Kevin Rose: His $100M/Year Watch Blog, Money From Digg.com, & Web3 Business

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. Talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.
When I saw you went and did the watch site, Hodinkee, first of all, Sean, have you ever read that? Like when I heard, I was like a blog, I like watches, I have Rolexes, I was like a blog for luxury watches. What the hell is this guy thinking?

**Shaan Puri** (1:17)
Did you just say that it went from like a million or two in revenue and now it's, Sam said it's over 100 million?

**Kevin Rose** (1:25)
Yeah, yeah, we're over 100 million in revenue now.

**Sam Parr** (1:27)
Man, that is wild.

**Shaan Puri** (1:29)
That's insane.
What's up? All right, in this episode, we are sitting down with Kevin Rose. A lot of you know Kevin because he's an Internet OG. He created DIG back in the day. He was a seed investor in Twitter and a bunch of other cool companies. He's been a VC, he's been a founder. He recently launched an NFT project that's done hundreds of millions of dollars worth of NFT sales. And so Kevin's has been around for a while. And the cool part of the interview, if you listen to it, you're gonna see, very chill guy, very down to earth, very humble.
And not a kind of like, oh my God, I'm gonna go take over the world, bubbling over with ambition and a big chip on his shoulder. Seemed like a happy dude who was enjoying himself and had a ton of success in the process. And I like that, I like seeing people who play the game in different ways. And he's definitely somebody who's interesting. We talked about a bunch of his projects that you may not know about. So for example, is creating Watchville, this niche project for watches that grew from 1 million in revenue to now over 100 million after it got acquired and merged with Hodinkee.
Then also we talked about how he hires writers. We talked about how he got into Twitter as an early investor and what does he do with his money? So he's got a bunch of money. How does he invest it? Where does he put it? And the answer is not what you may have expected. The last thing we did at the end is we did the crypto debate. So Sam is sort of a crypto skeptic. Kevin is obviously a crypto believer and one of the kind of most well-known guys in the crypto scene. And we had a little debate where we talked about is it all bullshit or are there some use cases? So I hope you enjoy this episode with Kevin Rose.
I liked it. I think you will too.

**Sam Parr** (3:18)
We should give like a brief overview, but like your resume, we don't really talk too much about like resumes and stuff, but your resume is like crazy long. So I've been following you forever.
So I've known about your work. So you started DIG, which was, when did you start that, in 04?

**Kevin Rose** (3:33)
2004, that's right.

**Sam Parr** (3:35)
Yeah, and so it was like one of the original like site link aggregators, and it was like a cultural phenomenon, and that was crazy. And you were like, was it Time Magazine that you were on the cover of like, you know-