Meeting Charlie Munger and Starting RE Costseg with David Senra and Mitchell Baldridge

 
Mitchell Baldridge and David Senra photo
 

Delighted to bring back our most-requested guest duo, Mitchell Baldridge of the Baldridge Financial Empire, and David Senra of the Founders Podcast.

We invite you to join our backroom catchups and take-over-the-world strategy sessions, and there are some very exciting stories in this episode:

A few highlights from the episode:

  • We jump immediately into David’s experience meeting Charlie Munger, visiting his library, and asking all of his most burning questions.

  • Bottom line: He felt peace about his decisions and his pathway. So sweet!

  • How Founders Podcast reached the Top 100 Podcasts In The World.

  • Mitchell shares how he de-risked and started RE Costseg with only $40,000. Nine months later, they are at 26 employees and growing fast.

  • Involve creators in the founding of new businesses to solve for initial distribution.

  • We have a civil conversation about bootstrapping vs. raising venture capital and decide… nothing.

  • Microsoft was a bootstrapped startup, with only one small round of funding that they never even touched.

  • You probably don’t need new ideas – you need simple, proven ideas taken seriously.

  • David makes Mitchell and I both worry we’ve started too many companies.

  • Mitchell is going to start a podcast!!

  • FOCUS ON YOUR CUSTOMERS NOT YOUR INVESTORS.

  • The fewer stakeholders you have, the simpler your life becomes.

  • Founders Podcast Live Event: April 18 in Miami

This episode is sponsored by Scribe Media.

​Scribe Media helps executives, entrepreneurs, and business leaders to write, edit, publish and market their books.

Scribe offers a middle path called "Professional Publishing" between self-publishing and traditional publishing. With Professional Publishing, the author owns all IP, so you can do anything with your book. You also keep 100% of their royalties.

You're getting the same level of professionalism as a traditional publisher—book design, interior design, and your own publishing imprint.

If you’re considering publishing a book, take 20 minutes to meet with Miles from Scribe to learn more about the publishing landscape. To get in touch with Miles, click here or email me and I’ll give you a warm introduction.

Learn more about David Senra:

Learn more about Mitchell Baldridge:

Additional episodes if you enjoyed:

Episode Transcript:

Eric Jorgenson: Hello again and welcome. I'm Eric Jorgenson, and I don't know much, but I have some very smart friends. And if you listen to this podcast then no matter who, where, or when you are, you do too. Together, we'll all explore how technology, investing, and entrepreneurship can curate a brighter, more abundant future. Today I have brought back David Senra and Mitchell Baldrige to the show. David is the host of the Founders Podcast where he studies biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs. It is currently one of the top podcasts in the world. He is blowing up. He's had an incredible year and that continues. We talk all about that today. He recently met Charlie Munger, and that's where we start the show. He shares what happens, what he's learned from Charlie. His life has just totally changed. And I'm so excited about what is going to continue to happen and how we're all going to get to see it and be a part of it. Mitchell Baldrige is the founder of Baldrige Financial. He's an accountant and a certified financial planner. I've had him on the show, too, previously. He's a good friend. He is building an empire of financial businesses. And today, we dive into the founding and the growth of RE Cost Seg, a new business in his portfolio. It's a really fun conversation. There's a lot of giggles when these guys get together. And we have a great time. I hope you enjoy joining us. This podcast is one of a few projects I work on. To read my book, blog, newsletter, or invest alongside us in early stage tech companies, please visit ejorgenson.com. Our conversation starts shortly. Until then, here is this episode's sponsor. If you're pulling out your phone to skip them, that's another great opportunity to leave a quick review. It really does mean so much. Thank you very much. 

This episode is sponsored by Bread. Bread is an agency of technical founders founded by very good friends of mine. They are incredibly talented designers and engineers. And they will help you as an early stage founder either expand your technical team or be a surrogate technical team. They'll even help you find and recruit and onboard your own technical co founder. So if you're looking to get something off the ground, this is an amazing way to get started. They will help you build a roadmap. They'll help you pick your tech stack. They will help you find your first product and iterate through them. They'll help you build your company from the very beginning. And this goes not just for new startups but also for existing companies looking to add strong new features, new products, new business lines. I can't emphasize enough that they are not a typical dev shop. They have rethought this model from the ground up. And they're extremely founder oriented. They’re founders themselves, have built successful companies. They're multi talented people, and I can’t encourage you to do business with them enough. They're very thoughtful about structuring this in a win-win way. And I wish I could say that of all agencies, but I can't. So please check out madebybread.com. And if you reach out to them, let them know Eric sent you. Now, with both ears and everything in between, please enjoy this conversation arriving in three, two, one.

David Senra: Okay, so you really want me to start with Charlie?

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, let's not be bashful and bury the lead. Like David, you got to just give us the- we won't be able to focus on anything else until you give us the Charlie story, so we got to just start there.

David Senra: Okay, let me pull up the notes too. Some of the stuff I can't say. Because Charlie is exactly as he appears at the meetings and online. Completely unfiltered. I think in the my post, I said he was ferociously intelligent. That's 100%. He's exactly as I pictured him to be, considering I've read like every single book that I could find about him, I've watched like all his speeches, have gone through Poor Charlie's Almanac a bunch of times, it was just unbelievable. Like, I still can't believe it. I just saw one of my mentions on Twitter, they're like, this picture looks like a dream or something like that, the actual like composition of the photo. I was like, dude, I still can't believe it happened. So for people that don't know, I ended up getting the opportunity to have dinner at Charlie Munger’s house. I got to spend three hours with him. I got to go through his library. You could ask him whatever question you want. Charlie, just so you know, is not going to ask you any questions. It's just like it's the Charlie show. It's like prompt him up, and we'll see where he goes. I guess like the main takeaway for me was just like this same thing happened where I got to spend three hours with Charlie. And then a few weeks before that, I got to spend two hours at lunch with Sam Zell. And Sam was like sitting directly across from me, just me, Sam, and my friend Rick. And same thing. He was telling stories, get to ask many questions as you want. And what I took away from that over five hours experience with these two multibillionaires, Sam is like 81, Charlie's like 99, is I get back and I'm like, oh, I'm definitely on the right path. Like the amount of business historical knowledge that both of them had, there was not one thing- Like so far, I think I've spent, what, six years on Founders Podcast, I'm going to hit about 300 books soon, it's over 100,000 pages, who knows how many hours. I literally could not tell them one thing that they did not already know. And the crazy thing about Sam Zell, and I know we're talking about Charlie, because I'm about to release an episode on the lunch with Sam Zell, hopefully like in a week or two, is not only like I try to bring up like some obscure guy that I read about, I would bring up his name. He'd be like, oh, yeah, I read the book, I know the company name. He knew the outcome. Dude, considering like how obsessed I am with everybody like knowing who Edwin Land was, the fact that he's the founder of Polaroid and a guy that Steve Jobs learned a ton about, used a lot of his ideas. And the crazy thing is I've read five- I think it's five biographies on Edwin Land. I've read all of them. I read three of them twice. I think I’ve done six or seven episodes on him. Sam Zell was telling me Edwin Land stories I didn't even know. Like he was in law school with the daughter of Edwin Land’s patent attorney.

Mitchell Baldridge: I think there's something to be said for just being there in the moment. You retain a different- Well, we talk about this a lot, David, like the idea that these biographies are like revisionist history. They're written, they're spelled out carefully. I wonder what like hits the cutting room floor, like all the good stuff that never gets written down would be amazing.

David Senra: So we talk about how crazy intelligent, and 99 years old, like you're going to have some kind of cognitive decline; everybody is. And all I could keep thinking is like- I even yelped one time. The good thing is like the dinner starts, and we get to Charlie's house. And behind him, we're in his library, and so I could see all the books- I had the advantage because I was like starstruck. I guess I should back up for people that don’t know. And I was like, I literally look at Charlie like the wise grandfather I never had. Like, I've taken a handful of his ideas, and I'm just running- I'm just using his ideas and a combination of other people's ideas. He's like, oh, that's a good idea of Charlie Munger’s. It's most likely a good idea if Charlie says it’s a good idea. How many businesses and how many founders has he observed. I'll just go down the list. And so one of my favorite things that he ever said is that he says in business, we find that the winning system either maximizes- goes ridiculously far in minimizing and/or maximizing one or few variables. He's talking about Costco. Then he also tells you, hey, become friends with the dead. It's like you're going to get through life a lot better if you can understand, I'm going to use one of Eric's maybe favorite words, leverage. He's like learning from history is a form of leverage. So use the- minimize or maximize one or two variables. So just the combination of- and this is something I wrote him in advance, minimizing, maximizing one or two variables, become friends with the dead, take a simple idea and take it really fucking seriously. The idea of learning from the past, of transmitting valuable information from one generation to the next is as old as humanity. And then he says, find what you're best at, oh, aim for durability. Do something for an extremely long time. Because knowledge, interest, money, everything compounds, so you’ll get all the benefits over 10, 20 30 years in the future, and then find what you're best at and keep pounding away at it forever. Like, we look at those five ideas, like the combination that's like, oh, that's exactly what I'm doing with Founders Podcast. And having a dinner with him and lunch with Sam is like, oh, it's not that you make billions and billions of dollars and then learn all this shit. It's like they started studying this intently. Sam was reading biographies and autobiographies when he was like a teenager. When he was in law school, he was reading Zeckendorf’s biography, which is a real estate developer that he's like, I found an idea in there when I was like 20, and I use it throughout my life. Same thing with Charlie Munger. Charlie Munger, by the time, he was like eight or nine, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin had already become his heroes. He was reading their biographies, studying like the information they had. And so the benefit I had is that this started out in Charlie's library. So, Andrew Wilkinson and Chris Sparling are the founders of Tiny; a lot of people on the internet will know who they are. They're huge supporters and fans of Founders Podcast. They're the ones that made this happen. And they've met him a bunch of times. So this is how starstruck I was. We're sitting there. And we're in almost like a little semi circle zone, like four or five of us. It's not a big group at all. And we're all like gathered around Charlie. And I'm looking, I'm like, I'm in Charlie Munger library. I'm in his house. What the fuck is happening right now? I literally said nothing. I'm just staring. I'm like, I see you on TV, man. Like I've seen you. I've watched how many hours of your meetings. How did you get here? How am I here?

Eric Jorgenson: I have a question. Can you set the scene for us? Like what is his- what's the vibe of his house? What's it like? Is it like cluttered genius messy, like old school? What's it like?

David Senra: First of all, it's a nice neighborhood, but you would have no idea from the outside that a multimillionaire lives there. So, he is what he says he is. This idea where like when Warren bought the private plane for Berkshire, Charlie nicknamed the plane The Indefensible because he doesn't like spending money. He just is like he's dead serious about this when he talks about control your cost. At the end of one of the last things we were talking about after we had dinner, he was like he loves a deal. He's like, look at this shirt. I think bought like- I forgot what it was, like he paid like $12 like 10 years ago, and you're just like, you can't buy the shirt cheaper than this. Just like because he was also telling me- He'll tell you the people he admires. He mentioned it over and over again. One of his favorite founders of all time, Jim Senegal. He has like this irrational love of Jim, and so do I. Like think about what he's built in the economic surplus that Jim's very unique business model has given to, what, hundreds of millions of people. I always tell the story where my wife's family has been a Costco member for 27 consecutive years. Think about how good your fucking product has to be for people to- it's not like it's an auto renew. You know if you guys are Costco members, you got to go back in there and be like I want this again, take my money again. 

Eric Jorgenson: I wear my Costco sweatshirt to Costco, and I'm like, hey, big fan. And I love Jim Senegal because I love anybody who like threatens to kill his executive team every time they try to raise the price of the hot dog. There's literally like a headline like every three years or so, like someone suggests taking the hot dog to $2 instead of $1.50. Jim Sinegal’s like, I will fucking kill you. Shut up. You're fired.

David Senra: So you got to explain why you said the viral Charlie Munger tweet is in Costco hot dog territory because I don't think many people are going to get that.

Mitchell Baldridge: So that was back when Luna- Yeah, when Tether de pegged and Luna wound all the way down. And I guess that was how long ago, it was a simpler time. But yeah, I posted a picture of the Costco hot dog that said, the last remaining stable coin. I went to dinner. When I got back, it had 400 likes. And then when I went to bed, it had 1000 likes. And then when I woke up, it had 8000. And by the next morning, it went to 20. And it wound up somewhere around 200,000. And kids I went to elementary school with were texting me going, oh my God, you're on the internet. What the hell?

Eric Jorgenson: In the year book as most likely to go viral.

Mitchell Baldridge: I mean, that was a weird experience. But yeah, so you had, David, Trung helped you write that post. What did Trung teach you in writing that post? What would you have written versus what did Trung write for you?

