"World of DaaS"
deep dive into Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) businesses. World of DaaS is a podcast for data enthusiasts, by data enthusiasts, where Auren Hoffman talks to business and technology leaders about all things data - building it, acquiring it, analyzing it, and everything in between.
"World of DaaS"
Greg Isenberg - Startup Studios vs Traditional VC
Greg Isenberg is the CEO and Founder of Late Checkout Studio, a holding company for online community businesses. Greg has founded three venture-backed startups and he was also an advisor to TikTok and Reddit.
In this episode of World of DaaS, Greg and Auren discuss:
- Changes to startup + VC ecosystem
- Startup studio model vs. private equity
- ChatGPT businesses in 2024
- Building without venture funding
World of DaaS is brought to you by SafeGraph & Flex Capital. For more episodes, visit worldofdaas.buzzsprout.com, and follow us @WorldOfDaaS.
You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Greg at @gregisenberg
Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)
Welcome to World of DaaS. A show for data enthusiasts. I'm your host, Auren Hoffman, ceo of Safegraph and GPFlex Capital. For more conversations, videos and transcripts, visit safegraphcom slash podcasts. Hello fellow data nerds. My guest today is Greg Isenberg. Greg is the CEO of Late Checkout, a holding company for community-based internet businesses. Greg has founded three venture-backed startups and has been an advisor to TikTok and Reddit. Greg, welcome to World of Daas.
Greg Isenberg:Hello fellow data nerds and hello Auren.
Auren Hoffman:Really excited. Now you've got this great long-form tweet on the future building startups. What do you think the biggest differences in the new startup model are?
Greg Isenberg:How much time do you have? I wrote that tweet. There's certain things that really resonated with people. So I said the future of building startups, mvp speed one per month. I think that really resonated. The fact that when I say MVP, I mean minimal, viable product. We're coming from a place where it used to take a year, 18 months, 24 months to create a really and I don't love actually the term MVP more of like a minimal, lovable product. But now you can create a minimal, lovable product in 30 days and the reason you can do that is because you're standing on the shoulder of giants and there's like all these low code and other types of things to spin things up really quickly.
Greg Isenberg:Exactly. And then I think now, with a lot of the co-pilot stuff happening, agent stuff happening in AI, it makes it even quicker. So for me that's like the biggest thing. The biggest tangible thing that has changed over the last five years is the fact that building something is cheaper than ever, faster than ever.
Auren Hoffman:Then you don't really need VC funding for most of these. I mean, as long as you can pay your own rent and buy some tuna, fish or whatever you're consuming, you don't really need that much more to start these companies.
Greg Isenberg:I've done the venture thing a few times. My last company was acquired by WeWork, and WeWork is like the poster child of when venture capital goes wrong, but there are examples of how venture capital could go right. There's a lot of companies that wouldn't exist today without the help of venture capital. That being said, I think for the vast majority of entrepreneurs, and probably people listening to this, it's good to set up your business so that venture capital is optional, not required, and I think we're moving into that world right now.
Auren Hoffman:Sam Lisson has this idea that every round you get in your head should be like the last round.
Greg Isenberg:How do you think about that, realistically, venture investors don't invest. So it's the last round. Because the way the venture business works is you invest at the C-level at a $10 million valuation. Your incentive then becomes for that founder to raise that a $40 million valuation series A so you can mark it up to your portfolio, exactly so that they can raise more funds, get more fees. Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcomes. And I actually really like what Slow is doing with Sam Lesson's fund. I think they're doing a lot of interesting new models, like, for example, they have this really cool creator fund where they'll go and invest in a top creator and basically say I want 10% of your earnings for the next 30 years, but I'm going to give you $5 million. They are doing really interesting things. But, that being said, I still think that a venture investor wants markups.
Auren Hoffman:So do you think VC, because of this, is going to move into more tougher, riskier industries A great example would be like SpaceX or something. Or do you think some of the software stuff? Maybe the capital needs are not as high.
