YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Mayer

lines on the record: 86
first: 2019-03-12
most recent: 2019-03-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Okay, so how do we decide on the form factor? Well, first of all, it had to be easy to build because I'm not a hardware engineer. I don't think I really knew what voltage and current even were when I started this. I didn't really pick something that I knew how to do.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bias because we're doing it because I'm not because we're doing it very early in the building process. Oh, yeah. Which, by the way, people talk a lot can I swear on your show? Yeah, sure, yeah. People talk a lot of shit about how I built this and what they call entrepreneur porn. I honestly think, yeah, there is some aspect of truth to that, but at the same time, who else would you rather”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think people have Stockholm syndrome to the way grocery works now. You know, you're like, oh, look at this. I only have to fill out a ton of web forms for 10 minutes instead of driving down to the store. And then it arrives two hours later. Wow, this is great. I actually don't think it's great. I don't like filling out web forms. I think it's only marginally better than going to the store. So I guess I'm biased, but I think what we're doing is much better because it arrives before you even know you needed it. So it sort of removes this whole problem that maybe people don't really know that they have, but once people figure out that they can get rid of this problem, they're really happy.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and that's why you don't see subscriptions for all of the repeatedly purchased items in people's houses. I saw this study that the average grocery consumer buys only 13 SKUs every week. So people are buying the same stuff over and over again, and people go to the grocery stores a couple times a week just to get the same stuff. And that's the idea behind bottomless is it's ridiculous. It's the same products. The information problem in a lot of retail is do you want a product or not? But with the vast majority of grocery items, the answer is yes, I do want that product. I want it all the time. So that's no longer the information problem. The information problem is when do we ship it? And so I think we can solve that for a lot of things.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, is a video call, where is he going? He comes back. He has two fists full of razors that he got from some subscription service. And he's like, you'd be surprised. I was surprised. So fundamentally, humans are not predictable creatures and our consumption of various things are not predictable. Even people that drink coffee at home every day, you know, you might run out of the house one day or you might have guests. It turns out that even very consistent consumers for us, if we were to put them on a set subscription schedule, they would get off very fast within like three or four shipments. The timing would be wrong.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, people are totally variable in their consumption. It's all over the map. And even people that consume regularly every day will see inflection points where suddenly they start consuming faster or slower. And definitely people will go on vacation. And then we automatically sort of like don't ship for you because you're flatlining. So yeah, when I started this, I thought that we would have to focus on things that were very, very consumed. Coffee for some people, you can imagine other examples. And I remember I was doing a pitch to somebody for the business and I was telling them, well, coffee works really well, but it wouldn't work for something like razors. That's why dollar shave club worked. There was this massive subscription boom after Dollar Shave Club, and it turns out like only a couple companies actually worked. And it's something that you actually can just use until you have to throw it away. You know, that's not true for most things. But like, I was telling him with total confidence that nobody's ever going to want bottomless for razors. And he's like, hold on a second.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Similarly, I think making stock levels and consumption speed legible will actually make subscriptions a reality in a lot more cases than currently exist. It'll definitely expand the market if you have subscriptions that actually work.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anytime you can make something important legible to computers, you can change the world. If you look at all of the revolutions that happened after smartphones got significant penetration, it was because suddenly people's locations were legible and the world around them was legible with cameras. Suddenly you have Uber, Instagram, all these things. So fundamentally, we're making the stock level in your house of coffee legible to us. And then eventually to coffee sellers and not just your level, but also using those levels, we can figure out how fast you're going through it. So previously where you have taxis, people's location isn't legible. People have to call to get a taxi and then the dispatcher has to call a taxi driver. And it's this whole laborious process. Then with Uber, when you make everything legible to a network, suddenly it's much more efficient and suddenly you see people using taxis a lot more than they used to.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's really funny. It almost sounds trivially simple, but it's essentially a smart subscription that figures out the perfect time to ship you your next order using a weight sensor. So the weight sensor essentially just captures how much you have and how fast you're going through it. And so therefore, it's able to ship you at the right time rather than just typical subscription, which just ships you on a monthly or weekly schedule. And we're starting with fresh coffee. Right now we're a coffee company in the future. Who knows?”