David Senra: He says he doesn't get any credit for it, which I think it's a lie.

Mitchell Baldridge: And why didn't you ask me? I could have helped you. I'm pretty good. 

David Senra: There's an interesting thought because I think what you just talked about, we never circled back on your ideas. Like, most of history's revisionist and winners- to the victor comes the spoils, they get to tell stories. And so something all three of us talk about I think online and privately, it's like I'm always looking for like the idea behind the idea. They're telling a story. I have no idea if the story is true or not. But like what is the principle or the idea that I can pull away from that? And so this whole thing with Trung and Charlie Munger dinner, it's like one of the most interesting things I learned from spending three weeks reading and rereading Paul Graham essays, it's episode 275 of Founders in case you haven't listened to it. I know Eric listened to it because he called me driving back in the snow. And he's like, dude, that line was so good, I wanted to pull over and write it down. The idea that a great product is better than it has to be. But the whole idea behind it. But one of my favorite ideas I've been thinking about nonstop since that happened, and that was close to 25 episodes ago. So, a couple months, is Paul Graham had this weird- first of all, he's just an amazing writer and a very clear thinker. And he had this thing I've never heard of before that it's called- he calls it conversational resourcefulness. And I was like, Paul, what the hell does that mean? And he's like, he noticed an interesting positive correlation between the founders that were easy to talk to and the performance of their company. And then he also noticed the same thing where it's like I'm meeting with a founder and I have a hard time talking to them, that positively correlates with a bad company performance. And he's trying to figure out in this essay like what is happening. And he realizes like, oh, the difference was, what he was picking up was like he called it conversation resourcefulness. With the great founders, you have to tell them something once and they will understand all the implications of what you're saying, even if they're unstated. And you'll also see the real time actions where it's like, great founders, he has a conversation, Paul introduces them to an investor. He's like, I can set it and forget it. I know that guy or that girl was coming back with the money. There's a level of conversational resourcefulness. And so I've been obsessed with that idea. So I was sitting here thinking, I was like, okay, I already knew what the title of the episode was going to be. And I was like, if I'm scrolling through a podcast player myself, because I’m always looking at things like as a podcast fan. I liked podcasts fanatically before I had my own. And so I was looking at it. That's the way my podcast is set up. It's like, what would I want to see? That's why I don't have mid roll ads. I don't do all this other shit. I don't have intro music, none of that. And I was like, if I scroll through, and I see I had dinner with Charlie Munger, they're going to stop. They may not click on it, but like what the hell is going on? And I see this because the downloads have gone absolutely insane. So one, I have a good title. Two, I have this really great picture. Andrew brought this really- his fancy camera. And he did this intentionally. This is the thing that I think- people know who Andrew and Chris are, they know their company, but being able to talk to them and observe them. And I've told other people, I've told them this, to them and to other people, like you guys need to watch how Andrew and Chris move. Like they're extremely- I always say- me and Sam Hinkie talk about this a lot. I talked about this with Patrick from Invest Like the Best too, like we have this framing of like who are the smartest players on the board? And what are these smart players on the board doing? And so, the way Andrew and Chris moves, you're like, oh, these guys know what- like they're extremely intelligent on the little details about how they're moving. So, he knew in advance, he’s like, dude, I brought the camera. We're going to get you a really good photo with you and Charlie Munger. I am not photogenic. I don't look like that in that picture. I was like, wow, I look really good in that picture. So I have a good headline. I have a very unique experience and experience that people will literally pay millions of dollars for. I have a great photo. I have this weird background of being able to compare with- Charlie Munger is telling me with- I have read three hundred something biographies and history of entrepreneurship. So I can place in a context that's different. And then if you have an audience, a very sophisticated audience, like the audience's that all three of us are building. These are not like average Joes. It's like somewhere, if you need something in your audience, it doesn't matter what it is, there's somebody that's world class or whatever you need in your audience. And they feel a compulsion to help you because they get so much value from the work that you put out there. So I'm looking at all these things, like you can't buy these things in a store, but they’re assets. They are resources. So how can I take Paul Graham's idea of conversational resourcefulness and show that like, oh, I can put it together too. And lik I could do this to the advantage and make, at the same time, not only one, I think that if you listen to podcast, it makes your life and business better, there will be ideas in there, but also it makes my business way better. I can't- I'm not going to tell you the amount, but like you would be fucking shocked at how many new listeners I got from that. I mean, I was- people know, like I was number one on entrepreneurship chart, number five in business, top 100 in all podcasts in the world, like shocking, insane. So you combine this. And then I saw- I was like, okay, well, I'm not going to do this on my own. Like, I don't know shit about Twitter. Like, I'm doing okay on Twitter. But I have a master- Like Trung Phan’s like Elon’s boy. Him and Elon are like tweeting at each other. Like, you're going to be like- Trung is went from like 8000 or 4000 followers to 600 something thousand followers. He's got- So I just start talking to him about this. And it should just be a thread? Should this be a long tweet? Like, what should I do here? And it was like a day and a half went back and forth. Then I was sending him what I originally was going to do, and he's like, Trung is nice. So he had to read between the lines. He's like, oh, yeah-  

Mitchell Baldridge: That could be cool. But like, what if we totally changed it?

David Senra: That's exactly what it was. And so we went back and forth. He didn't do any of the editing, like all the writing was myself, but the framework that he gave me. So that's when I tell him- I hit him up. I'm like, man, I can't believe this happened like that. And he's like, dude, I didn't do anything. I was like, no, you gave me a framework. And like you set this up. You definitely did. 

Eric Jorgenson: What was the framework?

David Senra: And then they just do a long tweet. Don't do that first thing that you sent me. That's fucking terrible. And then like make it interesting.

Mitchell Baldridge: He didn’t text Elon for you to throw into this like sideways laughing faces, and like that would have been a hook up.

David Senra: No, no. And he didn't even like edit it or anything. But he just gave me the idea, like this is what's going to work for you. And those long tweets have been working for me very well, like the past- They're getting a ton- every day, a lot of stuff I put up is doing really well. And then the other asset I have is that I don't ever ask anybody for favors, like ever. I've never sent a cold DM or cold email. I should. This is a mistake on my part. I don't ask Mitchell for anything. I don’t ask Eric for anything. I don't ask anybody for anything. And for this, I was like, listen, man, I'm going to do the Charlie Munger post. Can you guys just boost it? And so I called- like called or texted, I don't know, like 10 to 20 influential people. And everybody said yes because I don't ask for anything. And so that- I think two hours after I posted it, Trung texted me, goes this thing’s going nuclear. Because he knows. And it went nuclear. I was like, oh. And then I'm in a group chat with David from Acquired. I think like, oh, it's probably going to get a million views. And then like, the next day, I go, it's at three and a half. It's at five. It's at three million on LinkedIn. Like it just went fucking crazy.

Eric Jorgenson: That's crazy. So tell me about the actual- What about the actual experience? Where did you go in with like questions planned? Was there anything you were like dying to ask him?

David Senra: Another asset. Thank you for that. So I see this over and over again. Like Frederick, I think he pronounces it Gieshen. He's German. I can't even pronounce English. Frederick's a friend of mine. He writes Neckar Mines of the Market on Substack. If you don't mind, we can link below. He's an incredible researcher, like unbelievable researcher. And he's the one that like watches a ton of these, like he'll go back and watch a ton of the Berkshire Q&As that they do at the meeting. He finds like shit that- from 15 years ago you forgot about. And so I hit him up. I'm like, dude, I still don't believe it's going to happen. But I flew all the way to LA in case it does happen. Looks like tomorrow I'm going to have dinner with Charlie Munger. Can you please like- I obviously read a lot about him, but was like give me some good questions. He gave me incredible questions that you wouldn't hear anywhere else. I had this whole notebook saved on my phone. Never looked at my phone once the entire time. Because it goes back to what I was talking about. And then, tell me if we're talking too much about this because like Mitchell said at the beginning, like David could be in here for an hour and a half and not even realize we're not here. It goes back to like just me not believing that this was happening to the point where like Andrew and Chris have a relationship with Charlie. They probably have asked him hundreds of questions in their life. They jump right in like old friends. And then I'm still like starstruck, like having an out of body experience. And then Andrew looks at me like jump in. Don't just sit there. Like you sat here for 10 minutes not saying anything. And then I immediately jump in with- the benefit I had is I could see all the books behind Charlie and I had read a bunch of the obscure biographies because I found them from him. And so it goes back to Mitchell's revisionist history question. I was asking questions about Henry Kaiser, who this guy that started 100 companies, built the Hoover Dam, was as famous in his day as like Elon is in our day, built liberty ships and all kinds of crazy stuff. And Charlie immediately, just goes into like all the stuff Kaiser built, how he was, like unbelievable recall. And I yelp out, I go, Charlie, how do you remember all this stuff? He was like, I knew his partner. So like, to Charlie, it's not history. He was there. To us, it’s history. He was alive. He was a young man. I thought it was hilarious.

Mitchell Baldridge: So why do you think- what is Charlie getting from being friends with Andrew Wilkinson and like what is he getting by connecting to young entrepreneurs today?

David Senra: He likes young, sharp people. He says he invites them to his house for dinner. And if he can't invite them, he will Zoom with them. I saw a setup, somebody had set up- like he's got a camera right next to his chair. I think a lot of people know this. Maybe some don't. Charlie's been wheelchair bound for like six years. And so like he's sitting in his library. And so he's got like a camera here and he’s got family members and other people there that can help them with like technology. But like in ’99, he's still relentlessly curious, still wants to be intelligent people, still wants to help them. Because he knows that Andrew and Chris are like, they're building the very version of- version of like Berkshire on the internet. They are way further ahead at their ages then Charlie or Warren were at theirs. So like, there again, that's a prime example of like I had a very long lunch with Chris, he's super fucking smart, super sharp. And you talk to him, he's like, oh, he's actually one of the few people that can be capable of learning from history because Charlie and Warren say this over and over again, we're going to tell you these things, guys. Most of you aren't going to use them because you're incapable of learning from history. Charlie and Warren, they're speaking themselves, like we are capable of learning from history. When you talk to Chris and Andrew, same thing, like they're capable of learning from history. They're running that playbook. And so this was the same thing with Sam Zell, where it's like, listen, I think podcasting is the best business in the world. I think it's funny that people think it's like low status. You have like the new Jonah Hill Netflix movie, they say, hey, I'm going to be a podcaster. And he's laughed at. The New York Times just released this article, it's like girls won't date podcasters. And I'm like, when I hear shit like that, I get like giddy like a little fucking kid. I'm like, oh, you still don't understand what's happening. You still don't understand this. This is the best job in the world. The most valuable job in the world if you have an engaged, intelligent audience, not even if- for the fact that I like to read and make podcasts. So in and of itself, there's no means to an end. It's the end itself. But like you have no fucking clue what we're about to do. The businesses that we're going to build and the wealth that is going to come from podcasting because you're still making fun of it, which is exactly what humans do all the time. I was just rereading some past highlights because I did this like 12 or 13 part series on the early automobile industry. And if you were in 1899 a young man trying to build a car, people fucking laughed at you. They're like, at the time, for every one car on the road, there was 3600 horses. And so, everybody's like, why would you need a car? Just have another horse. They had no fucking idea that this giant- one of the most valuable industries that will ever be created is happening right in front of you. And you're dismissing it, and you're making fun of it. And so human nature never changes. Like it's just going to happen over and over again. And so, Sam Zell, when I'm talking to him, so he kept asking me questions. He's like obsessed with podcast. He loves listening to them. He was like, why’d you start it? What's the business model behind it? And to the point where he asked so many questions, he was so unbelievably curious about the world around him, just like Charlie Munger is at 99. And these guys have been like that forever. That's why they're successful. Because they're just synthesizing this information and figuring out- understanding the world around them and seeing how they can profit from that. And so it got to the point where Sam was like, dude- I literally said, like you were making you're- building businesses and making millions decades before I was born; I need to be asking you the questions. But they're just crazily obsessed with their curiosity and just knowing more about the world around them.

Eric Jorgenson: So you left just kind of feeling like you're on the right track and energized. 

David Senra: Yeah, for sure. Like when I got back home from the Sam Zell lunch, I remember telling my wife, I was like, I want that. I want that. That dude hasn't had to work for fucking 30 years. He sold his company for $38 billion. And he was rich before for that. It's absurd. And it's like yet he's still like- one of the first things we talked about today. Like he's buying all these businesses. He's doing all these investments. He's like lighting up like a little kid. He's like, I just spent, I don't remember, I'm going to make up the numbers because I didn't write it down. He's like, I just spent $300 million for 70% of this company yesterday and he was just like super excited about it. He was like leaving to go give a speech to entrepreneurs in like London and then he was going to fly to like I forgot where else to give another speech. 

