Transcription
If I had that size audience, I'd already be a billionaire. I'd say "put up or shut up" when I met you 3 years ago. You have just started on your great journey. Since then, millions of followers. The reason people followed me was because the systems were good, and so because the systems were good, they didn't need me for the systems to work. When I look at Creator space who've successfully exec on this, it's actually very minimal. I actually think creators are horrendously bad at picking product. Your constraint is not that you're a 97 out of 100 on content; it's that you're a zero out of 100 on monetization. That's a powerful concept right there.
I think that when people promote anything, they get backlashed because anything that you give me that is not free, you die. You're saying that people had followers but they didn't have influence. The point of short form is one thing, which is to drive them to long form. Would you invest in content creators? Alex Formosi might be the first Creator billionaire, and he's built his business really differently from other YouTubers that might follow like MrBeast today. Alex shares why most creators aren't a broken business model, the five ways to make money from content, and how to turn your social media into a real business. If you're a Creator wanting to grow, listen to this pod for 21 secrets from Horoi on how he did it. And if you want to learn more from other creators too, join our Discord. Every week we do live talks with Creator experts like Jack Kti of Patreon, Humphrey Yang, and Jenny Hoyos on topics like growth, monetization, and scaling your content. Link in BIO below.
When I met you 3 years ago, you had just started on your creator journey. Since then, millions of followers. Cover 250 million of revenue for portfolio companies. Is this where you wanted to be? I don't consider myself a traditional Creator; like, I had businesses and have businesses outside of this that aren't my face and anything but I saw where just the monster amount of Impressions that social media was getting and giving away for free, and I was like, this is the most insane thing I've ever seen. And to this day, I still think it's crazy that like we can get 100 million, a billion Impressions a quarter for free.
I think about creators in two buckets. Yeah, I think there are the words guys, and then there are the video guys, and then the Crossovers, audio. That I'm a little bit of both. I started making YouTube videos and I wrote a book basically about the same time. Yeah, and then the book kind of took on its own, you know, growth path. Yeah, and then the videos also did too. The nature of how I've done things is that I'm all about business process and system. Yeah, the reason people followed me was because the systems were good, and so because the systems were good, they didn't need me for the systems to work. Whereas many businesses don't have that, and a lot of people follow the Creator for other reasons that are not that, that are less duplicable. It's fascinating too because what you've built, it's a private Equity Firm in a way, but most private Equity firms add value by cutting and slashing operations. In a way, you're adding value because one, here's the business process you to run the influence you've now built about talking about faceless systems. Now you've been able to bring in your face to increase it. So yeah, and I think what you said at the very beginning, which is that like entrepreneurs are realizing just the amount of attention that's here, and this is just a way to advertise your business. I mean, that was the that was the entire thesis SP acis.com was I'm a big fan of something old and something new, so like something old private Equity with something new social media and like how do we how do we bridge that? How do we how do we merge that? Now because there's been old school, I mean Warren Buffett's an influencer for sure, he's just Legacy Media. Um, Ray Dalio is an influencer. Now he's starting, you know, he's making his TikToks and things like that. Um, Naval's an influencer, of course. These guys get deal flow because they're out there, you know, they're they're talking about business, and so they get it. I just took what they were doing, just like did a lot more.
What type of companies we look for, the process overall, um, those things have changed a lot from when we probably spoke three years ago, um, because three years ago I was looking at basically running the gym launch Playbook that we did, taking a company that has basically digital media driven that is vertically integrated education around a specific sector, yeah, and then wrap in business services and then be able to package that because you have Revenue retention and then sell it right, um, and transition it from a face-driven bus to a kind of Consulting business that's that's in one Niche right. It's a difficult operational challenge for for for face-driven businesses to remove the face, and I think that makes sense. Like Taylor Swift isn't looking for somebody to like step in and sing for her. There's a tension in what you said. You became the face for faceless systems. Your premise was I have these processes that work, 100 million offers, 100 million leads, you don't need Alex Rosi to literally be doing this for from exactly. It's to empower you to do it, as you said. The business model of the creator is very different. Kir talking about how there's an inverted pyramid where the creator is almost the chokehold, the gate point for everything because you need Taylor Swift to be there. Yeah, now you are an influencer, and so it's funny because you're like, well, I'm going to help you do a system where you don't need me, but now people follow you for that.
I think Once Upon a Time there's a conception of a Creator as like the Casey Neistat's at alter, like, oh hey, I make money to make content where I've started is on YouTube and the advertising, the brand deals is what supports me. I think now you're seeing creators becoming entrepreneurs, and KH is just becoming how they Market themselves in some ways, like the reputation of the Creator, yeah, was branded if you will, like in a figurative sense, like branded by the early creators, which is not reflective of how you advertise a business today. Yes, for creators who want to fall in your footsteps, do you think you'd advise them to double down on the creative distribution side of what they do or to try and get better at the B building business piece of what you do? Really interesting question. Um, I think it depends on your goal. So if your goal is to make money, then learn the money game. If your goal is to make content, then get, you know, just keep making content. I had a conversation with other Uber creators not that long ago, and we operate at acis.com off the theory of constraints, and so the positive of the theory of constraints is that any system will grow until this constrain and they grow further, and so, um, you know, these these gentlemen had like subscribed to that and they said, hey Alex, I think we understand what our constraint is, you know, we have our our our media and our content creation machine, the the constraint of it is like we need better editors for whatever, so we can get even more leverage on our time. I said, what's the goal, and they said, uh, we want to make money, and I remember kind of like smiling about this, and I was like, your constraint is not that you're a 97 out of 100 on content; it's that you're a zero out of 100 on monetization. If you don't care really about making money and your passion is making videos about whatever it is that you make videos about, then like congrat, you won, congratulations, you're making videos about this. Was yeah, you were like, if I could just quit my job and make videos about Dungeons and Dragons, then like I would do it, and it's like awesome, you're won, like, so now where you from here? But there are creators that I've talked to who I'm like, hey, so what do you want? They're like, dude, I just want to make money, and if that's the case, then you got to learn the game.