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't have to be code, it can be virtually anything, and you can have teachers as helpers while students are learning at their own pace. And that would, I know people have wanted to do that for a long time, and that might just be one of those ideas that failed for a long time because there were good reasons why it didn't work, but now it might work. I would just recommend people to actually try to learn things themselves rather than pay somebody.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have this system of education where essentially everybody needs to learn at the same pace, and it makes sense. It's like a batch process, batch processes are more efficient. So to the degree that information needs to be coming from the teacher, from one source, then you need to have batch processing of students. Otherwise, it's very inefficient to have one-to-one teacher-student relationships. Up until the moment where self-education was really possible, you absolutely need to have the system of education that we have today. Otherwise, it's way too expensive. So you have this system where the teacher teaches to the median are probably slightly above the median, but trying to get as many kids covered in the bell curve as possible by any lesson, which is okay. It makes sense. You lose the kids at the top and you lose the kids at the bottom, but that's what you have to do. Nowadays, self-education is absolutely possible. I've completely taught myself code, but it...”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, if you read something that is still being recommended by people 10 years later, anytime you get a book recommendation for something that's 30 years old, if it's 30 years old or 1,000 years old, you should fill your brain with that stuff as much as you can.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't you have to be informed? Some version of that, yeah. Yeah. You actually are uninformed if you're reading daily news. Because it's completely out of date. I mean, news is good if it's weekly or monthly news, perhaps, or quarterly. That almost isn't news anymore, but there is definitely”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is unlikely to be a source of solid insight more than a day from now. You know, it seems really simple. But if it's not going to matter tomorrow, why would you want to consume that information today because the shelf life of the information you consume is going to be so short? The stuff in your brain is just going to be constantly out of date and useless, basically.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, really? Inside baseball, but to get back to information sources, it's much more important for people to cut out bad information than it is for them to seek out good information. I'm imagining there's so many people out there that want to learn and educate themselves and they spend 95% of their time just consuming junk news articles online. And then they sit down to read this book. Recommended on some podcasts. Like, that's not going to get you very far. You're way better off cutting out all of that other stuff and then just reading what interests you. And whether that's books or podcasts or social media, as long as you curate your social media feed to remove all the garbage, I guarantee you, you can build a Twitter feed that is very high quality by just removing anybody that tweets about the Democrats or the Republicans.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That much better than other sources. I mean, obviously, you have editors, but there's a lot of really garbage books out there just because somebody has a lot of distribution. They're famous. Those aren't that great. For instance, I'm a big fan of CS183 notes that Blake Masters took on the class that was zero to one source material. Yeah, exactly. The zero-to-one source material. And like, I think I've read that like three or four times. And I bought zero to one. And I actually think zero to one is worse. Then the Tumblr blog, and there's a lot of great writers out there that write a lot of good stuff. I could name some. There's Jerry Newman. His blog is really great. It's so good. There's a lot of really, really great blogs out there. Kevin Simmers' blog is good.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I've noticed that a vast majority of podcasts, a guest, will be asked for book recommendations and almost everybody will give lots of book recommendations. And I'm guessing that most of those people don't read that many books or maybe read like a couple books a quarter. That's probably the medium. Okay, that's good. That's good. Yeah, I noticed there's not much about books in the modern age that would make the quality of information in them.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was kind of hoping you would ask me for book recommendations so that I could explicitly not give any book recommendations. Now's your chance. Yeah, now's my chance. I'm going to answer the question that I wanted to be asked.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in the shower and I was sitting there thinking oh, should the team trade X player or would it be better if a head coach took this player and put them in the rotation? And I had this epiphany that is this what I wanted was hijacked? No, is this what I want the stuff of my thought to be? Is this what I want to be having an epiphany about? Am I adding any value to my life or the lives of other people by having an insight about the configuration of what players play at what time in some regional sports team? I'm really not, to get back to, I think, what the original question was social capital formation through like content creation, you're not going to be able to get very far unless you have really good quality information coming into your mind, then therefore are able to transform it into good quality content.