Hosted By

Rabah Rahil
CMO at Triple Whale

Guests

Ben Parr
Co-founder & President, @OctaneAI

Ben Parr on The FUTURE of Ecommerce, VCs and AI

In this episode of ROAS we go over the future of e-commerce & tons of other high-value topics with Ben Parr#ROAS

Notes & Links

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Transcription

Ben Parr (00:00):

Investors are gonna pull back their investments by about 30 to 50% over the course of the next couple years. So it's, if they did, if they did 20 deals of the year, they might end up doing 10 to 15 the, this year. And that might continue. And that's just purely because the interest rates are going up.

Rabah Rahil (00:21):

All right, folks, we're back for episode 31. This was actually a, uh, childhood hero. If I may say we have a four of 3,030 a Northwestern grab a published author and now a co-founder or you, you founder. Now you, your co-founder president run an octane AI. Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben Parr (00:43):

Hello in the universe, everyone. Thank you for having me.

Rabah Rahil (00:47):

Oh, absolutely. And so as always, I'm in the marketing HQ out here in Austin, where's this podcast find you today, Ben,

Ben Parr (00:54):

Uh, I'm currently in a lavender field, isn't it pretty over here? I just set up a desk here in person, you know, making whole thing. You know what though? Like if, if we needed to go and like change scenery, you know, I could be inside of some kind of teleporter or I could be in the wild, wild west or yeah, for those who are just listening, they're like, what the hell is going on? I could be in a rainforest. It's so beautiful. You

Rabah Rahil (01:18):

That's not bad.

Ben Parr (01:19):

I don't. I know.

Rabah Rahil (01:21):

How do you, how do you support yourself? How, how are you doing all this sorcery? So this is actually one of my favorite apps, but give, give it the plug.

Ben Parr (01:28):

We, uh, we're both users of a company called mm-hmm <affirmative> it's, Mmhm M it's by one of our investors at Octa. I, uh, Philip in the former founder of Evernote. And it allows you to do some super amazing things, like change the backgrounds or put up different words. Like I just did right here, or, you know, uh, even put up like, you know, uh, screen share right in the middle, like this amazing case study about how Jones road beauty makes seven figures every single month from a new ad flow that involves TikTok ads in an tic quiz. I'm gonna plug in,

Rabah Rahil (02:01):

Shout out, shout out Cody Parker. Love me some Cody. Um, yeah, actually

Ben Parr (02:06):

Joan and Eli. I mean, it's a whole dream team over there just as a complete aside.

Rabah Rahil (02:11):

It's not bad, is it? Uh, yeah, Eli's actually been on the podcast. One of our, uh, most downloaded. He is just an absolute gem of human. I haven't got to interact with, uh, uh, Joanne that much, but I'm sure she's an absolute crusher. Cody. Cody's really building, building out. Um, there it's a, what an incredible story there, but we'll get to that later. We wanna talk about you. I,

Ben Parr (02:31):

Your customer,

Rabah Rahil (02:32):

The story of the story of BP here. Um, so you went to Northwestern, right?

Ben Parr (02:39):

Right. Northwestern over in, uh, Evanson, Illinois.

Rabah Rahil (02:42):

Yeah, absolutely. I went to Indiana. So same conference. We look, you, you are always the Smarties, the, the, the big 10 smarts. Uh, I feel like what'd you study who's

Ben Parr (02:52):

I was trying to just think on the side, uh, who's been the better football team in the last 10 years. I feel like we probably have won. I bet you it, us, but I gotta check.

Rabah Rahil (03:01):

It hurts. It hurts. We're supposed to be a sports school and you guys are supposed to be the nerds and the, the academics and the nerds killing me. You're killing me here.

Ben Parr (03:11):

Um, you have to, you have to play, you have to play Ohio state and Michigan state in Michigan every year. So, uh, that's the problem.

Rabah Rahil (03:18):

So dirty little secret when we would have Ohio state as a home game, because they have kind of colors close-ish to ours. Um, that's when they would take the overhead photos <laugh> so the stadium looked full cuz the, the Ohio state fans would travel and the stadium would never be full without that, but that's not here in north there. Oh yeah. Would you study while you were at Northwestern?

Ben Parr (03:40):

Uh, science and human culture, political science and business institutions. So two majors and a minor.

Rabah Rahil (03:48):

Oh, very, very cool. And then you also wrote a book, right? Captivology it's it was actually named, uh, marketing book of 2015 by strategy and business magazine. Tell me a little bit about that adventure.

Ben Parr (04:02):

Uh, so I did many things, many things between, uh, college and the book cuz I did. I was the editor of Nashville for four, four and a half years, uh, wrote 2,446 articles. In my four years, there did a small VC fund on behalf of celebrities into early stage startups, which is his own story. Uh, I did a column for CPS and CNET. I did a bunch of other stuff. And then I, uh, wrote Captivology in part because of all the investing and all these startup for help and press marketing customer user acquisition. And so, uh, Captivology goes through the science and psychology of attention, why we pay attention to certain people, products gives in ideas and how to utilize that science to captivate and capture the attention of others. So I went through 300 years of scientific research and attention and memory interviewed like, you know, 50 plus masters of attention. So like everyone from Cheryl Sandberg, Steven Soderberg, David Copperfield Shahi and BI Moto, like all sorts of super amazing people. So, you know, there there's, my face is on it. You can, if you ever go find it, it's very easy. They, I did a eight, six hour photo shoot just to get that one photo for the cover of the book. <laugh>

Rabah Rahil (05:17):

That's amazing. What was that experience like, like take me through, did you do, like how do you break that down? Is it like in terms of like big pillars and then those pillars kind of manifest in chapters? Or like how, how did you take, cause that's a big, big lift, right?

Ben Parr (05:34):

So you have to do your research and that takes actually a decent long time to kind of start forming the coherent thoughts before that you write, you don't write the book before you get the deal. You write a, a, a proposal which get, lets you like think other thoughts, you write a sample chapter, but not the entire book. A lot of that happens afterwards. So got it. In my case, you know, after the research there's a, there's a specific app, the secret app that all great. I think book writers use it's, uh, called Scrivener and oh yeah. It's specifically meant for writing books and writing these like long multi-piece things, because then you can put things to the individual chapters. You can move things around, you get little build to board in it. It's an amazing little like app that, uh, just has been around for forever for uh, book writers.

Ben Parr (06:23):

So, you know, I would just like tackle different chapters and sections. It would tell me how many words that you did to write in the day in order to keep on pace, to hit my, uh, deadline, which of course, you know, I didn't quite hit my deadline, but got pretty close. I remember like finishing the last version of the final of the edits with my editor just before going to Burnman being like, I have to finish this, I gotta get this done before burning man. And I was able to do that. So, uh, it's a journey I took two plus years. I lived alone for a couple months on a river in upstate,

Rabah Rahil (06:56):

Uh, seriously.

Ben Parr (06:58):

Yeah. In upstate Cal in California, near Mount Shasta. Uh, I spent some time in Thailand working on it, all sorts of things.

Rabah Rahil (07:06):

That is cool. I'm just, uh, imagine you like Johnny Depp in the, I forget what is it? The door or whatever. I forget that movie where he goes out to the, the upstate cabin in New York and just total isolation. You just banging away on your keyboard. That's incredible. Um, total digression, I didn't know you were a burner cuz uh, I usually do really pretty indepth research and uh, my assistant missed that. How, how was Bernie man? What was that? What was that?

Ben Parr (07:28):

I only did it. I only did it once. I want to do it again cuz but then COVID happened. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I went because a dear friend of mine, uh, as Raskin was getting married and you know, he, uh, helped create like he created an infinite school actually among a bunch of other things. Wow. Uh, he, he was the chief designer over at Firefox. Uh, but he was getting married and I'm like, I gotta go be there. And I wanted to go in, go there. And I went with my friend, Sarah bur, who was a tech crutch at the time and yeah, we just drove in my truck, filled with stuff. We had, like we found a couch on the street. We put a couch in the back, drove all the way through. No, it was, it was excellent. You just like have a level, especially with like the reason, like a wedding or something. You have a level of bonding, like people who I think will be family forever. So I want to go back. It's hard to know when, but, and I'm curious to see like what happens this year now that, uh, it will definitely be back and we've gone years without in isolation, frankly. A lot of, uh, people who were regular burners have been able to go for two, three years. Yeah. It's interesting to see

Rabah Rahil (08:34):

How you're such interesting person. Geez. I knew you were interesting when I was going through my show notes, but man, you have all these little interesting oddities and intricacies. I love it. You also sit on the board right. Of uh, semi source.

Ben Parr (08:47):

So I sit on the board. Well nowadays of the Lilo Jana foundation. So Samasource is the SI was the predecessor it's complicated, but okay. Soma source, uh, provides like, uh, the whole mission of everything is to give work. And so in the earlier Soma source, you know, was a nonprofit that was giving work and focus on training people in impoverished regions like in Uganda and Kenya on digital work. And then oftentimes employing a lot of those people to do, uh, AI, data trading or moderation or things like that. Uh, we split the organization into a for-profit and a non-profit because the for-profit needed to raise money to compete with its competitors. Yep. The nonprofit owns a big chunk of that. And so I said at the board of the non-profit and our focus is like promoting entrepreneurship and promoting the give work mission that the, uh, the late founder Lija, uh, really ascribed to. And so like we run a give work challenge in, uh, in Kenya, Uganda where we're like, we help fund great, uh, entrepreneurial ideas and help them like get the network of the resources so they can grow it. We kind of measure our impact in terms of the number of jobs that we help, uh, make like good jobs. And so we're hoping to do a lot more of that. So, uh, that's the board side of the Lilo Jana foundation.

Rabah Rahil (10:08):

How cool. How do you even find time to sleep? Incredible. All right. So where I actually first rubbed up against you is when you were sling heat at Mashable, do you have any fun stories there or cuz you were kind of there and it's pinnacle? Not that it's like not good now, but like you to be fair, like you were kind of running it during its heyday, right. Or is that, is that a misconception?

Ben Parr (10:28):

Uh, I ran the west coast in, uh, editor, chief, Adam Mo bread in the east coast. Yeah. Uh, so the, yeah, the early matchable days, it was just, I don't know, that was the early Silicon valley days. Like Twitter was a new thing. They had Twitter conferences, they had web 2.0 conferences for anyone who's in early tech. This will feel nostalgic, but there was like an early era and Mashable and tech crunch were the two big publications and we wrote, uh, content stream of articles. And I, we eventually had a T I had the team of 50 had like some amazing reporters, had some amazing stuff happen. I don't know it was, uh, it's like it's nostalgic, like the, about that era. You know, I still talk with some of my Nashville colleagues here and there. And just like, it's a unique kind of experience, especially when you're like in your early twenties and your first job is to be a reporter who gets to talk with everybody cuz that's how I met a lot of my, our investors. That's how I met a lot of, uh, early people in, across the industry.

Rabah Rahil (11:31):

How cool that is. You're right. That's incredible. So you're one of like the most productive people. I know. How do you balance that with like your work life? Like how do you show up in relationships as well as, you know, published books, be an editor, sit on a board, uh, start a company, run a company. Like, do you have any tricks or tips or people that are struggling with kind of finding, finding, I don't like really believing like the work life balance thing, but you definitely, you know, I don't think life is about working. Um, it's about building deep connections with humans you care about and you obviously do that very well. So how do you accomplish that?

Ben Parr (12:09):

Do I mean, I would first say don't try to do everything all at once, but I have a trouble with that and I assume you do too. <laugh> yes. Uh, I mean you, sometimes your brain just does better with a, with a break and that might mean go watch a movie with the partner, go, uh, text a friend, go on a walk. Uh, it kind of just depends. I feel like over a longer span of time, like I have done a bunch of things, but I did try to fo like when I was doing, Captivology tried to focus just on that and you know, that helped me compress like the timeframe and then it helped me add things and then there's like, you know, a level of automation to certain things, you know? Okay. Like you can get like, like, you know, have assistance and all that kind of thing as like help.

Ben Parr (12:52):

But there's like automation that can help with like making things happen, creating like, you know, I'm trying to currently make it so that I make it easier for myself to make investor intros, to companies that I either advise or invested in and having whole CR for doing it. And eventually I want to have like a system where I just like click two buttons and then it'll just like send off the email. And that's what I'm trying to get to in the like pretty near future. But like, you know, the more automations like that I can go and build the like more time I can go and get back and the lesser, the less daunting, the task, the other one being just send the thing immediately. Like you get a text, just send back. I've had, I still make that mistake. Just like, don't think like you could only think so hard, you know, like send the response back, like at least acknowledge something. Um, a lot of times, so things only require a couple words, you know, previously there's a couple that require more thought you need to have it, keep going back to your inbox. But that stuff that proves and piles up mentally, even more than in your inbox.

Rabah Rahil (13:53):

That's so well put. Yeah. I can't remember who said that, but if it's under, if it takes you under three minutes or something like that, just do it now because to your point, um, not only does it accrue, I think it compounds where it starts to almost clog up the system, right. Where these little things that are not necessarily meaningless, but you can just knock 'em out. And then it, I know when I get like all that busy work done or going, I just, are you on the super human train? Do are yes, no, maybe ish

Ben Parr (14:16):

<laugh> but yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that, that I was gonna say actually like certain tools do help you. Like I have a whole set of systems for different kinds of inboxes and superhuman. You know, there's a whole set of different, like I have a set of different things in a notion. I have like spreadsheet too for like tracking different personal habits. Um, Ooh, I love that, which I'm not as great at doing every day, but I'm trying to get better at, but the very minimum, it keeps them top of mind.

Rabah Rahil (14:41):

Oh, I love that. It's incredible. Uh, I'm also a big notion power user, one of the most amazing tool. Uh, I love it. Love it, love it. Um, okay, cool. Let's round out this main segment. One last question. What is the nicest thing someone's done for you?

Ben Parr (14:58):

This is a interesting question. What is the nicest thing somebody has ever done for me? There have been a tremendous number. I like, I don't know if I can pick one. That's hard. I could say that in general one, like I try to say this a lot. A lot of startup life is luck. Not skill hard percent and yeah. There's skill involved, but anyone who discounts the amount of luck that's required to have the right timing, have the right market dynamics sometimes make it the right hire is like, is like kidding you like a lot of stuff in startup world is just based off of luck. Uh, and I've gotten lucky, being able to have super amazingly experiences go to super awesome places, you know, get, receive super awesome introductions. And so I'm gonna have to actually ponder what the number one thing is. The problem is like, this is also where like I have like a thing where I try not to do superlatives because it's always hard for people to take a superlative.

Ben Parr (16:01):

If you go, like, what's a nice thing. There's like, like I was just a chop talk, the eCommerce conference and there's like a hundred nice things. People helping me get it to parties or people like, uh, on me helping other people get into things, uh, like going like someone just grabbing like a coffee, like the little things are overlooked sometimes, but they really kind of do add up, you know? And so I like think like, oh, there's like at least 30 examples of that kind of thing happening in a four day time span, which I'm still somehow, uh, able to sit and, uh, stay awake.

Rabah Rahil (16:35):

I love that. I love that. Yeah. I, I totally agree. I think there's definitely so one, a hundred percent agree with you. I think the two things that are probably the biggest like functions in terms of success of a business is timing and luck and luck is kind of a function of timing in a weird way. Um, so I totally agree with you there, but yeah, I just wanna see, you know, the nicest thing and I think that's a, a beautiful way to put it, rounding it out where just, just do good. The car balance will help you out and just try and make the world a better place. One action at a time. The, the Ben Ben par philosophy, the ethos of awesomeness.

Ben Parr (17:07):

Yeah. I'm gonna keep on thinking. I might have one later in the randomly. I'm just gonna answer, what are your random questions with, I remember this one time, because it's a good question.

Rabah Rahil (17:17):

The, the lightning bolt it'll just come outta context, totally shift the conversation. It'll be fantastic. Ben, you made it to the first segment already flying through. I love it. Okay. This is the reason why people bought the ticket. This is the value add segment. Let's get nerdy. Why did you start Octa? AI was there like a aha moment? Like, and then you had a little bit of a pivot as well. So if you can tell people a little bit about that.

Ben Parr (17:38):

So my co-founder Matt, uh, came up with the original concept for Ocana, which, uh, I feel like we have, like, we have evolved over time. I like using the word evolved, but the core idea has been the same, which is, uh, the conversation between consumer brand has been fundamentally broken for. Yep. Forever. It's been generally a one way spam kind of filter of like, I'm gonna just blast you with an email and as we not personalize in the slightest versus like your human interactions, you're personalized, we're literally personalizing our conversation as it goes. That's literally just nothing but personalization. Uh, but our communications with brands should be the same. It'd be better for the consumer. It'd be better for the brand. It'd be better for everybody. And our first attempt at this was chat bots, uh, for messenger. And we did this for artists, it's celebrities.

Ben Parr (18:26):

We raised a bunch of money. We did it with, uh, a whole all sorts of brands. Um, but it really became clear to us that it was our eCommerce customers that were getting the most benefit. And we were working with some amazing eCommerce stores and realized that they, uh, they could, this was just like an amazing industry there where its level of personalization was actually like really valued. And they were on the forefront of things. Yep. We started with messenger there, but it evolved into what we are now, uh, into our quiz product, into our zero party data platform because all of our, uh, customers were trying to build quizzes and they were like hacking basic messenger to do it. And we're like, why are you doing that? And they told us, we really wanna put this on the website, but it's not easy. That costs a lot to do.

Ben Parr (19:12):

Custom builds, custom builds, like, you know, are like require lots of engineering power to even just update doesn't come with integrations. Yeah. We're like, we'll build that like where it was the same technology we used to do messenger to build the quiz product. And we did, and we built this quiz product, cuz we saw this giant hole where everyone was looking for a solution to help them make and launch a quiz really easily and to get the analytics and the backend for it. And that worked out as you can imagine, uh, really well for us. Uh, we are by far the largest platform of our kind and Shopify Shopify itself is a customer of Octa AI. You could go take their hard work quiz. There you go. And we've gone we've to feel hardware.shopify.com. I have to go and like pull it up in my little like thing in a little bit.

Ben Parr (19:57):

But uh, we even have a, we even have a case study actually on, uh, on Octa eye where you can go do that, but we've had like more and more brands come to us, especially in the last like couple months. So, you know, we'll talk about Jones road again for a second. Uh, our lovely mutual customer, but Jones road, beauty, you know, they saw this is, you know, for those who the don't know it is Bobby Brazos skincare brand, uh, very successful, but they were using, you know, Facebook ads. Yeah. And that wa has many of us know, uh, Facebook ads have dropped like a rock 40% decreased in return in ad fence since iOS 14.5, since people could opt out of data tracking. And so e-commerce brands have been looking for an alternative Jones, Rhode switched their Facebook ad spent, uh, over to TikTok.

Ben Parr (20:41):

Uh, and they send that traffic except to just a landing page who sent it to an auction AI quiz. So they have this like beautiful quiz where they ask about like, what kind of like, you know, they're trying to ask, what kind of skin do you have? What kind of things like that? And they're doing that. What they found was like by having a quiz as like the landing page for, for themselves, for their, for their TikTok ads, it actually drove a lot more traffic. It drove a lot more, uh, it drove a lot more engagement. It drove a lot more conversions, especially I think some around like, you know, 80%, 85% plus of people who start the quiz complete the quiz. 15% of those people actually end up making a purchase. And that's like, those are huge numbers. Right? And for like them now they make seven figures a month from that flow, they get a three, three and a half X plus return on ad spent from it.

Ben Parr (21:28):

It's a real alternative to Facebook ads. And that's really like what we have found as like a real piece of our product market fit, which is if you've had trouble with your Facebook ads or ads in general, and you're looking for better conversion and you're looking to have data that you could use for, you know, the follow up segments, like more personalized Ebo, more personalized text message. That's also like a big part of what's driving a lot of like sales and a lot of revenue, you know, that's what we do. That's like what our software does. And so yeah, a brand here I'll actually even pull up like brand will build a beautiful quiz, like, uh, this to like, you know, this is Jones roads. They'll be able to like ask key questions, learn about the customer's preferences, make a really targeted recommendation, use that information to recommend really useful products to customers. And then, you know, can send personalized email. So they don't email you about things that don't make sense for you and your brand. So that's the idea, the AI story in a nutshell.

Rabah Rahil (22:22):

Yeah. That's wonderful. And another thing to pump you up even more, if you, you don't even need more pumping up, I mean you in the stratosphere already, but um, the customer value is also, um, much higher as well. So Cody shared some numbers with me as well, where people that convert, um, just straight up through a Facebook ad versus people that come convert through the Octa, I quiz, um, the AOV and also LTV. So the longer term, um, value lifetime customer value is much higher, um, with the octane. Yeah. Is this, is this the, uh, CA the case study is wonderful. We'll link. This

Ben Parr (22:52):

Is, this is the case study over on Octa. I cuz some specific numbers too, like this is only in the three month period, two and a half million, zero party data points. Yeah. 82% of people who started quiz complete it, 15% make a purchase, but yeah, you're right. One of the biggest ones people don't even think about, they, the customers who take a quiz, increase their AOB by 50%. Yeah. And this is true across the board. We have customers 20 to 50% increases in AOB. Plus the emails that to captured, it's a, it's a much more likely people are gonna give you an email that way than say through a popup. Yep. And that's a while another reason why a lot of customers go and use us.

Rabah Rahil (23:25):

I love that. Yeah. And so ultimately you're, it's so interesting though, cuz you're still adhering to your original thesis. It's just, the mechanism is different

Ben Parr (23:36):

Of right. And I think we'll continue to adhere to that thesis. Yeah. And continue to build on top of that. You know, cuz like for example, we wanna build a new set of integrations and like make it possible for our customers to leverage the zero party data for everything from uh, more personalized email, text messages. Yep. Which is a big focus today to more personalized websites to using AI, to give, uh, to do some super cool things like automatically, uh, I can't even quite talk about it. There's some super cool fit to the a side bet, but also being able to leverage the data in other platforms to do would say, you know, maybe you want to have some advanced analytics and some kind of, uh, awesome product that's uh, uh, utilized by Marine mammals. That would be, uh, super awesome too. Stay tuned

Rabah Rahil (24:24):

Coming in in soon coming and you see that you see the subtleties there, this man, his, his vernacular is incredible. He can, he can talk around somebody and instantly know what it is without saying it, the, the communication skills on this one,

Ben Parr (24:37):

By the way, I'm super clear talking about Platy post. Oh, oh not know. I didn't know, know what's on. I didn't even know it is. It is. I congratulations. It is for those like, listen, just so you know, today is April 1st when we're recording. So I just wanna say congratulations on your rebranding to triple PLA pie. So I'm really, really excited for, uh, the new Platypus logo, the new Platypus, everything, um, and all the egg memes that we're gonna have now. It's, it's great. It's, it's a great rebranding. I love it. Well

Rabah Rahil (25:05):

We figured right. What's better than a whale. A Platypus. Why not? Why not amazing. We should. We should ran with that. Oh, that's incredible. Um, what's been the best parts and hardest parts of running octane.

Ben Parr (25:18):

Uh, best parts is amazing people and like all these like and amazing customers. And like in the last couple of months, especially, we've seen so many more of our customers, you know, publicly like talk about us, talk about what they've been doing with their product and like getting to see like an ecosystem develop is amazing to like behold and really, uh, both not even enjoyable. Uh, it's just, it's an honor. Yeah. Almost like it's hard to describe the feeling. You're like, oh wow. Like they're using our product in way. Cause I would never would've imagined. And now there's hundreds, thousands of people talking about it. Um, the hard part is always just like startups are hard. There's an up and there's a down, we've had ups and downs. So we've even tell, we talked about like, you know, one where like when Facebook changed, uh, when Facebook shut down the messenger platform due to Cambridge Analytica and we had to, we had to do layoffs.

Ben Parr (26:16):

We dearly died. We survived by the skin of our teeth and then we were able to grow again. Uh, but that probably that kind of thing ages you very quickly. So there's a, there's a ton of like, they always talk about this. Like I always talk with investors and founders, like the roller coaster for being a founder in an early stage company is super high highs, super low lows. If you're a VC, for example, like the highs are not as high, but the lows are definitely not as low. Yes. Uh, which is probably why a lot of founders turn to VC after they do a company or two,

Rabah Rahil (26:49):

I, I couldn't agree more. And uh, it's almost equivalent to, um, almost a player being coming, the coach where it's like, you just, you just lose the, uh, not necessarily tenacity or maybe lose is a bad bird, but uh, there is just a lot to your point. Like there is just a lot of rollercoaster rides and there's like, it sounds cliche, but man, there is just always something. And so that VC is more out. It's just abstracted way. You're the drunk uncle where like you get to kind of hang out and play, but you aren't our uncle actually. So that's a great segue, but you, you get to hang out with the child.

Ben Parr (27:23):

It should be an article idea.

Rabah Rahil (27:24):

Yeah. But at the same time when shit hits the fan, you're like, all right, I'm out. And like, it's, it's like this thing. Whereas like the parent is more of like the founder owner operator where when shit happens, like you have to deal with it, you have to figure it out. And to your point, um, you know, hopefully sometimes the scars, the scars are kind of badges of honor, but sometimes the scar scuttle the ship. And so it's just a really big challenge. And then it also sucks. Like when, to your point, you have to make hard decisions and like it is what it is. And sometimes, you know, you have to, there's a, there's a terrible, but sometimes applicable line of like the greater good where like we have to, you know, seal off some of these things to, to make sure that the ship can stay afloat and it's not necessarily, you can do it in a, you know, a nice way, make sure there's a severance and there's some things where you can help people on their next pathway. But at the end of the day, you're firing people, you have to do it. And so there's just, uh, you know, some difficult conversations that usually the VC isn't involved in or has to be involved and they can basically step outta the room. And then when everything's fun, they come to the party. But if the party gets hit called, the cops get called to the party, <laugh> they just sneak out the back door and they don't have to deal with it. Well,

Ben Parr (28:30):

I have a, I have a couple thoughts here, which I think you're exactly right. Um, we've been lucky at octane to have honestly very good investors. Who've had our batter like, uh, I, I like some people are like, like honestly like general catalyst and boost VC and javelin and bullpen. They've all had our backs. They've, you know, put money in when we were like in dire straits, they've helped us figure out things. And that's a really valuable thing to have when you are a founder and it's hard to get. And I think for us, we do pretty much all the leads of all of our rounds for some period of time. That's really cool before we took their money. And that helped us a lot with like, we already had some trust, we already knew them, you know? Um, and that helped a lot with like figuring out like what to do and who to go and work with. The other thing you gave me an idea, the beginning of like, uh, your speech, great speech, uh, which is that I think I'm gonna write an article in my personal blog, uh, comparing which VC is, which coach and which sports league. Oh. Because I, the thought that went to my head is, and so when you're listening to this, I think I'll have that article done and published, but we'll even link to it. Oh, a hundred percent. Uh I'm like, who? Like

Rabah Rahil (29:48):

That is a really

Ben Parr (29:48):

Good point. Who is the bill? Be check.

Rabah Rahil (29:50):

Yeah.

