YouSaid · the spoken record

Bryan Johnson

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2015-06-12
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2015-06-12
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  1. “So, if we talked about, I'm trying to think of like a recurring theme that came up, maybe if it came up like two or three times, I could say like, look, like this honesty is like my deal because you guys have brought this up two or three times now. I've not done something about it that's adequate. So clearly I'm not doing what I should be doing because you're doing your job of being honest and transparent with me. I have not taken the responsibility of actually acting on this. So I'm going to go think about this, put together a plan and do it. But in the meantime, like this is my problem and my mistake. So I try to own things like that. Got it.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “In either case. So, one, I think it's a disposition. I try to be self-deprecating where I would make fun of myself for things I did or mistakes I'd made. I'd try to openly broadcast those so that they felt comfortable that I owned up and I wasn't sensitive about it. And then I would just, I guess in dialogue, I would try to typically own things myself to make them feel comfortable that they could bring it up. We could discuss it openly.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Company Christmas Party, we're in the buffet line. And I say, so like, how's, you know, so-and-so doing? He's four months in and how's he enjoying life? And she says, It's amazing. He is happy. And he comes home and he's energized and he loves his co-workers. And it's so different from what he felt before. And I thought, yes, like this is the data I want. I want to know the significant other knows the most about how that person feels in life based upon what they do on a daily basis. And so it was a constant quest of trying to find out the right data source of how people feel in life to build an exceptional company and knowing where to go for that data and how to get it. Now, of course, I couldn't go interview everyone all the time. It would be awkward. But just knowing that the data sources were out there to gather to build a good team.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “And it was great because he was a really hard question to answer. And so I encourage brutal, honest feedback. And if they criticize me, even better, right? If they could criticize me, then anything was for open game. But one thing I was at this Christmas party one year and I was talking to the significant other of one of my employees.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Exactly. The thing is true in life is that everyone always has a pebble in their shoe. Always, right? There's something bothering us. And that sometimes by just acknowledging it, it addresses the problem. But it seemed like every week we'd build up this tension in the startup and we, you know, in the company, and if we addressed it openly in the town hall setting, it'd be great. And so I would like these long pauses go and someone would find their raise their hand and say, like, all right, like, I'm really bothered that we hired someone for this role instead of promoting some of them's internally, right? Going on”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Exactly. So, like, I knew there's like one or two things on everyone's minds. I could feel the pressure build all week, right? I mean, the one thing I learned”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “So one thing I focused on a lot was the second goal, which was that employees would say it was the best place they ever worked. And it was this ongoing quest to figure out how to make that happen. Again, my goal in my mind was they go home and rave about what they do on a daily basis. They feel good in life, right? They love it. And so I always wanted to know what people were feeling and thinking because if I didn't know that, then I couldn't change or build certain things. And so I tried all the normal things of like we did town halls every week. And it was more like group therapy than it was company updates where I would let these long, awkward silences persist until like the thing came up that everyone was worried about or they wanted to talk about but no one dared.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Oh, yeah, sorry. So they were programming their software to speak to our software. And there was a certain way that they would do that. And so a lot of the value of how that's done would be is our software easy to work with. Does it make sense? Yeah.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “The being exceptional, this was the thing I said continually again and again internally is that if we paid attention to Creating an environment where people who interacted with us would walk away and say unbelievable, right? The software is amazing, the support is amazing that I just love this company. And it's so much so that I want to write them a love letter. If we solve that, everything else will take care of itself because they'd walk away and in that night when they're out with their friend getting a beer, they're going to bring us up because they have this amazing experience with us where we solved all their problems. And we did small things like we would, the integration team, we would see when someone was coding to the API. And if they were having problems with it, we'd reach out and say, hey, like we see you're coding to the API and they're having problems. Can we help? What? Like who does that? Who proactively reaches out? So we try to do these small things that created these really great experiences for people.