YouSaid · the spoken record

Tren Griffin

lines on the record: 96
first: 2018-05-15
most recent: 2018-05-15
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

“Someplace. I mean, just all of the breaks I've had and all the things I've learned, his mom was spectacular, Mary. And, of course, all the things that's happened to Seattle because of Microsoft and me. But just him taking time to mentor me would be the simple answer. Taking the time to help a young person.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess just stuff that all the stuff that Bill Gates Sr. did for me taking time to have breakfast with a young person and just talk about life and talk about judgment and talk about getting involved in the community and the importance of just showing up. That's the title of his book is that. And just the mentoring time that this one man gave to me. I've written a post on what he meant to me, Bill Gates Sr. lessons from, and just hours and hours of lunches and breakfast and sessions where I was able to talk and he was able to come back and just sometimes him just listening to me. And so he's a giant person in my life. If it wasn't for that family, for the Gates family, I'd be working in plumbing supplies.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is like this conversation we're having today, which is for certain people, you know, having an interesting conversation, reading an interesting book, that's its own reward. And nobody taxes it. It's great stuff. You've got to keep it forever. You can learn from it. You can profit from it too, but it is interesting life is its own reward.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started doing this and I met this person, and they introduced me to this person, and I started doing this, and pretty soon I was in Afghanistan, and I was selling water to groups and water systems. And then private equity guy met me, and we started, you know, investing in South America. This thing is like, and you meet people who are older and you ask them about their lives, a lot of times you'll get a story like that, that it's just fantastical. You couldn't write it. You couldn't script it. And so life just unfolds and is dynamic. You can't predict stuff. We haven't even talked about all these issues about the difficulty of forecasting and predicting things. And so the good news is it's fascinating. There was this John Klees monologue that I was at recently, and he said, his favorite line is with a woman who was dying, sort of elderly English woman. They asked her what her last words and she said, This has all been very interesting.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. We could go on a talk forever. We are natural kindred spirits and we're always thinking about things and we're curious about things. And for somebody to have a career like mine, somebody comes in and says, well, I want to do what you're doing. That sounds pretty fun. And I'm saying, boy, I got lucky. And this thing fell together and that thing fell together. Like, how do you do that? And I guess my advice to them is usually, well, the way life works is usually one thing leads to another.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Smallish business are trying to do a first national brand of landscape supply. You're going to do better in that business if you're really passionate about that. You love plants, you love the organization, so your thing, you're stoked. Me, I'd rather drop a large rock on my foot than be a dentist. Don't have anything against dentists, and next time I'm in, I hope he doesn't take it out on me, you know, for give me a root canal I don't need because I was that way. But just for me, that's just not what I would want to do. Same thing over and over and over again. I wouldn't make it for me. But the important thing is be passionate about something if you're going to take that level of risk in your life because it is a huge risk. Most stuff fails. But that's evolution. Most evolutionary trails. Badly.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Passionate. Find something if you really love X. If you really love, you know, I read about some of somebody the other day was doing landscape supply roll-up.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no fallback. And you've got young kids and all those sorts of things. So I feel lucky that I chance to be a missionary. But if you can't be a missionary and you don't have all those things, it's the worst of all possible worlds. Because at least if you're a missionary and you don't have any fallback and whatever, at least you have your passion. And if it doesn't work out, Elisa said, well, I live my dream. To go out and throw yourself at something that you don't care about, that you were doing it just for the money. I mean, they're the worst CEOs. The worst CEOs in the world, founder and CEO. It's like, we're going to do this and we're all going to get rich. It's just, it doesn't work. Those people don't succeed. They can. I'm not saying it never happens, but they don't. They're not the people you want to invest in. Certainly, if you ever see that with me, it's like, nope. But having that passion about that is essential. So if you're going to take that level of risk”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you can do the things you really want to do. And then they didn't have a choice, or they had to support their family or whatever it was, and they got into something they're just doing it and they hate it. There's that, but then there's also just not ever having seen somebody who was like truly stoked to say, I'm going to go do this, I'm going to go create this payment system for remittance overseas or whatever it is. What's their true passion? They've never had a model for it. And then the third piece is I won the lottery. I had models to see I got a college without any debt. I had great mentors. One thing after another. And I also had some money put away. And it's one thing for me to go out and do that startup when I have a little money put away. It's another thing to put up with you don't got”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think some of it is, first of all, some people grew up in an environment where the job is just a place where you go so you can get home. They just don't know. Get to the lake and the speedboat. And they just think that work is something you do.