Eric Jorgenson: How old is Sam Zell right now?

David Senra: 81. And I go Sam, why are you doing all this, man? He goes- it's the same reason why I think entrepreneurs write autobiographies when they know they're about to die, like Sam Walton did, like the founder of IKEA did, they all did this, like Steve Jobs did, Walter Isaacson. He's like, I feel it's my obligation. This was sanitized, like it's my obligation to pass on what I've learned through my career to the next generation. So that's why I do it. He doesn't take money for these fucking speeches. They give him whatever he wants. He comes in on his own fucking private plane on his own dime. So not only is he taking money for it, he's spending probably $100,000 in jet fuel to get back and forth. And when you fly to Europe, who knows what that is. He was just flying from Chicago to south Florida. And so I was like, I want to be that excited about what I'm working on, that curious, that hungry to learn until I fucking die. That seems like I'm doing deals until I die. Charlie Munger, I get there the day the SVB shit is happening.

Eric Jorgenson: I think the odds that you'll be that excited are pretty high.

David Senra: I hope- I certainly hope so. So same thing, like I saw Charlie the day the SVB stuff was happening. And like he was still like interested in like what's going on in the market, what's happening with all these banks. It's like, if it was just money, they would have stopped. If it was just numbers on the board, they would have stopped a long time ago. They just like the shit they do. 

Mitchell Baldridge: I tweeted at our friend Chris Powers the other day and was talking about how you worked in relative anonymity for five years. And then in this last year, your life totally changed. People know who you are. People have seen the awesome work you're doing. You may move, you may not move. What is your life like now that you're having dinner with Charlie Munger, as opposed to two years ago when you were just working and no one knew what you were doing?

David Senra: I do- I appreciate what you said, by the way, I'm actually trying to pull it up right now because I thought it was really interesting. So Chris is like a stand up dude. Thank you for introducing him to me. We talk very frequently. I just find him to be a very impressive person. And we went on the phone for like an hour just usually about podcasts because he's like taking his podcast seriously, sees like the value that it applies to- He sees. Like if you're on the other side of the fence, like the outside world is making fun of us, which is fantastic. Safe, low status is fine. I'm saying it's about traveling the world. That's cool. And regardless of what you think, it doesn’t matter. I'm still going to do it. But Chris is saying like, oh, wait a minute, even something that he was like doing just because he was interested in, didn't really promote that much, has a relatively small but growing audience. He's like, oh, look at the economic impact this is having. Like this is- It feels like we talk to Chris, he realized, oh, I stumbled on a secret. I'm like, yes, you did.

Mitchell Baldridge: Imagine how like entrenched his industry is where a bunch of 75 year old deal sponsors who are buying industrial real estate look at a guy in his 30s who has done it the right way but, yeah, raise hundreds of millions of dollars off a podcast. That's insane.

David Senra: It reverses the flow. It goes from hey, I'm Chris, this is what I do, would you like to invest? To hey, Chris, I love your podcast. I love your philosophy on you're building your company. Where can I wire this 5 million? Where can I wire this 10 million?

Mitchell Baldridge: Chris, I think he coined the term trust at scale. He talks about building- or I don't know if he coined the term, but I heard him say it, building trust at scale is what he's doing. And he's doing a hell of a job at it.

David Senra: So when I go around, and I talk to very sophisticated people that have been building giant businesses on the back of podcasts, they're like, David, take the advice that you give in the podcast, bad boys move in silence. Shut up about- their like, and I'm like, dude, we can yell this. Edwin Land says the best way to hide an idea is to yell it from the rooftops. He's like, I could say this all the time. They won't do it. The idea that we can title it, Mitchell said, what Chris tweeted after the conversation we had was like, hey, the other day I talked to Founders Podcast about what metric he cares about most for the pod. And then he summarized what I said. My wording was a little different. But this one he wrote, he goes I don't care about anything but making amazing content people will love. The rest will sort itself out. I use different words, but the idea behind that is-

Mitchell Baldridge: It was laced with expletives is what happened. I was screaming the F word.

David Senra: No, no, I don't look at metrics. What happens is when you log in to upload a new episode, you'll see and I'm usually- I'm always surprised, like oh shit. But I don't like oh, what percent are people finishing or- none of that. I'm going to do what I'm most energized about and enthusiastic and passionate about that will transform through the media because audio is straight up energy transmission. I will do it forever and time will carry most of the weight. I'm not going to like oh, this book underperformed, maybe I don't do books in that category anymore. It's like I liked it. And so then Mitchell responds to this tweet, and he's like, a lot of people will say that they don't care, like what I just said about the metrics, but he spent five years building one of the best podcasts in the world and new media. And then he screenshots the first episode which came out September 19, 2016. How did this discussion even start? You asked the question about- how can you- Yes. So, I always thought it was a good idea. I thought it made sense to me. It just made logical sense. Like, when you read biographies, all of history’s entrepreneurs learn from people before them, and yet this like very new entrepreneurship industry that is like servicing entrepreneurs with like information, like everything is about what is happening now. Like, let me give you example, and I don't want to- like I'm not trying to hurt anybody's feelings. One thing I learned about from David Ogilvy is he's got this concept of a code of conduct. And he's like, I love gentlemen with brains. When you meet Charlie Munger, you realize he's a gentleman with brains. He is unbelievably smart, unreasonably polite and nice. So I'm not going to say what this was. I got invited, this magazine had this like event. I don't like going to fucking group dinners. I'm introverted. I like small, intimate, one to three people at the most. Against my better judgment, I went to this thing. And whatever, two hours, I sat there and didn't say a word, so that tells you everything that you need to know. At the end, they're like, hey, we're having these events and these talks, and write down on a piece of paper, or like what they gave us, like who you'd like to see because they have these giant events where you can get the biggest names in business because of who is putting it on. And all these people were like writing- It's like, no, well, who would you write down? I wrote down Sam fucking Zell. Because he knows more in his 81 year old fucking brain than every single other person that like every 25 year old founder put together. Like this is absurd.

Mitchell Baldridge: Sam Zell, he doesn't know anything about one click checkout. Come on, bro.

David Senra: I think it goes back to like this is clearly- if you're going to spend time learning from people, are you going to spend- and this is not disrespect to that guy, man. But like, he did this long thread about, hey, you should- we're telling our employees to borrow money and to go into debt and buy equity at an $8 billion valuation of a company that is like most likely going to fail. And it's not an insult to him. It's like, dude, if you just look at- 

Eric Jorgenson: All that, that's fine. I'm cool with that. 

David Senra: But no, if you look at the last boom and bust cycle, you would see that this is- there was an idea that was tried before, and it doesn't work for x, y and z. Now, did you solve for x, y, and z? No, you did not. So it's not going to work again, the same shit that Sam Zell talked about where like he’d bring up this idea where you have this fundamental mismatch of people like WeWork where they like sign 15 year leases, so they have long term commitments and then short term customer cycles. He's like, David, that didn't work in 1952 when Richard did it, didn't work in 1960. Did he tell you the year, the fucking name of the guy, the name of the company, and why it didn't work. If you're going to innovate, you have to solve for this fundamental mismatch, or it's just going to keep replaying over and over and over again. That is my point. So I did not think, I swear to God, I remember I put up Episode 30, which is the second time I read Elon’s biography. I was like, I'm going to put this out, it’s going to be so popular. I'm going to have a built in audience. Like I had, I swear to god, that was like maybe a year into it, or whatever. I was like, this is like clearly going to work. It took years and years and years, but I had this delusional belief. I was like, dude, this just makes so much more sense because I don't find smarter shit anywhere than what I find in these books.

Eric Jorgenson: To your point on the podcast, like for context, my podcast now just, thanks to like a good size sponsor that we just signed that's going to do a full year's deal, Scribe, actually, Scribe will be the episode- This is the first episode they will have sponsored. 

David Senra: I thought I sponsoring this episode.

Eric Jorgenson: This is year three, 60 some episodes, 1000 hours, and probably between $50 and 100,000 of hard costs before it turns profitable, let alone pays its investment off. Like it's a long slog to create a podcast. But everything after that turning point, I think it just becomes immensely, immensely valuable. But I understand, man, why- there's a long tail of small struggling hard podcasts. And it's a huge battle to make it that long psychologically and financially to like get through that point. But we all know sort of what's on the other side. And I don't blame people for being like that is a mountain that I don't want to climb. I get it.

David Senra: But that's where all the valuable businesses are built. 100% easy to do. 

Eric Jorgenson: I think the pain comes from the mismatch. Like, it just looks much easier and cheaper and faster road to success than it is if people think it's like, oh, well, if I can build a Twitter account, I can build a podcast. And so like those are different. Those are different things. Twitter can help you build a podcast, for sure. But you have to think of it like building a business, going into the J curve, spending a few years of spending money and time playing chicken with failure knowing that you have to persevere long enough to break through. But then once you do, you have something incredibly valuable.

David Senra: So we do these- like we're doing this reoccurring meetup on Eric's podcast. And I think the main point of the reason we want to do it is because like we're all engaged in the same thing. We're like trying to build a business online. They're different businesses. We have different aims. And so we think, hey, let's get together and not just talk about Charlie Munger’ dinner. Let's talk about like the stuff that we're doing. And if you don't mind, I just want to piggyback on what you just said, we were talking to a ton of like, I'm in a bunch of like these podcast chat groups, I get a bunch of like DMs or whatever, I'm sure you guys do as well. And specifically for podcasts, building an actual podcast, I think what you're speaking about is like the reason it is so difficult is, one, there's no centralized like network pushing you out. There's like no algorithm. But two, people think it's a thing. And I think it's a medium. They think it's oh, it's me just shit hanging out with my boys, pressing record, and I'll just upload it, and then I'll be as famous as Joe Rogan a few years from now. I'm not going to say who, but Mitchell sent me this podcast. He's like, hey, they have giant social media followings, they're not getting any traction at all with their podcasts. Do you mind listening to it? I listen to it. And the diagnosis was clear. It's like, I'm 20 minutes in, I have no idea what the value proposition of what you're doing here. Like treat it like a product and a business. Like, when I look at how I describe the value proposition of listening to Founder’s Podcast, ended up as the first sentence in the description: learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs. If you're an entrepreneur interested in entrepreneurship, I don't have to say anything else but that. And if you don't get it just from that sentence, you're like there's no point, like you shouldn't be listening. Like, it's obvious what the value proposition is. So like, there's a bunch of things. This is what me and Chris have been talking about as well, where everybody skips to like the third or fourth thing. And what I mean by that, they're like, David, I have a podcast, or I don't necessarily like say this, just direct me to journalists, like I have a podcast. Okay. How do I grow it? It's just like you skipped a bunch of steps. First of all, is the actual content that you're making valuable to other people. You can go to Twitter account because you're asking for somebody's 15 seconds. A tweet you can read in 15 seconds. That's not the same thing as asking somebody for an ad. Just spent an hour, an hour and a half, two hours with you. That's a completely different value proposition. So is the content good? Most of the time when people say my podcast isn’t growing, you listen to it, and it sucks. The second thing is like they skip over a very important part – the branding. Like, this is something me and Mitchell- Mitchell is going to launch a podcast, that me and him have talked about for months.

Eric Jorgenson: Mitchell is going to launch a podcast? Breaking news.

Mitchell Baldridge: We're working on it. But yeah, I'll record my first one next week. And it's a daunting idea of like how do you make this good enough to be worth listening to, I'm going to suck at it for two years, presumably. Or like, David got to go build in silence. David's moat is unbelievable of like the amount of work he does and the amount of traction he has, like we were talking about somebody else trying to do a similar idea. And the idea of like if I started working 70 hours a week to try to do what David does, it wouldn't matter because there's just no way to catch up. Like, if you release three a week, you can't catch up. It's just impossible. 