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “So we did do some outbound. Like we did track a lot of these companies down, but most of these companies signed up on their own that we just found out they were customers when they were going through the underwriting process. But we did target some of these companies individually, but most of it was organic.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Primary competitors. Initially, it was the old guard like Cybersource and authorized.net and then processors like first data and global, which were really great targets because they were dinosaurs in technology. And then Stripe launched, I think, about a year or two after us. And they're obviously a fantastic company. And so they became Formidable competitors. And then, of course, PayPal was always there doing their thing”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “We did. We had some of the best companies in the whole world using us and that their growth fueled of credibility, of course, in our brand that we were able to provide great services to them. So we had this exceptional client base. That's what it was. Once these guys hit their growth trajectories, right? And then once the reputation started spreading that we were a great provider. People loved using our service. It just really built upon itself.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Yeah, so Let me think. So, we got as customers within the first couple years, 37 signals, GitHub, Uber, Airbnb, Living Social when they were on their tear. I mean, we had so many of the fastest.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Jason and David were amazingly good to us. They would tweet out all the time and they referred out all their friends. They were fantastic. And so we basically built the business on word of mouth because we tried so incredibly hard to be exceptional what we did. So they come on and they would love what we built and how we treated them and they would tell others.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “No, I found actually a couple academic research papers. That actually measured sociability and interconnectedness and had like these maps, the diagrams that showed where these nodes were and how they interconnected. And then I focused on Ruby on Rails and we got a couple leaders in there like 37 signals and a few other GitHub. That's a good one to have.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Right, exactly. And so what I did is I knew that software engineers were the target, that I needed to appeal to them. And I knew there were different communities, like Python.NET, Ruby on Rails, Java. They all hung out in these different communities. And each community had certain characteristics about how they work together, how collaborative they were, how chatty they were. And my theory was if I could find a community of engineers that were chatty and that helped each other through a word of mouth referral basis and I could get a few of the leaders in that group to come on board, then it would spread throughout the community. And then we'd go to adjacencies. And so I did this analysis of looking at the characteristics and I found that Ruby on Rails was the most conducive, that they were very tight.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Larger corporations, yeah, make their pay grade jump. It was just dramatic. And so I guess I would say to my son that the skills you need to succeed in a certain track of life may not require that education, that the course out of persistence and determination, and then just the ability to learn and adapt quickly are much better suited for trying to do this. I mean, that's not to say that education is not helpful. There certainly is in certain regards, but”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “So I remember the very first case study we did in school was about these guys who were, they came up with think of the new golf ball that was better than the golf balls. And it was about their struggle over two-year period of time to work through patents and IP and all the distribution channels and stuff like that. And then we got together with a study group to talk about the case. And there were certain questions we were trying to answer. I forget what they were. But in my group, there were five of us, and we were contemplating things like cost models and distribution channels. And in my mind, immediately went to like how are these people paying for their rent? Are there marriages still intact? Are they emotionally just too stressed out to function? The way I thought was so colored by my experience as an entrepreneur. And it was such a dramatic difference in how my peers thought coming in.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “I have mixed feelings about it. School I was always so bored to school because I felt like the data rate was so slow. It was like a 56K connection, right? Sitting in the classroom and the pace of speech and the data, it just, I wanted like a gig data transfer rate. I wanted to learn so much faster. And so school was just boring to me. And I mean, the NBA was helpful, but I don't know. I guess I learned in different ways, mostly from doing. And I'd been in the trenches of entrepreneurship my whole life. And that's really how I prefer to learn. Then, of course, reading on my own and stuff like that.