#43 - Getting your team to take big risks, Turning office workers into remote, Quiet founders making big money

**Shaan** (0:05)
In this episode, we talked about a framework to get your team to think big.

**Sam** (0:08)
We talked about a $200 million a year commercial laundry business.

**Shaan** (0:12)
Jessica Simpson, how she's making a billion dollars still off her fame.

**Sam** (0:16)
And a billionaire in Texas who you probably haven't heard of, but you should.

**Shaan** (0:19)
Don't forget about Jambi's special package I gave Sam, a special gift.

**Sam** (0:24)
Which is just underwear with pockets.

**Shaan** (0:26)
I gave Sam some underwear. Okay, I'm Shaan, this is Sam.

**Sam** (0:35)
Episode two of our experiment.

**Shaan** (0:39)
Of the experiment, yes. And new studio, we're looking fly.
Now the video is good. It's good to have video because now we're sitting in a legit studio. I got a bookcase behind me, I look smart.

**Sam** (0:49)
Yeah, it's still.

**Shaan** (0:51)
I've read none of these books.

**Sam** (0:52)
It's a work in progress. Uh-oh, that one's gonna fall. Did you see the videos that we posted yesterday?

**Shaan** (0:58)
I did, yeah, cool. Good stuff.

**Sam** (1:00)
Good framework.
We'll have to continue making it interesting or improve. I actually think.

**Shaan** (1:05)
I rode my bike here today because I was like, if we're gonna be on video, I can't be fat. So I'm gonna start riding my bike, start eating clean.
This podcast is gonna change my life.

**Sam** (1:14)
Okay, so let's get into this.
A couple things popped up this morning that I wanted to ask you about. We, last, maybe last year, maybe six months ago, we had like 10 high schoolers in our office and we were, I forget what they were doing. We were showing them around, I forget. But they started talking about Twitter and I was like, you guys use Twitter?
And all of them were like, yeah, it's boom. And it's like, it's where it's at. And so a few of us at the office started buying Twitter stock.

**Shaan** (1:38)
That's sophisticated strategy.

**Sam** (1:40)
Today popped, I think it's up 10%.

**Shaan** (1:42)
More, it was up 17% this morning.

**Sam** (1:45)
So big fan of that.

**Shaan** (1:46)
Big fan of that. Great job, Twitter.

**Sam** (1:48)
And I have noticed I've spent hours a day on it.

**Shaan** (1:51)
So I had a funny conversation yesterday about Twitter. So I was at work and I was talking about, I was like, you know, our company's not public. And I was like, in some ways that's great because you don't have to worry about the quarterly earnings and all that pressure.
On the other hand, there's no sort of stock price to look at every day. You know, you can do great work and the shares of the company don't necessarily get more valuable because it's already got acquired. And somebody was telling me a story. They were at one of these companies, let's call it, maybe Facebook, maybe Twitter, maybe Snapchat. And they were like, yeah, you know what sucked is, you know, 10 days before the earnings call, the CFO messages the product manager is like, hey, we need to lift monthly active users by like eight million. So send out an email blast, like send out a notification being like, hey, you know, something, come look. And I was like, yeah, that would suck.
But that's how funny. Well, the problem is it works temporarily because now you're hooked on that. Now you're inflating a number. It's not fraud, right?
It's just trying to juice the number right before their earnings. So you get your stock price, you know, stays stable or goes up. But now you got to do that every quarter. Any quarter you don't do it, you're deflating and that's a problem. So they were saying it wasn't fun to work in that environment.

**Sam** (3:11)
And I don't, it doesn't matter if you hate or like Trump, but he proposed something interesting a while ago where he said, let's get rid of quarterly earnings report and do six or 12 months. And that is an awesome idea.

**Shaan** (3:23)
That is an awesome, have you heard of the long-term stock exchange? No, you haven't heard of this? Oh, this is crazy.
So Eric Ries, who wrote The Lean Startup.

**Sam** (3:31)
Yeah.

**Shaan** (3:32)
Might be in this bookshelf, I can't tell.

**Sam** (3:33)
I have heard about it.

**Shaan** (3:34)
You don't have it up here. Okay, so Eric Ries, for those that don't know, he wrote the book The Lean Startup, which is a great book.
And he was thinking about his next project and he decided, what's most screwed up about companies is this quarterly earnings treadmill that you get on and it just incentivizes short-term behavior. So he's like, if we wanna change the way companies work, they're playing the game as it's laid out. They're playing by the rules of the game. They're incentivized to do short-term things. He's like, but what if there was a stock exchange you could list on where you were incentivized to do long-term things? So they have some rules around it where it's like, you have to hold the stock for over a year. So there's no short-term trading. Gets rid of the day traders, the quantitative trading.