David Senra: And if you do three a week, they are not going to be high enough quality, like I can't- you can't read three books and read to actually understand it well enough and deep enough to explain it to another person in an intelligent manner. So I guess my point is like this is not just about podcasts, this applies to everything, like is the actual product valuable? For most podcasts, the answer's no. And then people skip over branding. That is so fucking important. Like this is what Chris Powers is struggling with because it's like his show. I go, Chris, your show is- because he's got like how many entrepreneurs are building the business for 20 years, and he's only 38 or 39 years old. The access that people use in his network are fucking ridiculous so he can get a bunch of high quality people on the show. But I was like dude, Chris, your show is so much better than your branding. I don't know what the fuck the Forte means. I don't know, this is very important in the world of infinite scrolling. People are not- they are just going to scroll through. They're not going to sit there trying to figure out what does this mean. Jack Butcher, who I know is doing your illustrations again for the Balaji book and he did it for Naval. He has the best posts on this. It's called How to Make a Name for Yourself. Just type in visualize value, how to make a name for yourself. I'm sure we'll put it in the show notes as well. And his whole point is like that the name- language is a form of leverage. The name in this age of infinite scrolling has to do something for the customer. This is what I always say where my friend Patrick is ridiculously good at naming things. There's a handful of podcasts, one, I think Ben Wilson's How to Take Over the World might be the single best podcast title I've ever heard. And right up there, I would put Patrick's Invest like the Best because the value proposition to the listener is in the fucking title. That's crazy. Mine is in the second- the first sentence of the description. And then when he named Business Breakdowns. The name tells you what they're doing. Like you know what it's about. And people skip over that part. And so I would say like spend a ton of time figuring out how if I glance at your name, will it transmit some kind of information to me that will first get my attention, but also tell me oh, this is worth me pausing on a minute and actually looking into.

Eric Jorgenson: I mean, that was part of my motivation for totally rebranding the podcast over the last couple months. That's an ongoing thing. But yeah, it was two years. And I was like, alright, the podcast product is real. I hate my brand. I never really worked hard on it, like setting it up in the first place. Like I didn't give it a lot of thought. I just like published it. I was like, I now know what this thing is, and I want it to have a brand that I'm proud of that communicates like what the product has turned into, like what the substance of the podcast is about. So let's do it and like invest in this process. But it's totally sort of changed my relationship with the product and how excited I am to share it, and I get amazing feedback on it. I feel like it just changes how people feel when they're listening to it and what they are getting out of it, even if all the words in the episodes are the same, like the wrapping paper matters so much to the experience.

David Senra: It's a double- your name is a double entendre. If you think about it, it's like, okay, it's a description of what you're doing. You're just hanging out and recording conversations with your smart friends. But because of the parasocial relationship of podcasting, which is so, one, somehow deeply misunderstood and still underrated, it's like, oh, Eric is hanging out with his smart friends. I get to listen in. Now, I'm part of the smart friends.

Eric Jorgenson: Smart friends is like the value proposition of podcasting as a whole. 

Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, if at the end, you can hold the identity of being a smart friend, or the best podcast- Pete Holmes says you made it weird, and his listeners get to be weirdos. Or if you can become a part of the community that the podcast builds, if you can be a smart friend at the end of it, that's identity. People do that on purpose. You build this kind of meta world, or world building in podcasts or world building in storytelling and in business and in life is very important. And like, David, you have the whole meta web of every one of these founders and how they're all connected. And by listening to you, I get to be right in the center of it.

David Senra: And you wouldn't have identified with Jorgenson Soundbox. No, smart friends is not like double, it's not twice as good. It is like 10 times, 20 times as good. The one thing I would say is that also I think I understand why people, one, when you put this up, I hope you don't do what these people do where like they put these clips on Twitter, and they like zoom in on your face. Everybody's copying that, and I think it looks terrible. It's just like this fucking giant head coming at you. It's fucking talking. It's like, backup, buddy. Like, whoa, give me some space here.

Eric Jorgenson: I'm going to take that clip and put it on Twitter immediately.

Mitchell Baldridge: It's going to be like just your nose and your mouth. 

David Senra: It especially doesn’t work well for me because I got a giant fucking head. But another thing I think that people are not focusing enough on is matching the medium where like if you guys go look at my Twitter and you compare my follower count to the views I'm getting and the engagement I'm getting, like dude, all these podcasts produce interesting lines. They should be text, not just clips, and they just work so much better. Where it's like, I scroll through on Twitter, I never fucking sit and spend- I'm not going to spend a minute and a half watching a clip on Twitter. That's not what I'm here for. But I would spend 30 seconds, 20 seconds reading a text. And this has happened multiple times where I'm the CEO of Colossus is this guy named Matt Russell. I saw his tweet before I saw it on my podcast player where Patrick has this great interview with Doug Leone, who's the guy that helped build Sequoia into the massive business it is and Doug has this line where he's like, I want you to know, we were killers, not killers to make the most money, killers to get the job done. And it was like a paragraph, maybe two paragraphs. And I respond, I was like, you just convinced me- as I want it. What is he talking about? Like I want to know more about that. And I listened. I would have listened to that episode anyways, but like it prompted me to do it sooner. And I was like, oh shit, this is so good, wind up, listening to a choice that I talked about on my podcast. So, I mean like this from one simple block of text, which matches why I'm here on Twitter to begin with.

Mitchell Baldridge: So Eric, you have a book coming out really, really soon, right? 

David Senra: Great transition.

Mitchell Baldridge: I have nothing to add.

Eric Jorgenson: How many inside Munger jokes were dropped during dinner? Were you guys just like nudging each other? Like was peanut brittle present? 

Mitchell Baldridge: Did you break out some peanut brittle and just start working?

David Senra: So when I flew into the airport, they have all the Sea's Candies like kiosks there. And I'm like I should bring him peanut brittle. And I didn't- I like I don't know why I didn't, I was like, that would have been perfect. No, he talks just like that, like in his wisdom is prevention, he takes these very complex words. This is why it's so important because like think about our own experience reading books or listening podcasts, you can spend 20 hours reading a book, an hour and a half listening to a podcast, you're going to remember a story or you're going to remember a line. That's just how our brains work. And so, Charlie's gifted communication skills, he takes this unbelievably complex idea, the idea of like you have to know at least elementary probability, if you don't, you go through life like a one legged man in an ass kicking contest, you'll never going to fucking forget that. And that's the whole point. He's got your attention. And then now he's got your attention, you could put that in your brain. And Brandon sits there, and you could apply to multiple different experiences. Like, he's just the man. Like, I still love him so much. I was just so impressed by him.

Eric Jorgenson: It's so nice when you meet your heroes and they are exactly who you wanted them to be. Like, that's a big sorting function.

Mitchell Baldridge: David said this a few times where he was talking about somebody who should remain nameless. And he said, the more I listen to that guy, the more it hurts my brain. The more I listen to Charlie Munger, the more I like Charlie Munger. Just the idea of these ideas are so distilled and so excellent. And he just has this proof of doing that for years versus there's some crazy ideas out there. Be careful. 

David Senra: -That have massive audiences that the more you hear them speak- because then what happens is like there's this like audience capture where this whole discussion started, like, oh, how did your life change in a year, and it's just like you can't pay attention to that. I like the climb. I don't care what the summit is. Every day, what I do, I woke up, I worked out, and I read, and then when it got time for us to record, I sat down in front of a computer, we're going to record and I'm going to go with this, I'm going to go back to reading. If I just fucking read these biographies every day for a few hours and then once a week, I summarize ideas that were important to me that I like that may be valuable to you, and I do that, I'll let the chips fall where they may. It's like when you get caught up in this, oh, there's more people listening now or there's more pressure that I fucking record alone in a soundproof phone booth. There is no pressure. I'm talking to myself, I’m by myself talking directly to the listener. It's this idea where you think like you're hot, like you're special. I'm not fucking special. These are not my ideas. The reason I said that you, Mitchell, were like the more I listened to that guy speak, the worse it got, is because this idea is like you got to constantly come up with new ideas. There's been like 100 fucking billion humans that have lived. How fucking arrogant do you have to be to think that you're going to come up with new idea after new idea after new idea. You're lucky if in your entire existence you come up with one very unique idea. I have come up with exactly zero my entire life. I don't need to. Do you know how many lifetimes have lived out? I could just say, hey, that guy's really fucking smart. How did he build that company? Sam spent 60 years in the retail industry. Like he has direct connection with millions and millions of customers. He's constantly exposed to it. What is the chance that he spent sixty years being directly exposed to customers desires and wishes, and he learned not one thing that is going to be valuable in my business, the probability of that, going back to Charlie Munger, is fucking zero. Zero. It's impossible that he learned nothing. So that's why that I- especially entrepreneurs, because like entrepreneurship has been now like almost synonymous with technology. This is like, dude, yes, I meet some founders that are building technology. They're very impressive. But I just like people that start and run businesses of all kinds. I don't care about that. And that is a much larger part of the industry and just a shear- way more amount of people than like this tiny- like we're all fucking obsessed, going back to this dinner. That really, this is what really bothered me. I went to dinner. And it's like, I didn't say anything. 

Mitchell Baldridge: The next day, David called me and just yelled at me for 15 minutes and then hung up the phone and was like, okay, I got to go read. I was like, well, David, it was good to talk. He's like, I just ranted at you, sorry.

David Senra: The whole thing was like my investors say this, or this is what my investor wants me to do, or this is like- no one's fucking mentioned their customer. Who gives a fuck about what your investor thinks? Like, focus on your customer. The best technology entrepreneur that is still living right now is Jeff Bezos. Go read his shareholder letters. I've read them three times. I just did another episode on him. He doesn't talk about his investors at all. He doesn't give a fuck about his investors. It's, I'm going to be obsessive customers, we're going to be the most customer centric company in the world. We're going to treat our customers the best. We're going to serve all the customers’ needs. Go and search their online- go Ctrl F and fucking tell me how many times he says customers compared to investors. So why are we sitting here for two hours talking about your brain dead idiot investors. They're not important.

Mitchell Baldridge: I bought Amazon stock and it had to be 2012 or 2013 when they came out and they were just like we're not going to run a profit. We're never going to run a profit. Don't even talk to me about profit. I don't care about profit. We're building a business. And the stock sold off like 40%. And I was like, Amazon's a pretty good company. We get like 15 packages a week. Why don't I buy a little bit of that? That’s how- Jeff Bezos wouldn't say doesn't care about his investors but he's more concerned with building a business.

Eric Jorgenson: He's smart enough to know that smart investors want the CEO to care more about the customers and that that is the strictly dominant strategy. And Jeff Bezos is strong enough and smart enough to have, as our friend Sam Hinkie likes to say, the longest view in the room, like it's Bezos job to tell different people to shut up and to focus on the thing that has the longest view. And that's being obsessive about delivering to customers and making sure that the customers know that.

David Senra: I went to dinner with this guy, this guy I met through his podcast, he's got like $20 billion of assets under management. And one of the founders that he invested in was also there, who I absolutely loved and now we've become friends. And he's like, I love this dude because he is crazily- He's just narrowly focused and obsessed about his one product, serving his customer the best. No one talked about, at that dinner, this is what my investors advice gave me or this is how much I should raise or any of that stuff. Dude, a business- the best description of a business, this is why I like this. I'm extremely passionate about this, I'm trying to apply it to my own life, where it's like the best description I've ever heard of what a business is came from Richard Branson, he goes, all businesses is an idea that makes somebody else's life better. That's all I'm saying. Dude, the entrepreneurship industry that I read like online does not match up at all with the biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs. Like all I'm saying is like why don't we shift and those guys probably know a little bit more than these guys. Like, let's just- I'm going to bet on Rockefeller, Bezos, I just did an episode on Bernardono, I don't know how to pronounce his name, the guy from LVMH. I'm going to go with Sam Zell, I'm going to go with the Mungers, I'm going to go with the Buffets, I'm going to just going to go with those dudes. And if you want to read this 22 year old who raised a bunch of money, and his company is going to be sold for pennies two, three years from now. God bless you. I'm not interested in that. Time is the best filter. I'm going to go with the ideas that have been exposed for decade after decade to time and are still standing.

Mitchell Baldridge: So Eric, you are a capital allocator. We are not. How do you feel like there's new tools out there- It's arguable that the best way to go start a company is not to go raise $3 million at a $30 million valuation and start spending money and buying customers and hiring devs and all that stuff. And we're seeing a lot of it. What do you think?

Eric Jorgenson: The connection that I was going to make there that I will also answer that question is that I think what's interesting between like our three actual businesses is like they're all self funded. It's easy for Mitchell to have alignment with his investors because he is the investor, like it's all his cash going into whatever starts the next company. And I want to sort of talk through like, with you, what that looks like. Because you've spun up a new business like basically since we talked last that's bootstrapped, totally your own thing. And I think there's like a, I don't know if it's the narrative of venture capital or just like the fact that startups are kind of like sexy because they get headlines early, but like a lot more people are looking for venture funding than should actually be looking for venture funding. And venture is supposed to be like crazy frontier technology that has no hope of being profitable for a long time. Like Cisco, Genentech, like early, early venture was like taking on technical uncertainty and risks. And then, like the software sort of like- software used to be really fucking expensive to start. And so, it used to fit in that category. And now it really doesn't anymore, for the most part, and there's- I don't know, I have a theory that I'm still trying to work through like software investing and venture investing, actually, like totally diverging and turning into separate things. Like venture has come to mean like software. And it's just no longer a precise word. Like there are companies that do need to start with a bunch of cash and have no expectations that they're going to turn profit for three years, five years. But a software company that could be earning money in month three, month six should not be raising 3 out of 30, especially now that AI has come out in the moat of those companies like as they are brand new is reducing rapidly. So that's all kind of in flight and very interesting.