In 2024, you started working with School. Yeah, and so I think it's an interesting question using yourself as a case study. Number one, the product that you're associating with, it's not one that you like built it all nuts and bolts yourself. No, it was very much here's an existing company, but I can grow it, and so it kind of comes down for creators to question of hey, like, do you really want to lean into being an entrepreneur and do it yourself or do you just want to do a brand deal? This is gonna be really interesting, so because I've given a huge amount of thought to this, so I, I I'll see if I can get the number right, but the Creator paths exist on a spectrum, basically five paths, am mon monetization for a Creator, so and they exist on an axis of control, and so at the lowest amount of control you have sponsorships, right, like people just pay you money, you give basically you're an Advertiser, and so you promote their stuff, you read an ad, whatever that's that one degree. Next to that, you have being an affiliate, uh, which is just like, you know, getting sponsors except your pay on performance because what we do when you do an affiliate deal, uh, or a performance-based deal, you're saying I would like a larger percentage of The Upside if I can prove that I can generate it. And so what you're essentially doing is Shifting the risk from them to you, and the more risk you're willing to take on, the greater percentage of The Upside, and so winners always work on performance. No one should be able to as accurately estimate how much you can drive. No one knows better than you do, right? You're the seller, so like in M&A terms, uh, the seller of a business, the person who owns the business you're selling to somebody else always has an information Advantage because they always know more about the business than the person buying, right? And so you are the seller of attention, so you should always know the value of your attention better than someone else. Now if you know that your attention's [ __ ] um and doesn't actually convert at all, then maybe you should just do the sponsorship brand read. It's the brand value. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're just it's it's overall the impression. Now you've got me on board. Yeah, right. Yeah, it's going to change everything. So yeah, anyway, so you've got you've got uh sponsorships here, you've got kind of affiliate and performance deals here, then you've got kind of the the next uh path which is what I what I did with School, which is um you promote and you so I put capital on the deal too, so it wasn't just uh you also invested your yeah, yeah, it was a big deal. Yeah, um, and so we invested capital in the company, and we invested resources, and we invested brand, so it's we did so I think about them in terms of like what are the buckets that create investment, so there's work and for me there's brand. Some people don't have that, but like there's work, there's brand, and then there's capital, and so we put all three into the business.
I think there's a really nice sweet spot there because what you can do is rather than trying to go through all the iterations, I say, hey, let's do a deal. Oh, didn't see you there. Hi, I'm Quinn. I'm a YouTuber who works here at Carrot, and I'm here to help you out. Have you ever wanted to get real-time mentorship from the creators you see here on this very podcast? Well, what if I told you there's a place where you can get just that? That's right, they're in our Discord, and you can join too. Every week we'll be featuring a successful Creator to dive deep on The Business of Being a Creator. It's a live show with real-time interaction where we'll be digging into subjects like how to create the best thumbnails, how to maximize your brand deals, how to level up the storytelling in your videos, and so much more. If you're interested, you can check out the link in the description to apply to join the community today. I think there's a really nice sweet spot there, M because what you can do is rather than trying to go through all the iterations, I say, hey, let's do a deal. It has to be significant enough for me to like make it worth using what I would consider a brand bullet on and let's let's get Carrot into every business in the US, not just creators, and then if like if that's compelling, then then you get to just do what you're good at as a Creator. Um, this is me talking to creators and let the business do what they've already proven and this is the key point that they've already proven they are good at, and so this is where a little bit of business acumen comes it comes into play. Um, this is where like understanding what Revenue retention is, looking at churn, looking at user acquisition, looking at engagement rates, look at activation points, whatever that you want to look at a business to understand, okay, is this actually is the product good? Because what you want as a Creator, like the perfect Nirvana situation is unbelievable product compounding on its own from Word of Mouth for 12 to 24 months in a market that's like very similar to your audience and that you know that you can 10x in a year. That's where the magic happens for both parties. Yeah, they have an amazing product that could grow without you, but with you it just grows that much faster, and so fundamentally all you're doing is pulling the future forward by like four years. You're cutting the compounding curve and just basically stepwise increasing in a straight line up and then saying, okay, we're just going to pull year four forward, and now we're at a compound starting next month at year four to five rather than year two to three, right? And that's fundamentally what I was doing with School, and I mean, think about the amount of deals that we look at. School was the only deal that I've done since that time period. It was because it hit all of those things. Now next on, so that's like third stop on our Creator World here. The next is that you can white label, so you can drop ship stuff, which is pretty common, um, that I see as the simplest way of this is like you don't manufacture t-shirts, you find a t-shirt manufacturer, you slap your logo on it, and you ship it. Pretty straightforward. And then the final version, final boss of this is that you create a product from SC from scratch or service from scratch, and you mark and sell it, and uh those are degrees of control that exist on that Spectrum. There is a right path for everyone, and you just have to have some level of awareness to know which path is yours. Now which of these can create the most Enterprise Value? The further on the right you are, right, uh, the more Enterprise Value you have. Um, if you are doing sponsorships or affiliate deals, which is the first two categories that I talked about, those two can create Enterprise Value in of themselves if you consider yourself a media business, which is so funny. I was talking to a mondo Creator, so like 20 million plus subscribers, and it so funny he was like, dude, what we're doing like no one's ever done this before, like have a business around like making videos, and I was like, so you know media's existed for a long time, right? And I like and when I when I told him I was like, dude, Med like you should just look at existing media businesses, and it was like this big light bulb. I was like, all we're doing is taking an old business model and just doing it in a New Media, like that's all it is, right? The difference though is if you look at like a great media business of the new age is like Barstool Sports, right, right, and Dave Portnoy is sort of now a Creator. I would say he is a Creator now, but it wasn't started that way. He just saw the Arbitrage that existed for all these cheap Impressions properties. Yeah, exactly, and he built a network and so that he could sell Impressions across a specific demo, um, to advertisers, and if that's the business, I just have yet to see. I think YMH, Your Mom's House for comedy, I think they have a handful of Productions, so they're kind of becoming a media. Zach Justice is trying to do this too, right? You have to talk to Zach. It's tough though, especially if you're the primary like breadwinner kind of for the media business. I would say it's it's almost simpler to be like, hey, I know a ton of advertisers, right? Let me sell your ad space, and I think you could far more easily acquire a big network from that perspective, which is basically what important way did. Interesting. So for your POV, if you've successfully built the media side of your business, like that's a win, but the upside according to your degrees of control, it's very limited, and as you I was trying to think of people who I think have built these successful media Empires, so there have been many who failed, like BuzzFeed is a great example. Many failed. Yeah, many many have failed. We're going to reinvent the game. It's like, well, you're just doing newspaper, State I'll be on a new medium. There are some creators who have succeeded. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, Daily Mail, and there are some creators who've gone, they've taken steps in this direction where they've almost scaled their content, so one that comes to mind, Linus Tech Tips is a very good example where Linus Tech Tips started with just Linus, and over the time he's brought in other creators to be on his channel instead of himself, and then you also have creators like I think MKBHD is a great example too. MKBHD I still think of as primarily as a media business. He doesn't do that much with products, and well, he actually tried one, a wallpaper app that got a lot of backlash, which I, you know, if I were MKB, I feel like I would be like, yeah, no, you know what? I'll just stay and do content over here because whenever I sort of go over there, people get mad at me. Yeah. Now it sounds like you're saying though, from your POV, this also can we hit on this real quick before we we we switch. Um, so I want to say this mostly to the the creators are people who have started from organic and like built an audience and whatnot. There there's two types of angry, so there are there's angry because you have done something that you said you wouldn't do or that is against you or brand or purported values, right? Then there is people who think that everything in the world should be free, and I find that YouTube or really across all platforms these people exist, and you can by and large ignore them. And so I think that when people promote anything, um, they get backlashed because anything that you give me that is not free [ __ ] you die. Y I think on some level you just got to be like, okay, anything worth doing is going to get lashed back, and there's like show me one Ultra famous person because this is all we're talking about creators and influence and audiences who doesn't have haters, right? And so if you're going to get hate regardless, you might as well also accomplish your objectives. So that's just my two cents on. Now betraying the brand that you have. No, I think that's dumb. Um, so like if you have, for example, a naturopathic brand of weight loss, don't push a Zenic. That's probably a bad idea. At the same time, if you said, hey, I've got these supplements that help you do that, or I have this, you know, uh, nutrition program that I'm, you know, you do a retreat with me three times a year. Seems of course, I'm thinking of Liver King because the whole premise was his gains came from his diet, not from other things. 100%. You've been honest. I think it would have been fine. I think yeah, um, it would have been interesting for sure. Yeah, fine, maybe not fine. It would have been oh yeah, I eat I eat, you know, goat nuts, but I also inject uh Tren, um, like people were like, so is it the goat nuts or is it Tren? Well, it's actually both. It's interaction between the two. Don't understand that's what the magic, right? Like, um, yeah, so I that's that's yeah, but here actually I think he's uh it's it's it's a worthwhile example to pull that up because so obviously there was a moment where in time where he went super viral, and then it peaked, and then Derek, so as a call back to earlier, uh, ended up being the one who outed him. He exposed him. I remember heed. It's the thing, Liver King still makes content, and I would imagine that he probably still makes good money. Yep, and so I would see what happened to Liver King as close to a quote brand suicide moment as you can get, and yet yeah, he keeps going. And so here's the here's the real re. I don't think you can get canceled, and so a lot of people have this fear of making a mistake that's going to end their career, and no mistake ends your career unless you choose to end it. Mhm. And so you can always get back up and keep going. The only way that you can actually get canceled is if you get prevented from distribution, right? So if all platforms deplatform you, if every platform did that, then yeah, you are canceled, right? Like R. Kelly is in jail and make content. He cannot make content, so like he has been he has been effectively canceled. On the flip side, how many times has Chappelle been canceled? I put that in quotes here, right? He's not canceled. He just keeps going, right? Um, and so in the same light, uh, to to further hopefully put at stake through this thing, your assumption that you have killed your career assumes that everyone in the world knows who you are, and the vast majority of the world doesn't even know you exist, nor do they really care. Subtext. And so like let's say you have a million-person audience, okay, you mess up, just go get another million. You're not dead, and if anything, you start having learned a lesson, and you just keep going. It's interesting because like I think the poster Childs for this in some ways are like Jake and Lok and Paul, dude, the suicide forest thing. Yeah, like here he is on WWE or whatever whatever they're doing now. I don't follow as as tightly as I probably should to be uh, you know, in this world, but um, he's still around, and he's quote bigger than right. Yeah, and so like there's he also Jake Paul also has a VC fund now. Yeah. Well, there you go. There are so many examples of quote career-ending moves that didn't actually end the career. Well, you have to be able to deal with, and this is the real hard part is that you have to be you have to be able to handle hate for a week, M M because the news cycle is about a week, and so you have to be able to just be hated, and it's very against our human wiring to receive that much hatred and continue onward, especially online. It's Amplified. It's impossible to Fathom a million people telling you that you suck. Have you gone through that yourself? Um, I mean, I've Had My Moments of people hating on stuff that I that I put out, um, usually it's just stuff that I put out that just triggers people in general, and I would say that part of it is intended to that like cuz I have relatively extreme views, um, on life and death things like that, and um, I make those because those are the views that helped me free myself and made life a lot more palatable for me. I've always been like, and if it helps you use it, and if it doesn't, don't worry about it. Use whatever you're doing. This is not me trying to prelati; this is me sharing what's worked for me, but of course, people see it, and they're triggered because this conflicts with their worldview. My content is a documentary, not a sermon.
When you think about the different axes of control, the different models you've said, what's interesting is I've seen a lot of creators stay in the media per side. I've seen a good number of creators make money via their own products, like obviously there's Feastival. The middle area, what you've done is actually very, very rare. That's the advantage of if you understand the business game, you can do nasty things because I remember so there's I I can't wait for this to get the call back, um, but one of my very first podcasts I ever did was on Ice Coffee Hour, um, with Graham Stefan. Yeah, and on the show, uh, I said, if I had your size audience, I'd already be a billionaire. I'm excited for when we cross that because I think it'll be pretty close. You have the audience now, Alex, so is he say put up or shut up? Yeah, I mean, we've grown a ton. I'll just leave it at that. I'll say this for anybody who's who's listening to this, so the problem with me claiming something. I would like to have a third party substantiate, um, and so like I could say, well, if if you know what our revenue is, right, and you put any kind of iida on that that would be reasonable, especially in a business that has lowak, right, uh, you would probably imagine that it would be and you put any kind of multiple on that, it would be a pretty large number, and so we have things that are going for us, and we've had conversations with companies that said we would value in this in this range, but those are things that I wouldn't if I claim it, I want to be Rockside. Absolutely right, and so that's why I have it, but that being said, um, obviously we've grown a lot, um, in that period of time, and uh, I I'm excited for whenever that call back comes because he still has more YouTube people, so I'm using that as mine as my you're saying we haven't quite reached your audience yet. Yeah, on YouTube. Yeah, I'm still I'm still I'm still behind his audience on YouTube. It's actually another good point though. You said multiple, right? The multiple that you would get on what you've built is going to be higher than say a pure YouTuber. Yeah, here's your question. When you look at say like what Jimmy, MrBeast has built. Yeah, oh perfect. I was going to come back to that. Yes, okay. Is that a business you'd want to invest in yourself? So I think I'd probably take Ch's angle, which is like you just you're basically betting on Jimmy, and I think, um, yeah, I would take that bet, right? I think Jimmy will just die or H wi. Yep, and that's kind of and you just want to find people like that when you're distribution bases the world, uh, it's hard to lose. Yeah, I'll just I I'll