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Yeah, right. So we probably share a mutual love So in 1914 he went on the trans imperial Antarctic expedition where he tried to cross coast to coast the south pole, Antarctica. And what I like about Shackleton, there's a whole bunch of things I like about Shackleton, but basically to this question is when he imagined what he wanted to do in the world, he chose the most audacious thing imaginable. At the time it was nearly inconceivable that somebody could do that. And he chose to do it and he prepped and he did it and they failed in their endeavor, right? But he's not remembered as a failure. He's remembered as the grit and how they actually overcame all the obstacles that came about during the expedition. He's hugely inspirational in my life because I apply what I call the Shackleton Sniff test to everything I do in life. That I contemplate if I'm going about on this endeavor, doesn't meet the threshold that Shackleton applied.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Well, so it was a big decision because I think I was 28 at the time and I grew up poor. We'd have any money. And as an entrepreneur, of course, I had never had any money. And so I've been broke my entire life. And at this point, we were making really good money. We were making, I think, something like, I don't know, $200,000 in net income a year. So it was the first time I actually made money my entire life and deciding to become a software shop meant we were pouring back all the cash back into the business because I was bootstrapping. I hadn't take any outside capital. And so it was a huge decision on what to do. But it was also, though, I knew that I intuitively knew the industry was broken. I intuitively knew that if we got the right people there, we could build good software. And so to me, it was a must go.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “So it's funny being this small company, I went through this thought process of like, hey, I'm small and I'm insecure, so I'm going to come up with like National Federation of Merchant Services or using big words that connotate strength and stability. And nothing felt right. And I just read the biography of John Adams. who was born in Braintree, Massachusetts, and I really admired John for his contributions to the world. And so I wanted to come up with a name that was meaningful to me personally, and it was Braintree.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “It was first, yeah, which had this great psychological effect, and then the please do apply if. We wanted people to jump out of their seats and say, this is the environment I've been dying to be in. Because the most exceptional people love to work with exceptional people and they have a hard time dealing with people who are not that exceptional. And so if you build critical math around everyone around you, it's just really good, then it feeds upon itself. And so we wanted to put that signal out to say if you feel like this in your current job, like you're the best guy in the whole company, your best gal in the whole company. And everyone else around you is kind of driving you nuts. Like, you can come over here and feel really good about what you do every day and who you work with.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “So, the very first statement was, I will pay you $5,000 if you refer the most capable person you know. And then below it, it would say, please do not apply if. And we'd list out characteristics of people who just weren't compatible with our environment. And so we wanted to be Clearly distinctive in who we were, and then we had a section that said please do apply if. And so the goal was”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “So, I guess for non-engineers, I would write these posts on Craigslist to recruit people. And at the very top of the page, so the assumption was first, the person reading your job ad is not the person you want to hire.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “On the technical side, sure, there's a lot on the personality side. So what I would try to communicate when we hired someone was that we, payments was not necessarily changed in the world. It wasn't like we're going to provide cleaner water for everyone in the world or whatever else. The stated objective that we were going to build an exceptional company, like a company with a soul that we really cared about. And so I wanted people who really cared about what they did, the quality, the product, the quality interactions working with other engineers. So we're in it for the long term. And so I tried to flesh that out in interviews of we're here to do something epic and special. So if that appeals to you, great. If not, then...”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Yeah, that's right. And then the so when I started Braintree, I had three main goals. One is that I wanted us to be the best payment spider in the world for developers. Two, that I wanted our employees to say it was the best company they'd ever worked for. And three, that our customers would write us love letters. And so on the employee side, I wanted people to literally go home and rave about work, to be so excited about the stuff they were working on and what they did and how they did it in their peers. And so having high quality engineers was really important because no one likes to work with someone who is incompetent or causing a problem. So it was extremely important we got exceptional people to work”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “No, I wasn't. I wasn't connected to software engineers at all, actually. And so I had one friend who I trusted as a good developer. He had a high, you know, he has a good reputation. And I would post jobs online. And then he would help me interview these people as they came in. And as I listened to the questions he asked and how he discerned what made a good engineer, I learned over time how to decipher. And it took me a couple hires to get down. And then I found a couple really good core engineers. And I now had a benchmark to know what exactly to hire, both in personality but also coding skills. And we could then build it from there.