Mitchell Baldridge: I live in Houston, Texas, and I'm at a kids play date on the playground, and we're watching Silicon Valley Bank collapse. And I'm literally talking to these two oil traders. And they're kind of joking, but they're like, what has software really done in the last 20 years? Or what has technology really done in the last 20 years? I had Excel in 1997. And I still use Microsoft Excel to build models, and like that’s all they care about. 

David Senra: Well, wait a minute, this conversation is taking a weird turn. 

Mitchell Baldridge: I love it. And I don't believe that. But that's the joke is like, no, they don't believe it. But the joke is like really a lot of software is a database and a front end, and we capture data, we permutate it, and we give people a new outcome. That's like-

Eric Jorgenson: To be clear, like so there's an interview coming out I think just after this episode with Sam Harvestman, who is like- I'm of two minds here. Like software is fucking wizardry. Like it's magic. Like the fact that software creates incredible amounts of value. The business dynamics are incredible. But I don't blame oil traders or any normal person for feeling like technology's not doing anything because it's so intangible. The people who lived through the previous 100 years saw physical miracle, literally like they never thought we'd fly; we flew. Never thought we'd leave the planet, went to the moon, supposedly. Like submarines, nuclear bombs, fucking all kinds of insane things that seemed physically impossible, and the sense of wonder that that creates when that happens in the physical world is just so much more tangible and real and palpable for people then like, yeah, your software has gotten better for 20 years, the value creation that's come from that is incredible. And the devices that we have are amazing. But we haven't seen the kind of technological innovation that we saw during the Industrial Revolution yet in our, whatever, 30ish year old lifetimes, but those are coming hot and heavy. And there's like this really exciting little corner of the internet that's working hard on that. And as capital allocators and venture investors, like we're trying to find those businesses, one, because their moats are going to be bigger, two, because the impact on the world is going to be massively higher. Three, because like that's what the hard, exciting shit is. Like, building nuclear reactors for cheaper, creating abundant energy, automating construction so that you can get structures for like not millions and millions in increasing dollars and cost. Like, there's so much exciting stuff. And I think we are, especially with AI is going to kick off this feedback loop, that we're going to see like runaway innovation a lot more. It's going to do some crazy stuff and blow some people's minds. And I think we'll see a recentering of venture towards like hard tech. I think we'll see a lot more people get excited about it as they see material physical change in the real world. I can't wait to see it happen honestly. 

David Senra: Can I give the other side of that argument?

Eric Jorgenson: I don't know what the argument is but sure. Can't wait to find out.

David Senra: No, like you said, oh, we might see a recentering of venture to like hard tech. I think venture is like obviously a form of investing. What is always going to be consistent is human behavior. It’s like we're going to see a recentering into how can I make the most money with doing the least amount of work or the easiest way possible? And I think that just applies to human nature in general. I got to make something clear, though. You guys said that we all have bootstrapped businesses. I do have an announcement to make. That's not true in my case anymore. I sold the entire podcast to SoftBank.

Mitchell Baldridge: Oh, good. Thank you.

Eric Jorgenson: I hope you got a generous valuation. What's your earn out look like?

David Senra: But I got to be clear, though. I don't actually care at all. Like, one thing I'm not interested in partaking in on the internet that I feel is a giant waste of time for a lot of entrepreneurs do is like they argue over like should you bootstrap, or should you raise money? It's just like I don't think about that ever. I don't ever argue about it. My whole thing is that I want to make sure like I'm clear about what I'm saying. I think founders should always be focused on the customer. I'm into people that build great shit for customers. That is the only thing I care about. I just went to LA the day before I met Charlie Munger, I met with my friend Alexis Rivas, who I met through the podcast, and my friend John Coogan, who is now the EIR at Founders Fund. They're both venture technology advocates, techno optimists. You know what I mean? And Alexis, what he's trying to build, like Alexis, I love Alexis in the sense that like, one of the things he said during our discussion goes, he's like, he's essentially going to be the Henry Ford of houses. He's like, it's his goal in life to build more houses than any other human that’s ever lived. He's got to raise money for that. My thing is I don't care about how much money you raise. Like, I got to see the product. And like what the evolution of the product from the last time I saw it, and the new factories and all this other stuff. That makes perfect sense for him. I don't- like all I care about is customers. That's all I'm saying. It's like when Mitchell- we were talking the other day. And it's like there's all these like business models that people are doing that like if you have a podcast or you have a YouTube or Twitter, like you own equity in businesses, etc. He's like, you could always just do a fund. And what I told him is like, yes, you could make money doing that. If you're passionate about investing, you should do that. I go, I want to make a product, like my product is the podcast. Like I don't want to have a fund because I'm not interested in it. I'm interested in making something that literally makes somebody's life better. And that's why I fucking work on the podcast seven days a week and I keep doing it. Because I know when I put these things out there, these ideas will resonate, and they'll have real world impact. So I want to make clear, it's like I don't care about bootstrap versus VC. I care about what you are doing for the customer. And that's the only thing I care about.

Eric Jorgenson: It's a good distinction. That's where it should start. All I'm saying is like there are businesses that require capital to be raised and there are businesses that don't, and people should use as little capital as humanly possible. Because the simpler- the fewer stakeholders you have, and the simple your business is, the more likely it is to succeed. And I know there's a reason that Mitchell doesn't go raise money for each new investment or new company he spins up. And it's like because it makes it simpler and faster and easier.

Mitchell Baldridge: Well, I mean, I was starting Better Bookkeeping, and Better Bookkeeping is not nuclear fission. Like we're just trying to do a thing that's been done for a very, very, very long time. And we're trying to add benefits to the customer. And we're trying to build a killer product. And it's going to be this small, productized service. And the less money I raise, the less big it has to be for me to have it be a legitimate success for me. So that's how I think about it. But I went to a bunch of really, really smart people who I trust and I like, and I went to other smart people who I just got to meet, and I talked to a16z. I did the meetings, and I did everything I could do, and literally I just said the adverse fact pattern of like this business could be successful with 300 customers that pay $1,000 a month. They're like, yeah, it could be. And if you don't want to grow bigger than that, you really shouldn't take on investment because you'll have a bad time because we want you to be bigger than that. And I can be bigger than that, or this business can be a lot bigger than that. But it's just people- if you call venture capital debt, which is what it is, people wouldn't be as excited to take it because it's debt. That's what I learned. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's a very- I mean, you knew the destinations that you wanted. And you want to keep your options open to have like not a small business, like that's a big business. But that is not a- if you raise venture capital specifically, and it's that scale, that's not a successful business. But if you don't raise capital and you reach that same scale, it is a successful business. And there's all kinds of like new options in the middle for like raising small amounts of much more patient capital or all that kind of stuff. But I think what you're doing is so smart in that just keeping it really, really simple and building this family of businesses that all sort of reinforce each other.

David Senra: I'd say this thought we just referenced earlier like the revisionist element of history, you're reading these stories, you can't tell if they're really true, but you're looking for the idea or the principle behind it. I'm hearing you guys talk. And then thinking about the context of this, like the discussion, in its place and like what you hear from other people, other entrepreneurs or other people that are interested in like business building. And all I could think of is like this doesn't make any fucking sense. Where I think one of the best traits of the super successful entrepreneurs is they are indifferent to the opinions of other people. When Sam Walton has this thesis, he’s like I bet you there's probably a good amount of business out in these small towns, all the retailers are concentrated in the city, I can't go there because I’ll just lose for competition. What if I- the thesis is let me put up a Walmart after spending15 years in retail doing other forms. Let me bet that if I just compete on price, that people in these small towns will drive very far fucking distances to save money. No one else believed that. So standing around, like, hey, what do you think of this idea? He's like, I trust my own judgment. I'm going to reason from first principles. And I'm going to test this hypothesis. Turns out, that hypothesis was not only correct, it was correct to where it created the richest family in the fucking world. And so then I'm sitting here listening to this, I'm like, okay, well, who else is indifferent to the opinions of other people? Because this idea where what's happening is people will have their way of wanting to do something, and it doesn't- In our domain, we're talking about business building. Do you raise money? Do you do software? Do whatever it is. It's like, what religion you are, where you are going to live, what team you should cheer for. Human nature is, hey, I am so insecure in my opinions, I need to try to spread them, so then the more people that agree with me, I feel better about that. I think the best entrepreneurs don't give a fuck; like Bezos didn't give a fuck.

Mitchell Baldridge: What I did was I had this thesis and I went to the smartest people I could find who had what I thought was an incentive to talk me out of my thesis and then tried to get them to talk me out of it, and they didn't. So then I just kept moving.

David Senra: I’m not saying soliciting opinions of people you trust is the same thing as not caring what they say. Like, let me give an example. Munger just did this speech, Frederick just tweeted about it, where it's like the Henry Singleton CEO of Excellence Award and this came out I think like a month or two ago. The video is excellent. Frederick's summary of it is excellent. But he talked about, he's like Singleton- so the list of entrepreneurs that I've studied that are completely indifferent to the opinion of others and that trust their own judgment. They're going to take in information but they're not- They don't need you to agree with them. They don't care if you agree with them. Singleton's got to be on that list. And Munger made the point where like when Singleton does these buybacks of Teledyne, I think this was happening in the 1960s if I remember correctly, he's like, nobody was doing buybacks. So he's just like, oh, I trust my judgment. I'm going to do this. And then Munger makes the point in that presentation, he's like, oh, now everybody does buybacks, but they do it wrong. Singleton did it when the price was good. These guys, and Munger, I think said these idiots or something, these idiots do it when the price- after the price has already increased. And then he's like, that's the exact wrong time to do it. The book that I did, I think it's episode 286, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger speaking directly to you, I found the book because of Eric Jorgensen. Thank you very much. It's an excellent, excellent book, maybe one of the best books I've ever read, it's called All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there. Buffett and Munger are studying simplicity and uncommon common sense. I just want you guys to talk and I searched my Readwise for that book on my highlights with the word opinion. And this, I think, is demonstrating like if you see a bunch of founders online arguing with each other, they haven't done the work necessary to trust their own judgment. This is what Warren says, I would say, if Charlie and I have any advantage, it's not because we're so smart. It's because we're rational, and we very seldom let extraneous factors interfere with our thoughts. We do not let other people's opinion interfere. Later in the book, 40 pages later, Buffet again, we do not read other people's opinions. We want to think. We want to get the facts and then think. I never this whole time- I think I'm going to put this out there and say should I raise money for the podcast, should I bootstrap it, should I do this?

Eric Jorgenson: You're like shitting on Mitchell for like collecting information before he starts his business. And you did. It's coming off as shade. And I'm going to say the last episode we did was you doing the same thing, talking to all the other podcasters, figuring out that you shouldn't do a paid feed. Like we are all- Yeah, we learn from history. But we are also consulting with people who are in our field who are ahead of us, and we learn from them. And I'm sure we disregard a good portion of opinions. 

David Senra: If that's what you're hearing, then I'm not communicating clearly enough because that's not my intention. I would never first of all shit on Mitchell. That's not- my point being is that like soliciting information, like what Michelle did, he took these meetings, he talked to smart people, that is obviously smart. Buffett and Munger just I think they read- they're doing the formal reading or having phone calls. I’m saying when it comes to making the decision, I don't need people to agree with me to feel that I'm right. That's the distinction. Does that make more sense?

Eric Jorgenson: Exactly. Mitchell, I'm sure like of all the people that you talked to before you went into Better Bookkeeping, I'm sure a bunch of them would have pushed you in a ton of different directions. Like, you're synthesizing all of these different inputs.

Mitchell Baldridge: I talked to a guy at Capital Camp, and he's like, this is a stupid business, you're wasting your time. This is a productized service. No one's ever going to pay a high multiple for a productized service. And it's just like that- I don't want a high multiple. It doesn't matter because I'm not going to sell it. All it's going to do is you get 300 people $1,000 a month, and it makes a million and a half dollars a year of EBITDA. It's simple. So like, why do I need a high multiple if that's the outcome? And then from there, you can iterate 15 different ways to make it a whole lot bigger. But yeah, I think, ultimately, Twitter and all of this kind of learn in public stuff, I'm sure some of it is trying to kind of affirm your opinions or quell your anxieties. But a lot of the smartest people out there just go say things that they don't totally even agree with to just gain reaction from other smart people. And then, I mean, David gets reactions from some dumb people too, some adjunct professors. 