Greg Isenberg:When I first got into internet startups and stuff like that social networking, marketplaces, community software you really needed venture capital. So I studied the venture capital game a lot and how to play it and how to raise money and who to go to and all this stuff. But now in the software world, 99% of the time you don't need it. I think that deep tech, medical devices, that sort of thing is where venture capital is going to probably thrive over the next 10 years. I'm looking at what are more risky bets and what are bets that require a lot of capital. And also I actually saw today Cody Sanchez.
Greg Isenberg:I don't know if you know her. She runs a holding company of boring businesses laundromats and stuff like that. Anyways, I just saw that right before this that she had raised $5 million of venture funding, and one of the reasons she said she raised it was because if you have a lot of people rooting against you, it's very helpful to have billionaire investors backing you. So, for example, uber was going against the taxi industry and so a lot of taxi drivers were unhappy with Uber. Having billions of dollars of cash to go and fight those lobbies probably helped make Uber Uber Industries like that. I still think there's opportunity.
Auren Hoffman:One of the biggest costs for a lot of these tech companies is like sales and marketing, it's not the development costs. How does that cost go down in the new world?
Greg Isenberg:Let's just talk about marketing first. I think there's a lot of really interesting AI products that help make creating marketing faster. Did you see like this Sora demo? Of course yeah. If you can go and create 30 second videos that look Hollywood style in like two minutes, your marketing costs just went down. So price and marketing will go down. Now sales go. Look at who gets paid the most at any company it's the salesperson. I don't really anticipate sales seeing the same shift as dramatic as a shift as marketing, but I do think that the cost of a salesperson goes down because they will have sales agents, prospecting agents, other tools that can help them do their job a lot quicker.
Auren Hoffman:If you don't feel pressure to grow 100% year over year, you can invest very profitably in sales. You can bring on salespeople. You don't have to bring on 50 new salespeople and only 10 of them are going to work out or something. You can bring them on much slower.
Greg Isenberg:That's a great point. We often forget how important compounding is and you create a 500K business year, one 750K, a million, 1.25, grow like 25% or something year over year, but do it for 15 years and you end up with a really big business For sure, especially if you own 100% of it. It's unreal, I mean. I think when you look at it and I was just talking to someone he's been building a few content websites that are driven by SEO. I think he had like five websites. He's been doing it for 15 years Him and two other developers. They're based somewhere in Europe. He just sold it for $13 million cash closed and it's like changed him and these two people's lives and their families. It's unreal. That's awesome. I think also, you're going to start hearing more of these stories, so that'll also inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs to basically be like you know what. Maybe I won't raise that round, maybe I'll be like this guy in Europe.
Auren Hoffman:For a lot of these guys there's not a lot of reason to like have a hype machine around them because they're not trying to raise more money. Probably most of us will never hear about them.
Greg Isenberg:Yeah, that's an interesting point. I also think that this particular guy I was like, dude, get on Twitter, get on post up, and he was like no, no, no, Like I made my money being quiet. I think there's a lot of these people who are just happy to do it quietly. I respect that just as much as someone who wants to be public about things.
Auren Hoffman:A lot of me is like solopreneurs right now, but you've also said there's this real play of being a multi-preneur. How do you think about that?
Greg Isenberg:My thesis is that multi-preneurship is the future of entrepreneurship. What multi-preneurship means to me is you're not just building one business. You're building a portfolio of businesses powered by the internet. Some of those businesses you can start yourself, incubate yourself, like this guy in Europe. He just built all these websites. Some of them you can incubate or potentially even acquire. So maybe you have a few that you acquire, a few that you've incubated.
Greg Isenberg:I think this idea of being a multipreneur, which is someone who has a holding company, essentially that owns a bunch of these internet businesses, is going to be more and more popular because of some of the reasons that we talked about. It's quicker than ever to build something. Distribution now exists in a lot of different channels that are cheap, essentially, think about social traffic, things like that. You can tap into it. The other thing is there's now billions of people online daily on phones and on desktops, and soon to be in virtual reality, where you can sell them these things, and these people are willing to take out their credit card and pay for things online. 15 years ago, the idea of buying a car on the internet some people did it, of course, but it wasn't so popular. Now things like that are getting way more popular. Why I'm so interested in a world of multi-preneurship is because I think that the stars are just aligning.
Auren Hoffman:Now in internet 1.0, probably the most successful multi-preneur holding company would be IAC. Barry Diller. Are there folks that you've studied and learned from past eras that can be applicable to today's era?