leave it at that, but what you brought up though, like Prime, for example. Yeah, so Prime is actually the identical to a School deal because he didn't build the product. Congo Brands is another company that previously had worked with other creators to do other drinks as well. Yeah, and so they promoted it, right, right, but they put I don't know if they put cash in. I don't know what they did, but I'm assuming they put some money in because they have the capital. Why not to get more leverage on on the ultimate deal or joint venture? Was Logan going to learn the drink business and get the and get brick and mortar distri like maybe, but it's also the question is how much is your time worth, and I don't mean like dollars per hour or anything like that. You absolutely can do it, and when I say time is like how much is the next five years worth to you, right? Because if you can pull five years of knowledge forward and then grow for five years rather than learn for five years then begin growing because you're if you have an audience of their size, your constraint is going to be delivery. It's not distrib like yeah, it's not it's not media distribution; it's going to be product distribution. Prime. Yeah, it's going to be product distribution, and so to to build out the kind of infrastructure and knowledge base, uh, to satisfy the demand internationally, not just nationally, internet because they're in the UK too, um, you need you need deep expertise and large existing infrastructure, and so Kong already had that, and so it made sense, right? And so I would probably lean more towards that type of model. I'm curious like there's me, there's Sirant, Jimmy. I think with Feebles is the only person who's building things truly from scratch. Yeah, he hired his own team and everything. Yeah, and I don't know if if you were to ask Jim me again today, uh, if he could go back in time if he would have yeah, just if he would have done it the same. He talks about how stressful it is. Ir podcast and we can and we can already say, uh, he launched Lunch Le, right? And well, what did he do with Lunch Le? He didn't do with Feebles. He didn't build it from scratch, right? And so I think part of that is there is a desire that I totally understand as a Creator entrepreneur to control everything, and if you look at the people who are the wealthiest in the world, almost none of them Own 100% of the companies that they have made their wealth on. So you look at Jensen Huang from Nvidia owns 4%. You look at Elon, he owns whatever it is whatever small percentage of Tesla that he owns, um, and with SpaceX he's not the majority owner. Now he might have voting rights, whatever that's a different different question. Bezos owns 9% of of Amazon. Like I go down the list, Warren Buffett, I think or doesn't own more than 40% of Berkshire Hathaway, and we could keep going, and so the idea is to build something really, really big, in my opinion, needs multiple lifetimes, M, and you can either live all of those lifetimes, uh, in sequence chronologically yourself, and then take a lifetime to finally learn how to do everything, or you can get three people's lifetimes, you all start together, you divvy up the pie, and then you can build something way bigger, way faster. The longer I've been doing business, the more I value time and speed because also we have the assumption that these things will not change in 10 years, so maybe it does take you 10 years to learn everything is the moment still there. So that makes me think of two things. The first thing is for yourself, what are the elements of business that you're most willing like sure, I could learn this, but do I want to spend time with this? So I approach all new things with the same perspective, which you can you probably share with me, which is kind of the consultant's perspective, and so I started as a Management Consultant, uh, which we share as background, and the way that I was taught is if you want to rapidly learn something in a space and to give context on this, imagine this back in time. I'm 22 years old. I go through my security clearance, no beard by the way. Yeah, no beard. I have uh so I I have to get a top secret security clearance, so I get I pass that, thank God, you know, I'm Sweating Bullets, like, oh, what did I do in my frat days, you know, like I'm thinking this is like a huge, you know, deal to National Security. Anyways, so I passed that, and then I can't say which which Armed Forces, but we go and do work for uh the defense department, and I was focused on Space, cyber, and intelligence, and you know, some of the projects I can say this that we worked on was like basically mix of assets to kill the most bad guys the most efficiently, right? And the thing is that there's overlap between different Armed Forces for similar style of let's just say killing people or gathering Intel on uh, you know, bad guys. How do you at 20 years, 22 years old, go and say something that's impressive, right? And worth $4 million for a project that you're on, um, in four months, right? So it's like you start now, four months from now, you have to give a presentation to uh two two two star and a four-star general who have been doing this for their entire careers and then somehow managed to say something intelligent. So the way that they approach that problem is so the person who who uh does a re, you know, puts the requisite out for the project U we say who are the smartest people you know in around this problem, yeah, and they give you five people, so you go to those five people, and you interview all of them, and then you say who do you know five people who are the smartest people around this, and you do that for over and over and over again until eventually the same names keep popping up, and you're like, all already talked to John, I already talked to Steve, and basically you have you kind of like map the the neural network of expertise, and then you consolidate those notes into those buckets, so you like recode them, and then you distill them down, and then you make a pretty slide J. Um, that's like the very tldr job of Consulting. That is what Consulting is. Yeah, and if you were the 22-year-old, you were the one doing all of the notes and all of the good you're doing the calls, you're consolidating Y 100%. And so so I learned a very valuable skill set there, and so I've approached every new Endeavor using the same thing to answer the question, um, what are the things that I would say I will learn more about this or I won't. I think it depends on my first my first pass. Yeah, so if I get into because there's some Industries where I look at it, I'm like, this isn't that hard. Like some businesses, I'm like, this isn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Other ones, I'm like, this is way worse than I thought it was going to be, and it's also like what problems come up and how equipped am I to solve them? So like I'll use an like like insurance, for example, right? I think insurance is really interesting largely because one of the biggest problems with insurance is cost of acquisition. It's like it's a demand-constrained business. Insurance is not hard to get capital for, like there's tons of insurance companies that all that to say it's there, but that was like oh, that's more interesting. So when I have that like of the not now or later, like I put insurance in one of those buckets as something that like is also regulated, but uh, I would say less so than Banks, um, and there's pretty amazing tax advantages that exist with an insurance. You're picking these products that have to your earlier Point extremely high retention. People need it; it's just people don't historically like it, and acquisition is really hard, and you're coming in and saying, well, I could help with the acquisition side. Oh, but people still really like it, and there's like limitations in my ability to improve that right now because some of these things are regulated where the magic will happen is I'll find
He has a good, you know, a good program there, and so he is, he's paying down his keyman risk by getting larger and larger percentage of the business. And so I think the, the way to really scale an organic creator business is you launch it with the personal brand and then over time you backfill with other faces that you have to approve. And that's the key part—you have to approve—that are on brand with values and your message and are authentic to the product that you have and are attracting the audiences that you want to go after. And then they, over time, become bigger than you, and you kind of like Homer Simpson into the, into the bushes.
Oh yeah, you recede.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And you recede into the bushes until eventually people associate you with the brand, but the brand outgrows you. It's fascinating because, well, two questions immediately come to mind. The first is on keyman risk: Is this what you and Leila have—are you thinking about bringing a roster of folks just as the faces of even the content side of your business?