David Senra: Don’t say it. We have a new thing, man, bless his heart. You got to ignore people like this. But when Chris Powers put out that thing, it's like, oh, he's just trying to make the best thing possible, something he’s like proud with, and he'll let the numbers fall where they may. The guy's like, terrible mentality. He goes, terrible idea. That is a sub optimal mentality. And so now we have a meme where like if you hear a bad idea of like there's a sub optimal mentality. Your actions speak louder than words. Like you're not going to see me in a public forum going around- Like you're not going to be able to search David Senra on YouTube and see me leaving negative comments under somebody's YouTube page. He's just like sending a mean tweet. It's just like, dude, you're saying by your actions that you don't understand the value of your time because if you understood you have limited time, you're going to die one day, you wouldn't spend your very precious limited time leaving comments like that’s a suboptimum mentality. Like that’s loser shit.

Mitchell Baldridge: Elon putting the view count on the tweet has helped me so much because whenever someone says really something nasty, I'm like, oh 27 people have seen this. If I reply, 4000 people will see it. Why would I ever reply to this? Like what will that do for me?

Eric Jorgenson: Just people the unlock a small watching that guy be a dick.

David Senra: But he's funny though. That's a funny tweet. That's hilarious. Don't do what you think is right. Run your business based on some optimal strategy that some random dude on Twitter picked for you.

Eric Jorgenson: And then you look, he's got like three followers, and all his other tweets are shit too, like just being mean.

Mitchell Baldridge: One of the shit posters yesterday had posted something and Elon wrote the sideways crying laughing face on it. And he screenshotted him muting Elon’s reply, and he just wrote, nope. He's like, I'm not going to even invite Elon into my-  I don't need the amount of like brigading that's going to come along with the Elon reply. He actually did mute it. It made me laugh.

David Senra: So we still haven't touched on the businesses that you're building. Do you want to talk about- Because I think we talked about the podcast enough. Do you want to talk about Cost Seg at all? Or do you want to talk about the idea behind it? Because there's like a larger theme here. Or like, what do you want to go with this?

Mitchell Baldridge: Should we talk about how you went to dinner with Charlie Munger? 

David Senra: It’s funny, like I'm very curious, how much- how many more listeners I'm going to get out of that? Because I just did this like three hour long podcast with David-

Eric Jorgenson: He does. He does want to talk more. 

David Senra: And that's the first thing they started with too. Jesus Christ. This is going to get some legs, man.

Eric Jorgenson: I want to hear the starting conditions of RE Cost Seg. What is like the-

Mitchell Baldridge: So I own this accounting firm in Houston, Texas. We have like 13 people working here. I have a partner in this business, and that's a pretty recent new development. And it's not exactly finalized. But so like there's a constraint as to how big-

David Senra: Is it Soft Bank?

Mitchell Baldridge: But like there is a maximum size that I feel like I can grow a really high touch boutique accounting firm, and we have 150 clients. And I don't think I'm going to have 4500 clients two years from now. Like, it's just impractical to provide the level of service that I want to provide to the clients I have to be able to grow fast enough. And then I have 60,000 Twitter followers. So there's this top of funnel, and then there's this bottom of funnel of like 60,000, 150. And I'm like, man, I got to do something in the middle. That was my mindset. And the kind of problem I was solving is that I need information products, I need a productized service, I need something to sell to all these people who, to your point, David, want to reciprocate value because I've just provided a bunch of value for free. And yeah, and I have a thesis. I have trust and I have a thesis of like my thesis is start a business, buy real estate, use the tax benefits of real estate to crush your income in your successful business, enjoy all the cash your business kicks off, pay no tax. So I'm trying to like implement this in my own life. I implement it in my clients’ life. And I advise people on the internet to do that. And so one of the businesses that I've always loved is this cost seg business. Cost Segregation is this engineering study that real estate investors do the year they buy real estate so that they can accelerate depreciation and save a bunch on taxes. Really simple idea. There's a lot of people who do this business and do it well. But what I have is distribution. My partner in this business is Nick Huber, Sweaty Startup. And he has more distribution than all of us combined in that when he tweets stuff, he has a way of tweeting, of getting a lot of people to notice what he tweets and get hot and bothered. 

Eric Jorgenson: He's  willing to get crucified on the internet by everyone in the world.

Mitchell Baldridge: I think he enjoys it, by the way. So, willing is not even the characterization I would do. But basically, my wife Melanie is the CEO of this business. We have a bunch of employees. We have employees onshore, employees offshore. And we built this system of how to basically build these studies at scale and do a really, really high quality job. But there's a few secrets. One is distribution, two is technology, and three is great employees. And we've stacked all those together and it crossed yesterday a million dollars in sales. And we started it, I think, really, we started working in earnest in like July of last year, and it's getting bigger every month. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, this chart you shared is amazing. 

David Senra: Where's the chart? I don't see it.

Eric Jorgenson: In the notes that Mitchell and I have looked at that you haven't clearly that are guiding our conversation. Mitchell, I want to know what does day one look like when you spin up a new self funded business? Like you spent a few months like putting the pieces in place, I assume, like talking to Nick, being sure that you had a distribution solution like with equity on day one, you spin up a bank account. Like how much money do you put in? How do you- Did you know Mel was going to run this before you really started it? Like talk about putting the puzzle together.

Mitchell Baldridge: So the way we did RE Cost Seg and then like we have another one in the works called Tax Credit Hunter that's a similar idea of running a playbook of doing R&D tax credits, ERC tax credits, 4 or 5L tax credits, a lot of these tax credits that are available in real estate and to startup owners. The way we're starting that is different than the way we started RE Cost Seg where with RE Cost Seg, it's me, Nick, and Dan, Dan is Nick’s partner, and we get a domain name, and we get a Twitter handle, and we get a logo, and we get a bank account, and we have a lawyer draft up a really simple operating agreement, we put $40,000 in a bank account, and we just start working. And Melanie came in pretty early on because it was going to be me and then we were going to hire somebody and then we were going to hire a CPA at first, and we just didn't find anybody who was the right fit. And Melanie was already working in my business and had kind of done a lot of these projects that we had this architecture in Baldrige of like we have all these no code tools, we have a client portal that we use, we have ways we invoice people, we have ways we do accounting, and like we kind of ported a lot of that over into this business. So we already had this kind of like framework or system, operating system of how this business was going to work on the back end. And then, Melanie hired three people. And then we were working, we're building the model, we were building a lot of the kind of inner ways of how this business was going to work. And then we started talking about it, getting new client leads, selling business, and then we started hiring people like crazy. We're at I think 26 people now in the business. And we hired- In Cost Seg.

David Senra: Okay, I’m looking at the thing now. It is super impressive. 

Eric Jorgenson: You ever needed more than 40 grand to get started, right?

Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, we returned the 40- Sorry.

David Senra: Because Eric mentioned this graph. This shows insane revenue growth, which is congratulations to you, by the way, but also, like you guys are doing really well controlling your costs. It's insane and profitable growth.

Eric Jorgenson: Profitable from month two. So how much do you have to burn down to? Are you making money right away?

Mitchell Baldridge: We returned- here, let me- I got to go into Better Bookkeeping to look. But I think we returned the initial capital I think somewhere like three or four months in. We returned all the money. And then we went from there.

David Senra: Guys, this is a good list of questions, by the way. I like the- an hour and a half into the podcast.

Eric Jorgenson: Do you remember that text you sent yesterday that you said looks really good guys. That was the link. This was what was in the link that you clearly didn't even click when you said that.

David Senra: I saw on the top. I saw the top where it's like David met Charlie Munger.

Eric Jorgenson: You saw the title of the document.

Mitchell Baldridge: We were like David met Charlie Munger, one and a half hours. Okay, then we have like 40 other points to cover. So yeah, we spun it up. It became immediately profitable. We've paid $0 to acquire customers. We've sponsored a couple of conferences. And then yeah, we've gotten to work. We've been able to control costs in the sense that we built a model that scales, and really over the last couple of months, we're working, working, working toward the tax deadline and trying to get a huge chunk of the work out. But then beyond that, we keep building these meta processes of like using scripts and using systems and refining and refining.

Eric Jorgenson: That’ll be the exact playbook for the next business. 

Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah. And then we're building an app around the whole process and system.

Eric Jorgenson: So something I'm curious about because this is a great example. And it's something that David and I have talked about a bunch too, like I think we will see- I think Nick is far ahead on this and you are too, we will see more and more and more like creators either being given equity in businesses from the beginning and relied on as the distribution solution or sold equity in businesses and like we'll transition away from like paper ad sponsorships and then affiliate deals, and then like long term partnerships, and then just like full owned equity, and this is something that Nick does amazingly well. He's done it with Shepherd. He's done it now with Cost Seg. I'm curious what the arrangement looks like, for lack of a better- I know you and Nick are really good friends and have high trust and stuff like that. But is there a certain expectation of like driving customers or sponsoring podcasts? Or like is that a discussion? Or do you just kind of have like we trust him to drive customers? Or we’re all working to drive customers, but we know we have the kind of an ace up your sleeve? Like, what does that look like? So David, we both like may end up in some of these conversations or already be in some of these conversations, too.

Mitchell Baldridge: Sure. So like we're launching Tax Credit Hunter right now, and the lawyer’s drawing up the paperwork, and we're talking about how we're going to start that. And we started the new business. Now we have a guy who works for the cost seg business who is the manager level Director of Operations subject matter expert, that as soon as we got traction, we were like, holy shit, we need to hire a real operator who has done this for a while who knows all the trade secrets of the business. And we are doing that with Tax Credit Hunter on the very front end. We're hiring a guy out of PricewaterhouseCoopers who's done R&D credits for Apple. You know what I mean? He's been doing R&D credits for billion dollar businesses. And he is our first hire. We're going to surround him with- it's going to be him and a sales coordinator type person and one VA type person. And we're just going to launch with the guy with the big salary off the bat because it's worth it. And frankly, we can fund the business to that level to go do that. But yeah, we will drop the systems and the processes. So back to your question-

Eric Jorgenson: How different is the initial funding requirement for a business like that, like to start with like the senior operator in place? Like 10x?

Mitchell Baldridge: No, it won't be, we put 40,000 into RE Cost Seg, so we'll probably put the 60 into this. I mean, we will start to get traction quickly. And frankly, if we need to capital call ourselves, we can do that because it's the same kind of structure that's moving forward into this. But like, the way we started that business is we sent Nick's lawyer just kind of, I think I wrote it, and it's just a memo. And it's: Here's the business. Here's how much capital we're going to start with. Here's the first hire. Here's the second and third hire. Here's what Nick does. Here's what Mitchell does. Here's what Dan does. Here's what Melanie does. Here's what employee number one does. And we kind of just wrote an investment mailout of how the business is going to be set up, how it's going to be structured, whose responsibilities are what, and we just go from there. And who's going to own what, and essentially the business is going to own a website and a Twitter account and eventually an email list. And we just go.

David Senra: How does a question like that, Eric, relate to the post that you wrote, that's good for founders and bad for investors? What made- like why are those two things connected in your mind?

Eric Jorgenson: This is what's interesting about like Mitchell's question earlier; I like to compare like Mitchell and Nick starting a company, putting in 50 grand into a bank account, and building up the value of the equity from there. I don't know what you declare your like initial equity value to be when you're first putting capital in the business, but I'm sure it's like relatively small. And then everything cash.

Mitchell Baldridge: It's the cash you put in.

Eric Jorgenson: That's it. And then a week in, it's something higher, in six months, and it's something higher, nine months in-

Mitchell Baldridge: It was something lower and lower three months in, it was something- there was a J curve of yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I mean, that's like founders do that in startups. And they're doing it too. Like you put in fractions of a penny per share. And the initial founding value of the business is really low. And that’s why founders can do really well. But if you immediately go raise money at a 5, 10, 20 million dollar valuation for venture investors like now that's the bar for success is like the equity value of that business. In so many- my most common answer to people who send me a deck or try to raise money, he's like, this is a great business. But like, not if you've raise venture money, or probably not if you raise venture money, or raising venture money can change the nature of this business and make it bad for you but definitely for investors. Like, you should be able to bootstrap this business or get it off the ground with a lot less money. And I think we're seeing interesting- Tyler Drink, the Calm Fund is like funding specifically companies like this for people who can't put together the first 50 or 100 grand, or whatever. It is a very- which is partly what I mean when I say like separating software and venture investing. But that's why I wanted to sort of hear this story because I think your alignment is so much better when you have like all the pieces that you need for a successful business on a founding team with the same equity like exposure, with clear expectations of what each other wants. People lost the thread that that's how businesses can get started. Like, we don't all have to go fucking make a deck and raise a million dollars to start a company, especially a software company.