Greg Isenberg:In general, I'm one of those people that I think the best way to invent the future is to look at the past. Last night, right before I went to sleep, I tweeted this business was ahead of its time and it was an image of AskJeevescom. I was kind of joking in that tweet because AskJeeves was basically ChatGPT. Before ChatGPT, it was AI agents.
Auren Hoffman:And speaking of Barry Diller, they did buy that, so IAC bought that.
Greg Isenberg:Exactly so. I look at IAC as a model. Bill Gross In some ways this is in the venture world. But Paul Graham what he built with Y Combinator was just so great and also how he had his media component like Hacker News was the media part of his business that no one talks about. So he was able to attract the smartest engineers in the world to this media property and then they'd be like oh, what's Y Combinator? And then I also think about looking not just in internet world, but like media titans who are the biggest media titans in the last 100 years the Rupert Murdochs and Summer Redstones and people like that where you can look and be like how did these people create multiple products, multiple businesses, acquisition field and apply that to 2024?
Auren Hoffman:On the venture studio side, it is like a weird business where often they fail for two reasons One, because they never have a hit and the second one is because they have too big of a hit. Somebody's like Uber was part of like a venture studio and then it became like too big of a hit and Travis joined it. One of the studios that seems to be doing extremely well is Flagship Pioneering, like they did Moderna and they do all these other really successful biotech companies. Is there something about just being super, super focused that could be helpful.
Greg Isenberg:A lot of people say why are you starting a studio? Most studios fail. First of all, I think most startups fail too. The question is what are you going to be more successful at? I would say that a studio, on average, does better than a startup long term. So that's one piece. I think the folks who built Moderna and those people I don't know exactly what made them successful, but what I can tell you is that here's some things that I've seen.
Greg Isenberg:What is the recipe for a studio that's been successful? I think one is you don't need to raise venture capital for your studio, because then you are on that same treadmill that you would be on if you're a startup. That's one thing. Also, having a very focused thesis is really helpful. The hard part about running a studio is you literally could do anything, but you have to be very, very conscious about the types of things that you incubate or buy because you want to have it. So each individual product feeds off each other. They're shared learnings, maybe shared systems, shared processes. I also think that the studios that do the best have some sort of distribution advantage. We talked about YC having Hacker News One of the ways, if you're thinking about starting a studio. You might just want to start by building media and then from there you can actually build the products.
Auren Hoffman:One studio that I really admire that was built in like the mid 2000s, was Light Bank and they were based in Chicago and they had this one advantage where they're just really good at selling to SMBs and they just built inner 10 companies I don't know how many that just kept selling just really good companies that would sell to these SMBs, and the only reason why I kind of stopped is they had a few that went public. But then, having the mega hit which was Groupon, I liked the fact that they kind of started the same company over and over again.
Greg Isenberg:Our model is we call it the ACP funnel, audience, community product. So we start each business with an audience, then we convert some of that internet audience into a community, then we build a product for that community with that community. So we've basically created this process around how to do it, and it's similar to LightBank in no Groupon level successes but I think the idea is similar in the sense that we focus on the community, where they also, I would imagine, focused on a particular subsegment of SMBs and they're like we're just going to focus on this community and then build a bunch of products that service their customer journey, and I think that's really smart.
Auren Hoffman:At Startup Studio. You could think of as a VC, where you make a hit-driven business, where you have a power law distribution. Or you can think of it more like a private equity firm or something where there's going to be lots of mid-level winners and stuff and maybe every once in a while you're going to get a great hit.
Greg Isenberg:How do you think about it? I think about it not similar to either of those. I think about it as I own real estate. I have different properties. Some may be commercial, some might be residential, some might be turned into a skyscraper, some might be a one-bedroom apartment that I'm renting out at $800 a month. We focus on cash flowing businesses. Margins are important to us. Making profit at the end of the year is really important to us. So I just think about this is like a piece of property. Ultimately, that is generating some level of cash, and I think then we have to be more developers. Okay, this is great on one floor. How do we add a second floor, a third floor and stuff like that? So that's how we think about it. It allows us to value M&A. It gives us a better, clearer view, a more HD view into M&A, because we know what a business has worked to us based on this model.