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you don't love the idea of it. You don't love the underlying technology. You don't love the math. You don't love the product. You don't love the thing. It's like if you're going to do something and you're going to throw yourself into it and it's going to dominate your life for like seven years. And those people around you, you're going to be with constantly. And you're in those same life. Why would you do something that you weren't like super, super passionate about, that you didn't want to throw yourself into? And that's what investors look for because those people get over the hard times. Mercenaries say, oh, this is bullshit. I'm out of here. And so they might have succeeded if they just hung in. And I guess the last piece is...”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a lost opportunity to get really professional, value added money. And then the other thing is be a missionary. Don't be sitting around in your office and saying, well, Bitcoin's hot, I don't think I'll go do that.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think on the young founder thing, I think it's really critical to think about who you raise money from because too many people think, okay, I'm going to raise some money and I can raise some money from my Uncle Fester and my Aunt Morticia and a couple of other friends of theirs or whatever. And it's not value-added money. You're not getting any intelligence from it. It's not going to help you do your A-round. And there may be going to be calling you all the time. And they have no idea that it's a 15 year, maybe 12-year, 10-year exit if it happens. And then you're maybe spoiling a relationship you have with your Uncle Fester, who you've loved since the Adams family days, you know, all these times that people are raising money where they're not raising money from professionals.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, but if you're a caring person, you care about these people, so you got to throw yourself into it. And it's like being on a great roller coaster.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or something, they just don't realize the odds. I know the odds. They don't realize that it's a power law. They don't understand. They heard about this one good one, and that sounds pretty good to them.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For five years, and you've got to be a dad at the same time and all those sorts of things. I will have felt a lie, but I also felt like I had to rally. And even though I was getting home late on Friday night, I had to be there at the swim meet or there, you know, whatever the event was for both my kids. And it's tough, but it did make me feel alive. You know, there's this whole idea of fear. And I think fear is a good thing. The absence of any fear is like you're dead. You got to have some tension in your life. And so that was the time where I was most terrified. Not terrified, just alive. Because if I messed up my assistant, I was not going to be able to make her mortgage. But the important thing was, I cared about her and her family, and I didn't want to screw up. And I think about founders out there today, they're all that way. And, you know, most businesses, startups, they don't make it. And if you're a feeling person, you feel horrible if you don't make it. And some people go into start.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I felt most alive in my career when I did the startup, when there was only four of us and we were going to build a system that was going to cost $9 billion when we have any money and we had to go out and do it. And nobody had ever thought about what was a clean slate. And I couldn't turn to anybody and say, you have to do this. And I think that life experience, I wouldn't trade it for anything, but it was hell on my health and some of my relationships. I had to go back and repair some things because you're just completely, you know, when you're flying 500,000 miles a year.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at Lean Startup or all these other processes or some of the things that we're talking about in A and all that, scientific method is really super, super powerful. And if you can instrument it and you got the modern processing and cloud power behind it, you can actually see doing more than ever. But I think in the end, though, somebody like you and I also need to go out on sales calls. And we also need to talk to some customers and sit in on some focus groups. And there's diversity required and you really need to get out there and sit with a customer. There's just nothing Bill Gates said once, unhappy customers are our greatest source of learning. This is back in the days of Microsoft Basic in the early days. But basically, you know, you just got to get out there. And being in a call center.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is stunning and the ability to turn that thing around. And if you have good systems, you can run up and run an experiment in a day, in an A-B test. If you're an instrument or an hour. Yeah, exactly. And that kind of thing allows you to test more doing than you've ever tested before. And what it is, is the scientific method on students.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is a magical time because so many devices are connected and so many processes are connected now that somebody like you and I, the two of us who read so much, have actually the ability to actually have data scientists and other people's statisticians. I'm sure you have some more coming for you right now, who can give you this feedback of these experiments and you can say, well, what if you did this? It actually works. Yeah. The velocity at which you can do that.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A big important concept that's really big in terms of the books you read. I know you're huge on that, but the books you read and the people you talk to and the friends you have, the team you recruit, some of the teams I've seen, like Craig Macau's team or the team at Microsoft Early, very, very different personalities, all of them. Difference between Bill and John Shirley and Frank Odette and Mike Maples, they're all very different. But as a team, they were like just magic because it all sort of gelled. And you can see it as sort of like pattern recognition, but you've never seen that exact pattern before, but you've seen it.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would sort of like there are certain people, particularly if they come out of consulting firms, that just love to talk, they can talk an issue to death. Well, I think we should do here, you know, and think about pivoting here and all that. And eventually someone's got to go out and sell some stuff. You got to make a sales call and you got to like not sell some stuff and get some feedback and actually have real data. And so the really great founders are doers. They roll up their sleeves and they do stuff. And like John Stanton, when Mascellite was out, he'd get on a plane and go there and he'd make sure it got fixed. They'd like to do stuff. And you need a mix of doers and thinkers and in your own mentality you need a mix of thinking and just all doing and no thinking is not going to have a good result. But all thinking and no doing isn't going to have a good result either. So this idea of diversity in the broadest possible sense in terms of what you do and how you think and who you read and how you listen, you know, diversity is.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Focus things on generating results, making sure you make quota, making sure you make the numbers. And he was a role model for a lot of other people.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stories and homilisms that someone's a good salesman, he could talk a dog off a meat truck, you know, things like that, but real operating.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We got some stuff to fix. But he's also, you can't measure something, it's hard to focus on it. There are plenty of things you can measure that you can fix. The whole thing about when you encounter a snake, shoot it. Don't write memos about it. You know, if you got a damn snake in front of you, shoot the thing. And then if you shoot it, and then don't write a lot more memos about, well, is it really dead? Is it still out there? It's like if you see a snake shoot it, he's got these other ones. The one that I love is sort of off color, but a little bit the saying of the south, which is if someone comes up to you and said, here's this horseshit. Would you keep this for me? You know, would you hold this in your hands for me? And a lot of life is that way. Someone's saying, here's this trouble. Will you please have this? And you have the ability to say, well, no, that's modifying horseshit you got there, but I'm not grabbing it. That's yours. I'll give you some advice about it, and I'm going to get out of here quickly because it kind of smells, but I'm not going to grab that from me just because you asked me. And he's got all these southern...”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They got out of their chair and they go find out. They go visit and meet with the infantry. Like in macabre in the old days, it was like, if you were exhibiting tea in the officers club kind of mentality, they forced you to spend a whole day in the call center. There's nothing like a whole day in a call center to give you a good sense of what the customers are thinking about your product. Do you have product market fit? You come out a day like that like, holy crap.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and then he came to McCaw to basically, Craig was building a roll-up company, but it needed to have operations. It needed to make the trains run on time. He was there until the sale to AT&T, and then he went down to Netscape. And he's from the south. He's from Jackson, Mississippi down there. And he's just like a monster operator guy. And he just knows how to make things work. And what he knows is people in the field are out there trying to sell stuff. And they're at the point of moment of truth, tip of the spear, and he knows what the hell's going on. They're not some guy back, you know, sipping coffee yet. The officers club, you know, thinking, well, I think we should outflank these. They know what the hell's going on. Their tanks coming at us, you know, whatever. But it's the same thing in business. And Jim understands that. And the great operators, guys, I've seen like John Stanton was that way, which is...”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So this is classic, Jim, and the story of him is long history of, was it Federal Express, and they came to Macaw to turn Macaw into an operating company from an M&A company? He was a COO.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I feel sorry for them because it's going to be bad. And then I feel bad for society because these people are going to be old and poor and are going to be a negative externality for everybody. We don't want old, poor people. And so how do we prevent that? What's the right degree of education? How much of that should be Australia style where they have some things they have to do in terms of saving? All hard questions”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I've even thought about writing a post about what should a high school finance course look like, what should be in that class, who could teach it, should it be online? Could a high school sociology teacher segue to teach that? Probably not. So anyway, but the people who need it the most have it the least, and they don't know what to buy. And they're loading up on denticoin or, you know, it's just... This stuff is just mind-boggling.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who need an introduction to the basics of a business? And frankly, with my blog, I'd rather help a plumber in Akron than a hedge fund guy on the Because they're the people who are struggling, they don't know what to do, they're getting sold all kinds of rubbish, and they're getting these messages from people who are just trying to take them. So if I could reach a few of them with a biggie post or a post on Sammy Hagar or whoever, and then plus he just lightens it up, you know, because I got 120 posts when I did the biggie one, and now I'm up to like 275 or something. One a week, right? Yeah, yeah, one a week, every Saturday, you know, without fail, without break. But the point here is, though, How do you reach people and how do you teach young people?”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, Well, this biggie thing that was really popular, I can see the stats. And I bet it's a different audience, so maybe I can reach more people by saying, okay, well, I'm right about Wu Tang, I think it was next. And then there was Yeezy and Kendrick. And I go down the list. But the point was, I also did one about Sammy Hagar for equal opportunity time. Sure. I should probably do, you know. That was a good one. Some country Western one sooner. But the point is I'm trying to reach people.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, I can write one about anybody. And I said, The reason I can is because I don't think I've ever met anybody you can't learn something from. And that replies in what Talib calls inverse role models, which is some things you can learn from people is what not to do. And so somebody's example of somebody's life. But with Biggie, you go through his things and he was a street smart guy who pushed his way out of a situation that was very hard and he learned on the street how to sell, how to take care of himself, who his friends were and all that. And so I wrote the first one on Biggie and I said, I just felt pretty good. But also part of my blog, I'm not content marketing. I don't have any ads on it. There's no business book. All the problems with your charity. I'm just trying to teach as penance in a Charlie Munger-style way. He says it's penance. I got lucky, as Muhammad Ali said, part of rent and life or getting lucky is you got to pay back. So this teaching stuff for me is that way.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, anybody who's my age who has kids for a time in their life drove them in carpools to swim meets or whatever it was. And so that music was playing. So I actually know that music very well. Yeah. And particularly what would now be called old school. And I was in a situation and someone said, guy, you're writing all these posts of all these people. He said, I bet you couldn't write one about Biggie”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the positive sense, I'm always interested in what Reed Hastings is doing. I think it is sort of a brilliant move. I especially admire the bravery he had when he knew that he was going to have a massive wholesale transfer pricing power when he lost what's called the first sale doctrine on the discs in the mail where he was guaranteed a reasonable price. And he basically just did what they did in South America when the Contistadors landed, which is they burned the lifeboats. And they said, we're going to go all in, we're going to make this content. He's just brave. And he's not willing to just throw the chips down and say, this is what I'm going to do. And that level of spending and that bravery about this is customer acquisition cost and CAC, it's both. He uses that better content to acquire customers, not just that. And the LTV of that and the magnitude of the Betty's placing, that to me is just one of the most compelling stories in business because it's just sort of unprecedented bravery.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kids in high school, you know, the line is someone who doesn't understand probably the statistic is like a one-legged person in an ass-kicking. You need to understand probability statistics. And this is a Talib Mandelbrot. You go down the list of ideas.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And get the heck over to whatever country it is and have that growing experience. And the upside of that is just potentially so massive. So that core idea of probability and statistics, I think it should be taught before calculus in high school. I think it's even more important than Munger said recently, like two years ago. I've never used calculus in my whole career. You have to use it to send someone to the moon and engineers use it, all that kind of thing. But in terms of as an investor.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're going to be in a situation where maybe you haven't drunk that much, but your friend has, and your friend wants to drive you home. You need to understand this math, which is probability times magnitude, which is the Mobisan classic line. It's magnitude of correctness that matters. But the important point is even if there's only 0.1, 0.2% chance that your friend's going to drive into a tree and kill you, the magnitude is great. You just don't take that risk. You call me, I won't be mad at you, I'll come get you, but never take that risk. But then the converse of that is occasionally in your life, you're going to get an opportunity and someone's going to say, hey, the rotary's just offered you a scholarship to go spend your junior year in Fiji or France or someplace like that. And they're going to say, I miss my friends. I'm going to do this and that. But it's like, whoa, think about the positive optionality of going to another country, learning new things. And so it's the flip side of getting into a car with a drunk friend to take the ride home where you have big downside, you know, small magnitude. Just magnitude.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My children, it's sort of a Talib idea, but it's also a mandle idea or whatever, which is this whole idea, or Sam Zell, you know, they all have the same thing, which is this concept of convexity, which you would never use that word to teach it to iSchool. The way you tell the story is, okay, I know you're going to be in high school and you're going to go to parties and there's going to be drinking”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All in. It's just totally all in. And you're the first person there and there's no health insurance yet. You figured out things like that. Eventually you get it. But, you know, all that stuff. And it was also, you know, I was gone a lot. So I had to sell them on the fact that this was going to be worth it and it would be good for them and good for me and something I needed to do. And so I had to sell that. They'll forgive me someday.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the other thing, I guess another one I would say is when I decided to go with the fourth employee of a startup. I had to sell my family on the idea that I was going to go do something that I was going to be traveling 500,000 miles a year for five years and I was going to throw myself into it. And I was still going to be able to go to good dad and I still be there for him. So I had to sell that phase of my life to them. And I think they just did it because they love me and they'll forgive me for it someday. But I had to sell my family on doing a startup because startup is”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably selling ideas because that's my job and the ideas of the best sell I ever made was the internet bubble was upon us and things were rough and everybody who was a capital allocator who was an investor in private equity had to decide where to put their chips and we had to decide whether to put our chips in XO and fight a battle with Icon or whether to double down on Nexto and the best sell I ever made was to say we need to double down on Next Doll and we can let Icon have XO because there was never going to be there that level three was just going to be too problematic and it was just going to be a long haul and I proved to be right so I sort of believed in wireless and the scarcity but that was that was selling an idea and that's a lot of what you do as an investor is selling an idea as opposed to selling a new sell site or something like that but selling ideas requires its own skill and then”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably when he was doing recruiting David Byrne, who was a partner at Benchmark at one point, he could sell somebody on going to a startup from a big company. He was magic at selling, at selling like that, at a high level. He'd convince some CEO to leave AT&T and come run some little tiny startup. He had that ability to, it was also the big sale. I was in meetings with Erwin Jacobs was selling his first TDMA system. He was a good salesman. He was a different guy, had great math. He was very technical. He did sort of a great job selling. It's just sort of different in terms of that personal sale of selling someone. Again, you get this cushy job, you're top of the heap. You should leave that and go join this startup. That takes a salesperson.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The personality types I've seen succeed in almost every line job. I'm always shocked at how different they are. But, you know, there are certain things that you can just sense, and some people just know how to sell. And it's funny because to be a founder, you really have to know how to sell because you can't recruit. You don't know how to sell. And there's just a natural affinity to selling that you find in these people. But they have different styles, want some are more direct, some are more of a relationship cell, some are a million different ways to do it, but they all have this sort of common core of they're not afraid of rejection. They're not willing to just keep being relentless. They have grit. There are some personite allerts that are almost always there, but the amount of diversity is actually almost surprising.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you take the chips that Qualcomm or other folks make, a company like Intel employs more software engineers than hardware engineers. Software is key, and that software in a box too. So software is truly eating the world, as Andreessen says, but sometimes hardware is enabling the distribution. Distribution is people who are able to get products distributed, they're magicians in their own right. And having somebody on your team who knows how to distribute and sell products highly underrated.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and that's the classic software in a box case, which is you sell this thing, which enables you to sell this service. And the margins are in the service, the stickiness is in the thing, and the enabling thing is the thing. It's like there are no peloton clones you can just go out and buy. But the bad news is you have to create these and sell these things. The good news is that if you get actually a feedback loop going, you can make them readily more cheaply with everything else. And the thing that differentiates a GoPro from a peloton is GoPro, I think never my opinion is they never invested enough in software in creating the software that came with that box because that would have given them some staying power because then you're not just competing against the latest thing to come out of software. Well, it's a cost producer, yeah. And so, you know, software, it becomes critical. But sometimes the hardware is an enabling thing.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“During the dot-com era, I was sent down to Silicon Valley every week. I went down on Monday, come back on Friday, and I spent a lot of time with Benchmark. And Gurley and a guy named Bruce Dunlevy and Andy Ratchliff and Bob Kagel, you go down the Steve Spurlock and all that, they were all mentors of mine. And they taught me a lot of things. But at the time, I was in the telecom business. And in the telecom business, we had a next step, the private equity firm, we own Next Dell, next to International, XO. We had a bunch of different investments. I was just pining for software margins. And I was pining for pricing power because it was just a tough business selling long haul, you know, against level theory or whatever. And I got this idea for a thesis, I called it software in a box, which is basically, you know, sometimes you have to sell a box to sell software.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, sure. Yeah, I guess they have a lot of them. And they're also a wholesaler of people who sell subscription models. Right, sure. And they're a fascinating model that Bill Gurley and I talked about.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you still have to have a product that people really love and want to buy. Subscription can make the product better, and it can make the model better because if somebody signs up for a year, you don't have to worry about them leaving for 12 months. That's the good news. Everything has a flip side. The bad news is you have to pay a little bit more to get them unless the product is truly viral, your KACA is going to go up. And this is the point I talk about, about all your variables in the LTV equation, which is they're all linked. They all have ropes attach to each other. You tug on one and the other ones all move. It's like a spider's web or whatever. And so everything's dynamic. Everything's related. And that's the fun of it. It would be boring if linear and not dynamic. That's why it's a game. That's why Buffett does a tap downs on the work to work every day because it's fun. To me, it's the biggest game of all.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think one of the things that's interesting in exploring on the SaaS business model is the idea that subscriptions are somehow magical. Subscriptions are a way of charging for a product. And they're a way of getting a customer in a situation where you're not constantly fighting for renewal. And so there are some aspects of it that are good. But unless you have dog food that the dogs want to eat, subscription isn't going to get you bukkas. Yeah.”
2018-05-15 · Invest Like the Best · Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread - [Invest Like the Best, EP.87] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source