but I would have nea I needed for me I needed to learn a lesson that I didn't need to be on my own sitting in front of a computer screen writing a thousand word blog post that I was trying to get to go viral or something every day I need to to become an operator of a business that did things and this was one of those things

[31:15] and I think there's a lot of people and by the way the audience is different now right because now you can get a hundred million followers or whatever you want Tick Tock you couldn't do that down the internet was just not that mature but those people that did succeed they were able to separate themselves from the content they were able to say I run a business and my marketing engine is content versus I am the content I am the engine and I am the business which is just too much and uh and and I think it you know in a lot of ways was too early

[31:47] so where are you with respect to content for Julian Smith like it feels like you're slowly getting back into it now you have a podcast that you've been doing saw a couple 2023 blog posts you change your profile picture from some like strange lizard looking person to something a bit more serious where are we at yeah and there's more coming that I I'm not at a place where I'm ready to talk about yeah but you're right you you're noticing that I am taking him more seriously because I am taking him more seriously I felt that I still feel for the first time like everything is aligned properly one of the big

[32:25] struggles that I experienced at the time was the voice that I had built on my blog and how how difficult it was to align with being a CEO of a 250 person business that was accidentally ended up selling um fractional office space right like it was just so incongruent with what my brand was and that's because they were really built by accident I'll tell you what they what that gave me is it gave me a confidence that I wasn't a fluke success and that I wasn't a idiot because I was like okay well clearly I had a voice on from a Blog standpoint at a book standpoint that resonated with

[33:05] people oh and I also was able to build the best out of and raise a lot of money I was like okay I'm not a like and so my imposter syndrome didn't exactly vanish but I definitely like diminished I was like oh okay I'm I'm qualified for like the first time probably and so um but but nonetheless that incongruence that that contradiction between blogger writer Julian and CEO Julian really did exist and I didn't deliberately align it but I did kind of accidentally align it when I um made a decision about what next business I want to run and I said okay well what are the few things that I

[33:47] really cared about and I've always cared about and I knew that when you run up especially a business that you're trying to get somewhere big it's going to take you 10 years I think about our friend Rob uh who's been running a business for his business I want to say 12 years or something and if now really successful but but at the very beginning like everybody else you know it's like like a zigzag you just don't know where it's gonna go you get to the other side you're like wow that was impressive it takes a long time to build something that lasts some that's really powerful I

[34:18] thought what are the things that I can build that I really have always cared about and that I will always care about and a few things came to my mind one of them was self-development and I always cared about self-development another one was I always cared about the little guy and that's always been a theme throughout everything that I've done and then another one as I which is not really related but I thought about is I I always really care about games I'm a huge board game person I'm a huge Dungeons and Dragons and RPG person less so computer games or console games but still games were always at the center of

[34:52] uh how I spend my time so I was like well what do I care about today that I'm going to care about in five years there's only a few things that have been in that Realm so I said well I gotta build something around those things and that's why we started at practice building around coaches and solopreneurs now we're waiting now we're like coaches tutored a lot of tutor customers teams of these people virtual assistants like all these other solopreneurs individual businesses and team businesses so all of those things align themselves and then then I had a coaching practice which I've had for I want to say three years

[35:31] four years and it's been I think I think now might be the third year anniversary so and I still have some clients from back then and so everything has kind of aligned itself in a way that it wasn't before now I run a business working for the little guy I have a coaching practice which is self-development oriented I have tons of writing that I've done that is self-development oriented if you remember from the blog back in the day and all of my books were about that stuff and so all it it feels like the first time I'm 44 today uh I feel like for the first time everything is kind of

[36:08] aligned and I haven't felt that a long time maybe especially because there's so many things going on now right like my life is more complicated than it was and uh but everything is aligned towards the things that I care about it's I started a coaching practice to dog food my own software in 2020 2021 the result is is I have a small coaching practice it's really thriving it's successful and I really love that part of my life and if I write I know I'm writing or if I'm speaking on a podcast I know I'm going to be speaking to a bunch of people that uh that are really

[36:48] going to be able to uh resonate with with the stuff that I've written because I have a real voice so it's all just kind of connected at this point and and that took me a really long time to align those different versions of myself into one what you're saying is in order to come up with a long-term content strategy you have to look Inward and really be honest with yourself to basically find what are the buckets that I really care about that I want to be creating content in 5 10 15 20 years so in order to look yeah in order to in order to go outward you

[37:24] have to look inward do you have any advice for people who Wanna you know who don't want to wait until their 40s maybe or or 50s or 60s and you want to get going right away I'm super convinced that the things I cared about in my 20s I also cared about Nehemiah was 12. I believe that they I probably you're gonna find new things right you you're like you're really into sports in your teens you might be really into baseball like I was in your 30s you might be really into basketball nonetheless you're into sports and you've always been into sports okay sure so you actually don't need to here

[38:04] here's what here's what your past needs to contain and these are really broad checklist items one of them is hopefully it's something that you cared about and have cared about for a really long time and and so if so you're probably never going to stop caring about it in the same way your view will change you might get more cynical about the basic parts of it you might you're you're sophisticated you're I wrote a book to Flinch in 2013 that really took off almost everything from there I'm still very proud of that book but there's some things in that book where I was like yeah I don't know about that but I still

[38:42] am really happy with that book The Influence I had with those people and yeah I'm not writing a sequel to that book but like I still care about those things I'm never going to stop caring about those things so there are through lines in your life that you have had forever and it is really easy if you align your life with those things somehow that's really challenging sometimes because sometimes those things don't have a commercial orientation right so you're actually you'll be like oh I I legitimately did think about how could I build a games company in some way I thought about this for a while in 2018 2019. uh I found

[39:25] that it would be difficult but I definitely considered it because I knew the time would just pass and that the people that I would work with would just be so easy to work with and they would be my type of people I just knew that and and so it's almost like acknowledging instead of saying I'm on land it's like I'm in a river and the river is me and the river is all of the past stuff that has ever happened to me and all of the previous decisions and so the river has a slow and you have to acknowledge what that slow is you a version of you that can be

[40:01] self-reflective can look at the river of you and be like who am I and what do I care about and how do I attach that to things that are going on in 2023 and if you do that you probably have years of content by the way some of them are so Niche I was watching such a stupid thing to watch I'm embarrassed to say this I don't consume a ton of short form I consume tons of long-form videos so I'm I'm on YouTube a lot and I was consuming I think a two hour long history of Street Fighter 2 okay and the the guy who has this channel this

[40:38] literally all that he makes is history of video game worlds and people love it and it's really clear that this guy also really loves it is that big no does it need to be it gives a he loves it his millions of people that watch his videos love it and it'll expand as it as it goes on way better than trying to follow some Trend that you only have a vague understanding of you know and the truth is I think he could he could build a a pretty big business around it like he could well first he can do a paid Community he can do info products he can create his own

[41:17] games he could yep there's a lot of ways you know if he was interested I don't know if this is just like a side hobby or just a hobby for him but if he you know he now has the opportunity to make that decision and how cool is that that you know he can go and do that and and clear out his his job you know who knows working at in a restaurant or a bar or working at KPMG or you know pushing papers I don't know sure yeah and there's actually it's a great opportunity in 2023 because it's like for the first time like the whole world

[41:54] is online we're coming online that's incredible and there's so many ways to speak to so many people I can't see how you would I I get it you know I'm giving people feedback here right now live I'm saying go after things you care about some people will find that like they're going to find parts and they're going to realize that visual media sculpture like my fiance like those people they're not going to be like I should be in Tech so here they're not going to be in a quote-unquote growth space but I'd probably the people who are lit who are listening to this or watching this are

[42:30] thinking one okay I want to be doing something on the Internet very like I have my own project or I want to attach myself off to a project and then two they'll be thinking okay well and I've got these these Ley lines so to speak these lines underground in my world and I need to figure out what those things are so for them they can find insane growth areas and that's really what Venture is about going back to the beginning of the conversation Venture is about finding a CEO that has quote unquote uh you know Market founder market fit who really cares about the space alongside a super fast growing

[43:08] town where ideally they have a secret about that town right and so if that happens amazing Confluence of things but even if your choice is not uh is I want to start a restaurant and that's what your lifeblood is about you probably know that and you probably don't care if it's a growth space or not I don't know what your odds are and that's why you and I are in this space like we build businesses really naturally online it's just kind of the kind of person that we are but we we had it took us time to kind of like figure that out and now that we're here it kind of comes

[43:39] together it doesn't need to happen in your 40s it just happens when you when you realize who you are yeah which sometimes that happens in your 40s sometimes happens your 20s 30s 50s 60s or sometimes that never happens at all right exactly you're referring to anyone in particular no I've got no one in mind but you know I think a lot of people uh you know I think one lesson here is just it's okay to not know and but I think you you need to make that conscious effort to to be self-discovering which sounds obvious but you know one of the great ways that one of the cool things about building

[44:14] audiences I think is that it allows you to not have to invest tons of money and time into into learning about a space so for example if you're passionate about uh food and opening up a restaurant one day well there's like a path that you can take right so you could you know maybe create a create a food truck which is like kind of like the MVP of you know building a restaurant but what's even more MVP than that is maybe like going to creating a YouTube channel that interviews people uh in the kitchen at different restaurants and having and just like interviewing them and learning

[44:55] them learning with them and seeing if other people might be interested in that and then all of a sudden you're building this audience with you and then you build this community and then you could potentially you know hey you trust me because I know all the cool restaurants or interesting restaurants and chefs in my city now I have my own restaurant or my own food truck come and visit so I think the coolest part about audience and content is the doors it opens and how cheap it is to to actually do so that's why that's where I was coming from when I was like dude why aren't you

[45:27] creating more content and I understand how much work it takes but I also think that you know there you don't need to be a full-time Creator you can be a part-time Creator and you can spend one hour a week or two hours a week and still create a niche audience if if anyone wanted you are you're right I will say as a thought though that I really believe in the Gary vaynerchuk kind of method which is it's it's got to happen like an hour a day that's my perspective just having like having written a thousand blog posts having written over three books probably definitely and and

[46:04] discarded many words along the way you don't figure it out without sitting in front of a page or whatever your version of that is like some editing software suite like whatever it is you actually don't figure it out unless your your hands are just in it all the time and and so you can't get really really good at something I don't know if it's ten thousand hours it could be anything but whatever it is like you don't get really really good at it by by uh by being a hobbyist unless you're a hobbyist for 30 years right if you want to get really good at something like

[46:38] being a CEO is a crazy example you know being a CEO is a wild job and being a Founder is a crazy job like I would never encourage anyone to do this unless I knew that they had to do it because it's psycho as a uh a way to run your life but I don't have a choice it's it's built into me it's probably built into you so I cannot learn that part-time I cannot understand the influence of trade-offs in a business part-time I cannot understand the consequence of road map decisions part-time I cannot build products and put them in the market in a fake way right and when

[47:20] you're unless you're starting them putting things on a in a Tim Ferriss way like just a landing page like you do mini versions of that but to really learn you've got to do it like a hundred times so I'm a I'm a big believer in doing a couple things and doing them well because you really get compound effects like hugely compounding effects committing to them God where did I see this I think it was Gary again I don't even really listen to him but like like I saw him on like some Tick Tock thing maybe and somebody was talking about how they feel old and it's like a

[47:49] like conference table and Gary's Auto and like he's like you haven't even lived he's talking to a dude that's 23 you know like you get there's there's this comic I'll reference back to it we can talk about it in the show notes Maybe where uh they talk about every seven years you get to live a new life and I've found that to be true so from 18 to about 24 I built a career doing just not much of a career building random off doing random office stuff I didn't really have a career nor did I go to college uh and graduate from 24 to 31 I