Auren Hoffman:One of the things I find as I get older is that when you're young, the core thing you're trying to figure out is to differentiate good opportunities from bad opportunities. You see a lot more good opportunities as you get older and have a little bit of success. Your core thing is really trying to figure out great opportunities, and sometimes great opportunities come disguised as bad opportunities. How do you not end up in this trap where you just keep doing good opportunities over and over again?
Greg Isenberg:I think that if we ended up doing good opportunities over and over again, we would still fast forward as long as we're healthy and stuff like that. Fast forward 15, 20 years and it'll work. The model will work. The point I'm trying to make is you actually don't need to build a Groupon to win.
Auren Hoffman:You just keep getting that one bedroom apartment and all of a sudden you become extraordinarily wealthy.
Greg Isenberg:I actually don't think it's more complicated than that.
Auren Hoffman:In your case, part of it is you're often working with a partner quote, unquote CEO of these companies. How do you think about this person? What should they look like? What do you think is the person who's going to be the most successful?
Greg Isenberg:One of our partners and CEOs that has been performing the best actually comes from LightBank. Our ultimate goal at LateCheckout is to build a holding company of holding companies. We will incubate a product and then hopefully that works, and then we'll have like an adjacent product that we'll incubate and then now there'll be two products and then the GM or CEO of that first product might now be the CEO of the holding companies for those two products. Now he has two CEOs and GMs under him.
Auren Hoffman:It's like multi-layer marketing or something.
Greg Isenberg:Exactly. I always say it sounds like a pyramid scheme, but there's no scheme. Ultimately, it's just a model around. Instead of running one company, you're running multiple companies. You're essentially empowering these capital allocators slash builders to accelerate and own a bunch of properties. We tend to like operators that understand capital allocation LightBank also is like a VC, for example and at the same time, understand how to build zero to one incubation, so that, for us, is like our unicorn type of person that we love to work with, and how do you suss that out when you're meeting people and talking with them?
Greg Isenberg:On the zero to one. It's like show me things that you've built zero to one. For us, content is really important because a lot of our businesses have internet audiences and communities as a part of it. So we'll say have you gone viral? And if the answer is no, chances are you're not a great fit for that CEO role. Even once. Something that's taken off zero to one. And then capital allocator is just someone who knows how to allocate capital and they don't need to have bought big companies before but someone who's, in their own way, taking capital to make more capital.
Auren Hoffman:That makes sense Now. These social platforms are at least a part of community building that are out there. How do you think of? What are the platforms to build on that we should be investing in today, versus what we did five years ago?
Greg Isenberg:Five years ago, the world in the social world looked very different, and then, five years before that, it looked very different. Five years before that, it looked very different. So it's always changing, which is what is so fun about social there's always opportunity in social. As we're recording this, tiktok is being talked about being banned, but it is still one of the best places to go viral on the internet today and people will say, well, it's for young people. Now it's quite ubiquitous. There's such a big audience on TikTok that I think it's a great platform to create on and it also gets you to become a short form video master. Short form is just the gasoline of the internet right now.
Auren Hoffman:For people who don't understand it.
Greg Isenberg:Why is that the case? Why is it? Is because if you run a social platform, or if you're Instagram, if you're Elon Musk at X, you want people to stay on your platform as long as possible. So it's faster to read text than to watch video. So that's one reason. And the second reason is if you're in the business of ads, you're selling ads. Twitter makes more money or Meta makes more money selling video ads than they do a text link or an image. So for those two reasons, the platforms prioritizing the algorithm, short form video.
Auren Hoffman:Are they actually more shareable? Are those the things that the average person likes more?
Greg Isenberg:I think the average person does like video. It's like one of the best storytelling mediums we have out there. You have a mix of it's rich in terms of it's essentially stitched images together. You have sound. You're seeing the person. That being said, I think a social internet where everything looks the same, where Instagram looks like TikTok and TikTok looks like X, and I don't love that. I predict that there's going to be one or two new social platforms that are going to look completely different than the video-based platforms that we see today. Right now, you want to be a pro at video and short form video, and I think, starting with either Instagram, reels or TikTok are great places to iterate as opposed to like a YouTube shorts or something.
Greg Isenberg:Yeah, iterate with there, like download CapCut, iterate on TikTok and Instagram and then try to get the format of your video really dialed, have a concept for what's going to work and something that's repeatable. So think of the man on the street, videos like how much money do you make? Or it's like the watch guy comes up to someone and says, hey, is that a Rolex, daytona, these luxury watch negotiations? These are concepts. So you have to come up with a concept, then you have to iterate on it, and then you have to post it a bunch of times and see what people like. And then, once you have that, you start building an audience. And, that being said, I'll caveat with if you are more into tech, more into professional stuff. I think LinkedIn and X are great platforms.
Auren Hoffman:You said that we're kind of having like a social crisis where everyone's just way too online and socializing less, and that seems to be a common view. What's the solution?
Greg Isenberg:there it's tough. The solution is we have to have strong willpower is the actual answer.
Auren Hoffman:These systems are designed by some of the smartest people in the world to attack our willpower. It becomes harder and harder for us to fight against it, each individual.
Greg Isenberg:That's true. That being said, I like McDonald's and I would love to have, like nuggets, mcnuggets, but I probably have it once every five or 10 years because I have some restraint and I know it's not good for me and I know there's a bunch of chemicals in it.
Auren Hoffman:But if you really like McNuggets, why not have it at least every quarter or something? What's worth the delayed gratification of five or 10?
Greg Isenberg:years. That's true. Maybe I do need to have McNuggets a little bit more often. Yeah, I'm going to encourage you to have a few more McNuggets, exactly. Maybe someone who's listening to this will send me like a gift card. But yeah, I think we live in a world full of temptation. We need to teach how to deal with that. If our phones essentially become casinos which they've become, dopamine casinos then I don't have faith that Apple or Google or whoever are going to put hey, don't use this product, because their incentive going back to show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome is that they want people on apps, they want people buying apps, they want people spending money on the platforms, and the platforms also want people to spend more time on these places, watch more video. The solution is to acknowledge everything in moderation, including McNuggets, and try to show some moderation.
Auren Hoffman:There's a thread out there that says these new GLP drugs like Ozempic and stuff will allow us to combat some of these other certain addictive type behaviors. Do you think there's like any?
Greg Isenberg:truth to that. I have a friend who's taking one of these drugs and he didn't have a problem with alcohol, but he definitely drank more than he should and he was telling me that he has no desire anymore to drink. Crazy, it's crazy. This is a guy who is drinking I don't know four nights a week. Six drinks, five drinks, something like that.
Auren Hoffman:Five drinks per night.
Greg Isenberg:Per night. He was drinking like half a bottle of wine to a bottle of wine for four nights a week. Basically, maybe that is a problem. Actually, I think it's probably a problem. So he had a problem with alcohol and he hasn't had a drink in like a year. That's insane. It wasn't even like he was like I'm going to take this drug and I'm not going to drink anymore. It was just a side effect of the drug.
Auren Hoffman:There would definitely be these things to inhibit your addictiveness. So if you feel like you're a little bit too addicted, so if you're aware of your addiction, at least you're a little bit too addicted to your phone, or a little bit too addicted to TikTok, or a little bit too addicted to gambling or whatever it's possible these inhibitors. That might not be a good thing for society, I don't know. Maybe it'll become less creative or whatever it might be, but people could have less addictive personalities.
Greg Isenberg:Yeah, I don't know how I feel about this. I generally try to refrain from like taking prescription pills when I can and stuff like that. How can I do this organically? I'm just talking about my own life. This is how I live my own life.
Auren Hoffman:Well, for people watching this video, you're incredibly fit. Maybe not everybody has the same regimen that you might have.
Greg Isenberg:Well, thank you. Thank you for calling me fit. I appreciate that you are also incredibly fit.
Auren Hoffman:Minus AI. This is not actually me.
Greg Isenberg:Here's a way to put it. There's a group of people who need prescription drugs to live their life. For those people, and for those drugs, I'm grateful for. There's another group of people that probably don't need drugs prescription drugs to change their behaviors, but it's easier to take a prescription drug, and those are the people that I'm talking about.
Auren Hoffman:The overprescription, like Adderall and some of these other types of things. Exactly, you wrote this super piece on unbundling Reddit. What do you think is the opportunity there long term?
Greg Isenberg:This has been basically the core thesis of our studio, which is there's thousands of subreddits, niche communities essentially yeah, exactly, niche communities. I use a platform called redditlistcom, which basically shows all the different trending and growing communities. There's other tools I use as well, like AI tools, to basically tell me what's going on in the world of Reddit, what are people talking about and what are the niche communities that are not the top 100, but are trending in the right direction.
Auren Hoffman:So you would have seen Pickleball well before any of us saw Pickleball.
Greg Isenberg:Seven years ago I would have saw Longevity nine years ago. Just people interested in. So it's picking up on that, getting in early, understanding the insights and then building audiences and communities around those things.
Auren Hoffman:Some of them may just be a fad and go away, but some of them may really become the next pickleball Exactly the paddle which is probably the next pickleball. Already you have this other great sub-sack on hot takes for the startup world. Last year One of them was people are saying chat TPT wrappers are dead on arrival. But you think this is less true. You think actually it's like really good businesses can be built on that. How do you think about that?
Greg Isenberg:I don't think people would say that owning a blog or owning a content website is not worth doing because it's wrapped by Google, Meaning. For a long time, all internet websites were essentially a wrapper quote unquote on Google, based on Google. You derived 80% of your traffic from Google and meta. We talked about building on the shoulder of giants earlier. I think if you're building on the shoulder of giants, there's always the risk that your giant is going to trip on a rock and fall down, and you have to acknowledge that as a key risk to building on the Internet today. No, don't create a vertical SaaS or something like that on top of GPT-4, Shopify, whatever, because they're just going to pull the rug. And number one, there might be enough cash flow for 12, 18, 24, 36 months, where it actually makes a lot of sense just like financial sense to continue doing it. And also, number two, you actually might be totally cool. No one knows what is going to happen.
Auren Hoffman:Let's say you get a $20 million business, which would be amazing For these platforms. They could care less about a $20 million business, especially if they pull the rug and that $20 million business became a $10 million business. Like what would they care?
Greg Isenberg:There's a guy who owns pdfai. Have you seen this guy? No, his name is Damon Chen. What pdfai does is you can basically chat with your PDFs using AI. Let's say, you upload like a legal document, you could ask for a summary or stuff like that.
Auren Hoffman:So it's like a UI wrapper on ChatGPT, essentially.
Greg Isenberg:Exactly that sounds so cool. It sounds cool until chat GPT allows you to chat with your PDF three months ago. So then I saw on Twitter all these people being like oh my God, we told you, so it's over. The guy had like a little blip, a small I don't know 5%, 7% go down, but now he's completely back up. That's because he's still the best way to chat with me. If you're thinking about building a rapper, you've got to go hyper specific. And my advice to Damon I don't know him would be like how do you make this even more niche?
Auren Hoffman:Get even more or more legal, or whatever it might be. Exactly Now you have this great piece titled why I no Longer Hire from Harvard and Google. Unpack that a bit for us.
Greg Isenberg:Well, first of all, that was before the whole Claudine Gay debacle. So I just want to be clear about that. I've been saying this for years, and the reason I've been saying this for years is I didn't go to Stanford or Harvard, but I grew up in Montreal, canada. I ended up dropping out of school. I didn't know a lot of people who worked at McKinsey, or I know anyone. I know anyone who worked at McKinsey or worked at Google, or I didn't know anyone.
Greg Isenberg:Like I'm from this French-speaking city where it's kind of like its own bubble in a lot of ways, and I actually realized that the people who have the most amount of grit are people who didn't necessarily graduate Harvard or graduate Stanford. Of course, there's tremendous talent out of those places Incredible but I just think that the idea is you don't need to hire from the big tech firms, you don't need to hire from the Ivy League, because you're like, oh, this product's not going to work unless I hire a director of product who graduated Stanford product design and worked at Snap as employee 1,000. The zero to one skillset is a very different skillset than the optimization skillset and a lot of the people who graduate some of those schools end up working at the larger companies who are in optimization, and the people we like to hire or the people we like to partner with even are people who are zero to one, people, just because of the nature of our business.