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “It was actually Matt Maloney and Mike Evans from Grubhub. They just went public and Corran Gohl, who was a local entrepreneur. But there was like five or six of us and people were just getting together to have breakfast. And he and I hit it off and he was clearly a great guy. I mean, he had the right disposition, the insights. He was advising people around the table. He was an advisor for Matt and Mike at Grubhub. And he came on, and he was my only advisor for the whole duration of when I was building Braintree.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “So the co founder, or the founder of OpenTable, Chuck Templeton, was an advisor, and he knew of the problem they had internally where they had this huge global network of restaurants and they stored credit card data when people made reservations. And they had the compliance issue. And so they came to us and they said, like, we have this big problem. And we said, we can fix it. And of course, like I had no idea if I could fix it. But we did a deal with them. And that's when we became a software company. But it was a bet the company decision.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Yeah, so we what I did to start Braintree is I had these customers in Utah. I was in Chicago at the time where I built Braintree in Chicago and I went back to my 10 best customers in Utah, best meaning like most loyal and also making me the most amount of money. And I said, hey, I just started this company Braintree. I would love it if you switched over your processing to me. And it was restaurants and retailers, so it was just terminals. I could use backend processors for it. I think I had like nine out of ten say yes, if I remember right. And they collectively made me $6,200 a month. And it was enough for me to get going, hire some part-time help, and start the company. And the biggest transition we had is open table showed up, and they said, hey, we have 11,000 restaurants around the world.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Just so ripe for the right technology and the right disposition as a company to be honest and transparent and treat customers so they were thrilled.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “I did it for a year, and It was amazing because it was this terribly broken world where the technology just was years behind and no one trusted the different providers. It was fragmented with hundreds of providers. And after doing it, I thought this is a perfect industry to start a company. And so I started Braintree.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “We will generally be surprised at how seamlessly the technologies rolled throughout society and how we just interact as we normally would. It will appeal to our emotions and all these things we read”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “I don't think I'm qualified to answer. I will say that. The other day I watched a video online where robots were walking along and then people were kicking the robots or tripping them or doing something to put up an obstacle. And I had this emotional reaction watching this happen, even though I knew they were robots, but watching humans be cruel to robots, this visceral reaction inside of me. And so as you talk about X Machina and the progression of robotics to read our emotions and for us interact with them, the emotions real, right? Our ability to connect with robots is significant as I watch my kids interact with Siri and even other low tech computer interfaces. I think that”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Yeah, I don't know. I guess I've always had an interest in people because I'm curious and I've always enjoyed friendships. And I don't know if I could even articulate this. It's just this subconscious process that happens that I read, whatever the hundreds of data points that you read when you meet someone. And you intuitively feel like, yeah, I could trust this person. And the more you gather, of course, the higher your confidence level becomes. And of course, I make mistakes, like everyone else. But I think it's a fairly accurate, I think most people can read that.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “That they had to be genuine. It couldn't be that they were manipulating them into believing them. It had to be truthful, right? That if I trusted you, that you were saying something that I could believe you and that would be true tomorrow as well. So I think that sincerity and being genuine go a long ways. And I think even it spans differences of personalities and experiences in life. But if someone feels like someone is really trustworthy”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Exactly. Bottom floor small shops. And Fannie Mae came in. They were our equity investor. We really put together a great project. The single biggest flaw was storage space. So empty nesters showed up to buy and there wasn't sufficient storage.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “So I'm really proud of actually of what we did. We launched a $50 million mixed-ups project in one of the best places in Utah.