So two answers: First, we're not planning on selling or acquisition anytime soon, and that's useful, um, and so I, like I see Elon as keyman to SpaceX and Tesla. Yeah, and so what if you have the desire to exit a business, then keyman risk becomes a problem if you want to go public or you want to hold. It's really who cares. And so it's kind of a who cares issue. Um, that being said, the second answer is, uh, yes, because I do like having fewer single points of failure in general. So despite the fact that I don't think we necessarily would need it, I still like to build businesses that way in general, and we have plans for what we're going to do over the next probably 24 months and beyond to build out Acqs brand.
Makes sense.
Yeah. The second question I had related to that was when I look at creation space, who've successfully executed on this, it's actually very minimal, right?
Yeah. I can tell you one who I look at, who: Dave Ramsey. So that's right, he's brought in George, he's brought in other people under him, he's got Rachel, who's his daughter, but like he's got Rachel, um, he's got John, um, he's got, um, yeah, he's got nine, I think, channels for example, just on YouTube that are associated with the primary. And what's interesting is that they basically run the same playbook—it's a daily calling show and clips and full episodes basically are, are the channel. And so they clip each episode into like four or five 10-minute clips, uh, and they put each of those out, so that's like, that gives them tons of good like mid-length clips, they get the one full episodes, and then short clips get taken and become shorts. I study Ramsey a lot, um, one because I like Dave, but secondly because the amount of creators that get quote creator burnout is really high. Yeah, um, or we're talking like Shelby Church, right, just kind of shifted to I would say a sustainable, uh, content model, right? But it's, it doesn't really acquire new viewership anymore. Like you only care about a vlog if you care about the person.
Yeah, it's you're maintaining, or some creator on YouTube now they shift to a podcast, right?
Yeah. And it's because it's a quote easier form, but it doesn't really grow the audience, it just kind of like maintains the audience that you have. And again, to be clear, nothing wrong with that, totally. But I look at somebody like Dave and I think he's been making content for 40 years—like there's something to be learned from that. And I think the nature of why his content has been so interesting is because you have, he has two types of variety, or three really, and that I think have to be present. So what are, what are the types of shows that have, uh, already shows that have existed for a long time? You look at The Daily Show, right? You look at the, the night, the nightly host shows, like those can go for 20 years, right? What makes that unique in my opinion? Um, you have, you have three variables: You have the people who are on the show, uh, you have the subject matter, and you have, actually it's just that two.
Yeah, yeah. I was thinking because you also have the interviewer, right?
Format as well. Yeah, so I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll still say the third, which is the interviewer, comma s, uh, so like there are some shows where they will rotate 10 people through three seats who are doing the interviewing of other people about dynamic topics. And so you need some level of novelty, I think, to consistently one engage your existing audience, but also to bring in new people. And I think that a lot of creator content on a long enough time horizon becomes the news, like they say all the things they wanted to say about personal finance or how to build a house or like, and then at some point they're like, I don't know what else to talk about, and then they're like the news, and I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, it just like, I just, it's just a pattern that I've seen over and over again. Because if you have a single person, they only have topic as their variety, and so once you've exhausted many of the I would call it standard direct-to-camera topics, then the novelty comes from news, which is literally novelty, right? What is new? And so that's where they allow the environment to create their content or their topics. Going back to Ramsey, he has on, he has the call-ins, which create endless variety. And so those are kind of like the two formats, and he doesn't have to prepare really ahead of time. And so he is, for if he does three hours of content a day, he's generating three hours of content, whereas I would say many creators will spend 20 hours on generating one hour of content. And so he has pretty decent leverage on his time in terms of, uh, output per unit of time spent on content itself. And if you want to grow a business around it, you can't just do content, because then you have like, when do you, when do you grow the business? It's a really interesting point because you mentioned that a lot of creators start with one thing, then they eventually burn out and bu a scalability.
Like Graham Stephan's a good mutual friend of ours, and Graham has openly talked about how he is getting really tired on his main channel.
Said that three years ago. Yeah, I've noticed Graham every year talks about, and even when I met him he was doing like three videos a week, and you just run out of topics, and to a point you just become a news reactor, and that's not something he enjoys as much as doing. And in a way, he's found a lot of success now with his podcast channel for a while, like he's spun up a coffee business.
Yeah. And he's also talked about how the coffee business didn't work. Yeah. And so I think it's interesting because on the one hand everybody's like, well, acquisition is one of the most important things to a business, if you're a creator you're going to succeed. On the other hand, hey, Graham did the coffee business, didn't necessarily work. Emma Chamberlain has talked about how Chamberlain coffee line also doesn't apparently make money. There are many creators who go to the business path, and it seems like, well, maybe that was not the right play. So two really interesting things about this, uh, well, Graham specifically, and then also in general, so, um, I think we need to be very careful about what audience we want to gather. And so Graham's audience has been predominantly people who don't want to spend money.
Yes. Frugal. And so he gathered everybody together who don't want to spend money and then was like, hey, spend some money. And so I think there's, I think in some ways it's hard, it's almost harder for him to sell something than almost anybody else, right, uh, because of the nature of his brand specifically. That's why I think like for him it's like doing media stuff in some ways is probably an easier, he can sell to advertisers, and he can, they can have the, the good luck, you know, but I think for him like something that would have been on brand would have been like Honey, right, before the, the, the, yeah, before the scandal, right? Pre-scandal Honey, I think would have been very on brand for him to offer money. Yeah, and he could have made a lot of money on that. And so I think all discount-related things or discount-related financial services probably would have been good angles for him. So that's thing one. Thing two is, uh, so I guess that, sorry, I was getting into thing two, which is, uh, picking the right product, right, uh, so you have, right, a, it's right product. And so I think that having the saving money audience, you can make money from it, but getting them to buy something that would be considered frivolous, which is just like coffee—now you can try and position it as like, okay, it's not Starbucks, fine, but now you're literally dealing with a commodity, like it's traded like, coffee beans are traded as a commodity, like very hard to be to have alpha from a brand perspective when the whole brand has been built on don't buy, like this stuff comes off the same factory floor as this stuff and they just put a markup on it, right? And so from a product perspective, I actually think creators are horrendously bad at picking products, like the amount of conversations I've had with creators who are like, hey, I'm thinking about launching an X, and I'm like, what? So on one hand, I like, these are real conversations I've had where they're like, yeah, you know, I read Peter Thiel's *Zero to One*, and I think I have to create like a totally new category.
Yeah. Monopolizing.
Yeah. And I'm like, dude, you already, your, your monopoly is the attention, you can sell a commodity, and as long as it's on brand, you know, like with, with, with you, you'll probably be able to do really well. The question is, will you do as well as you could have otherwise done if you picked a better product, which then goes into kind of like circling all the way back to acis.com in terms of what we do is we, I only really solve for revenue retention, it's like really the only thing I care about, because on a long enough time horizon anything that retains customers becomes huge if you know how to advertise at all, which if you're a creator you do, and if you can keep the customers, then on a long enough time horizon you become, you, you build a massive company, right?