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that originality is important, and in order to achieve some degree of originality, you need to have an original information diet. You're not really that special. If you consume the same information as everybody else, how are you going to come up with unique ideas? Maybe you can. Like maybe you're such a fantastic algorithm that you can combine those in a unique way. But fundamentally, it's unlikely. So if you can find a way to try to inject random unique interesting things into your mind at a regular point and also try to regularly inject good content into your mind. I know a lot of people that basically spend 90% of their information consumption on sports and serial TV shows and stuff like that. Then they try to come up with unique insights about tech or business. And it's like good luck, man. I started cutting out a lot of what I consider junk information when one day.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The traditional ways of building social capital are definitely useful if you can get a Harvard degree or a Stanford degree, of course, but even then they can only be so valuable because they're being minted. You're still replaceable with another Harvard MBA. But if you can create social capital in a totally unique way, you're totally irreplaceable. And that is much more valuable. Even if what you're doing, if you imagine that it's more valuable than credential that is stamped out, almost an industrial process, you can do something that's actually less impressive than a Harvard MBA. For instance, for me, I've built up a number of pseudonymous accounts. Maybe doing that is actually not as impressive as being like a Harvard undergrad and like a Stanford MBA or whatever it may be.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're just one of the average, you have to understand, like, you're one of the average people out there. And by the time the contrarian idea hits your mind, assuming that you didn't come up with yourself, that you found it online or you read about it, it's not contrarian anymore. And it's actually probably less likely to work than mainstream. Because contrarian ideas, they're contingent and the opportunity vanishes once people discover it.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who knew what the right application of the internet or any particular technology was? So it's definitely good for people to explore. But you see these trend falling. Like, for instance, I've heard on your podcast people talking about value investing and how value investing became very popular after the dot-com bubble. But now there's probably just not much alpha left unless you have some other unique insight. So I think you have to be careful following trends. And in particular, contrarian ideas, which is sort of counterintuitive. You would think contrarian ideas are a way to avoid the trend. By the time that you hear them, they're not contrarian anymore by definition.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That every company should be doing computer vision. For instance, bottomless is using weight based sensors to restock. And if I had a nickel for every person who's told us we should do computer vision, we would already have raised our series, like our C rounds. But fundamentally, I don't think computer vision is going to work in people's cabinets or fridges or wherever it may be. I fundamentally think it's not the right technology, but that doesn't mean you're not going to see everyone trying every possible computer vision thing they can, which isn't a bad thing, right? Who knew?”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you hit the nail on the head that basically the keys to the castle are there and available to anyone. And, you know, I'm not sure that there's that much that I can add because it's already out there. The market for ideas and business strategy is pretty efficient. Berkshire, Hathaway, and like Amazon.com shareholder letters. They basically give it away for free. The only thing that isn't free is actually executing on that. And the judgment to choose the right strategy. And, you know, I think people get infatuated with certain strategies. You see things that become popular and then everybody wants to do it, both in the business world and the technology world. For instance, right now computer vision is really hot because suddenly you can make all of these real world things legible. Yeah, fundamentally the real world has now become legible to computers and to the internet through cameras. But that doesn't mean”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it wasn't a conscious decision. I just always thinking about businesses and random business ideas and just obsessed with business strategy or whatever, like reading whatever I could come across. So it wasn't really so much of a progression as just stumbling upon an idea that I couldn't get out of my mind that I thought could potentially be very powerful. And that's what eventually drove me to leave where I was working at the time to start bottomless. I was so taken. I was infatuated with the concept and the potential of what the future could look like if we were able to really attack the idea.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Independent movie theaters in my town. Not an interesting product, but I wanted it. So I sat down to build it and I thought it was just sort of Quixotic attempt that I would abandon. But I made such rapid progress on it. And it turns out there's an example for exactly how to do this. And you can use all of these libraries that already exist completely for free. And when I discovered the power of that, and I realized, holy crap, there's examples for literally anything that I want to do out there and there's free open source libraries that are fully documented that I can use. That really piqued my interest because it's just like a massive amount of leverage for a curious person that is just available. It's just sitting there open for anyone to figure out.