[48:25] was a Content person and as a Content person I built out a a successful content business right that included New York Times best-selling books viral other books and PDFs uh viral blog posts by gigantic standards that everybody talked about and then at 31 and you were there ish 33 really I started a venture back business and my that course began again and so that course was started in 2013 2012 and continues today and then three four years ago so again the seven year Arc I started a coaching practice and now I'm an executive coach which is not something that probably I could have done my father was a coach like I could

[49:06] not have done that probably while he was alive it would have been too weird but now I can do it and so it's like a whole other Arc so there's so many different arcs that are people go on in their lives so and they had so many different shots on goal of things that they really can do so so you shouldn't do things for like a year or two year part-time you really should go at them super super hard and put your soul in you should you should work so hard that you die a little bit working on this there and then only then can you say man when you

[49:36] and then that you know that's that's when something does really well I find when you really put your heart on Soul into something Seth Godin taught me this when he was editing Flinch the book he said to me uh you're gonna have you said a few things I remember one is is you're only gonna have one shot ever to write a book this visceral that's what he said I said okay and I took that really seriously because Seth Gordon was like like I like my idol a little bit and my mentor and another thing that he said was do you want to write a book that's

[50:04] good or do you want to be in awe of what you have written and I was like holy I got off the phone Helen never she'll never forget telling the story she always tells that I was I was screaming you know not at her but like out there in the world after hanging up the phone or whatever being like I don't know how to do that yeah but but I I did work that hard at that thing and that's why that book had that reached it down so anyway I'm not sure what this talk is about or what you're going to title it those are the things I think all I know

[50:35] is I'm like ready to run through a brick wall right now that's all I know laughs I feel very inspired I feel I agree with you on the every person lives so many lifetimes and every seven years that there is a new life and I almost think that and actually I don't almost think I think that not only should you reflect on that and be like wow I'm entering a new chapter but also get yourself a physical item that you can wear or maybe for you it's like a tattoo or whatever just something that you can see uh maybe it's like a gold watch who knows a ring

[51:10] a bracelet something that commemorates that you've entered into this new place so that every time you see it you you're reminded of it that's a good lesson it's true I I have some awards from my book writing days that I still look on fondly today it doesn't mean that they're in the center of my house but like when I look at them I'm like oh yeah that's true you know it reminds you and you do need to be reminded because you're the Arc of your life is a long one hopefully before we head out about what's one book recommendation that that you can give to people that they sh that

[51:48] is a is a must read based on this conversation based on this conversation I'm just going to give a few things that I find a really interesting about relative to our conversation uh we have we have a mutual friend Dario Mellie who's one of the founders of boot Suite he got me into these books by uh David Graham one of them is being made into a Martin Scorsese movie I think killers of the flower and but he has another book about Obsession his books are always kind of about Obsession and the book that really influenced me that I just finished is lost city of Z which is

[52:26] about the exploration of the Amazon and trying to find El Dorado in the early 1920s and it is an exploration of obsession and how what Obsession really looks like and also the consequences so that's a really powerful word like others I consume tons of important startup texts like high output management and I listed a higher Management on my uh on my phone through audible kind of non-stop I think my broader lesson is uh audiobook subscriptions like audible are actually a great idea because they accumulate a set of credits over time and then you're like I've got nine credits or whatever because you haven't consumed them and then you're

[53:13] like let me go look for things and now you've got nine books to teach you about startup so you've got nine books to teach you about psychology and all those things will give you an ability to absorb and change and help you become who you want to be that is something that is really meaningfully improved my life I'll take it where could uh where can people follow Julian and and your content and practice and learn more about practice Yeah practice is at practice.do and uh you should absolutely check it out I am mostly on Twitter at Twitter x.com Julian j-u-l-a-n and the blog that people are referring to is in over your

[54:01] head.net and if you go to Amazon there are some books that I've written to amazing and and if you made it to the deep end hit us up on Twitter with the link of this of this YouTube Spotify Apple podcast and let us know what you think this has been fun Julian I'll I'll catch you IRL in Montreal yeah IRL uh thanks for chatting and thanks for having me out bye-bye

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