Surprised me you said retention instead of growth.
Actually, well, at base level one: keep customers. Level two: grow those customers too and get them to bring more, but yes, uh, and so from a product perspective though, I don't think enough of them are thinking about recurring and recurring revenue. And my two cents for anybody who's a creator who's listening to this: Do not try and solve churn, try and find products that people already don't churn out of, and then make it your own. I spent a huge amount of my career banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how to make something that people inherently leave, like a gym membership, uh, something that's sticky, and I've learned a ton. And so there's lots of what I would consider like blocking and tackling tactics that I have learned that will, will that will, that will improve churn, right? But to conquer churn, like how many of you have churned out of your internet lately? How many of you have churned out of your cell phone bill? How many of you have churned out of your insurance account for that matter?
Yeah. Ex-them, and you're still with them, of course. And so you think about these products, and so I would rather find products that people already don't leave and have no affinity for and then try and just shift them over. Now you're like, wait, how can, well, aren't they technically churning out of them? Yeah, but I'm being laser-targeted and how, like, yes, that's the point, that's the advantage that you have as a creator, that you can bring those people over from what is otherwise a commoditized product that they don't care much about but still pay for, rather than trying, getting people to care about your product in order to buy it. You might remember 2021—everyone is really excited about the creator economy, everyone thought it's going to be the biggest thing in the world, one because Covid, everyone's at home, they're watching online videos, and two because TikTok short-form is going on the scene, everyone's getting millions of followers. And then 2022, 2023, there actually was a bust where a lot of people were like, oh, creator economy is not going to be a thing, and it's because people weren't able to monetize, they have all these short-form followers, they didn't really see really strong views on this.
Oh yeah, what are you thinking?
So I think it's because the people who are allocating money didn't understand media at this level. Like I, I would, I would wager that you and I probably understand the creator world and media better than most, and I, I think that fortunately, unfortunately, I think short-form content does not build tremendous influence, right? I think it brings awareness, uh, but if we think about influence in terms of like, what percentage likelihood can we get the audience of this person to purchase something, um, you just need, okay, so four elements for influence: So you've got likeness, so is, does this person look the way that I look? So because of that, I will trust them more and be more likely to follow their directions. The second is credibility, which is, say, do correspondence, which is basically, does the person have evidence or proof that what they say is true? Uh, third, you have, uh, power, uh, and power comes from someone doing some directive that you have stated, uh, and then yielding a positive consequence from it. And so I'll give an example of this: So, Huberman made a short about if you have the hiccups, how to stop having the hiccups, right? And I remember watching it and being like, well, I don't have the hiccups right now, but I'll try to remember this when I have the hiccups. And about a month later, I had the hiccups, power, what he said, and then I did the thing, and the hiccup stopped. And so in that moment, Huberman gained influence over me, I'm more likely to follow a directive in the future. And so status is the, is the fourth thing that gives you influence, which is relative control over, over, uh, reinforcers, meaning, uh, if I am a bartender and I control a scarce resource, which is alcohol, I have status in this setting, uh, because I control the things that reinforce. Does it matter how rich or powerful you are? I'm the bartender in this setting, I control what's scarce, right? And so, if you're a billionaire, you control money, and so you gain status just from that. Presidents and politicians also have status because they control resources of the government, right? But they still control resources. And so, um, women have status because they control a scarce resource for men, very, just being real.
Yep. And so they can influence behavior. And so all of those things, um, increase the likely that you get adherence, uh, from or, or compliance from a request. And so if you have all four, then you're incredibly influential, right? And big picture, our goal as creators is to gain actual influence so that we can influence, uh, the behavior of a large group of people, right? And the way to do that most powerfully is to give them something, some sort of directive that they follow and their life gets better, and then they're more likely to adhere to a, you know, following request.
Makes sense.
So if that's the case, it's very difficult for you to do that well with very short content. And so to put this in context, let's say that somebody has consumed 20 YouTube videos of mine, and let's say that that v, those videos on average for 30 minutes, all right? So that's 10 hours of, of content that they've consumed from me. Okay, right? Let's do the math here: If the average short that I put out is, let's say 20 seconds, okay? So if we have 20 seconds for a short, that means it's three shorts per minute, so 10 hours times 60, we have 600 minutes is what my longs were.
Yep. And we'd have to triple that, so they would have to consume 1800 shorts of mine.
God, right? And so I think that what's happened is that people have wildly overleveraged followership and views for influence. What's interesting is that like small businesses, I remember, uh, Michael showed me this actually, he saw this little Q card, he took a picture of it from like a, a car detailing business or something, and they said, uh, for 400,000 views on TikTok or 10,000 views on YouTube, $500. So any creator who wants to make something about their car detailing organically, they'll pay them $500 if they get 10,000 views on YouTube or 400,000 views on TikTok. So they had, they had already basically appropriated that as 40x is the equivalent, uh, amount of influence. And if it were me, I still would probably rather have the 10,000 views on YouTube. If, if we're looking at this, um, what's her name, the, the dancing girl, Charli, uh, D'Amelio, right? So I think she's had a couple of things that didn't work as well, that like, and again it's, if I make a brand built around slapping strangers in public, right, as a complete extreme, and then I launch a credit card, does that really carry? There's no said correspondence, I have no proof, right? So I have no proof that she actually did partner with a credit card company, by the way, right? And I think she had a popcorn, and to be clear, I'm, I'm, there's no, that's not my, my point here, my point is to help creators monetize, and so I see the point of short-form as one thing, which is to drive them to long-form, or if you can obviously deliver some sort of value like I got from Huberman in that, in that short, short clip. But the thing is is that the likelihood that that occurs is really, really low. I have a pretty decent memory, and I remembered a short from a month earlier, and that actually did it and got a resolve—super unlikely. Now, if you listen to Huberman on a daily basis, for example, he probably gives 80 directives over his every podcast, and all you have to do if you're a long-term listener is listen to one of them over a month and your life gets better, and he gains influence. And so when he then makes a product recommendation, I'll bet you that the Huberman collabs have probably crushed Athletic Greens. W, and he's got broke, he's got the sunglasses thing, um, I think he's promoting David's bars, uh, which is actually protein. Yeah, so like, uh, and those collabs I think have probably gone pretty, and also to the degree like when he's, when he's recommendations, like a huge amount of people, including presale recommendations, a huge amount of people follow. And this is where it gets really [ __ ] interesting. So again, it's all of those elements, so if you have a, let's say somebody who a long-term host doesn't talk about politics at all, shows no knowledge of the stuff, has a big audience, brings, uh, brings somebody on, their endorsement probably matters little if their audience pays attention to a political candidate, then that's basically just functions as an ad, and the political candidate is doing the influencing on their behalf. But for their endorsement to matter, not just the distribution, they have to have demonstrated some credibility around the topic so that people say, this guy is informed. The value to be other than you've reached a million people or whatever, right?
Right. Joe Rogan has done a ton of political stuff, and like it or don't like it, whatever, he's demonstrated that he's at least spent a lot of time trying to research the topics with the intention of just trying to find truth from an independent perspective. I'm not getting into like the weeds on either side here, but just that that has been the intention, and so he is tremendous influence because most people think, at least I think most consumers think this way, uh, I don't want to do all that work, right, uh, I'll just trust him. See what's fascinating, you described the primary function as short-form to drive to long-form, because you go to a broader point, you're seeing that people had followers, but they didn't have influence because influence comes from the four things you just describe: likeness, credibility, power, status. Initially, what was going through my mind was, yes, 2022, 2023, you saw a bust because a lot of investors confused influence with followers.
Yes. Because there were more followers brought into EOS forms, but nothing else. The initial premise I was operating with in 2025, which now I'm rethinking, was, oh, but now people have figured out how to use short-form to upsell to products and services, whether on schools or, yeah, or, yeah, or these other 15 different monetization methods where these short-form units are just becoming really marketing.
The best one.
Yeah. I mean, it is the best one.
Well said. Well said. The premise for me was, oh, now short-form, it's actually just marketing, like they're just like commercials.
Yes. And so the monetization is coming back, the short-form is not really successful in growing your influence, but it is successful just from a distribution POV. Think of it as like awareness ads.
Yep. And so what happens is the objective, in my opinion, so like the ones you like, school for example, if you're a short-form person, it's like, how can I just get them to take the tiniest amount of action to an affinity where I can get moreac with them on a feedback loop so that I can gain the other three or four more like harder, right? Um, but what's interesting is like the people who I think were doing really well on monetization right now for TikTok are doing TikTok shop plus lives.
Yes. And what's alive, long? I think there were some creators that were still wildly undervalued. Yeah, and many that were wildly overvalued, and this is the, uh, you know, the classic story of like, I had two people that I paid 100,000, you know, had 100,000, uh, followers on Instagram, and I had both of them do a shout-out for my thing, and one guy drove 10,000 customers, and one guy drove zero.
How is, now assuming it's not bots, but like there's definitely legitimate creator accounts that have 100,000 followers that have zero influence? Do you think more businesses should be trying to follow content creator Le models? Like we've talked a lot about, hey, there's five different ways these businesses make money, here are some of the challenges they have, should the other, you know, 60% of entrepreneurs come to you be thinking about, oh, I should be incorporating content more into what I do? I have super strong reservations with the word "should" in general. Um, I would say really just depends on what the constraint of the business is. And so like, let's say you have an outbound channel that you have cold callers and cold emailers that, you know, generate B2B customers for you, do you need to start making content? Probably not. And given the resources required, are there, is there something else in the business that would generate more enterprise value? Yeah, if so, then you should do that, right? Big picture, more attention in general tends to grow businesses, provided they are not supply-constrained, but that's a big asterisk because many businesses are supply-constrained. There's a lot of plumbers who the phone's ringing off the hook, and they're like, I just need more plumbers, dude. Like, I mean, yeah, of course, like I could, we can like, I don't have a problem getting people. If you have a cleaning business, the problem is not getting people to want cleaning, the problem is finding cleaners.
Yeah, right? So like it depends on what, what the problem of the business is. Now, if that were the issue, do you make content around like what it's like to be a cleaner so that you attract cleaners? People who want to clean, it's like, hey, you already clean your house all the time, want to do it for money, and we have better working conditions, blah, blah, blah. Like fundamentally, uh, I guess reframing the question as, should the other 60% of businesses add another advertising channel? No, unless it's the constraint of the business. When you think about when you're investing for acquisition.com or now for Acq Ventures, it sounds like traditionally it started from, let me bring you better business processes with school. It actually shifted a bit to, I can just bring you tremendous distribution via my own content. What types of companies were you leaning more toward investing in once you help with the processes or ones where you think the content distribution actually is what matters?
So I'll say it's both, right, um, and I still use those three kind of legs of the stool, so I got money, we've got time or work, and then we've got brand reputation, distribution, etc. Um, I prefer to do as many as I can of the first two because in a lot of ways brand is so much more limited—not limited in its power, but limited in how many, and maybe this could be a limiting belief for me, but I, I don't think it is, I think it's, it's very, so brand is built on associations and pairings, and if you pair yourself with too many things, it, the brand starts to lose its potency because you've associated with too many disparate things. Now, if you made many associations with things in the similar buckets, I think you could get more bullets, right? It's more okay, more shots on goal if you will. But no, I, I, I try to basically do the more scalable things, which money is actually, you know, pretty scalable. We've developed a pretty, pretty exceptional team at the holding company for acquisition.com, um, because I, I basically take, I marry a lot of old school and new school, so we have a lot of young, caught five and 10-year McKinsey, you know, um, Bain consultants that will pull who are like, I hate feeling like a cog in a machine and just doing billable hours, but are otherwise incredibly hardworking, incredibly bright, and also see the problem with a lot of antiquated businesses and want to work with more new, more cutting-edge stuff and also really like, and a lot of them came from, you know, my content, my world, um, and want to marry, I would say big business strategy with small business tactics, uh, and then kind of like bridge those two gaps, uh, together, and that's a lot of what we do at, at Acq anyways. And so I think they really enjoy it because they learn a ton, uh, from the frameworks that we have for growing companies. It adds nuance and texture to their existing knowledge set from what they learned at the kind of like big consulting firms. And just to put context to this, like if you're looking at like supply chain for Walmart Brazil, right, or something, you know, Walmart Latam, uh, because you need to do some, you know, analysis for that, super heady, uh, really complex, lots of moving parts, and not useful to a small business, like really valuable to a big business, which is why they pay the money for it, not useful at all to a small business, but the thinking process and the reason I like taking people from that world, one is because I came from it, but also because I think at the end of the day consultants are a lot like engineers in that you just have to solve problems, and being able to have a really good problem-thinking mind, um, is I think what makes a good, a good consultant, uh, in general. And so that feeds really well into the advisory practice.
Would you invest in content creators?
I would if I like, okay, let me clarify, qualify the answer. So are you saying invest in them like if I could buy a stock in a person or like if, hey, I want to start, I want to start this umbrella company?
I was thinking initially the second. I probably wouldn't for a denovo idea, um, for a couple of reasons: One is like I don't, I don't really like seed stuff, like idea stuff, right? Also because creators are typically like big idea people, that's not the constraint, the constraint for them is execution, um, and business acumen. And for a deal structure like that to, like in a traditional structure, I probably wouldn't have majority controller ownership, and so that would be really high risk, I think, and so I probably wouldn't like that deal. If it was a deal that was kind of the opposite, where like maybe they owned like 20% and we owned 80 and we fronted the capital and we like put all the stuff together.
You're incubating them.
Yeah, maybe. But even then it's like I also have to look at supply demand of like my own deal flow, right? And to do that, it would have to prove that that deal structure provides more alpha than the existing thing, which I would have a hard time believing. What about a later-stage creator company, like the primes of the world?
Yeah, so like a Logan Paul or like a, whatever, Jake Paul or something, who's not him, but somebody else, right? It would be tough, and the, the main reason is investing in, in someone like that isn't really investing, it's a joint venture, and then it's really like, so I'm starting another business, and that's really what it would be. And so it would have to be a business that I felt the existing resources and assets that we had, we already had a huge percentage of the core competencies required, not just in knowledge, but like in manpower, yeah, to do it. Makes sense because for you, you're either obviously you're bringing capital, money, right? But you're also either bringing your image and likeness, which is distribution, or you're bringing the operational expertise, right? You're working with these businesses that are less heavy on the distribution side. Clearly something of value, you're working with these creators, well, you have distribution, you don't necessarily need theirs, and they don't have the operations side, which means you have to spend tons of time building, tons, they like, they don't have any, right? And so we'd have to build, we'd have to build a company, and so that's where I see that as like, like translating the ultimate question to like, would you build a company for a creator if that's what it, if that's what I translated into, then the answer is probably not, right, uh, just given the, the, the con, like how much it would take. When I was chatting with Michael earlier today, he did say you've been shifting more into investing, and Acq Ventures is all capital.
Yeah. Acq Ventures, and from my understanding that's much earlier stage. So what prompted that?
Actually, honestly, just we had so much deal flow for it. So a lot of people were coming in and saying, hey, I would say it is largely tech, so CU, it's venture, you need to have really, really potential big access outcomes.
Yeah, yeah. They just, the economic, like the economics lend themselves to tech, but we had a lot of, uh, people were coming towards us in, in I would say like a couple of buckets. So bucket one is somebody who's already raised some round, yeah, consumes all my stuff, it helped them grow, and they're like, I would just rather have you on our cap table than somebody else, and that's like a perfect scenario, right? Like they already, they, they like the stuff, they kind of like subscribe to the ideology, we can provide capital, help them grow because we believe in the thesis. So like that's great, and those, and the thing is is that the existing model that we had prior to that required us to have a significantly larger equity position, right, to justify, uh, the return, right? But because some of these tech companies can have, uh, significantly larger exits and because they don't require more work, right, uh, we can take smaller slugs and do, um, and just do money only essentially. So that's, so that was, that was kind of bucket one. Bucket two is people who don't have a cap table at all, um, they're maybe bootstrapped, but they still want to take on some clear opportunity that we can help fund, um, and those also, uh, you know, as long as the deal structure makes sense, like those can make a lot of sense. The nice thing with that is that they require almost no work and expertise, right, uh, and so it's really just like these entrepreneurs are like, I'm not trying to exit, I'm not trying to have a growth partner, I need capital, and I prefer your capital to somebody else's, and we basically had so much of that, they were like, we should probably just, just spin this up, and the check sizes are not that big, and so I don't even really need to raise a fund to do, like I, like I can just do it on my own.
Yeah, exactly. So, um, that's worked out really well. We've already done like I want to say like six or eight deals.
Oh wow, that's fast.
Yeah, I know. Just in the last like two months. So like it's, it's heating up really pretty quickly, which is great, or I'll just lose my ass and we'll find out, but like, yeah, one where, yeah, I've deployed a lot of money. Like congratulations, you know, cuz it's funny because in the investing world, for those who don't know this, uh, in a fund structure you basically are incentivized to deploy capital.
Yeah. Job to put out money. Yeah. So it's kind of interesting because like the traditional, like clapping of hands that happens when it's all your money, it's actually like, well, I, I took a lot of swings, we'll see. You don't really have LPs, your LPs are yourself.
That's why so cool. I've spent all my money.
Yeah, amazing. Yeah, um, yeah, I mean, fundamentally we operate 100% like a private equity group, and obviously the fund, the, the, the Acq, uh, Ventures operates like a VC, right? Like we have a, basically a, a general partner who just basically runs that, came from the Y Combinator world, like has really good deal flow on his own. Yeah, he sources a bunch of deals on his own outside of our network too, which I, you'll probably notice this a common theme is like, I want stuff that already works and that
I was like, okay, so if I were to solve for that, what would I do? I was like, well, if I could build the biggest business brand, then that would basically shrink into irrelevance, or make—sorry—shrink all of my problems or make them irrelevant by consequence. That was fundamentally why I decided to do it. You mentioned beginning you weren't even sure you wanted to do it. Do you enjoy having over a million followers now? In that piece of accomplishment, um, there are pros and there are cons, and right now there are more pros than cons. And if there's a day where I feel like there are more cons than pros, I will stop. Right? I think there are some people who really love attention and love fame and things like that. I don't think I am that person, and I feel like I have evidence to support that, uh, because I didn't do it for a long time when I think I had the opportunity to.
Right now, my content feeds thousands of families. First, from obviously what we do at acis.com, the holding company, but then also all of the, you know, I school like there's there's, you know, from a distributed uh perspective. If I were to quit in the future, I would try to make sure that I had backfilled my responsibility to those families, to make sure that that that vacuum, you know, didn't—that that it was filled. The pros of this are: you have recruiting. Talent becomes infinitely easier. The best people in the world at whatever they do, which is such such an underrated lever. Like I just can't I can't overstate this—was is lever number one. Number number two is you have the obvious thing is that you have lots of deal flow or customer flow, depending on whatever, you know, whatever whatever you sell. Those are really the big pros. You have some ancillary pros like, you know, if I go to a gym and drop in, like they usually know who I am and they'll give me some nicer treatment. And if I go to a restaurant, they probably know who I am and they'll they'll, you know, be nice about it. Um, those don't aren't super—some people like that.
The downsides are that what you sell is privacy, and so that's the that's the price that you give up. Sense is privacy is the price. And so, um, and one of the really tough parts and why I spent so much time thinking about this was that, um, it's it's it's kind of a it's a one-way door. Yeah, it's uh you can't undo it. There's no control Z. Alex, thanks so much for making time. That's a WP 100% rock and roll boom. That's great. Yeah.