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah Almost by definition, you shouldn't over-explore. You should explore the right amount. And the question is what is the right amount? Maybe you should over explore because most people don't explore enough. So in their mind, they should overexplore. The funny thing is you were asking about how I got into technology, and that was just a pure exploration. I had a really simple thing that I wanted, and I thought, why not just try to build it? And I was shocked at how easy it was to build. I don't think people understand how coding works today. There are tons of massively powerful libraries and technologies that are totally free to use and fully documented online with tons of examples all over the place for virtually anything that you want to do. People don't understand that. They think that you have to be some sort of wizard or some sort of incredibly educated person. Somebody needs to teach you to code. And that's absolutely not the case. So this was like a simple project. It was basically I wanted to show all of the show times for the...”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It just seems to me like technology is obviously the most fascinating thing going on right now. Human beings are tool builders. Everything around us was a technology once before. So building new technology is just really building the future. And I think it's the best way to make an impact.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there was a seminal moment, to be honest. I think it was just the momentum flipping from the wrong direction to the right direction. And once things are going in the right direction, habits really can compound. So once you have a solid foundation, you can start layering better habits on top. So I probably didn't quit binge watching TV shows until after I had got a solid exercise habit and was eating well and I felt well enough to do that.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Removing things and then adding things, exercising regularly personal health, your physical and mental health is upstream of your productivity, trying to be productive first is virtually impossible. No matter how ambitious you are, I was ambitious at the time and I just couldn't find a way to hack it because I didn't have the right foundation.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First step, there's just sort of like a constellation of habits that are useful, and some of them are removing things, and some of them are adding things. And I honestly think that the removing of things is easier, removing unhealthy food, removing binge watching of TV shows, removing junk information, junk food, just removing as much junk as I could, removing very unhealthy people from my life. Whenever I hear people say that, I sort of cringe. It sounds cruel, but in reality, it's very helpful to remove people from your life that don't really want to see you happy because we're social creatures and we want to make the people around us happy. And if the people around you don't want you to thrive, then you actually subconsciously internalize that and don't really want that for yourself either. So if you surround yourself with people that actually are happy when things go well for you, suddenly it starts to create this incentive in your social mind or whatever you would call it to do better.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Since then, and I would probably put almost all of that down to just getting my habits right. And I can get into that if you're curious.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most interesting thing about my background is probably less where I am today and more about my speed of progress in the last five years and where I was five years ago, a snapshot of where I was five years ago. I had dropped out of school. It was a unranked university, by the way. Like if you win, found my university on the US News and World Reports. It says unranked. And I had dropped out of that because I couldn't hack it there. I was working at a restaurant and watching dishes and doing prep work. And I was working with lot of Spanish speakers and they had a nickname for me. They would call me Tortuga, which means turtle in Spanish. So I wasn't even particularly succeeding at that. And if you flash forward to today, I consider myself a fairly productive person. I have this company with venture backing that's growing fast. I have a lot of distribution for my ideas online through various accounts. And so it's been quite a rapid clip of improvements.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Surprisingly, it doesn't matter whether my public identity is connected to my account at all. I don't think I've seen any difference. I myself am not a famous person because of it, but it's somewhat easy to transfer that social capital into the right places when necessary. And so it's somewhat overrated to accumulate social capital only under your own name. Like I still have control of the various accounts that I have, and they're still my own capital. It's like a Swiss bank account or whatever. Like I can transfer out of it whenever I want.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a lot of people assume that I do this because I want to sort of protect my real life identity from anything offensive, I might say. And that's not really the case. I mean, that's part of it. It is useful to have this firewall between anything you say online and your real personality. But the crux of it is that I just don't think who I am is that relevant to people out there in the world in terms of like what I'm saying why should people care about picture my face, a link to my LinkedIn, it's noise, and I think the best way to be successful with publishing online is to have the best signal to noise ratio. So you go to my account, you see nothing about me, you don't see a picture of me, you directly get to the content. So I guess, yeah, I just don't think my identity is the most relevant thing in the world.”
2019-03-12 · Invest Like the Best · Michael Mayer – Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee - [Invest Like the Best, EP.124] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source