David Senra: Microsoft didn’t. Paul Graham had one of the best tweets the other day where he's like, somebody asked, what's the biggest bootstrapped company in history? And Paul was like, Microsoft. And then people in the comments- and it's like you don't understand the early history of Microsoft. They sold 990- almost a million shares for a million dollars. Like when they already had millions and millions in profit, and millions and millions in the bank, they did that just to get the guy on their team. 

Eric Jorgenson: They never touched the cash.

David Senra: Never. There's a great biography of the early days of Bill Gates’ life called Hard Drive, it's one of the best books I've read, because I'm obsessed with like the early life of the founder, and then the early- it ends right after Microsoft IPOed. And they're like, we just took the million and put it on top of- he said, we just took the million and we put it with the rest of the millions that we had. Like, they were unbelievably profitable. The year before they went- they IPOed, I think they did 140 million in revenue and 38 million in profit. 

Mitchell Baldridge: What did Bill Gates own when they IPOed?

David Senra: I think like 40%, 45%, some crazy number like that.

Mitchell Baldridge: So I mean, the other thing is like RE Cost Seg can be a pretty big business, Tax Credit Hunter can be a pretty big business. We are running a playbook out of Tax Credit Hunter that somebody has already ran a couple of years ago that they raised $60 million and tried to acquire a bunch of customers, and it just never- I don't think they ever made $60 million in revenue. And it's just like it's a simple business. There's no need to raise money. The reason that people raise money is because they have to go spend to acquire customers. Well, if you can build your own marketing machine or build your own distribution, you don't have to spend to acquire customers. And with no code tools and with AI and with all of this junk out there, you also don't have to spend millions of dollars to develop software. All the software is already developed. I mean, especially again, these are simple businesses. They're simple models. And then, on Tax Credit Hunter, for example, the issue is trust in the market. One of our big sales strategies is going to be selling on trust because there's a bunch of- you'll get texts on your phone, you'll get emails out of nowhere about ERC credits, these employee retention credits, there's these kind of like mills out there doing a really bad job for people because their incentive is to go sell you to go get the credits, so they can get their percentage of the credit when you don't actually qualify for the credit because the credits are complicated, and they will be long gone. And you'll be holding the bag with a credit that you got that you never really were eligible for. So Better Bookkeeping has been software first. My partner in the business is a developer. He's the CTO of the business. And that has been a much longer run because we've had that I know- It's a secret, it's a Stripe and a SQL database and a front end. But it's been non trivial to like build up this whole business to be able to take the first customer, and it's taken a long time. But my idea with that is there's just we can do a really good job of selling value that other businesses in a similar product category don't sell at all. And there's just massive lock in and the price you pay versus the value you get as a customer can be- I mean, again, I want 300 people at $1,000 a month.

David Senra: Which I have two questions for you, listening to you speak at the slog. It's almost like you're on two opposite ends of the spectrum, Better Bookkeeping, way more of a slog than maybe even you initially thought, Cost Seg doing way better than you would probably- I don't think he thought.

Eric Jorgenson: That's a good slide. This was not a slog. 

David Senra: Exactly. Let's say that the order was reversed. You had the idea for Cost Seg first. You knew in the back of your mind that you wanted this productized Better Bookkeeping thing. But do you think that if six months ago Cost Seg was producing as much profit as it is now, would you have even still entertained the idea of doing Better Bookkeeping? Would that have affected your outlook at all? 

Mitchell Baldridge: No, I think Better Bookkeeping is a business that can be 40 times bigger than Cost Seg can ever be. 

David Senra: Yeah, that's your thing. Because I've heard you say that a couple times. I'm like, wait, it could sound-

Eric Jorgenson: Just the addressable market is so big. 

David Senra: You're not saying I'm going to get to 300 and stop. You're saying that's like the minimum? It's a successful business. And I'm looking out for that. Correct?

Mitchell Baldridge: Correct. But that is a- but the 300 customers is like a very successful business. And it's a very unique thing that, yeah, by the end of this year, I can be well past 100. And end of the- by tax season of next year, we'll talk next April, I will be at 300 customers, and it will be a good business. And then that's the time you go raise capital. Or if you have an idea of how you can go raise $2 million, spend it, and return it in a month and a half and reap the rewards forever, that's how you think about capitalizing these businesses. 

David Senra: Why is Better Bookkeeping a better business long term than Cost Seg? Like, is it because the market should bigger? Let me back up. I have a weird question.

Eric Jorgenson: Much more revenue per user, higher margin. Well, I don't know higher margin, but- 

David Senra: How would you kill Cost Seg?

Mitchell Baldridge: Cost Seg has a regulatory component that sits on the back of it. There's this thing called bonus depreciation. There's this thing called the deduction, which is a gift from Congress, and going down from there, we're in the like sweet spot of Cost Seg of in 2017 tax cuts, Jobs Act gets passed. They allow 100% bonus depreciation on used property, which just changes the game for how many people can use a cost seg. And that thing sort of slowly unwinding in front of our eyes. I think it'll be extended.

David Senra: So they could change the law, and then you don't have a business? Am I understanding that?

Mitchell Baldridge: It’s not that we don't have a business, just the market gets smaller and smaller and smaller as the law kind of- as the juicy benefits of the law kind of retrace, whereas-

David Senra: But it's never going to happen? Your Bookkeeping and Tax Prep-

Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah. And I have a secret sauce of these value levers that I can programmatically add on to the system I've built that allow me to deliver more value than my competitors and probably, frankly, have better margins in the sense that I've built a simple product for founders and solopreneurs that is really dialed in to a specific person who wants to derive a specific outcome. And the specific person is, I make 200, 500, a million dollars a year. So that's a narrow market. How many people make half a million dollars a year? But a lot more than 300. And I've built a business that can succeed with capturing a relatively small part of my distribution. And then I have a lot of ways that I can go to market with this thing. So I think time will tell. I mean, we're-

Eric Jorgenson: David just wants to know when you're going to be able to sponsor his podcast.

David Senra: No, that's hilarious. I do want to tie this back to I think what we were talking about earlier, too, because I'm sitting here while you're talking also, I had previously read Eric's post, the one that related to why he was asking these questions. And we were even texting about this like a week or two ago. And I want to make sure I'm clear because I definitely wasn't communicating properly earlier. It's just like you have a line in here, Eric, that I absolutely love, and it's what I texted you. And it says in your post, which is titled Good for Founders, Bad for Investors, here like breaking down the difference of do you raise money, do you not? Like, is it a good business? Percent alone? Does it need venture capital do good business? And you said that's why VCs look for outright zealots, the kind of nutcase who will laugh at $100 million offer and say, fuck your buyout. I'm coming for your whole industry. And what I was trying to explain last time, it's not that you don't go on asking other people's opinion or synthesizing information, whether through reading for pages of people you trust, it's like that's the mentality. Like, it didn't matter if you thought Warren Buffett building a conglomerate, 38 year old Warren Buffett, 40 year old Warren Buffett was good idea. Like he decided it was a good idea. That was like my viewpoint. It didn't matter if you thought it was weird that a 19 year old Steve Jobs sells his Volkswagen van and takes that money and buys 100- and tries to make 150 of these like board, these like primitive computers. He's like he was going to do, they trusted their own judgment. What I see a lot is like entrepreneurs that haven't done the work yet to trust your own judgment, which is fine. It's like, and then you're seeking approval from other people. All I'm saying is, these people were not seeking your approval. If you had information that was valuable, they will get it out of you, and it will just go into their own brain to figure out, okay, how does that information help me achieve this objective, so that I just want to make it very clear, not don't go solicit opinions, just saying, hey, fuck your x, I'm coming for all. Like, I am so passionate and zealot for what I'm doing and I believe in it with everything that I'm willing to dedicate my precious and limited life energy to seeing this thing created and live in the world. That was my point.

Eric Jorgenson: That's what Mitchell's doing, I think, like his big picture, he has that conviction.

Mitchell Baldridge: With every one of these businesses, we're building a foundation where ultimately with all of these businesses, what you do is you drive the price to zero. And you capture the whole industry, and then you sell credit cards at the end or something. But there's a guy, Patrick Campbell, who I've gotten to know and is a really smart guy, ran this business called Profit Well. It started as the good, better, best pricing model consulting service. And then he attached a data component onto the other side of it, he got everyone to shove in their Zuora and their Stripe and their PayPal. And he started to aggregate everybody's data. And so he went from this, VCs would fund companies, and then they would send them direct to Patrick to build their pricing model. And he would make 30 grand every time a16z funded somebody to he had 50,000 customers at the other end of it, they had 100 million plus exit. And he had bootstrapped it the whole way. And he went from a $30,000 product to a free product and grew this massive company through the whole lifecycle. And I think Better Bookkeeping could definitely do that. It could start as this kind of boutique wrapper and go all the way to where it becomes mint.com and it becomes a massive business. There's no reason why that shouldn't happen frankly.

David Senra: Should we talk about Eric's book now?

Eric Jorgenson: We got to go quick. I’ve got a plane to catch. 

Mitchell Baldridge: He's coming out tomorrow.

David Senra: Where are you? Where are you going?

Eric Jorgenson: I'm just going to visit my family. I was laughing so hard listening to our previous episode because I was like, I had said six months ago that the book would be probably out in six months. And it's not. Like I thought it'd be out by now. Because I'm an optimistic, sweet, naive second time author who should know better. I think it's still probably three months out depending. But it just takes a long time. The last, it's one of those like last 10% and 90% of the work kind of things.

Mitchell Baldridge: So I said your book subject and friend and compatriot recently has made a pretty big bet. And I told the group chat how much Bitcoin are we buying? And David said, he only invests in one thing, Founders Podcast. David, how much can you reasonably invest in Founders Podcast at this point? And how big can- or David don't say anything. Eric, let's talk about your book.

Eric Jorgenson: But no, no, no, I really- that's a really good question. I want to hear David's answer to it. Because I think reinvesting in growth is like a thing that we're all thinking about how to do effectively and will be for a long time. And to your point, podcasting is not a super capital intensive business. So you got a big ass podcast and it is now throwing off cash, I assume a lot of cash, enough that you're trying to figure out how to reinvest it into growth, because the Founders Podcast, as you say, is the only business- not the only business you ever want to own, maybe he has said that. I'm not sure he wants to be on the record, we'll see. The floor is yours. 

David Senra: There's a larger thought here that again, this is not my own idea. I've never come up with a unique idea in my life. And I don't care if I die never coming up with a unique idea in my life. You just see this like- Okay, so the biggest juxtaposition and contrast between fucking the books I read and the conversations I have with entrepreneurs is like, I read books about these insanely focused people. And then I pop up and I go into the real life, real world when nobody's focused on anything. So it's just like, not that you don't want to own equity in other businesses, or investors anything else- It's like Andrew Carnegie, when he was young man, before he started his steel company, he was building a bridge company, he was doing all these investments. He made the equivalent of like 10 million a year. This is before he's going to wind up building the largest liquid- when he sells his steel company to JP Morgan, he has the world's largest liquid fortune, in cash just chillin’. And he says something was just fascinating that people don't- This is something that Peter Thiel says, that people systematically undervalue their time and their attention. Like you just give it away for free at all this useless shit. And so what I'm trying to do is like- learning to me is not memorizing information. Learning is changing behavior. So if I don't- if I'm reading all these books and thinking about this intently and making a podcast about the history of entrepreneurship, and I'm not changing my behavior, that means it's a big waste of time. And I'm not going to dedicate all my life energy into what I hope is my life's work and say, oh, that's a waste of time. So Andrew decides, hey, I'm sick of fucking like looking at the newspaper and looking at like the stock,  what's the stock doing this day? Or like, what's this investment? Is private company worth? Or am I going to get my money back? And so he decided when he found his best opportunity, not his second best, third best, understood his single best opportunities like steel is clearly where I need to devote all my attention. It's where I can be world class at. Its he was the best- literally had the best steel company in the world. He sold everything. Because he’s like it's not that I'm worried about making money. It's I'm worried that my attention goes from priority number one, the sole priority, to this other shit, even if it's 30 minutes a day, an hour a week, that compounds. It's 50 hours in a year, 200 hours in four years, that somebody else is not thinking about it. So when I say it's like I want 100%- I want my family's wealth to be derived 100% from Founders because I don't want to focus on anything else. There's this great post I keep sending to fucking everybody. Apologies if I haven’t sent it to you guys. Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes. It's this guy named Joe Lonsdale who I think was like the co founder of Palantir. Or Peter Thiel. He wrote it a long time ago. It says in 2010. It's called Lessons from Peter Thiel. And it's like nine lessons, you can read it in five minutes. And there's a couple lines I just want to pull out here. The second thing that he learned, this is the headline, don't divide your attention. Focusing on one thing yields increasing returns. For each unit of effort. This is going to sound- this is going to echo one of the most important things I read in your book, Eric, that wouldn't have- it says that being at the extreme of your art is very important in the age of leverage. Because power laws rule everything. Like this is my assumption. If I can build the world's best podcast on history's greatest founders, I will capture more value than the second, third, fourth, fifth, tenth, fifteenth people that have done that. 