Ben Parr (29:51):

Who is the bill be check of the VC world. Like, this is like, actually like a question I'm trying to think, like, who is the bill? Be check. So

Rabah Rahil (29:59):

Curly, maybe,

Ben Parr (30:00):

Uh, I'm gonna acting it's girl girlies. Girly is up there. I had to like, it's hard. Cause like there's so many coaches and then there's like so many I love. And then you got like, you got like, it depends. It depends if you just stick to football, but you could go SHA chef

Rabah Rahil (30:13):

Ski, whatever

Ben Parr (30:14):

You

Rabah Rahil (30:14):

Could be. So that,

Ben Parr (30:15):

Or, or like yeah. Duke or

Rabah Rahil (30:18):

My Alma mater Bob Knight. Who's the VC. That's choking people out. <laugh> this is brilliant, man. This is, oh my God. I can't wait to read this article. You have to have this out. When we publish, I think there'll be like a three week bleed time or something on this. This is brilliant. Ben. I like, there's so much meat on this bone. That is hilarious. I love this breaking news people.

Ben Parr (30:40):

I, I think, I think, I think I figured out who, uh, I was just like thinking through some of them I'm like, okay, I think I know who Kirsten green a 4runner would be. I won't reveal yet, but there's a whole set of them, you know? So this

Rabah Rahil (30:51):

Will be fun. Oh, it's super fun. And now, now that you're kind of walking it through my head, the analogies are really actually incredibly tight because there are certain types of coach. Like for example, Bob Knight, wasn't gonna really take a super talented team like cuz he didn't deal with a lot of crap. Whereas like a chef ski or uh, uh, Roy Williams, X, U UNC person, like he wasn't gonna make a C player into an a player, but he was incredible at one recruiting a player and B making sure those a players coalesced into a championship level team. And so there there's so many interesting parallels here. Oh I love it. Look at that big brain energy coming from BP. Let's go. Let's go. I love it. Um, okay. Next question. How do you see the next two to three years unfolding? Um, in eCommerce specifically kind of like the DTC Shopify space.

Ben Parr (31:41):

Uh, want me to be honest? Yeah, yeah. Bumpy. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I will be it's we will be bumpy. It's already starting to happen with, uh, the ad issues. So 20, 20 most incredible year for eCommerce I yep. 20, 21 supply chain issues choke some, uh, iOS started this year. The I stuff is started to compound more. Yeah. Some brands really are starting to figure it out. Of course, the ones that are using Octa, I and triple, uh, triple PLA pie <laugh> are doing the

Rabah Rahil (32:12):

Best. Is that really the, the plural for platapus

Ben Parr (32:16):

It's PLA it's platapus technically I believe it's not PLA sort. I like PLA I've been corrected on this before. I I like PLA pipe too, but I think it is actually technically triple PLA pluses, which doesn't roll off the time. That's cool as well. Triple PLA. So we're gonna go triple PLA pie,

Rabah Rahil (32:33):

Better branding

Ben Parr (32:34):

<laugh> but, but you know, we can have fun, but uh, there will be some difficult times because the market is, uh, there's some things you can extrapolate from the market. And I had this conversation at chop talk with a whole bunch of investors. Uh, investors are gonna pull back their investments by about 30 to 50%. Oh

Rabah Rahil (32:53):

Wow. Over the next couple

Ben Parr (32:54):

Years. Yeah. So it's, if they did, if they did 20 deals of the year, they might end up doing 10 to 15 the, this year and that might continue. And that's just purely because the interest rates are going up a hundred percent. And so what happens when the interest rates going up? I know I'm going to hard core economics. No, no. I love it. When the interest rates go up, uh, the, the people who invest in VCs, uh, which are like family offices, wealthy individuals, they put more of their money towards, uh, bonds and things that are safe. But those have higher return when the interest rates are up and less into VC. Why we've had so much money in VC in the last 10 years is because the interest rates were so low. It was more, it was so you would get no return on bonds and some of those instruments.

Ben Parr (33:35):

And so you put more money into things that were higher risk that turned out to be higher reward. And so some of that money will pull back. Some early funds will, will perish some bigger funds will raise smaller funds. Uh, and it's not clear how long that will last or how difficult that will be. Uh, but it will be it's going to have an impact on everything. Yep. And so I think it might mean people might spend a bit less because they will have a little bit less cash in their pocket or have to pay, uh, more in interest rates. Some PE for some people it's going to require just, uh, like be harder to fundraise, to continue to grow your company. But I also think that for the ones who build like real product value in like, uh, are able to find economics that work you're gonna end up really in a really good place in part, because like there are frankly probably too many companies in too many verticals.

Ben Parr (34:27):

Uh, and if you survive the next couple of years, uh, you'll end up being in really great shape and having an even bigger market to own a control. So it's gonna be bumpy is the word some will go way up, some will go down, uh, it'll be a little bit unpredictable, but you can rely on the fact that probably VCs will put down less money because interest rates will go up and when interest rates go up, there's just a set of things that always happen every single time. Yep. And you just have to track it and it'll probably be like that for a couple years.

Rabah Rahil (34:57):

I mean, I think that you're like on NBC finance or so right there, that was just an absolutely wonderful rant. I think it's absolutely spot on. Um, and also inflationary pressures are, are, are a real thing as well where we're kind of running away with that. Um, but I, I think you're right. And in a, in a way, like, obviously you don't want people to not do well, but I think there will be a way of creative destruction where, um, there's just some people that were basically growing a business off of ad arbitrage and that hypergrowth is just non-existent anymore. Like I think if you grow your business 50% year over year, um, this year you're killing it, like you're, you're doing really well. And to your point, I do think there's actually gonna be, I don't, I do agree that the deployment of capital will probably be less, but I think there's gonna be a concentration in the people that are doing well because they do, like you said, have those sound robust economics and they can kind of like if a company can do well within this type of forecasting in a bull market, it's cocaine and champagne.

Rabah Rahil (35:55):

And so like, if you can get it now, once you you're willing. Yep, exactly.

Ben Parr (36:00):

Yeah. I was gonna say, you're willing to make more pets when, uh, it's just more free flowing money. Uh, and you have so much more capital to deploy. So you're willing to put it into more things, less capital. You're gonna put into a fewer bets, but you're gonna pick the ones that we do have the traction. Yep. So there's, that will be if you're really, if you are really executing, you will always still be able to raise money and do things. And you know, if you have the ability to get to profitability or are profitable, you're in the best shape you have control for your own

Rabah Rahil (36:29):

Debt. Exactly. And that's the RNA of financing. Like, uh, the bank will give you money when you don't need it. And then when you do need it, nobody will give you money. <laugh> so it's this very paradoxical thing, but, uh, that's so well put man, I love it. I love it. I love it. Um, what is the biggest mistake you see when people start or found a business?

Ben Parr (36:53):

Oh, there's hundreds. Can I just like list a whole

Rabah Rahil (36:56):

Yeah, just go rapid

Ben Parr (36:57):

Fire. Cause I look, I, I, I advise a bunch of amazing startups, which I don't even try to go and do that. It just friends or people that I really like end up starting companies and I can help them, especially maybe on the fundraising side or on the like, uh, marketing launch side. But, uh, I, I, I've seen a bunch of things like I've tried specifically to help my companies avoid, which are things like, uh, like wrong founders is always number one. So like then why Combinator? For example, the number one predictor. I remember Paul, uh, uh, the founder of, of why Combinator telling me this, the like, uh, number one predictor of a startup success or failure through the Y combinary program was the number of months that the founders knew each other beforehand. Interesting. If they knew each other 18 months or more, they're much more likely to succeed because it's more, you spend more time with your founders than you do with your partner. Fair point

Rabah Rahil (37:54):

A lot of times

Ben Parr (37:54):

Fair point. And so you've gotta think of it like a marriage. Would you marry this person? Can you have good communication? Get through fights, not feel, uh, like have thick skin with each other, right? Because you're supposed to disagree on a bunch of stuff and come to resolution and feel right and have each other's backs. If you can't feel that way, you're in a really bad situation. It becomes a toxic relationship. It's always the number one thing that kills startups. But you know, there's a whole bunch of things spending too much money. Yeah. Uh, early on false flag signals on what the, uh, what product market fit is, uh, uh, banking of money before it's actually in the bank, uh, the wrong, the wrong hires, you know, especially at the stage of the earlier stage, focus on people who can execute and do things more than the people who maybe have the longer track record and have like, you know, the vior Dame from Salesforce or something.

Ben Parr (38:49):

Someone coming from Salesforce and only been in the big companies, joining a super early stage company just rarely works out. It happens, but it rarely works out because it's a different thing, different process in the early stages that you have to like your, your fir your first VP of sales needs to be able to hop in and sell your first feed product needs to product manage and not just manage product managers. There's a whole set of things like that. We could go on for several days, which I'm sure we will do in my eventual podcast, which I'm

Rabah Rahil (39:20):

Working on. Oh, cool. Any working names yet? The Platypus show, the Platypus

Ben Parr (39:24):

Pod, uh, there is a working name, but we're changing it probably. Okay. So I'll tell you, so I'll tell you,

Rabah Rahil (39:28):

Yeah. Give it to me. I love names.

Ben Parr (39:29):

Uh, I have a dear friend. His I'll actually see if I have an old version. I have a dear friend. His name is Greg Berg. He, uh, if you've ever watched the show heroes yep. Alias or the new star wars movies, uh, you'll recognize him cuz he's the mind reading cop and heroes and all that sort of thing. And I, him and I have talked about doing a show for forever. And so we've talked about shows, working title we'll change called vested interest. So there's scratch there's me. Um, and so we're gonna demystify key business topics for the average entrepreneur. Like, you know, what is an NFT and why should you care? So we're gonna have a very special guest for that one. Or how does like the restaurant business work or the business of entertainment? Oh. Or how do you use, uh, exit your company? And there's a whole set of interesting things. And so, you know, we built a whole beautiful, there's a whole beautiful studio belt. There's a bunch of other stuff. Uh, we're lining up first guests. There there's a lot of stuff. So you can sign up signature podcast.com. They might change, but the people will,

Rabah Rahil (40:28):

Oh, I'd love this. Let me know if you're taking some sponsorships. I got some sponsorship dollars. This is incredible. Ben. That looks amazing. I love the hat by the way, too.

Ben Parr (40:36):

You and I will talk right after

Rabah Rahil (40:37):

This. I love this. Ben, you made it to the rapid fire section. Can you believe it? Even though I'm such a fan, I got, I cannot it, are you ready? I'm ready. Here we go. Let's do the thing. Writing a book, overrated, underrated,

Ben Parr (40:54):

Uh, underrated, something that you have to do. I'm not gonna do more sentence, uh, something that you should do once in your life.

Rabah Rahil (41:00):

Love it. Going to university overrated or underrated.

Ben Parr (41:06):

Uh, very dependent upon you and your things. I value me my personal going, but it won't be forever. Love

Rabah Rahil (41:12):

It. Fours 30 under 30 overrated or

Ben Parr (41:18):

Underrated. Actually. I love it. Um, overrated from the overrated, from the perspective of, oh, like it's a like amazing whatever award. The specialty of the 30, under 30 is the private communities that are behind there. I have WhatsApp groups where I have made some, both real friends and gotten some serious business done. The community is why it's underrated. People don't see it, but that there's stuff happening all the time within the 30.

Rabah Rahil (41:45):

I love it. I love it. Being on a board, overrated, underrated,

Ben Parr (41:51):

Uh, underrated again, one of those things that you should do, especially if you're gonna eventually start a company, uh, being on a board, the Soma board was very helpful for, you know, running board meetings for love

Rabah Rahil (42:03):

It, NFTs, overrated or underrated,

Ben Parr (42:09):

Uh, overrated right now, underrated long term. Uh, I would over rate, you know, the random like drop of bears that do something or cats that do something or whatever animal is in Vogue at the moment. But the use cases that I'm actually much more interested in are underrated. I, but the example I wanna see, I know people working on is ticketing. For example, the ticketing system is fundamentally broken, but an NFT means like you can have your own verifiable ticket and you can put limits on what the resale price is. And the venue can get a piece of the resale price and can limit how many times it can be resold. And so you can have verifiable pieces to each part, the venue wins. The consumer wins, especially if you could cap like how much they could resell for. And the artist could say, I only wanna have it be allowed to resell for 15% more. That's been everyone's best interest. That's the kind of use case I wanna see with NFTs that hasn't happened yet. That bothers

Rabah Rahil (43:07):

Me. I love that that's big brain stuff, incredible founded a company, overrated or underrated.

Ben Parr (43:15):

Uh, uh, it just depends. It's not for every it it's, uh, everyone inspires and dreams, but it's much harder work and much more painful. Um, and you know, it's a, if you're gonna do it, it's a commitment of minimum five use of your life. But up 15, plus like you gotta think like you're starting company 25. You might be doing it at 40. Are you okay with that? And some people, the answer is no, but they try to go in anyway and then they realize, oh crap. So again, it's one of those really dependent upon upon you. I can understand a lot of people want to go in, do it at least once, but it is a bit overrated, a bunch of ways when there's like easier ways to make money and to have live a fulfilling life.

Rabah Rahil (43:56):

Oh, that's so well put, I love that your answers are so eloquent. Fantastic. What gave you more gray hair Mashable or writing a book?

Ben Parr (44:08):

Writing a book.

Rabah Rahil (44:09):

Oh, okay.

Ben Parr (44:10):

Like deadlines. Like, well, there's Mashable was easy. I got to talk with everybody. Uh, everyone wanna talk with me as a reporter? Uh, I got to network and see everybody when you're writing a book, you see nobody you're I was a hard, I switched from extra version to hardcore introversion. You know, that's much more complex ideas to go and together. So definitely

Rabah Rahil (44:32):

It's harder. Love favorite meal and why?

Ben Parr (44:37):

Oh, I don't know if I have a specific favorite meal. It just kind of like changes, you know, like you wanna come for food, maybe it's something like a pot tie. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I love to cook a paella. It's like when I want to be a little bit more extensive or, uh, make a Chaka for, uh, oh

Rabah Rahil (44:55):

Wow. You just went across like three different cuisines there. Wow. Your culinary delights. Incredible.

Ben Parr (45:01):

I, I, I mean, sushi, you know, had, uh, was like enough to have some Nobu over in Vegas for shop talk and you can never go wrong with some miso co some crispy rice with spicy tuna and uh, some like very fresh. She, I

Rabah Rahil (45:16):

Love it, but come out to awesome. Go to a Chico. We'll we'll we'll put you up. It's good stuff. Um, favorite theater,

Ben Parr (45:26):

Movie theater,

Rabah Rahil (45:27):

Or like you go to a lot of plays, right? I saw you you'll have a lot of play bills on your Instagram.

Ben Parr (45:32):

Cause my, so my, my, my girl, my, uh, girlfriend's at playwright.

Rabah Rahil (45:36):

That makes sense that

Ben Parr (45:38):

Right. Deborah archon.com. I'm gonna go plug her. Uh she'll she'll she checks the traffic all the time on her website. So I'm like, can I just break her brain one day? In fact, this would be a good way to do it. Um, I have to think what's my favorite theater. Uh, there's a I'm like, I'm like thinking through there was, there's been a couple of theaters we've been to in LA recently. Uh, like there's one across, uh, the street from me, the Kirk Douglas theater, which is a beautiful theater. Uh, the one over the, at UCLA top of my head. I can't remember its name. And then New York, there's just like a hundred. It's more like, I think about the plays more than the theaters. The theater is transformed by the right director and the stage manager,

Rabah Rahil (46:23):

The play. Ooh, I love that. Well, moving right into that. What's your favorite player show that you've attended?

Ben Parr (46:30):

Oh, I don't even know. What's the favorite? Uh, there's been a couple that Deborah's taken me to. I'm gonna, uh, I'm gonna forget some of the names. I remember slave play being very fascinating, which is now on Broadway. Uh, so I suggest we're seeing that, uh, I'm trying to think about more of a recent one. There was one, I can't remember the name. It was, it was about adoption and I'll go and find the name, but it was so well, like had audience interaction. It was so well done. And then of course, you know, I love drive, which is, uh, one of Deborah's do as plays, which is about, uh, a group of self of truck drivers who lose their jobs with self-driving trucks and go to the social economic and political consequences of, uh, the rise of automation. Uh, she also has an amazing play called preservation, which is, uh, also somewhat about technology and the consequences of AI, but also hilarious. So I'm gonna just say different place place. So drive and preservation, go check them out. Uh, I know there's some, there's some premieres happening in Vermont and wi in Canada and a bunch of other places next

Rabah Rahil (47:37):

Year. You got yourself a good one. Ben Ben is the hype man. He is killing it for you. I love it. Um, favorite in person marketing event, I know you just went to shop talk in Vegas. Uh, how was that? Or do you have any other favorite ones?

Ben Parr (47:53):

Uh, uh, well, shop talk is like the biggest one for e-commerce. So I don't, I'm not gonna tell you favorites hard and subjective. I would say it was nice to see lots of partners, lots of customers, lots of friends, uh, Joe Jason Long and

Rabah Rahil (48:11):

Lashes what's TD D customers were,

Ben Parr (48:13):

Uh, but it was tens of thou. It was crazy 10 thousands of people. I was so tired. Everyone was so tired. I, I still regaining my voice. Uh, after that I've had lots of opportunities to have amazing conferences. One of the most amazing ones was founders, which is run by the web summit folks, uh, which they now do in Portugal. But I was lucky enough to be able to attend several amazing founders, which is like happens right after web summit. And just get to, I just re I have a name drop you want, I just, I'll just, this is my only name drop you thing here. I remember at a table, uh, for the opening, it, they, they rented out the, the like cathedral in Dublin and I was at a table and I had like Patty Cosgrave on one side and I had, I was facing bono and I think right to his side was Elon Musk. And I was just like, why am I at this table? Why does that make any sense? And then the founder river dance was up ons. It was this way I was sitting on this side, found a river dance, came up and like had a private showing of river dance for everyone, like right up over that way. So I've had a bunch of those opportunities in life. And I have that one, that one was interesting, like table of just like, yeah, this makes no sense at all.

Rabah Rahil (49:25):

Wow. What a fun story. Uh, favorite place travel to and why?

Ben Parr (49:33):

I mean, I'm a Thai citizen. I love traveling to Thailand when I can. Um, I'm always about trying to do new places. Tokyo is next in the list. I've never actually been Japan more than an airport transfer, which bothers the heck outta me. We plan to go 2020. I really does. Wouldn't want to go, but Thailand, you know, like I like want to see family. You get the most beautiful beaches in the world. You have just amazing food for really cheap. You have amazing people. You get yourself some time massages. Uh, nothing better.

Rabah Rahil (50:01):

Love it. I love it. Favorite follow on Twitter.

Speaker 3 (50:08):

Ooh.

Ben Parr (50:11):

I mean, am I allowed to say my co-founder Matt to start also my favorite? This is a RapidFire talk, uh, at Matt PRD. I mean, but also he's just, he is. So he, he has so many interesting, thoughtful. Insight's great for e-commerce anyone e-commerce to go follow him cuz he's just tweeting out gems, but he's also like, I could just see some of the tweets beforehand, some of the thing beforehand, he's really thinking through like, what's gonna be like super interesting. What's gonna be super helpful. Um, it just depends. Like I try again, I'm a variety person. So I have a variety of super interesting VCs that are dropping super interesting, concise, so super interesting. E-commerce people, you know, like we've already talked about like, uh, Cody and Jason Wong, but there's a ton of super interesting people like Joan Coffy also from Jones road is worth of follow. I, we have a whole list. In fact, uh, we're gonna have a, we're gonna, we, we have these weekly events at 1130 on Wednesdays where we have some of the super interesting people that we, our favorite follows and we have, 'em talk about their quizzes and talk about, uh, other things we're having a whole giant amazing group talk about mother's day. Oh, sort of

Rabah Rahil (51:11):

Crazy stuff on spaces or where, how do people log in?

Ben Parr (51:16):

We could do it on a zoom. So there's like a Okta i.com/community. You can go and sign up. Uh, we have, we have, I mean, would, by the time this drops, you go, the panel we're putting together right now will have already passed, but there'll be a recording. I can't say the names are CRA. I'm like, we're just putting together the most crazy names into like one panel and we're doing that every single week. And it's just

Rabah Rahil (51:39):

Amazing. There you go. Folks, go get you some community on. All right. Last one. You ready? If you could have dinner with anybody dead or live fiction or non-fictional three people, who would they be? You're at a four person table. You're sitting at the head. You get to invite three people who are you inviting?

Ben Parr (51:55):

Uh, I'm gonna do one joke and maybe three will, uh, Jeanie of the lamp so that I can make three wishes to get anything that I want in my entire life. Plus, you know, if that's Cindy, Robin Williams genie, uh, it has to be Robin Williams. Wait, that'd be much more interesting if it's will Smith cheaty, then I'm gonna get slapped in the face.

Rabah Rahil (52:16):

Oh, that's good.

Ben Parr (52:18):

Oh, now you now you just got a Photoshop Chris rock.

Rabah Rahil (52:21):

That's amazing. We do have a great meme or my head is social is just on top of the memes. I'll have to, that'll be the cover art for this, uh, pod. That's amazing.

Ben Parr (52:31):

I do have a prediction before I continue with the other three that there will be a green lit Hancock two and that Chris rock will be in it. And that movie will make trillion dollars.

Rabah Rahil (52:41):

The slap heard around the world, huh? Or the slap slap. That's printing that money.

Ben Parr (52:45):

I, I mean, that's just good that that's deser good business. Uh, even if it's a, even if it's this pickable act, uh, both could be true Hollywood. Uh, God, that's, that's a hard, that's such a hard one because I would try to like, you know, there's people in modern era, I would love to do dinner with that. I haven't done dinner with like a Steven Spielberg or, uh, I haven't had dinner with Barack Obama yet, but I honestly feel like I can get to the point where I go and do that and I can work by way towards that. And uh, I always believe that, but I can't work by way towards having dinner with people who have passed. So I'm kind of like curious to get the perspective of somebody like, uh, yeah, you could pick an it or all that, but I'm almost like what was like Julie, if, if I could,

Rabah Rahil (53:34):

Yeah.

Ben Parr (53:34):

Then like

Rabah Rahil (53:35):

Normalize the conversation, you can absolutely communicate.

Ben Parr (53:41):

Uh, oh God. I was thinking Patrick, be interesting, like past world leaders, uh, and like talking about like their thoughts and like the eras and like, there's like all, there's like a large list I had to go and like narrow that one down, but I would try to pick peop super interest people from the past. And it wouldn't even just be world leaders. Like, you know, you're talking about like, you have, like, you have Isaac Newton, you have, uh, Leonard, Leonard, Aren. Good.

Rabah Rahil (54:06):

She has here's your gun unless be one

Ben Parr (54:08):

Got, so Leah,

Rabah Rahil (54:09):

You got the genie. You need one more.

Ben Parr (54:14):

Uh, you, I, I will. I I'm like, I'm trying to think. What's the ones that gonna help me answer questions. You know, I'm like, I guess I'm not gonna have a conversation with the first human,

Rabah Rahil (54:28):

Whether that's interesting.

Ben Parr (54:29):

You want to think it is. There's some, you know, it depends cuz I guess, you know, that would count because that's either, uh, it's either fictional. Yeah. It's or it is the first person depending on your beliefs. Totally. So I I'd be interested in like the beginning of the universe and I'm probably not, you know, gonna ask for dinner with any kind of God cuz I've got, I don't think my mind could handle that, but you know, the first creation is

Rabah Rahil (54:57):

That's incredible.

Ben Parr (54:58):

Be interesting. Uh, uh, it goes, there goes on and on in different religions too. That's interesting people across Budha.

Rabah Rahil (55:07):

Yeah. Would be super

Ben Parr (55:08):

Interesting too. Actually. There you go. And that's a real loud person. I, I, I actually my

Rabah Rahil (55:12):

Top. So you got your genie. There you go. You got uh, Buddha and then now I'm just based on the second one. Who's your second one. I forgot who was um, oh geez. Uh, the Isaac. No, not Isaac noon. Was it new? No, it was uh, we, oh jeez.

Ben Parr (55:25):

We went E Adam E we went through, we went through a lot of people

Rabah Rahil (55:29):

Didn't you guys listened to it. You'll remember it. That was really, really interesting that damn it. I didn't even

Ben Parr (55:34):

Remember forget <laugh> I, I didn't even get into the fictional. I didn't get into the fictional characters, which would be interesting too. The problem is you, I already know intimately their fictional worlds or they did tell me something about their fictional world that I don't even know what is like, you know, like think like final fantasy, like cloud strip, final fantasy seven for the nerds out there. Like, does he know anything outside of like his orders gonna be like, this is gonna be like a, you asked him a question about what's outside the borders of, uh, of the final fantasy

Rabah Rahil (56:03):

Seven breaking the third wall, right.

Ben Parr (56:05):

Spank blanks. Or does it, I know, I know that like, but I gotta, we're not like people from actual history, so we'll, we'll make up a list. We'll go make a teleporter. Uh, can I pick someone from the far future? That would be interesting. Add even better, pick a top scientist from the interesting, super far future and then get all the key, key information. Maybe be like, how do I do time travel teleportation.

Rabah Rahil (56:28):

It's a bit of the back to the future vibe. Right? But inverted. I like it. I like it. Yeah. Ben, you're one of the most fascinating people I've ever had on. I knew this was gonna be a hit. Our listeners are gonna love it. Tell people where to find you, tell people how to get involved in octane AI. This time is yours. My friend

Ben Parr (56:46):

Octane ai.com O CT, a N E ai.com. If you are a store and you like making money and you've had any trouble with your return at ad spent, you go to Octa the I and you add it to a beautiful whale and you will print more money. Just go ask Jones road, beauty and hundreds, if not thousands of other eCommerce brands, uh, Ben at Ben at act in the eye on social too. It's great fun times. Uh, at Ben par, B E N P a R on literally every social network. Uh, you feel free to DB on Twitter. Uh, I may regret say that, but whatever. Uh, and then all the other networks, it's all at Ben par, Ben par.com where I will eventually post that article comparison

Rabah Rahil (57:28):

And

Ben Parr (57:28):

VCs coaches to VCs and, and seeing where that goes,

Rabah Rahil (57:33):

Oh, I love it. And then don't forget about vested interest working name, but podcast coming soon,

Ben Parr (57:39):

Vested interest podcast.com and just follow me. And Greg Berg will be talking about it constantly. So that will be coming sued. There's we, we got some, uh, going record.

Rabah Rahil (57:50):

I know that fancy then you're such a gem. Thank you so much for your time. Uh, just super fan. This has been such a dream of mine to get you on and just jam with you. It's been incredible. Um, if you do, oh, look at this. Going into the universe. If you do wanna get more involved with triple whale, we are tri triple.com. We're on the bird app at triple whale, and then we have a fantastic newsletter that goes out every Tuesday, Thursday called whale mail. You can subscribe right on our Twitter profile and that's it. 31 in the books. Ben, thank you so much again for your time. Go sign up for octane AI, go get, mm. Download it. It's a fantastic little app. And then go ano call Ben on the Twitter's DM him and tell him why triple Platy is the way we should go in our rebranding. Ben, thanks so much again, that's it folks. 30 ones in the books.

Podcast

Ben Parr on The FUTURE of Ecommerce, VCs and AI

March 18, 2024

58:48

Hosted By

Rabah Rahil
CMO at Triple Whale

Guests

Ben Parr
Co-founder & President, @OctaneAI

Episode Description

In this episode of ROAS we go over the future of e-commerce & tons of other high-value topics with Ben Parr#ROAS

Notes & Links

📧Subscribe to Whale Mail for exclusive industry insights and in-depth marketing breakdowns: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/tripl...

🐦 Follow us on Twitter for Industry insights https://twitter.com/triplewhale

Follow the people featured in this episode here:

- Rabah's Twitter: https://twitter.com/rabahrahil
- Ben's Twitter: https://twitter.com/benparr

Transcription

Ben Parr (00:00):

Investors are gonna pull back their investments by about 30 to 50% over the course of the next couple years. So it's, if they did, if they did 20 deals of the year, they might end up doing 10 to 15 the, this year. And that might continue. And that's just purely because the interest rates are going up.

Rabah Rahil (00:21):

All right, folks, we're back for episode 31. This was actually a, uh, childhood hero. If I may say we have a four of 3,030 a Northwestern grab a published author and now a co-founder or you, you founder. Now you, your co-founder president run an octane AI. Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben Parr (00:43):

Hello in the universe, everyone. Thank you for having me.

Rabah Rahil (00:47):

Oh, absolutely. And so as always, I'm in the marketing HQ out here in Austin, where's this podcast find you today, Ben,

Ben Parr (00:54):

Uh, I'm currently in a lavender field, isn't it pretty over here? I just set up a desk here in person, you know, making whole thing. You know what though? Like if, if we needed to go and like change scenery, you know, I could be inside of some kind of teleporter or I could be in the wild, wild west or yeah, for those who are just listening, they're like, what the hell is going on? I could be in a rainforest. It's so beautiful. You

Rabah Rahil (01:18):

That's not bad.

Ben Parr (01:19):

I don't. I know.

Rabah Rahil (01:21):

How do you, how do you support yourself? How, how are you doing all this sorcery? So this is actually one of my favorite apps, but give, give it the plug.

Ben Parr (01:28):

We, uh, we're both users of a company called mm-hmm <affirmative> it's, Mmhm M it's by one of our investors at Octa. I, uh, Philip in the former founder of Evernote. And it allows you to do some super amazing things, like change the backgrounds or put up different words. Like I just did right here, or, you know, uh, even put up like, you know, uh, screen share right in the middle, like this amazing case study about how Jones road beauty makes seven figures every single month from a new ad flow that involves TikTok ads in an tic quiz. I'm gonna plug in,

Rabah Rahil (02:01):

Shout out, shout out Cody Parker. Love me some Cody. Um, yeah, actually

Ben Parr (02:06):

Joan and Eli. I mean, it's a whole dream team over there just as a complete aside.

Rabah Rahil (02:11):

It's not bad, is it? Uh, yeah, Eli's actually been on the podcast. One of our, uh, most downloaded. He is just an absolute gem of human. I haven't got to interact with, uh, uh, Joanne that much, but I'm sure she's an absolute crusher. Cody. Cody's really building, building out. Um, there it's a, what an incredible story there, but we'll get to that later. We wanna talk about you. I,

Ben Parr (02:31):

Your customer,

Rabah Rahil (02:32):

The story of the story of BP here. Um, so you went to Northwestern, right?

Ben Parr (02:39):

Right. Northwestern over in, uh, Evanson, Illinois.

Rabah Rahil (02:42):

Yeah, absolutely. I went to Indiana. So same conference. We look, you, you are always the Smarties, the, the, the big 10 smarts. Uh, I feel like what'd you study who's

Ben Parr (02:52):

I was trying to just think on the side, uh, who's been the better football team in the last 10 years. I feel like we probably have won. I bet you it, us, but I gotta check.

Rabah Rahil (03:01):

It hurts. It hurts. We're supposed to be a sports school and you guys are supposed to be the nerds and the, the academics and the nerds killing me. You're killing me here.

Ben Parr (03:11):

Um, you have to, you have to play, you have to play Ohio state and Michigan state in Michigan every year. So, uh, that's the problem.

Rabah Rahil (03:18):

So dirty little secret when we would have Ohio state as a home game, because they have kind of colors close-ish to ours. Um, that's when they would take the overhead photos <laugh> so the stadium looked full cuz the, the Ohio state fans would travel and the stadium would never be full without that, but that's not here in north there. Oh yeah. Would you study while you were at Northwestern?

Ben Parr (03:40):

Uh, science and human culture, political science and business institutions. So two majors and a minor.

Rabah Rahil (03:48):

Oh, very, very cool. And then you also wrote a book, right? Captivology it's it was actually named, uh, marketing book of 2015 by strategy and business magazine. Tell me a little bit about that adventure.

Ben Parr (04:02):

Uh, so I did many things, many things between, uh, college and the book cuz I did. I was the editor of Nashville for four, four and a half years, uh, wrote 2,446 articles. In my four years, there did a small VC fund on behalf of celebrities into early stage startups, which is his own story. Uh, I did a column for CPS and CNET. I did a bunch of other stuff. And then I, uh, wrote Captivology in part because of all the investing and all these startup for help and press marketing customer user acquisition. And so, uh, Captivology goes through the science and psychology of attention, why we pay attention to certain people, products gives in ideas and how to utilize that science to captivate and capture the attention of others. So I went through 300 years of scientific research and attention and memory interviewed like, you know, 50 plus masters of attention. So like everyone from Cheryl Sandberg, Steven Soderberg, David Copperfield Shahi and BI Moto, like all sorts of super amazing people. So, you know, there there's, my face is on it. You can, if you ever go find it, it's very easy. They, I did a eight, six hour photo shoot just to get that one photo for the cover of the book. <laugh>

Rabah Rahil (05:17):

That's amazing. What was that experience like, like take me through, did you do, like how do you break that down? Is it like in terms of like big pillars and then those pillars kind of manifest in chapters? Or like how, how did you take, cause that's a big, big lift, right?

Ben Parr (05:34):

So you have to do your research and that takes actually a decent long time to kind of start forming the coherent thoughts before that you write, you don't write the book before you get the deal. You write a, a, a proposal which get, lets you like think other thoughts, you write a sample chapter, but not the entire book. A lot of that happens afterwards. So got it. In my case, you know, after the research there's a, there's a specific app, the secret app that all great. I think book writers use it's, uh, called Scrivener and oh yeah. It's specifically meant for writing books and writing these like long multi-piece things, because then you can put things to the individual chapters. You can move things around, you get little build to board in it. It's an amazing little like app that, uh, just has been around for forever for uh, book writers.

Ben Parr (06:23):

So, you know, I would just like tackle different chapters and sections. It would tell me how many words that you did to write in the day in order to keep on pace, to hit my, uh, deadline, which of course, you know, I didn't quite hit my deadline, but got pretty close. I remember like finishing the last version of the final of the edits with my editor just before going to Burnman being like, I have to finish this, I gotta get this done before burning man. And I was able to do that. So, uh, it's a journey I took two plus years. I lived alone for a couple months on a river in upstate,

Rabah Rahil (06:56):

Uh, seriously.

Ben Parr (06:58):

Yeah. In upstate Cal in California, near Mount Shasta. Uh, I spent some time in Thailand working on it, all sorts of things.

Rabah Rahil (07:06):

That is cool. I'm just, uh, imagine you like Johnny Depp in the, I forget what is it? The door or whatever. I forget that movie where he goes out to the, the upstate cabin in New York and just total isolation. You just banging away on your keyboard. That's incredible. Um, total digression, I didn't know you were a burner cuz uh, I usually do really pretty indepth research and uh, my assistant missed that. How, how was Bernie man? What was that? What was that?

Ben Parr (07:28):

I only did it. I only did it once. I want to do it again cuz but then COVID happened. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I went because a dear friend of mine, uh, as Raskin was getting married and you know, he, uh, helped create like he created an infinite school actually among a bunch of other things. Wow. Uh, he, he was the chief designer over at Firefox. Uh, but he was getting married and I'm like, I gotta go be there. And I wanted to go in, go there. And I went with my friend, Sarah bur, who was a tech crutch at the time and yeah, we just drove in my truck, filled with stuff. We had, like we found a couch on the street. We put a couch in the back, drove all the way through. No, it was, it was excellent. You just like have a level, especially with like the reason, like a wedding or something. You have a level of bonding, like people who I think will be family forever. So I want to go back. It's hard to know when, but, and I'm curious to see like what happens this year now that, uh, it will definitely be back and we've gone years without in isolation, frankly. A lot of, uh, people who were regular burners have been able to go for two, three years. Yeah. It's interesting to see

Rabah Rahil (08:34):

How you're such interesting person. Geez. I knew you were interesting when I was going through my show notes, but man, you have all these little interesting oddities and intricacies. I love it. You also sit on the board right. Of uh, semi source.

Ben Parr (08:47):

So I sit on the board. Well nowadays of the Lilo Jana foundation. So Samasource is the SI was the predecessor it's complicated, but okay. Soma source, uh, provides like, uh, the whole mission of everything is to give work. And so in the earlier Soma source, you know, was a nonprofit that was giving work and focus on training people in impoverished regions like in Uganda and Kenya on digital work. And then oftentimes employing a lot of those people to do, uh, AI, data trading or moderation or things like that. Uh, we split the organization into a for-profit and a non-profit because the for-profit needed to raise money to compete with its competitors. Yep. The nonprofit owns a big chunk of that. And so I said at the board of the non-profit and our focus is like promoting entrepreneurship and promoting the give work mission that the, uh, the late founder Lija, uh, really ascribed to. And so like we run a give work challenge in, uh, in Kenya, Uganda where we're like, we help fund great, uh, entrepreneurial ideas and help them like get the network of the resources so they can grow it. We kind of measure our impact in terms of the number of jobs that we help, uh, make like good jobs. And so we're hoping to do a lot more of that. So, uh, that's the board side of the Lilo Jana foundation.

Rabah Rahil (10:08):

How cool. How do you even find time to sleep? Incredible. All right. So where I actually first rubbed up against you is when you were sling heat at Mashable, do you have any fun stories there or cuz you were kind of there and it's pinnacle? Not that it's like not good now, but like you to be fair, like you were kind of running it during its heyday, right. Or is that, is that a misconception?

Ben Parr (10:28):

Uh, I ran the west coast in, uh, editor, chief, Adam Mo bread in the east coast. Yeah. Uh, so the, yeah, the early matchable days, it was just, I don't know, that was the early Silicon valley days. Like Twitter was a new thing. They had Twitter conferences, they had web 2.0 conferences for anyone who's in early tech. This will feel nostalgic, but there was like an early era and Mashable and tech crunch were the two big publications and we wrote, uh, content stream of articles. And I, we eventually had a T I had the team of 50 had like some amazing reporters, had some amazing stuff happen. I don't know it was, uh, it's like it's nostalgic, like the, about that era. You know, I still talk with some of my Nashville colleagues here and there. And just like, it's a unique kind of experience, especially when you're like in your early twenties and your first job is to be a reporter who gets to talk with everybody cuz that's how I met a lot of my, our investors. That's how I met a lot of, uh, early people in, across the industry.

Rabah Rahil (11:31):

How cool that is. You're right. That's incredible. So you're one of like the most productive people. I know. How do you balance that with like your work life? Like how do you show up in relationships as well as, you know, published books, be an editor, sit on a board, uh, start a company, run a company. Like, do you have any tricks or tips or people that are struggling with kind of finding, finding, I don't like really believing like the work life balance thing, but you definitely, you know, I don't think life is about working. Um, it's about building deep connections with humans you care about and you obviously do that very well. So how do you accomplish that?

Ben Parr (12:09):

Do I mean, I would first say don't try to do everything all at once, but I have a trouble with that and I assume you do too. <laugh> yes. Uh, I mean you, sometimes your brain just does better with a, with a break and that might mean go watch a movie with the partner, go, uh, text a friend, go on a walk. Uh, it kind of just depends. I feel like over a longer span of time, like I have done a bunch of things, but I did try to fo like when I was doing, Captivology tried to focus just on that and you know, that helped me compress like the timeframe and then it helped me add things and then there's like, you know, a level of automation to certain things, you know? Okay. Like you can get like, like, you know, have assistance and all that kind of thing as like help.

Ben Parr (12:52):

But there's like automation that can help with like making things happen, creating like, you know, I'm trying to currently make it so that I make it easier for myself to make investor intros, to companies that I either advise or invested in and having whole CR for doing it. And eventually I want to have like a system where I just like click two buttons and then it'll just like send off the email. And that's what I'm trying to get to in the like pretty near future. But like, you know, the more automations like that I can go and build the like more time I can go and get back and the lesser, the less daunting, the task, the other one being just send the thing immediately. Like you get a text, just send back. I've had, I still make that mistake. Just like, don't think like you could only think so hard, you know, like send the response back, like at least acknowledge something. Um, a lot of times, so things only require a couple words, you know, previously there's a couple that require more thought you need to have it, keep going back to your inbox. But that stuff that proves and piles up mentally, even more than in your inbox.

Rabah Rahil (13:53):

That's so well put. Yeah. I can't remember who said that, but if it's under, if it takes you under three minutes or something like that, just do it now because to your point, um, not only does it accrue, I think it compounds where it starts to almost clog up the system, right. Where these little things that are not necessarily meaningless, but you can just knock 'em out. And then it, I know when I get like all that busy work done or going, I just, are you on the super human train? Do are yes, no, maybe ish

Ben Parr (14:16):

<laugh> but yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that, that I was gonna say actually like certain tools do help you. Like I have a whole set of systems for different kinds of inboxes and superhuman. You know, there's a whole set of different, like I have a set of different things in a notion. I have like spreadsheet too for like tracking different personal habits. Um, Ooh, I love that, which I'm not as great at doing every day, but I'm trying to get better at, but the very minimum, it keeps them top of mind.

Rabah Rahil (14:41):

Oh, I love that. It's incredible. Uh, I'm also a big notion power user, one of the most amazing tool. Uh, I love it. Love it, love it. Um, okay, cool. Let's round out this main segment. One last question. What is the nicest thing someone's done for you?

Ben Parr (14:58):

This is a interesting question. What is the nicest thing somebody has ever done for me? There have been a tremendous number. I like, I don't know if I can pick one. That's hard. I could say that in general one, like I try to say this a lot. A lot of startup life is luck. Not skill hard percent and yeah. There's skill involved, but anyone who discounts the amount of luck that's required to have the right timing, have the right market dynamics sometimes make it the right hire is like, is like kidding you like a lot of stuff in startup world is just based off of luck. Uh, and I've gotten lucky, being able to have super amazingly experiences go to super awesome places, you know, get, receive super awesome introductions. And so I'm gonna have to actually ponder what the number one thing is. The problem is like, this is also where like I have like a thing where I try not to do superlatives because it's always hard for people to take a superlative.

Ben Parr (16:01):

If you go, like, what's a nice thing. There's like, like I was just a chop talk, the eCommerce conference and there's like a hundred nice things. People helping me get it to parties or people like, uh, on me helping other people get into things, uh, like going like someone just grabbing like a coffee, like the little things are overlooked sometimes, but they really kind of do add up, you know? And so I like think like, oh, there's like at least 30 examples of that kind of thing happening in a four day time span, which I'm still somehow, uh, able to sit and, uh, stay awake.

Rabah Rahil (16:35):

I love that. I love that. Yeah. I, I totally agree. I think there's definitely so one, a hundred percent agree with you. I think the two things that are probably the biggest like functions in terms of success of a business is timing and luck and luck is kind of a function of timing in a weird way. Um, so I totally agree with you there, but yeah, I just wanna see, you know, the nicest thing and I think that's a, a beautiful way to put it, rounding it out where just, just do good. The car balance will help you out and just try and make the world a better place. One action at a time. The, the Ben Ben par philosophy, the ethos of awesomeness.

Ben Parr (17:07):

Yeah. I'm gonna keep on thinking. I might have one later in the randomly. I'm just gonna answer, what are your random questions with, I remember this one time, because it's a good question.

Rabah Rahil (17:17):

The, the lightning bolt it'll just come outta context, totally shift the conversation. It'll be fantastic. Ben, you made it to the first segment already flying through. I love it. Okay. This is the reason why people bought the ticket. This is the value add segment. Let's get nerdy. Why did you start Octa? AI was there like a aha moment? Like, and then you had a little bit of a pivot as well. So if you can tell people a little bit about that.

Ben Parr (17:38):

So my co-founder Matt, uh, came up with the original concept for Ocana, which, uh, I feel like we have, like, we have evolved over time. I like using the word evolved, but the core idea has been the same, which is, uh, the conversation between consumer brand has been fundamentally broken for. Yep. Forever. It's been generally a one way spam kind of filter of like, I'm gonna just blast you with an email and as we not personalize in the slightest versus like your human interactions, you're personalized, we're literally personalizing our conversation as it goes. That's literally just nothing but personalization. Uh, but our communications with brands should be the same. It'd be better for the consumer. It'd be better for the brand. It'd be better for everybody. And our first attempt at this was chat bots, uh, for messenger. And we did this for artists, it's celebrities.

Ben Parr (18:26):

We raised a bunch of money. We did it with, uh, a whole all sorts of brands. Um, but it really became clear to us that it was our eCommerce customers that were getting the most benefit. And we were working with some amazing eCommerce stores and realized that they, uh, they could, this was just like an amazing industry there where its level of personalization was actually like really valued. And they were on the forefront of things. Yep. We started with messenger there, but it evolved into what we are now, uh, into our quiz product, into our zero party data platform because all of our, uh, customers were trying to build quizzes and they were like hacking basic messenger to do it. And we're like, why are you doing that? And they told us, we really wanna put this on the website, but it's not easy. That costs a lot to do.

Ben Parr (19:12):

Custom builds, custom builds, like, you know, are like require lots of engineering power to even just update doesn't come with integrations. Yeah. We're like, we'll build that like where it was the same technology we used to do messenger to build the quiz product. And we did, and we built this quiz product, cuz we saw this giant hole where everyone was looking for a solution to help them make and launch a quiz really easily and to get the analytics and the backend for it. And that worked out as you can imagine, uh, really well for us. Uh, we are by far the largest platform of our kind and Shopify Shopify itself is a customer of Octa AI. You could go take their hard work quiz. There you go. And we've gone we've to feel hardware.shopify.com. I have to go and like pull it up in my little like thing in a little bit.

Ben Parr (19:57):

But uh, we even have a, we even have a case study actually on, uh, on Octa eye where you can go do that, but we've had like more and more brands come to us, especially in the last like couple months. So, you know, we'll talk about Jones road again for a second. Uh, our lovely mutual customer, but Jones road, beauty, you know, they saw this is, you know, for those who the don't know it is Bobby Brazos skincare brand, uh, very successful, but they were using, you know, Facebook ads. Yeah. And that wa has many of us know, uh, Facebook ads have dropped like a rock 40% decreased in return in ad fence since iOS 14.5, since people could opt out of data tracking. And so e-commerce brands have been looking for an alternative Jones, Rhode switched their Facebook ad spent, uh, over to TikTok.

Ben Parr (20:41):

Uh, and they send that traffic except to just a landing page who sent it to an auction AI quiz. So they have this like beautiful quiz where they ask about like, what kind of like, you know, they're trying to ask, what kind of skin do you have? What kind of things like that? And they're doing that. What they found was like by having a quiz as like the landing page for, for themselves, for their, for their TikTok ads, it actually drove a lot more traffic. It drove a lot more, uh, it drove a lot more engagement. It drove a lot more conversions, especially I think some around like, you know, 80%, 85% plus of people who start the quiz complete the quiz. 15% of those people actually end up making a purchase. And that's like, those are huge numbers. Right? And for like them now they make seven figures a month from that flow, they get a three, three and a half X plus return on ad spent from it.

Ben Parr (21:28):

It's a real alternative to Facebook ads. And that's really like what we have found as like a real piece of our product market fit, which is if you've had trouble with your Facebook ads or ads in general, and you're looking for better conversion and you're looking to have data that you could use for, you know, the follow up segments, like more personalized Ebo, more personalized text message. That's also like a big part of what's driving a lot of like sales and a lot of revenue, you know, that's what we do. That's like what our software does. And so yeah, a brand here I'll actually even pull up like brand will build a beautiful quiz, like, uh, this to like, you know, this is Jones roads. They'll be able to like ask key questions, learn about the customer's preferences, make a really targeted recommendation, use that information to recommend really useful products to customers. And then, you know, can send personalized email. So they don't email you about things that don't make sense for you and your brand. So that's the idea, the AI story in a nutshell.

Rabah Rahil (22:22):

Yeah. That's wonderful. And another thing to pump you up even more, if you, you don't even need more pumping up, I mean you in the stratosphere already, but um, the customer value is also, um, much higher as well. So Cody shared some numbers with me as well, where people that convert, um, just straight up through a Facebook ad versus people that come convert through the Octa, I quiz, um, the AOV and also LTV. So the longer term, um, value lifetime customer value is much higher, um, with the octane. Yeah. Is this, is this the, uh, CA the case study is wonderful. We'll link. This

Ben Parr (22:52):

Is, this is the case study over on Octa. I cuz some specific numbers too, like this is only in the three month period, two and a half million, zero party data points. Yeah. 82% of people who started quiz complete it, 15% make a purchase, but yeah, you're right. One of the biggest ones people don't even think about, they, the customers who take a quiz, increase their AOB by 50%. Yeah. And this is true across the board. We have customers 20 to 50% increases in AOB. Plus the emails that to captured, it's a, it's a much more likely people are gonna give you an email that way than say through a popup. Yep. And that's a while another reason why a lot of customers go and use us.

Rabah Rahil (23:25):

I love that. Yeah. And so ultimately you're, it's so interesting though, cuz you're still adhering to your original thesis. It's just, the mechanism is different

Ben Parr (23:36):

Of right. And I think we'll continue to adhere to that thesis. Yeah. And continue to build on top of that. You know, cuz like for example, we wanna build a new set of integrations and like make it possible for our customers to leverage the zero party data for everything from uh, more personalized email, text messages. Yep. Which is a big focus today to more personalized websites to using AI, to give, uh, to do some super cool things like automatically, uh, I can't even quite talk about it. There's some super cool fit to the a side bet, but also being able to leverage the data in other platforms to do would say, you know, maybe you want to have some advanced analytics and some kind of, uh, awesome product that's uh, uh, utilized by Marine mammals. That would be, uh, super awesome too. Stay tuned

Rabah Rahil (24:24):

Coming in in soon coming and you see that you see the subtleties there, this man, his, his vernacular is incredible. He can, he can talk around somebody and instantly know what it is without saying it, the, the communication skills on this one,

Ben Parr (24:37):

By the way, I'm super clear talking about Platy post. Oh, oh not know. I didn't know, know what's on. I didn't even know it is. It is. I congratulations. It is for those like, listen, just so you know, today is April 1st when we're recording. So I just wanna say congratulations on your rebranding to triple PLA pie. So I'm really, really excited for, uh, the new Platypus logo, the new Platypus, everything, um, and all the egg memes that we're gonna have now. It's, it's great. It's, it's a great rebranding. I love it. Well

Rabah Rahil (25:05):

We figured right. What's better than a whale. A Platypus. Why not? Why not amazing. We should. We should ran with that. Oh, that's incredible. Um, what's been the best parts and hardest parts of running octane.

Ben Parr (25:18):

Uh, best parts is amazing people and like all these like and amazing customers. And like in the last couple of months, especially, we've seen so many more of our customers, you know, publicly like talk about us, talk about what they've been doing with their product and like getting to see like an ecosystem develop is amazing to like behold and really, uh, both not even enjoyable. Uh, it's just, it's an honor. Yeah. Almost like it's hard to describe the feeling. You're like, oh wow. Like they're using our product in way. Cause I would never would've imagined. And now there's hundreds, thousands of people talking about it. Um, the hard part is always just like startups are hard. There's an up and there's a down, we've had ups and downs. So we've even tell, we talked about like, you know, one where like when Facebook changed, uh, when Facebook shut down the messenger platform due to Cambridge Analytica and we had to, we had to do layoffs.

Ben Parr (26:16):

We dearly died. We survived by the skin of our teeth and then we were able to grow again. Uh, but that probably that kind of thing ages you very quickly. So there's a, there's a ton of like, they always talk about this. Like I always talk with investors and founders, like the roller coaster for being a founder in an early stage company is super high highs, super low lows. If you're a VC, for example, like the highs are not as high, but the lows are definitely not as low. Yes. Uh, which is probably why a lot of founders turn to VC after they do a company or two,

Rabah Rahil (26:49):

I, I couldn't agree more. And uh, it's almost equivalent to, um, almost a player being coming, the coach where it's like, you just, you just lose the, uh, not necessarily tenacity or maybe lose is a bad bird, but uh, there is just a lot to your point. Like there is just a lot of rollercoaster rides and there's like, it sounds cliche, but man, there is just always something. And so that VC is more out. It's just abstracted way. You're the drunk uncle where like you get to kind of hang out and play, but you aren't our uncle actually. So that's a great segue, but you, you get to hang out with the child.

Ben Parr (27:23):

It should be an article idea.

Rabah Rahil (27:24):

Yeah. But at the same time when shit hits the fan, you're like, all right, I'm out. And like, it's, it's like this thing. Whereas like the parent is more of like the founder owner operator where when shit happens, like you have to deal with it, you have to figure it out. And to your point, um, you know, hopefully sometimes the scars, the scars are kind of badges of honor, but sometimes the scar scuttle the ship. And so it's just a really big challenge. And then it also sucks. Like when, to your point, you have to make hard decisions and like it is what it is. And sometimes, you know, you have to, there's a, there's a terrible, but sometimes applicable line of like the greater good where like we have to, you know, seal off some of these things to, to make sure that the ship can stay afloat and it's not necessarily, you can do it in a, you know, a nice way, make sure there's a severance and there's some things where you can help people on their next pathway. But at the end of the day, you're firing people, you have to do it. And so there's just, uh, you know, some difficult conversations that usually the VC isn't involved in or has to be involved and they can basically step outta the room. And then when everything's fun, they come to the party. But if the party gets hit called, the cops get called to the party, <laugh> they just sneak out the back door and they don't have to deal with it. Well,

Ben Parr (28:30):

I have a, I have a couple thoughts here, which I think you're exactly right. Um, we've been lucky at octane to have honestly very good investors. Who've had our batter like, uh, I, I like some people are like, like honestly like general catalyst and boost VC and javelin and bullpen. They've all had our backs. They've, you know, put money in when we were like in dire straits, they've helped us figure out things. And that's a really valuable thing to have when you are a founder and it's hard to get. And I think for us, we do pretty much all the leads of all of our rounds for some period of time. That's really cool before we took their money. And that helped us a lot with like, we already had some trust, we already knew them, you know? Um, and that helped a lot with like figuring out like what to do and who to go and work with. The other thing you gave me an idea, the beginning of like, uh, your speech, great speech, uh, which is that I think I'm gonna write an article in my personal blog, uh, comparing which VC is, which coach and which sports league. Oh. Because I, the thought that went to my head is, and so when you're listening to this, I think I'll have that article done and published, but we'll even link to it. Oh, a hundred percent. Uh I'm like, who? Like

Rabah Rahil (29:48):

That is a really

Ben Parr (29:48):

Good point. Who is the bill? Be check.

Rabah Rahil (29:50):

Yeah.

Ben Parr (29:51):

Who is the bill be check of the VC world. Like, this is like, actually like a question I'm trying to think, like, who is the bill? Be check. So

Rabah Rahil (29:59):

Curly, maybe,

Ben Parr (30:00):

Uh, I'm gonna acting it's girl girlies. Girly is up there. I had to like, it's hard. Cause like there's so many coaches and then there's like so many I love. And then you got like, you got like, it depends. It depends if you just stick to football, but you could go SHA chef

Rabah Rahil (30:13):

Ski, whatever

Ben Parr (30:14):

You

Rabah Rahil (30:14):

Could be. So that,

Ben Parr (30:15):

Or, or like yeah. Duke or

Rabah Rahil (30:18):

My Alma mater Bob Knight. Who's the VC. That's choking people out. <laugh> this is brilliant, man. This is, oh my God. I can't wait to read this article. You have to have this out. When we publish, I think there'll be like a three week bleed time or something on this. This is brilliant. Ben. I like, there's so much meat on this bone. That is hilarious. I love this breaking news people.

Ben Parr (30:40):

I, I think, I think, I think I figured out who, uh, I was just like thinking through some of them I'm like, okay, I think I know who Kirsten green a 4runner would be. I won't reveal yet, but there's a whole set of them, you know? So this

Rabah Rahil (30:51):

Will be fun. Oh, it's super fun. And now, now that you're kind of walking it through my head, the analogies are really actually incredibly tight because there are certain types of coach. Like for example, Bob Knight, wasn't gonna really take a super talented team like cuz he didn't deal with a lot of crap. Whereas like a chef ski or uh, uh, Roy Williams, X, U UNC person, like he wasn't gonna make a C player into an a player, but he was incredible at one recruiting a player and B making sure those a players coalesced into a championship level team. And so there there's so many interesting parallels here. Oh I love it. Look at that big brain energy coming from BP. Let's go. Let's go. I love it. Um, okay. Next question. How do you see the next two to three years unfolding? Um, in eCommerce specifically kind of like the DTC Shopify space.

Ben Parr (31:41):

Uh, want me to be honest? Yeah, yeah. Bumpy. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I will be it's we will be bumpy. It's already starting to happen with, uh, the ad issues. So 20, 20 most incredible year for eCommerce I yep. 20, 21 supply chain issues choke some, uh, iOS started this year. The I stuff is started to compound more. Yeah. Some brands really are starting to figure it out. Of course, the ones that are using Octa, I and triple, uh, triple PLA pie <laugh> are doing the

Rabah Rahil (32:12):

Best. Is that really the, the plural for platapus

Ben Parr (32:16):

It's PLA it's platapus technically I believe it's not PLA sort. I like PLA I've been corrected on this before. I I like PLA pipe too, but I think it is actually technically triple PLA pluses, which doesn't roll off the time. That's cool as well. Triple PLA. So we're gonna go triple PLA pie,

Rabah Rahil (32:33):

Better branding

Ben Parr (32:34):

<laugh> but, but you know, we can have fun, but uh, there will be some difficult times because the market is, uh, there's some things you can extrapolate from the market. And I had this conversation at chop talk with a whole bunch of investors. Uh, investors are gonna pull back their investments by about 30 to 50%. Oh

Rabah Rahil (32:53):

Wow. Over the next couple

Ben Parr (32:54):

Years. Yeah. So it's, if they did, if they did 20 deals of the year, they might end up doing 10 to 15 the, this year and that might continue. And that's just purely because the interest rates are going up a hundred percent. And so what happens when the interest rates going up? I know I'm going to hard core economics. No, no. I love it. When the interest rates go up, uh, the, the people who invest in VCs, uh, which are like family offices, wealthy individuals, they put more of their money towards, uh, bonds and things that are safe. But those have higher return when the interest rates are up and less into VC. Why we've had so much money in VC in the last 10 years is because the interest rates were so low. It was more, it was so you would get no return on bonds and some of those instruments.

Ben Parr (33:35):

And so you put more money into things that were higher risk that turned out to be higher reward. And so some of that money will pull back. Some early funds will, will perish some bigger funds will raise smaller funds. Uh, and it's not clear how long that will last or how difficult that will be. Uh, but it will be it's going to have an impact on everything. Yep. And so I think it might mean people might spend a bit less because they will have a little bit less cash in their pocket or have to pay, uh, more in interest rates. Some PE for some people it's going to require just, uh, like be harder to fundraise, to continue to grow your company. But I also think that for the ones who build like real product value in like, uh, are able to find economics that work you're gonna end up really in a really good place in part, because like there are frankly probably too many companies in too many verticals.

Ben Parr (34:27):

Uh, and if you survive the next couple of years, uh, you'll end up being in really great shape and having an even bigger market to own a control. So it's gonna be bumpy is the word some will go way up, some will go down, uh, it'll be a little bit unpredictable, but you can rely on the fact that probably VCs will put down less money because interest rates will go up and when interest rates go up, there's just a set of things that always happen every single time. Yep. And you just have to track it and it'll probably be like that for a couple years.

Rabah Rahil (34:57):

I mean, I think that you're like on NBC finance or so right there, that was just an absolutely wonderful rant. I think it's absolutely spot on. Um, and also inflationary pressures are, are, are a real thing as well where we're kind of running away with that. Um, but I, I think you're right. And in a, in a way, like, obviously you don't want people to not do well, but I think there will be a way of creative destruction where, um, there's just some people that were basically growing a business off of ad arbitrage and that hypergrowth is just non-existent anymore. Like I think if you grow your business 50% year over year, um, this year you're killing it, like you're, you're doing really well. And to your point, I do think there's actually gonna be, I don't, I do agree that the deployment of capital will probably be less, but I think there's gonna be a concentration in the people that are doing well because they do, like you said, have those sound robust economics and they can kind of like if a company can do well within this type of forecasting in a bull market, it's cocaine and champagne.

Rabah Rahil (35:55):

And so like, if you can get it now, once you you're willing. Yep, exactly.

Ben Parr (36:00):

Yeah. I was gonna say, you're willing to make more pets when, uh, it's just more free flowing money. Uh, and you have so much more capital to deploy. So you're willing to put it into more things, less capital. You're gonna put into a fewer bets, but you're gonna pick the ones that we do have the traction. Yep. So there's, that will be if you're really, if you are really executing, you will always still be able to raise money and do things. And you know, if you have the ability to get to profitability or are profitable, you're in the best shape you have control for your own

Rabah Rahil (36:29):

Debt. Exactly. And that's the RNA of financing. Like, uh, the bank will give you money when you don't need it. And then when you do need it, nobody will give you money. <laugh> so it's this very paradoxical thing, but, uh, that's so well put man, I love it. I love it. I love it. Um, what is the biggest mistake you see when people start or found a business?

Ben Parr (36:53):

Oh, there's hundreds. Can I just like list a whole

Rabah Rahil (36:56):

Yeah, just go rapid

Ben Parr (36:57):

Fire. Cause I look, I, I, I advise a bunch of amazing startups, which I don't even try to go and do that. It just friends or people that I really like end up starting companies and I can help them, especially maybe on the fundraising side or on the like, uh, marketing launch side. But, uh, I, I, I've seen a bunch of things like I've tried specifically to help my companies avoid, which are things like, uh, like wrong founders is always number one. So like then why Combinator? For example, the number one predictor. I remember Paul, uh, uh, the founder of, of why Combinator telling me this, the like, uh, number one predictor of a startup success or failure through the Y combinary program was the number of months that the founders knew each other beforehand. Interesting. If they knew each other 18 months or more, they're much more likely to succeed because it's more, you spend more time with your founders than you do with your partner. Fair point

Rabah Rahil (37:54):

A lot of times

Ben Parr (37:54):

Fair point. And so you've gotta think of it like a marriage. Would you marry this person? Can you have good communication? Get through fights, not feel, uh, like have thick skin with each other, right? Because you're supposed to disagree on a bunch of stuff and come to resolution and feel right and have each other's backs. If you can't feel that way, you're in a really bad situation. It becomes a toxic relationship. It's always the number one thing that kills startups. But you know, there's a whole bunch of things spending too much money. Yeah. Uh, early on false flag signals on what the, uh, what product market fit is, uh, uh, banking of money before it's actually in the bank, uh, the wrong, the wrong hires, you know, especially at the stage of the earlier stage, focus on people who can execute and do things more than the people who maybe have the longer track record and have like, you know, the vior Dame from Salesforce or something.

Ben Parr (38:49):

Someone coming from Salesforce and only been in the big companies, joining a super early stage company just rarely works out. It happens, but it rarely works out because it's a different thing, different process in the early stages that you have to like your, your fir your first VP of sales needs to be able to hop in and sell your first feed product needs to product manage and not just manage product managers. There's a whole set of things like that. We could go on for several days, which I'm sure we will do in my eventual podcast, which I'm

Rabah Rahil (39:20):

Working on. Oh, cool. Any working names yet? The Platypus show, the Platypus

Ben Parr (39:24):

Pod, uh, there is a working name, but we're changing it probably. Okay. So I'll tell you, so I'll tell you,

Rabah Rahil (39:28):

Yeah. Give it to me. I love names.

Ben Parr (39:29):

Uh, I have a dear friend. His I'll actually see if I have an old version. I have a dear friend. His name is Greg Berg. He, uh, if you've ever watched the show heroes yep. Alias or the new star wars movies, uh, you'll recognize him cuz he's the mind reading cop and heroes and all that sort of thing. And I, him and I have talked about doing a show for forever. And so we've talked about shows, working title we'll change called vested interest. So there's scratch there's me. Um, and so we're gonna demystify key business topics for the average entrepreneur. Like, you know, what is an NFT and why should you care? So we're gonna have a very special guest for that one. Or how does like the restaurant business work or the business of entertainment? Oh. Or how do you use, uh, exit your company? And there's a whole set of interesting things. And so, you know, we built a whole beautiful, there's a whole beautiful studio belt. There's a bunch of other stuff. Uh, we're lining up first guests. There there's a lot of stuff. So you can sign up signature podcast.com. They might change, but the people will,

Rabah Rahil (40:28):

Oh, I'd love this. Let me know if you're taking some sponsorships. I got some sponsorship dollars. This is incredible. Ben. That looks amazing. I love the hat by the way, too.

Ben Parr (40:36):

You and I will talk right after

Rabah Rahil (40:37):

This. I love this. Ben, you made it to the rapid fire section. Can you believe it? Even though I'm such a fan, I got, I cannot it, are you ready? I'm ready. Here we go. Let's do the thing. Writing a book, overrated, underrated,

Ben Parr (40:54):

Uh, underrated, something that you have to do. I'm not gonna do more sentence, uh, something that you should do once in your life.

Rabah Rahil (41:00):

Love it. Going to university overrated or underrated.

Ben Parr (41:06):

Uh, very dependent upon you and your things. I value me my personal going, but it won't be forever. Love

Rabah Rahil (41:12):

It. Fours 30 under 30 overrated or

Ben Parr (41:18):

Underrated. Actually. I love it. Um, overrated from the overrated, from the perspective of, oh, like it's a like amazing whatever award. The specialty of the 30, under 30 is the private communities that are behind there. I have WhatsApp groups where I have made some, both real friends and gotten some serious business done. The community is why it's underrated. People don't see it, but that there's stuff happening all the time within the 30.

Rabah Rahil (41:45):

I love it. I love it. Being on a board, overrated, underrated,

Ben Parr (41:51):

Uh, underrated again, one of those things that you should do, especially if you're gonna eventually start a company, uh, being on a board, the Soma board was very helpful for, you know, running board meetings for love

Rabah Rahil (42:03):

It, NFTs, overrated or underrated,

Ben Parr (42:09):

Uh, overrated right now, underrated long term. Uh, I would over rate, you know, the random like drop of bears that do something or cats that do something or whatever animal is in Vogue at the moment. But the use cases that I'm actually much more interested in are underrated. I, but the example I wanna see, I know people working on is ticketing. For example, the ticketing system is fundamentally broken, but an NFT means like you can have your own verifiable ticket and you can put limits on what the resale price is. And the venue can get a piece of the resale price and can limit how many times it can be resold. And so you can have verifiable pieces to each part, the venue wins. The consumer wins, especially if you could cap like how much they could resell for. And the artist could say, I only wanna have it be allowed to resell for 15% more. That's been everyone's best interest. That's the kind of use case I wanna see with NFTs that hasn't happened yet. That bothers

Rabah Rahil (43:07):

Me. I love that that's big brain stuff, incredible founded a company, overrated or underrated.

Ben Parr (43:15):

Uh, uh, it just depends. It's not for every it it's, uh, everyone inspires and dreams, but it's much harder work and much more painful. Um, and you know, it's a, if you're gonna do it, it's a commitment of minimum five use of your life. But up 15, plus like you gotta think like you're starting company 25. You might be doing it at 40. Are you okay with that? And some people, the answer is no, but they try to go in anyway and then they realize, oh crap. So again, it's one of those really dependent upon upon you. I can understand a lot of people want to go in, do it at least once, but it is a bit overrated, a bunch of ways when there's like easier ways to make money and to have live a fulfilling life.

Rabah Rahil (43:56):

Oh, that's so well put, I love that your answers are so eloquent. Fantastic. What gave you more gray hair Mashable or writing a book?

Ben Parr (44:08):

Writing a book.

Rabah Rahil (44:09):

Oh, okay.

Ben Parr (44:10):

Like deadlines. Like, well, there's Mashable was easy. I got to talk with everybody. Uh, everyone wanna talk with me as a reporter? Uh, I got to network and see everybody when you're writing a book, you see nobody you're I was a hard, I switched from extra version to hardcore introversion. You know, that's much more complex ideas to go and together. So definitely

Rabah Rahil (44:32):

It's harder. Love favorite meal and why?

Ben Parr (44:37):

Oh, I don't know if I have a specific favorite meal. It just kind of like changes, you know, like you wanna come for food, maybe it's something like a pot tie. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I love to cook a paella. It's like when I want to be a little bit more extensive or, uh, make a Chaka for, uh, oh

Rabah Rahil (44:55):

Wow. You just went across like three different cuisines there. Wow. Your culinary delights. Incredible.

Ben Parr (45:01):

I, I, I mean, sushi, you know, had, uh, was like enough to have some Nobu over in Vegas for shop talk and you can never go wrong with some miso co some crispy rice with spicy tuna and uh, some like very fresh. She, I

Rabah Rahil (45:16):

Love it, but come out to awesome. Go to a Chico. We'll we'll we'll put you up. It's good stuff. Um, favorite theater,

Ben Parr (45:26):

Movie theater,

Rabah Rahil (45:27):

Or like you go to a lot of plays, right? I saw you you'll have a lot of play bills on your Instagram.

Ben Parr (45:32):

Cause my, so my, my, my girl, my, uh, girlfriend's at playwright.

Rabah Rahil (45:36):

That makes sense that

Ben Parr (45:38):

Right. Deborah archon.com. I'm gonna go plug her. Uh she'll she'll she checks the traffic all the time on her website. So I'm like, can I just break her brain one day? In fact, this would be a good way to do it. Um, I have to think what's my favorite theater. Uh, there's a I'm like, I'm like thinking through there was, there's been a couple of theaters we've been to in LA recently. Uh, like there's one across, uh, the street from me, the Kirk Douglas theater, which is a beautiful theater. Uh, the one over the, at UCLA top of my head. I can't remember its name. And then New York, there's just like a hundred. It's more like, I think about the plays more than the theaters. The theater is transformed by the right director and the stage manager,

Rabah Rahil (46:23):

The play. Ooh, I love that. Well, moving right into that. What's your favorite player show that you've attended?

Ben Parr (46:30):

Oh, I don't even know. What's the favorite? Uh, there's been a couple that Deborah's taken me to. I'm gonna, uh, I'm gonna forget some of the names. I remember slave play being very fascinating, which is now on Broadway. Uh, so I suggest we're seeing that, uh, I'm trying to think about more of a recent one. There was one, I can't remember the name. It was, it was about adoption and I'll go and find the name, but it was so well, like had audience interaction. It was so well done. And then of course, you know, I love drive, which is, uh, one of Deborah's do as plays, which is about, uh, a group of self of truck drivers who lose their jobs with self-driving trucks and go to the social economic and political consequences of, uh, the rise of automation. Uh, she also has an amazing play called preservation, which is, uh, also somewhat about technology and the consequences of AI, but also hilarious. So I'm gonna just say different place place. So drive and preservation, go check them out. Uh, I know there's some, there's some premieres happening in Vermont and wi in Canada and a bunch of other places next

Rabah Rahil (47:37):

Year. You got yourself a good one. Ben Ben is the hype man. He is killing it for you. I love it. Um, favorite in person marketing event, I know you just went to shop talk in Vegas. Uh, how was that? Or do you have any other favorite ones?

Ben Parr (47:53):

Uh, uh, well, shop talk is like the biggest one for e-commerce. So I don't, I'm not gonna tell you favorites hard and subjective. I would say it was nice to see lots of partners, lots of customers, lots of friends, uh, Joe Jason Long and

Rabah Rahil (48:11):

Lashes what's TD D customers were,

Ben Parr (48:13):

Uh, but it was tens of thou. It was crazy 10 thousands of people. I was so tired. Everyone was so tired. I, I still regaining my voice. Uh, after that I've had lots of opportunities to have amazing conferences. One of the most amazing ones was founders, which is run by the web summit folks, uh, which they now do in Portugal. But I was lucky enough to be able to attend several amazing founders, which is like happens right after web summit. And just get to, I just re I have a name drop you want, I just, I'll just, this is my only name drop you thing here. I remember at a table, uh, for the opening, it, they, they rented out the, the like cathedral in Dublin and I was at a table and I had like Patty Cosgrave on one side and I had, I was facing bono and I think right to his side was Elon Musk. And I was just like, why am I at this table? Why does that make any sense? And then the founder river dance was up ons. It was this way I was sitting on this side, found a river dance, came up and like had a private showing of river dance for everyone, like right up over that way. So I've had a bunch of those opportunities in life. And I have that one, that one was interesting, like table of just like, yeah, this makes no sense at all.

Rabah Rahil (49:25):

Wow. What a fun story. Uh, favorite place travel to and why?

Ben Parr (49:33):

I mean, I'm a Thai citizen. I love traveling to Thailand when I can. Um, I'm always about trying to do new places. Tokyo is next in the list. I've never actually been Japan more than an airport transfer, which bothers the heck outta me. We plan to go 2020. I really does. Wouldn't want to go, but Thailand, you know, like I like want to see family. You get the most beautiful beaches in the world. You have just amazing food for really cheap. You have amazing people. You get yourself some time massages. Uh, nothing better.

Rabah Rahil (50:01):

Love it. I love it. Favorite follow on Twitter.

Speaker 3 (50:08):

Ooh.

Ben Parr (50:11):

I mean, am I allowed to say my co-founder Matt to start also my favorite? This is a RapidFire talk, uh, at Matt PRD. I mean, but also he's just, he is. So he, he has so many interesting, thoughtful. Insight's great for e-commerce anyone e-commerce to go follow him cuz he's just tweeting out gems, but he's also like, I could just see some of the tweets beforehand, some of the thing beforehand, he's really thinking through like, what's gonna be like super interesting. What's gonna be super helpful. Um, it just depends. Like I try again, I'm a variety person. So I have a variety of super interesting VCs that are dropping super interesting, concise, so super interesting. E-commerce people, you know, like we've already talked about like, uh, Cody and Jason Wong, but there's a ton of super interesting people like Joan Coffy also from Jones road is worth of follow. I, we have a whole list. In fact, uh, we're gonna have a, we're gonna, we, we have these weekly events at 1130 on Wednesdays where we have some of the super interesting people that we, our favorite follows and we have, 'em talk about their quizzes and talk about, uh, other things we're having a whole giant amazing group talk about mother's day. Oh, sort of

Rabah Rahil (51:11):

Crazy stuff on spaces or where, how do people log in?

Ben Parr (51:16):

We could do it on a zoom. So there's like a Okta i.com/community. You can go and sign up. Uh, we have, we have, I mean, would, by the time this drops, you go, the panel we're putting together right now will have already passed, but there'll be a recording. I can't say the names are CRA. I'm like, we're just putting together the most crazy names into like one panel and we're doing that every single week. And it's just

Rabah Rahil (51:39):

Amazing. There you go. Folks, go get you some community on. All right. Last one. You ready? If you could have dinner with anybody dead or live fiction or non-fictional three people, who would they be? You're at a four person table. You're sitting at the head. You get to invite three people who are you inviting?

Ben Parr (51:55):

Uh, I'm gonna do one joke and maybe three will, uh, Jeanie of the lamp so that I can make three wishes to get anything that I want in my entire life. Plus, you know, if that's Cindy, Robin Williams genie, uh, it has to be Robin Williams. Wait, that'd be much more interesting if it's will Smith cheaty, then I'm gonna get slapped in the face.

Rabah Rahil (52:16):

Oh, that's good.

Ben Parr (52:18):

Oh, now you now you just got a Photoshop Chris rock.

Rabah Rahil (52:21):

That's amazing. We do have a great meme or my head is social is just on top of the memes. I'll have to, that'll be the cover art for this, uh, pod. That's amazing.

Ben Parr (52:31):

I do have a prediction before I continue with the other three that there will be a green lit Hancock two and that Chris rock will be in it. And that movie will make trillion dollars.

Rabah Rahil (52:41):

The slap heard around the world, huh? Or the slap slap. That's printing that money.

Ben Parr (52:45):

I, I mean, that's just good that that's deser good business. Uh, even if it's a, even if it's this pickable act, uh, both could be true Hollywood. Uh, God, that's, that's a hard, that's such a hard one because I would try to like, you know, there's people in modern era, I would love to do dinner with that. I haven't done dinner with like a Steven Spielberg or, uh, I haven't had dinner with Barack Obama yet, but I honestly feel like I can get to the point where I go and do that and I can work by way towards that. And uh, I always believe that, but I can't work by way towards having dinner with people who have passed. So I'm kind of like curious to get the perspective of somebody like, uh, yeah, you could pick an it or all that, but I'm almost like what was like Julie, if, if I could,

Rabah Rahil (53:34):

Yeah.

Ben Parr (53:34):

Then like

Rabah Rahil (53:35):

Normalize the conversation, you can absolutely communicate.

Ben Parr (53:41):

Uh, oh God. I was thinking Patrick, be interesting, like past world leaders, uh, and like talking about like their thoughts and like the eras and like, there's like all, there's like a large list I had to go and like narrow that one down, but I would try to pick peop super interest people from the past. And it wouldn't even just be world leaders. Like, you know, you're talking about like, you have, like, you have Isaac Newton, you have, uh, Leonard, Leonard, Aren. Good.

Rabah Rahil (54:06):

She has here's your gun unless be one

Ben Parr (54:08):

Got, so Leah,

Rabah Rahil (54:09):

You got the genie. You need one more.

Ben Parr (54:14):

Uh, you, I, I will. I I'm like, I'm trying to think. What's the ones that gonna help me answer questions. You know, I'm like, I guess I'm not gonna have a conversation with the first human,

Rabah Rahil (54:28):

Whether that's interesting.

Ben Parr (54:29):

You want to think it is. There's some, you know, it depends cuz I guess, you know, that would count because that's either, uh, it's either fictional. Yeah. It's or it is the first person depending on your beliefs. Totally. So I I'd be interested in like the beginning of the universe and I'm probably not, you know, gonna ask for dinner with any kind of God cuz I've got, I don't think my mind could handle that, but you know, the first creation is

Rabah Rahil (54:57):

That's incredible.

Ben Parr (54:58):

Be interesting. Uh, uh, it goes, there goes on and on in different religions too. That's interesting people across Budha.

Rabah Rahil (55:07):

Yeah. Would be super

Ben Parr (55:08):

Interesting too. Actually. There you go. And that's a real loud person. I, I, I actually my

Rabah Rahil (55:12):

Top. So you got your genie. There you go. You got uh, Buddha and then now I'm just based on the second one. Who's your second one. I forgot who was um, oh geez. Uh, the Isaac. No, not Isaac noon. Was it new? No, it was uh, we, oh jeez.

Ben Parr (55:25):

We went E Adam E we went through, we went through a lot of people

Rabah Rahil (55:29):

Didn't you guys listened to it. You'll remember it. That was really, really interesting that damn it. I didn't even

Ben Parr (55:34):

Remember forget <laugh> I, I didn't even get into the fictional. I didn't get into the fictional characters, which would be interesting too. The problem is you, I already know intimately their fictional worlds or they did tell me something about their fictional world that I don't even know what is like, you know, like think like final fantasy, like cloud strip, final fantasy seven for the nerds out there. Like, does he know anything outside of like his orders gonna be like, this is gonna be like a, you asked him a question about what's outside the borders of, uh, of the final fantasy

Rabah Rahil (56:03):

Seven breaking the third wall, right.

Ben Parr (56:05):

Spank blanks. Or does it, I know, I know that like, but I gotta, we're not like people from actual history, so we'll, we'll make up a list. We'll go make a teleporter. Uh, can I pick someone from the far future? That would be interesting. Add even better, pick a top scientist from the interesting, super far future and then get all the key, key information. Maybe be like, how do I do time travel teleportation.

Rabah Rahil (56:28):

It's a bit of the back to the future vibe. Right? But inverted. I like it. I like it. Yeah. Ben, you're one of the most fascinating people I've ever had on. I knew this was gonna be a hit. Our listeners are gonna love it. Tell people where to find you, tell people how to get involved in octane AI. This time is yours. My friend

Ben Parr (56:46):

Octane ai.com O CT, a N E ai.com. If you are a store and you like making money and you've had any trouble with your return at ad spent, you go to Octa the I and you add it to a beautiful whale and you will print more money. Just go ask Jones road, beauty and hundreds, if not thousands of other eCommerce brands, uh, Ben at Ben at act in the eye on social too. It's great fun times. Uh, at Ben par, B E N P a R on literally every social network. Uh, you feel free to DB on Twitter. Uh, I may regret say that, but whatever. Uh, and then all the other networks, it's all at Ben par, Ben par.com where I will eventually post that article comparison

Rabah Rahil (57:28):

And

Ben Parr (57:28):

VCs coaches to VCs and, and seeing where that goes,

Rabah Rahil (57:33):

Oh, I love it. And then don't forget about vested interest working name, but podcast coming soon,

Ben Parr (57:39):

Vested interest podcast.com and just follow me. And Greg Berg will be talking about it constantly. So that will be coming sued. There's we, we got some, uh, going record.

Rabah Rahil (57:50):

I know that fancy then you're such a gem. Thank you so much for your time. Uh, just super fan. This has been such a dream of mine to get you on and just jam with you. It's been incredible. Um, if you do, oh, look at this. Going into the universe. If you do wanna get more involved with triple whale, we are tri triple.com. We're on the bird app at triple whale, and then we have a fantastic newsletter that goes out every Tuesday, Thursday called whale mail. You can subscribe right on our Twitter profile and that's it. 31 in the books. Ben, thank you so much again for your time. Go sign up for octane AI, go get, mm. Download it. It's a fantastic little app. And then go ano call Ben on the Twitter's DM him and tell him why triple Platy is the way we should go in our rebranding. Ben, thanks so much again, that's it folks. 30 ones in the books.

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