#42 - Wall Street Bets & Tesla Shorts, Curating Job Boards & Executive Recruitment Firms

**Shaan** (0:00)
Did your thing go viral?

**Sam** (0:01)
The Amazon dating thing?

**Shaan** (0:02)
Yeah.

**Sam** (0:03)
It's all relative, but I am... compared to what I'm used to.

**Shaan** (0:07)
I saw that same link in like five other groups I was in. I don't know if they saw it through you or not, but that link is spreading.

**Sam** (0:14)
Yeah, I have no idea if I was the catalyst, but I'm just trying to play this Twitter game. It's a game to me at this point, and I'm trying to crack the code.

**Shaan** (0:23)
Nice.

**Sam** (0:23)
We're gonna give this a go. We're gonna try three times a week.
Our goal, Shaan and I's goal, is to hit 100,000 listens per episode.

**Shaan** (0:31)
100,000, baby.

**Sam** (0:33)
100,000. We are-

**Shaan** (0:34)
Per episode.

**Sam** (0:35)
Per episode. I don't want to reveal where we are now.
But I think we can hit it. But we're gonna need help, so please share and get people on this. And then we're gonna have video clips coming soon, which will hopefully help. So let's kick this off by, let's bring up some new stuff, and then I have a whole bunch of opportunities I want to go over, and I think you do as well, right?

**Shaan** (0:54)
Yeah, I got a couple.

**Sam** (0:55)
First big news thing, all right, so Harry's, the razor company, you see they got blocked.

**Shaan** (1:01)
Yeah, so what happened? They tried to sell the company, and FTC stepped in and said no.

**Sam** (1:05)
The FTC blocked it, and I read the report. Basically what it said is, Edge, is it Edgewell? Edgewell and Glick are the two biggest guys.
Edgewell wants to buy it for over a billion dollars. FTC blocked it. They said it's gonna be a monopoly.

**Shaan** (1:18)
How could this be a monopoly, right?

**Sam** (1:20)
Because here's why, I read the report. They put buying razors online in one category, and buying them in stores in another category. And they only looked at stores. So they didn't say Amazon was competition. They said Target. They talked about Target and things like that.

**Shaan** (1:31)
Gotcha, so they monopolized the in-store component.

**Sam** (1:34)
Yeah, I actually think it's bullshit.

**Shaan** (1:36)
That's a silly way of doing it.

**Sam** (1:37)
It's bullshit. But, so what happened was, this is what I'm getting at with this. Harry's got blocked, and Casper is going public at a half of the valuation in which they raised money at. Right. Not good for this whole D2C thing. My prediction is, and I think many people have this prediction, is that the D2C companies, what they're gonna have to do is go the route of getting sold to PE companies.
And which means it's gonna be ruthlessly prioritized of?

**Shaan** (2:05)
Profits.

**Sam** (2:06)
Profits. So like five, 10 times profit. I think it's a good thing.

**Shaan** (2:10)
Yeah, I had the founder of Life Aid, or Fit Aid, they have a bunch of drinks, it's basically a beverage company. Yeah, it's like on. And he sold to PE, and he sold, I think, when they were at like roughly 30 million in sales or something like that, and now it's much bigger than that.
And so, and you know, his path was so, it didn't take a miracle, you know what I mean? Like he made a good product, he distributed it through CrossFit and others, and then he had the financials in place where it wasn't like Casper, where it's like the marketing expenses are just so out of control, that the business just doesn't make any sense.

**Sam** (2:47)
Where was that company located?

**Shaan** (2:48)
Here, like Santa Clara, or whatever, like not far.

**Sam** (2:51)
That's a good idea to be located in a different place than San Francisco or New York. Casper shouldn't be in Manhattan. You don't need customer service people in Manhattan. That's so stupid.
So this thing is gonna be interesting. We'll have to talk about this later, about how it's gonna impact these direct consumer companies, because for a long time, they were being valued at a revenue multiple, which is not right for most.

**Shaan** (3:10)
Yeah, the real question is what's happened since? So for example, Dollar Shave Club sells to I think Unilever, for a billion dollars, that didn't get blocked, they do all online.
And the question is, is Unilever writing that off three years from now, or is it now worth three billion or whatever? And so if you're a DDC company today, you're really hoping with fingers crossed that some of these other acquisitions, like we talked about the native acquisition, right, gets bought by Procter & Gamble, and revenue has soared since then, because the Procter & Gamble machine was able to take native and pump it into targets and do more things with it. And so they're looking back at that and they're saying that was a good buy. And that's what needs to happen is some of these need to come out successful. This is what happens in tech, right?