Eric Jorgenson: That’s the power law.

David Senra: So he goes into the powerlaw 100%. So it's like in this thing where it's like this- what he says at a macro level, understanding that applied effort has a convex output curve is a very useful discipline when considering new market areas. He's talking about what Peter taught him. This convexity means that the opportunity cost of transferring resources from existing projects to a new one is high. This is the punchline. Unless the new area is incredibly valuable, anything we can do to extend and increase an existing anything we can do to extend an existing convex curve is worth so much more. When you talk to founders today, they'll be like, oh, I'm running this business, but I'm also running this business and I'm running this business, and then I have startup fund, and I'm doing all these other things. This is a conversation me and Eric- Eric actually like jarred me back into this intense focus on this hour and a half long conversation we were having at night. I think you were driving, and I was walking when this happened, where it's like, oh, I started- as I got more and more opportunity because the scope of my work became more well known, you get all this kind of weird, crazy inbound. And Eric's like, no, dude, you're doing it wrong. Ignore all that. Just keep working on the podcast. Remember this conversation? 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, because it's what you have told both of us a number of times, like we have always admired your focus. And I was like, this is the first time I've ever heard you be unfocused. And I think it's just like you get pulled into all these crazy rooms and directions and given these wild opportunities and shown all these other paths that have been successful for other people. But to your point, like that's not the power law. And if superpower is your focus, then-

David Senra: And it was super helpful. You jolted me back, likenNo, dude, like that's not- you’re making a mistake here. Like you need to get back on your path. So this is my whole thing is like what I told Mitchell yesterday about the fund thing. It's like, man, listen, I understand. I don't give a shit what other people do. I told you like rule number two, that I teach my kids is mind your own business. If founders out there want to run 17 businesses, it's not my business. I don't care what other people do. I can't live their lives. If they said their primary motivation is taking a pile of money and making it into a bigger pile of money, then by all means, go for it. I'm not saying this is the best economic opportunity for me. I'm saying when I tell you I want to make the world's greatest podcast about history’s greatest entrepreneurs, I'm fucking serious. And I'm willing to direct all my attention and resources, financial or otherwise, to that one endeavor. And I think if I do that, I'll get everything I want out of life that I deserve. Will I be the richest person in the world? No, but I wouldn't need for anything. And so that's what I mean. It's like, so if you're asking like physically where do you put your money? Like, I told you, I listen to Charlie Munger, what is Charlie like? There's another thing that came from the dinner that he said that really fucking everybody underestimates, and he's like, we made a ton of money because we always had cash and we could move fast. And he was telling stories about literally getting a call on Saturday morning, oh, you want this asset that you know is worth a couple of billion dollars that's blowing up inside this other company; we need 450 million dollars on Monday morning. And on Monday morning, Warren Buffett sent that wire without even a fucking- not even a contract in email. And he's like, oh yeah, we made a couple billion dollars on that deal. And so my whole thing is like what I should do right now is the audit, reinvest in growth as much as possible and then just sit here and wait for a fat fucking pitch and a great opportunity. And that's better than putting it in index funds or any other thing that I could do in my life. And so that's the way I'm thinking about this. It's not like, oh, I'm just going to keep can't really invest in a podcast other than like there are certain things you could do. But like, the reason they’re such great businesses is because they almost have almost no expenses.

Mitchell Baldridge: Do you have anything to add, Eric? 

Eric Jorgenson: No, we have nothing to add. That's a good summary and interesting thing. I'm excited for all of these sort of continued conversations. David's so focused; Mitchell and I are less so. But I think also with like decent rationale for it. And it's just going to always be an interesting conversation since we're all building fun stuff. And I can’t wait to see how it all unfolds.

Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, it's been fun to watch. David has these really, really strong ideas. I mean, you had this strong of an idea about keeping the podcast behind the paywall as anything. And then, at some point, it made sense to unwind that. I mean, frankly, I think you could hire a principal to go run a venture fund, and you could make a shitload of money, and it wouldn't take that much of your effort. And you should probably do that. But stay poor, whatever. Can we have fun staying poor in 2023 or no?

Eric Jorgenson: He's going to go full Rogan. And then just come back, bring you a clip of all the times you told him to get unfocused after his $500 million Spotify deal.

Mitchell Baldridge: He's not wrong.

David Senra: But that also is- that's also comes from studying history and like learning the benefit of learning from other people's experiences. It's like, man, I know that the standard- a very common theme is like the more money you make, the happier you will be. And I've read literally now hundreds of stories where it's just like that's not- Sam Walton was happy and proud that he built Walmart, the byproduct was a large fortune. Still more important than the large fortune was what he built and the benefits that he gave to his customers. I don't think you're going to change human nature. That's my main thesis. And I know that if I just do things that I'm not interested in to make more money, I'm going to get to the end of my life and be like you idiot, you should have listened to the books that you're reading. And that's just something I've completely like saturated myself in that most people- 

Mitchell Baldridge: You're going to raise a bunch of LP money, and you're going to hire the principal to run the fund. And one Saturday afternoon, one of your investments is going to go totally to shit. And you're going to be at a family picnic and have to like refocus your attention on this shitty portfolio company. 

David Senra: Part of that, okay, so now if I raise a giant fund, or whatever, and I have a partner that deploys the capital, whatever, it's like nothing in my life gets better by just adding me being accountable to other people outside of my family. I mean, that's why like me and Eric have had these conversations over and over again. It's like, why the hell do you not have an editor? Why don't you have this, I don't even have an assistant. Like, why? Because that's a good filter. If I have my- if I have an assistant, that means my life has got so much complicated I have to like manage a schedule. But I just told you, the only thing I need to do to ensure the success is read books and make podcasts. I don't need an assistant to read books and make podcasts. And if I now need- like right now, if you go to all my messages, yeah, like I'm sure there's unread emails, there's opportunities sitting there. But it's not reading books and making podcasts. That's another form of focus. I'm not disagreeing with the principles of what you guys are saying; I think you're probably right. I'm just saying that like these things- it's extremely important to me that I'm not accountable to anybody that there's nobody that can call me right now or say, hey, there's nobody right now in the planet. Like, I'm completely free. No one could call me and say, hey, if you don't get on this phone with me, I'm not going to give you money, or you're going to be in trouble. Like, even if one of my advertisers said that, it's like, okay, I got a fucking line out the door, dude. Like, I'm not dependent on that. I'm not going to do and I'm not going to trade anything that I want to do for money. Because I know what Ben Franklin said, like all that's important in life is time. That's the stuff life is made up of. And right now, I like how I'm spending my time.

Eric Jorgenson: So many people pursue wealth because they need it to be free and then get enough money to be free and then immediately keep making decisions that make them unfree in order to get more money because they just lost that correlation. And I mean, David, I think you're totally right. Like there's a huge piece that comes with not being accountable. I feel that I make those decisions and like sort of trade offs all the time. I think that's a really interesting important thing. Like you want control over your time all the time, and you want- like I want that control over my time in order to do the other thing that you're saying which is like pursue craft. I want to make great podcasts. I want to make great books. To me, investing is part of that craft because I'm interested in it. I appreciate that you're not. But like, I love the feeling that I work for the future. And that I have been trusted to allocate like capital into entrepreneurs who are building things that will literally change the world and make lives better because I believe that technology is upstream of a lot of life improvements for all of humanity. And to me that's like really, really exciting on the craft level. And I think of making those investments and assembling that portfolio as craft on the level of writing a great book that people love or making a podcast that makes people laugh and learn something and enjoy themselves.

David Senra: And the way you select everything that you have potential Lollapalooza- using Charlie's term, you have the potential Lollapalooza effects here because like the book writing, the investing, and the podcast all have like synergistic- like they can actually- like the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. But my point is, what's fascinating to me is like I am so confusing to other people where I am like so simple to myself, like the conversations that I have is like, why don't you do this? Because I like reading books. And they're like, yeah, but do this. Like, to me, it's the most simple- like, I'm not- dude, I promise you. Like, I am not- I internalize what Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett say, like I'm just trying to be consistently not dumb. I do not need people to think I'm brilliant at all. I just literally am such a simple person where it's just like, I like doing this. I'm going to continue doing it. And anything that's not it, I just won't do that. And when you tell that to people, they look at you like you're fucking like you got three heads or like you're an alien. I was just like, it makes perfect sense to me, though. I literally don't understand the reaction I get from other people. Mitchell, why are you laughing?

Mitchell Baldridge: I'm laughing because the number one node at the top of the notes section was, guys, the last podcast we did was two and a half hours. Maybe we can tighten it up a little bit. That’s what Eric said. My wife walked in, and she's like, are you still on that podcast?

David Senra: But I want to end on your last notes. Is everybody going to Capital Camp this year?

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. I'll see you guys next at Capital Camp. 

Mitchell Baldridge: I think Berkshire’s off, Eric. But we will see.

David Senra: I just got an email while we are recording. I mean, my only thing is like, if we wait until next year- 

Eric Jorgenson: I'm going to go. It's just going to be a short trip. That's all I'm saying.

David Senra: Why can't you stay for two days? What if you like-

Eric Jorgenson: I'm not going to go into that here. I'm like getting back from a trip late the night before. I can't do it. 

Mitchell Baldridge: What if we spill over to the next day? 

Eric Jorgenson: Maybe I can stay over, but I leave again on Monday.

David Senra: You're just a world traveling writer, investor, podcaster. Look at this guy.

Eric Jorgenson: I'll see you guys at Capital Camp. I'm sure you guys are getting together in Miami before that, right?

David Senra: You flying in for that, bro? You going everywhere else but here?

Mitchell Baldridge: Yeah, I'm going to Miami. We're doing the RE Cost Seg team trip. But we're going to do it around the David Sendra Shane Parrish event. 

Eric Jorgenson: How did that happen? David, that sounds amazing.

David Senra: So I'll plug that real quick. I think it's April 18. This might not even be out by then. Eric, what's your release schedule?

Eric Jorgenson: It'll be out by then. But about the week before.

David Senra: So Shane Parrish is coming to Miami, he suggested we do a meet up. And then we got together with what looks like right now the co founder of Ramp and Founders Fund, and I think they're going to host it. We'll leave the email if you're interested. It's on Shane’s website. But looks like we're going to do like Shane Parrish Founders podcast, Miami Entrepreneurial like meetup event, which should be kind of fun. And Mitchell and his whole crew are flying in too, so it's going to be cool.

Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. Very exciting. I wish I could be there. Dude, I like that you're branching out into live events.

David Senra: No, like this was- Well, first of all. Second of all, originally, it just became bigger than what it was going to be. We're just going to meet up with like maybe like 50 people or something, whatever the number is, like some kind of like bar or restaurant. And then I just mentioned it to Kareem, who's the co-founder of Ramp and he's going to have it at our building. That's like because if you go to Wynwood Miami, like that's where like a lot of startups are that's where a lot of investors are. So it just makes sense with the audience's that like Shane has and I have.

Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. That'd be an amazing event. I’m excited for you guys. Start that world tour.

David Senra: We're not playing this. Eric did change though. 

Eric Jorgenson: I like it when we match for symmetry. Just seems organized. 

David Senra: But thank you very much for inviting us back on. 

Eric Jorgenson: Thank you guys. This is awesome. We will do a Capital Camp recap after we hang out, it’d be good cadence. Every time it happens, we say we need to do it more often. And I get more requests honestly for us to redo this than any other episode which is hilarious and amazing. Because halfway through it, I'm always like I can't believe people listen to this.

David Senra: How dare you. I think the next one given the current trajectory of Mitchell's businesses should be a live recording at Mitchell's new Texas mansion.

Mitchell Baldridge: That's going to be in the pool. I’m going to have a pool with an island in the middle of it so we'll do it on the island. Love you both. Thank you.

Eric Jorgenson: I appreciate you hanging out with us today. Thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, you will also love my individual episodes with Mitchell, that's episode number 12, with David, episode number 41 where we dive into his history, it's an incredible story. And we have one previous group conversation, that's episode number 50. And if you like this vibe, you will like that one too. Please check out madebybread.com or invest alongside me and my partners in early stage startups at rolling.fun. Links to both are in the show notes. And if you haven't left a review for the show in your podcast player, please do it. It'll make me love you just a little bit more. Appreciate you.

PodcastEric JorgensonStartups, PodcastComment