Auren Hoffman:It's helpful also to find someone at some point who's been punched in the face and see how they reacted. If you've been a stellar student all your life and went to Harvard and then Google, mckinsey, whatever it might be, you could be in a scenario where you're in your mid thirties and never really had any at least career issues. Maybe you had a personal thing that happened to you here and there, but never a career issue in your entire life, and so as an employer, it's hard to know how that person will react when they have some misfortune. Yeah, I think that's right.
Auren Hoffman:When you're looking for these kind of zero to one people I mean you mentioned earlier, okay, well, the best way is figuring out like they've started something before. They have like a form in a way like hey, here's a form, fill this out, tell me something you started or something. I'll go look at it and then I'll get back to you if I'm interested. You need some sort of gate. The reason why people use Harvard and Google and some of these things is that it's really easy to screen out resumes really fast and then only interview certain types of people.
Greg Isenberg:Imagine you have like tons of inbound like how do you have that gate? One is we reach out to people daily. We're scouring places like Product Hunt or Dribbble, which is the design community, and we see what people are posting. If we think it's cool, we'll be like hey, we think that's really cool and you might be like a solopreneur and might be interested in being a part of a platform like Late.
Auren Hoffman:Checkout, almost not getting the inbound, but more just actively reaching out to people that build cool stuff.
Greg Isenberg:Exactly. I don't think enough people actively reach out. The second thing is someone reached out to us reached out to me actually yesterday, and I think we're actually going to hire him today, which is a crazy turnaround. He figured out my email, which I, just, like you, can see that he emailed. I'm not going to say what my email is, but he emailed 10 different emails and 10 different iterations. He landed on the right one. That itself shows grit. And then he sent me a five minute loom, a recorded video of 30 seconds on him, and then four and a half minutes around. Here's the five things I would do if I were you, and 30 seconds about him. We're very focused on. I launched this product, I built this product, I scaled this product, and that's music to your ears when you're building a product.
Auren Hoffman:This is my general advice for anyone who's looking for a job is you need to show value to the company. People are always like I want some advice. It's like just tell them how you can make their product better or something, or what you can do. You've done some research on it. If you can do that, you may or may not be a right fit for that company, but they're going to want to talk to you for sure.
Greg Isenberg:Those types of people really stand out.
Auren Hoffman:They stand out because they're so rare. We can have like 50 podcasts talking about this and we'll probably increase the number of people who do it by 1% Totally.
Greg Isenberg:A partner at Late Checkout sent me a message saying after he watched the loom, he goes. I'm totally amped about XYZ person's potential. And then I wrote potential gem, Totally, these people are out there. And this is what he said as a response, which I think is so true. He's like these people are everywhere, yet nowhere.
Auren Hoffman:Totally. Now you were. We work from like 2019 to 2020, kind of as the ship was going down. What was that like it?
Greg Isenberg:was like watching a movie. It was like being first row at the movie. I really felt like I was a part of it and just watching it at the most stressful, tense moment, because I joined May 13th 2019. And WeWork was supposed to go public in September 2019. I was employed like 13,000. By September, we were 17,000. So they were hiring like absolutely crazy, it's just unheard of. And it just unrolled from September. The summer. People were rumbling. There's headlines like should WeWork be at a $47 billion valuation? And then all of a sudden, it just went down from there. And so what was it like? It was fascinating to see. Unfortunately, a lot of people saw their wealth destroyed, employees and stuff like that. So that sucked. And it sucks seeing people becoming friends with people and them telling me hey, I can't wait till we go public because I'm going to buy my dream house. And then it's like I guess I'm going to rent for another year. And then it's like, oh, I just got laid off. How am I going to afford my rent? So that really sucked.
Auren Hoffman:A couple of personal questions. We ask all of our guests what conspiracy theory do you believe?
Greg Isenberg:Define conspiracy theory.
Auren Hoffman:Something you believe in, where you think a bunch of people are working in cahoots or doing something together and could be for good or for evil.
Greg Isenberg:I think taxes are basically made up.
Auren Hoffman:What do you mean?
Greg Isenberg:I was living in Canada, I was getting taxed 51%, but in return I got free healthcare and free education and stuff like that. Then I moved to South Florida. I'm getting taxed a lot less. There's no state income tax and I just feel like what happens with taxes is they creep up over time. I would bet that where I lived in Quebec, they probably didn't start at 51% or 50%. They probably started at 40%. But then they need money for this and then this and this, and then, once you're taking that money, it's hard to get out of it. My theory is that it's like a made up number that unfortunately affects everyone.
Auren Hoffman:I'm not familiar with Canada, but in Europe France for instance, has a very high tax rate. California is like 54%, but I think France is much higher. I think the way it works there is that the kind of rich pay the taxes, but the super rich don't pay any taxes because US is one of the very few countries that has a global nexus. And so once you're in France, you're like moving your money through Switzerland and Ireland and through the Caymans and et cetera. So once you get a wealth above a certain amount let's say some dollar amount your tax bill goes almost to zero. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the same thing in Canada the super wealthy people Whereas if you live in California it's just much harder to avoid it. There are super billionaires like Sergey Brin that avoid it, but for most people it's much more difficult.
Greg Isenberg:It's funny you mentioned that, because I was recently in the Cayman Islands for a few days and I was walking around and I see all these Canadian banks Royal Bank of Canada, toronto Dominion, td Bank, scotiabank, which is Bank of Nova Scotia and I'm like thinking to myself why this doesn't make any sense. I'm in this Caribbean island, by the way. It's amazing and it's kind of weird that so far from Canada there's all these banks. And then someone told me well yeah, it's because a bunch of Canadian billionaires basically do a lot of work here.
Auren Hoffman:It's easy to raise the taxes when the super rich don't pay it. The ones with the most influence don't pay it. They're happy for you to raise the taxes. All right, this is great. Last question we ask all of our guests what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?
Greg Isenberg:Right now there's this advice that go build a startup and it's just like romantic idea. Go build a startup, go build a product, go on your own, leave your cushy job, escape your nine to five. I actually think that's relatively bad advice for the vast majority of people and in fact, there's a lot of people I've worked with who worked with me, but I was the founder who did extraordinary well. This idea around in order for you to gain wealth and freedom, you need to go out on your own I think is a narrative that is just spread.
Auren Hoffman:It's also not for most people. Even if it is advice for some people, for the vast majority of people it's probably bad advice.
Greg Isenberg:And I'll give you a bonus, one, which is the CEO is probably the worst job at the company, but the best job at the company is to be a co-founder Totally.
Auren Hoffman:That's the best job.
Greg Isenberg:Yeah, exactly that's the best job, so you have more equity than an advisor, but you have less responsibilities as the CEO.
Auren Hoffman:I actually don't even know the names of the other two co-founders of Airbnb, but I bet you they're way happier than Brian Chesky.
Greg Isenberg:Totally. That's something I wish someone told me too, and I'm happy you agree with me on that.
Auren Hoffman:Awesome, all right. Thank you, greg Eisenberg, for joining us on World of Desk. By the way, I follow you at Greg Eisenberg on Twitter. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been a ton of fun.
Greg Isenberg:I appreciate it. No, this is really cool. And also check out my new YouTube channel at Greg Eisenberg. Or, actually, you can find everything on my website, gregeisenbergcom. My Twitter.
Auren Hoffman:Okay, gregeisenbergcom. I hope everyone goes there for sure. All right, it's great. Take care. If you're a super data nerd, go to worldofdascom that's D-A-A-S worldofdascom and sign up for our weekly data as a service roundup newsletter. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the show, consider reading this podcast and leaving a review. If you enjoyed the show, consider reading this podcast and leaving a review. For more, world of DAS and DAS is D-A-A-S you can subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts and also check out YouTube for videos. You can find me at Twitter at at Oren. That's A-U-R-E-N, oren, and we'd love to hear from you. World of DAS is brought to you by Safegraph. Safegraph is geospatial data for physical places. Check it out at safegraphcom. And by Flex Capital. Flex Capital invests in data companies like those we talk about at World of DAS. Check it out at flexcapitalcom.