March 22, 2019

Michael Mayer: Pseudonymous Social Capital and Bottomless Coffee – Invest Like the Best

Check out the Invest Like the Best Episode Page and Show Notes

Key Takeaways

• Instead of focusing so much on adding good habits into your life, consider first subtracting the bad ones
• With the internet, you can learn to do nearly anything as long as you have the necessary desire to do so
• “If you consume the same information as everyone else, how are you going to come up with unique ideas?”
• “It is much more important for people to cut out bad information than it is to seek good information”
  • Carefully curate who you follow on Twitter – if you follow the right people, Twitter can be a great educational tool, rather than a dopamine farm
  • Stop consuming information with a short-term shelf life – it won’t matter tomorrow
• We’re moving into an age where your social media account/writing may be more valuable than your education at securing you a job
• If a book is still being recommended 30+ years after it was written, that’s what you want to be reading

Books, Blogs, and Resources Mentioned

• Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
• Michael thinks Blake Master’s notes from Peter Thiel’s class are actually better than Thiel’s book – Zero To One (the book is based on a class Peter taught at Stanford about startups)
• Jerry Neumann Blog- Reaction Wheel
• Kevin Simler’s Blog – Melting Asphalt
• Michael recommends reading both Amazon’s and Berkshire Hathaway’s letters to shareholders to learn about proven business strategy and concepts

Intro

• Host: Patrick O’Shaughnessy (@patrick_oshag) is the CEO of O’Shaughnessy Asset Management
• Guest: Michael Mayer (@micjm) is the founder of Bottomless, a company that uses a smart scale to automatically order coffee for customers

Why Michael Uses A Pseudonymous Twitter Account

• Michael says it’s nice to have a firewall between your real personality and the online world
  • Having a picture or link to your site isn’t really relevant and doesn’t improve the quality of one’s message
  • “I think the best way to be successful publishing online is to have the best signal to noise ratio”
    • Michael has nothing on his Twitter account except his content – he eliminated all noise, and tries to focus on providing just the signal

About Michael’s Life

• Michael dropped out of college and worked at a restaurant as a young kid
  • Today he has a venture-backed company – Bottomless
• Michael credits part of his success to creating better habits
  • There are 2 ways to do this – removing bad habits and adding good habits
    • He says removing bad habits is the easier of the two (removing unhealthy foods, removing tv shows, removing junk information, etc.)
    • Michael says removing unhealthy/negative people from your life sounds cringey, but it has been very helpful
    • When it comes to adding good habits, add the obvious – exercise, healthy foods, etc
• Michael taught himself how to code
  • He says there’s a near infinite amount of free information (like Codemy) on the internet where anyone can learn
    • “There’s a massive amount of leverage for a curious person”

Social Capital

• Michael says that getting a degree from a great school does boost your social capital, but one Harvard grad can always be replaced by another Harvard grad
• Some experiences may be less impressive but perhaps more valuable
  • Michael uses the example of his successful Twitter following compared to someone with no following but who has an MBA
• To be original, you need to be different
  • “If you consume the same information as everyone else, how are you going to come up with unique ideas?”
    • “Try to inject random, interesting things into your mind”
      • You need to have high-quality information inputs to have high-quality idea outputs

Michael’s Thoughts on Book Recommendations

• Michael is not a fan of asking people for book recommendations since most people only read a couple of books a quarter
• On top of this:
  • There are tons of garbage books in the world
  • Lots of popular books are only bestsellers because they were written by someone famous
    • Michael thinks Blake Master’s notes from Peter Thiel’s class are actually better than Thiel’s book – Zero To One (the book is based on a class Peter taught at Stanford about startups)
• Michael says that he enjoys reading blogs such as Kevin Simler’s
• Michael recommends reading both Amazon’s and Berkshire Hathaway’s letters to shareholders to learn about proven business strategy and concepts
• “It is much more important for people to cut out bad information than it is to seek good information”
  • By being very careful about who he follows, Michael has been able to create a Twitter feed with a lot of high-quality information, allowing Twitter to be an educational tool for him
  • Don’t consume information with a short-term shelf life – it won’t matter tomorrow
• A good point:
  • If a book is still being recommended 30+ years after it was written, that’s what you want to be reading

Why Standard Education Is Busted

• Standard education is tailored toward the middle of the bell curve -teachers teach the majority of the students, but they lose the kids at the bottom and the top
  • In today’s world, students can teach themselves AND at a pace they feel comfortable with
    • Michael recommends people try free online courses first before paying $2,000 for a course filled with multiple students and a single teacher

Michael’s Company – Bottomless

• Bottomless is a scale that uses a wireless weight sensor to figure out if a user is running low on coffee, and if they are, ships them a fresh bag
  • It’s similar to a subscription service but more efficient
    • A typical coffee subscription delivers a set amount of coffee each month
      • Why is this a problem? – A person may need more coffee if they had a lot of guests over that month or perhaps they need less coffee if they are going on vacation for several weeks
    • With Bottomless, the sensor can detect how much coffee someone has left and thus provide more customized/accurate amount of coffee
• Interestingly, Michael doesn’t have a hardware or engineering background – “I just picked something that I thought would be great and figured it out”
  • Michael taught himself how to build the hardware through online classes, books, and other free sources of information
• Business thoughts:
  • A very important metric to keep track of is customer retention
  • A good question to ask customers – “How much would I have to pay you to cancel the service?”

On Having His Wife as a Co-founder

• “I think it’s a huge advantage” – Michael points out that a lot of great companies are built by co-founders that work and live together and get along well (like Stripe which was built by two brothers)
  • During the early stages of building a company, there are so many decisions to make that the founders must work and meet with one another more regularly than a standard 9 to 5, Monday through Friday type company

Growing Bottomless

• Michael agrees with Chamath’s statement that about 40% of venture capital money goes back into Google, Facebook, and Amazon through ads
  • Growing customer acquisition costs is one of the main deaths of early startups
• Michael’s plan is to get people comfortable using their Bottomless sensor and then to start adding sensors for other staple items

Additional Notes

• “The best tweets are the ones that seem contrarian but are actually consensus”
• People are often too scared to be wrong, but interesting ideas ARE often risky and wrong
• Equality is not always a good thing
  • An equal education hurts students at the bottom AND the top

These notes were edited by RoRoPa Editing Services