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “Yeah, like leave. So I would say, Tim, if you give me three minutes of your time, I will give you $100 if you don't say yes to using my service. And usually they'd say like, okay, that's interesting. Like, what does this guy have to offer? And I would open my pitch book and I'd walk him through the industry. Here are the providers. Here's what they do. Here's how they do it. Here's what I do. I'm the same as everyone else, except for with me, you get, you know, honesty and transparency and great customer support. And so I became this company's number one salesperson. I broke all their sales records following this really simple formula of just selling honesty and transparency in a broken industry.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “But to your point on the sale side I would go to inside a business. I figured out pretty quickly the industry was really messed up. The technology was terrible. And people were just generally plagued by the industry because it was just unscrupulous. All this dishonesty and complexity. And so I figured out that was the hook because my product had zero differentiation. It was exactly the same as 500 other providers that walked in the door every day. And so I'd walk in, I'd say, all right, Tim right when you saw me walking in, you'd be like, all right, sales guy, all right, not interested. I've got stuff to do. Then when you heard me say credit card processing, it's like, please leave.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Yes, or mostly change. Everyone already had existing service. Got it. And so the requirement was like if you could fog a mirror, you could work through these guys. It's 100% commission. Like, what's they don't care if you don't succeed? Right, right.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “I do, and I'm empathetic to it. I totally am. So at this point, I have no income. I have a child at home. And so I need to make ends meet. And so I find this job posting, again, I think it's Monster. It was selling credit card processing door to door. And basically, it was like, if you can build a business.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “To a player. And then I saw the newspaper one day. I had a list of the 50 richest people in Utah. And I thought, bingo, like that's what it is. I will write an email to these 50 people. I'll say, I'm young, I'm smart, I'm trying to become an entrepreneur, but I just need some money on the sides. I'll be coming a right-hand man. I'll do whatever you want me to do. And no one responded. So at this point, I'm like totally desperate.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “Yes. And we had revenue. So we actually. Built something, but in reality, like we were not set up to succeed. So that failed. And then on the hills of that, I started, I joined another guy to do real estate development. And the short of that is that failed because of some bad decisions we made. And so without income for two years, I was dead broke. And so I applied for 60 jobs and found a monster and the other job sites at the time. Nobody would hire me. I think it was so clear that I was, I had no intention of staying a long time. I tried to make the resume look like it, but just never was the case. So nobody would even give me an interview.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Well, the short version is the cell phone company went remarkably well, but it was not going to make me enough money to retire by thirty. So I had to find something bigger. So I started a voiceover IP company with three founders. And it was just before Skype and Vonage. And the short of that is we had the wrong team, wrong product, wrong timing. Sounds perfect. We did everything wrong. No, we did have a pro. We actually built something. We got customers.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “No kidding. When somebody opened the door, well, I was able testing the different approaches. I could walk throughout campus and ask students. I could walk door to door. So this was my second day. And this was the day to test going up and down the street. So yeah, it was, do you have cell phone service? And if you don't, then I've got a plan for you.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “And she had screamed two screaming kids, and I had this thought, I thought, wait a second, if I'm selling phones for him, why can't others sell phones for me? And I left the cell, I ran home, and I spent almost two solid days figuring out how to become a wholesale provider of cell phone service. And I figured it out and I started a company. And now I changed the commission structure. So now I was making $300 per activation. And it was the first company I started, and I hired college students to sell phones for me. And I paid my way through college doing that.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “So I was trying to find a cell phone and I was really frugal. I've always been very frugal. And I found this guy in the yellow pages. I met him at the mall and I bought a cell phone that was super cheap. And he said, hey, you look like you're smart and energetic. Why don't you come sell phones for me? I'll pay you $40 per activation. And I thought, perfect. I never understood this whole idea that I would trade 60 minutes of my time for $8.25 an hour. I seem crazy to me. And so he said that to me. I thought, okay, I'll make $80 an hour. I can do two.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “Was it before that? Okay. Well, because I wasn't good at necessarily great at school or science or biology. I didn't really have any skills of note. And so I figured, you know, what I do have is I'm persistent, I'm determined, and I'm smart enough that I can figure stuff out on the fly. And so entrepreneurship seems like a good path for me.”

    2015-06-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #81: The Rags to Riches Philosopher: Bryan Johnson's Path to $800 Million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT