Lads and ladies, we're back. Welcome to Behind the Diary. And we have a crazy week ahead of us.
Flying out to America to have a series of really, really interesting meetings. One of them is with the New York Times. And LinkedIn are announcing something.
Here's a clue. You might be about to make some serious money just by posting on LinkedIn. I'm going to reveal something about AI that I've been thinking for some time.
Also, these are two leaked memos from two of the biggest CEOs in the world. They're emails that they sent to their team. So, let me explain.
I have a memo here from Shopify, but also I'm going to leak my own memo. The memo that I sent to my team this week and why I'm offering them $20,000 if they listen to what's written in that memo. $20,000.
Oh, and also one more thing. I had someone on my podcast and I'm so obsessed with their company that I'm gonna try and invest a million dollars into their business. Check of like one or two million.
In this episode, you're gonna see who that is. Think about your favorite company. And now imagine that they let you see in every meeting in every room from day one.
Boy, I've forgotten how much work it actually is to start a company. It's a lot of work. We're building a media company and an investment fund.
So, what does that mean? In our studio, we create and scale new shows. You might have seen these flight studio shows, but they're really taking off.
I mean, top 10 stars. We're live all here studio. Use that audience to accelerate some of the most exciting companies in the world that I have invested in.
This is life story. Jessica Tester, she's media call for the New York Times. Obviously, it takes place tomorrow.
That call that I just did in the car was discussing this interview that I have coming up with the New York Times. The main focus of the article is kind of an intro of you to an American audience, your success, the success of DOAC, the use of analytics in interviewee choice. When I spoke to her, she was very keen and very interested in that aspect.
I guess the wider context here is Flight Story is now launching our company in the United States of America. I guess this is our big opportunity to announce ourselves to America. One of the questions you might have is why do we do these things?
We reach more than a billion people a year at the at the moment across our own channel. So why do we do interviews that we can't control? I think over my career I've learned that there are still several things that push a business forward.
And those things for me historically have always been the following. My own channel. So things like personal branding and marketing on the company's channels.
So my previous business which scaled to be a very very big company called Social Chain, we had a greater focus on creating content for our company, not just our clients. And this is a big thing that I see so many founders get wrong. Instead of just thinking about servicing your clients, which is obviously incredibly important, you should never forget that you also have a huge responsibility to market your company, to make content about your company, and people buy from people.
So, one of the most effective things you can do if you are building a company is to get your team members build their personal brands because the algorithm on LinkedIn in particular has a greater waiting for people than it does companies. I. e.
, my CEO Georgie producing content on her channels will reach more people than our company page even if it has the same amount of followers. Number two has been speaking on stage. Specifically when I was running an agency business I spent sometimes 30 40 weeks a year speaking on stage all around the world and that always resulted in a huge flurry of new business.
I'd say number three was press and PR. Still incredibly important for every business owner to be thinking seriously about PR and that is because of AI. AI search, which is people searching for things on AI, is exploding right now.
More than a billion people around the world are using AI as their search engine. And AI looks at articles to find its information. So, one of the most important things you can do if you want to have accurate information out in the world about your company, your products, your services, or you is to get out there and do interviews because AI is scanning not social media posts necessarily.
It's not scanning LinkedIn necessarily, although it does look at LinkedIn as one of its sources, but it's looking at high authority credible sources like the New York Times. Also, LinkedIn have just announced something which I think is going to be very very interesting to all of you. Meeting the CMO of LinkedIn to talk about that.
This is a big opportunity. I've literally seen people make millions from these moments when the platform announces that. Okay, we are here in Manhattan, New York City.
I really do love New York. I do think it's maybe the best city on earth. Every time I come back, I realize that I'm I'm not done with this place.
Flight Story is going to open an office in New York in the next year or two. Who knows? That could see me back here again.
That was fun. Uh, I don't usually do things like this, but um, it's the New York Times. They're one of the biggest publications in the world, maybe the biggest in the world.
So, what an honor. I'm now going to jump in the car and head over to an event with LinkedIn. There's a big event taking place across town.
I'm speaking on stage on a panel with LinkedIn. I'm talking about my new LinkedIn strategy. I'm talking about the single most important principle for anyone creating content or doing marketing or really building anything.
And on the car on the way there, I've got a call with my investment team in the UK. Quick one. Sh.
Hey guys, uh I'm Will. I edit these videos with Alex who shoots them or you guys are behind the Diary. And Steve jokingly said that if Behind the Diary gets bigger than the main channel, he will give us a million dollars.
I am currently 10 and a half million subscribers away from being a millionaire. So, do us a favor. If you enjoy these videos, click that subscribe button on this channel so we can have a big house in Cape Town like Steve.
And if this happens overnight, don't tell him so that we don't get in trouble. And I'll bring you guys out to our big house. Our house is going to look like this.
And I'm gonna invite all of you out there for a big party. Everyone except Steve, please. Back to the video.
We are on our way to LinkedIn. I'm doing an interview with the chief marketing and strategy officer who is superb. LinkedIn have been a big partner of mine, big partner of Flight Story as well.
And they are responsible for many, many millions of partnership and sponsorship support. And they're also announcing something that I think is really interesting to everybody right now, which is they're going to start paying creators on the platform that make video. We've seen this happen with YouTube, with Tik Tok, with Snapchat, with Facebook, and now it's arrived with LinkedIn where if you make video on LinkedIn, you will be paid in the future for the videos that you make because they'll start to put advertising partners as pre-roll in some of those videos.
Big opportunity. And especially for brands, if you're you're building your business, you probably should have a will in the fold because video is going to become more important. Nice to meet you.
Welcome to LinkedIn. Great to meet you. What do you find has been the most powerful tools or formats for you on the platform?
And I think for really any founder out there, I think it is your most important platform because the most important thing in business is obviously acquiring customers. It's hiring great people. it is uh you know marketing the company itself and I tell all of the founders in my portfolio that until you've cracked LinkedIn and you've got this system up and running the flywheel the video flywheel the recruiting side you filled out your profile really don't think beyond that I I draw this picture out which I've drawn so many times it's a pyramid and at the bottom of the pyramid is LinkedIn if you're a founder so like make sure your LinkedIn strategy is on point and only until you've completed that that part of the pyramid you move up to level two which could be newsletters which are a big part of LinkedIn now as Um, and so I think it's the foundation of the the pyramid if you're a founder or an entrepreneur for so many reasons.
So, and it's actually helped build my businesses in so many ways. Oh, your pyramid and thinking about LinkedIn is the foundation for founders. Yeah.
Because you've only got you've got finite resources found. No, you have very little time. Yeah.
You've got to figure out what's going to yield the most and then relative to the yield, which platform is going to require the least investment. You don't need to have 20 30 people a predict big production team to get started on LinkedIn and the return of investment is so high relative to the investment that it is the best place to start and then you move on. Yeah.
Building from there. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you so much. Remember at the start of this episode I said there's a founder of a company who's been on my podcast in the last 60 days and I'm going to invest a million dollars into their company. Well, you're going to find out which company it is.
Do you remember the guy? Do you remember the company? Replet.
Do you remember? Obviously, I'm very very bullish about AI agents and I have been doing a bit of market research and Replet I think are by far and away number one and I think they're kind of like the Canva of AI agents. If you look at their compounding growth over the last I think month over month from what I saw they were growing by about 45% at the moment.
So would be keen to put in a check of like 1 or 2 million. I've spoken to the founder and he's willing to reopen the round even though it was overs subscribed. There's going to be a couple of big winners here and I think Replet is certainly going to be one of them.
Nice to meet you. Anyone can develop any software that they want and the software can be personalized to you. So like on replet or lovable or cursor, you can build any app for anything using an AI agent.
What's a good example like you might have had this week time shifter. We were just talking about that. So, I use this app time shifter whenever I travel because today I've flown into New York for basically two days and then I'm flying back out of New York, landing, doing a podcast with Chris Eubank, and then going to Drgon's Den in rapid succession.
So, you don't want to be jetlagged. So, I use this app which basically helps me plan when to sleep, when to drink caffeine, when to eat, so that when I land, I don't have jet lag. Instead of needing to even like go and download Time Shifter and log in and put your details in and all this stuff, you can just speak to an agent.
Hey, could you make me an app that um tells me when I need to have my coffee so I don't have jet lag when I land and just think about the rest of the feature set and build it for me and put it on my phone and it will and it'll be on your phone. The value of having an app and paying for it is going to like that whole industry is going to be gone. Yes.
And we've already dropped roles in the last week because of this and then we started this competition. $20,000 I am going to offer $20,000 to anybody in my team that listens to the memo that I'm about to send to my team. And much of it is based and inspired on some of the leaked memos that I have found billion-dollar CEOs are currently sending to their companies.
Let me explain. I have a memo here from Shopify. The CEO of Shopify sent this to his team telling all of his staff that using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at the company.
And he now says that they're actually going to measure all of their staff based on how much they're using AI before any team asks for extra people or budget. That team must prove that AI can't do the work. Let's take a look at this next memo, which is even more interesting if you ask me.
Okay, so this leaked memo is from the CEO of Fiverr. He says, "I've always believed in radical cander and despise those who sugarcoat reality to avoid stating the unpleasant truth. AI is coming for your jobs.
Heck, it's coming for my job, too. This is a wakeup call. Are we all doomed?
Not all of us. But those who will not wake up and understand the new reality fast are unfortunately doomed. Wow.
So, with all of this in mind, there's a couple of things I'm going to do. I want to invest in replet. com, which I think is probably going to be the leader in the AI agent race.
They're an incredible company. I had the founder on my podcast recently and but we are a media company here at Flight Story. We're an investment fund.
We're building loads of different businesses and we also need to start taking AI and AI agents seriously. So, I've sent a memo to my team. It's only fair that I leak my own memo.
The title is rethinking our team in the age of AI, the 90day AI agent competition. Hey team, over the last few months, it's become increasingly clear that we are standing at the edge of the biggest shift of our professional lives. AI is no longer a novelty.
It is becoming part of the core infrastructure of businesses like ours. The incumbents will be slow. They will think conventionally.
They will hire conventionally. And they will fail to realize that the world in front of them has fundamentally changed. Right now, we are still defaulting to solving team capacity issues by adding more people, more headcount.
But in the world we're heading into, is no longer the right initial reflex. I've spent time speaking to people at the forefront of the agentic AI revolution, including this week with Replet CEO, and the message is unanimous. Creative companies need to rethink radically how they are built.
I know some people might hear this and question their place in a world where AI and AI agents are so capable. That is a natural reaction. As a content creator, I've asked myself some of those questions, too.
But the most important reality is this. Those of you who shift your mindset now will become the most valuable people in the world we are moving into. From here on out, every hiring conversation must start with the question, why can't this be solved by an AI agent?
We want to be the most effective, innovative, high leverage media company on earth. We need to stop thinking and hiring like a conventional team and today we're going to make some steps in this direction. I'm starting a new channel in Slack for talking about AI agents and AI more generally.
And then I introduced a competition. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here today to talk about the AI agent competition which we launched about a month ago, just over a month ago now, and there's been some incredible progress. So, the team with the most impressive implementation of AI agents will win an incredible prize.
I'm going to throw some pictures up on the screen of how the team responded to this. And when we get to the last 30 days of the challenge, I'm going to announce to the team that that very incredible prize I was talking about is actually $20,000 in cash for whatever team in this company has implemented AI in the most time-saving, cost reducing ways. The prize is significant.
The prize is $20,000. There's so many reasons why I'm doing this. One of them is because I think companies have to get excited about change and I'm fortunate that I have a group of people around me that do get excited by change in stuff actually doesn't really matter.
I'm just doing that as a as a sweetener. Just think about this as a CEO, right? Like $20,000.
What is that? That's nothing compared to the cost savings. So even us saving in one hire in one role um will save us more than $20,000.
If we saved like three or four hires, we're going to save $200,000 maybe like $250,000. Actually, the mentality that we're going to get as a team by thinking about automation and thinking about AI agents and self-educating is going to save us millions. It's going to save us millions, but it's exciting as well.
I think that's a really important point. Like, do you want to be in a company that gets excited about things changing and loves to innovate and experiment and and learn new things? I do.
And that's what company we want to build here. Like, it's fun, right? So, that's also why we do it.
Welcome to the AI agent competition. Let's do this. Let's do this team.
Would you guys talk a little bit about the different voice that you have on LinkedIn versus elsewhere? And then how do you make sure that you are building a community if that's important? My strategy has shifted interestingly in the last I'd say in the last 30 days and my strategy has shifted with LinkedIn predominantly because chatg andms have produced a lot of like cookie cutter sy content.
When everyone goes left it makes a lot of sense to go right. I was saying this earlier on in a meeting I was having earlier. I was like the spelling mistake is back in fashion because the spelling mistake says human.
And so I I almost discount things now when I see that long end dash. The cost of creation goes to zero and everybody starts churning out the same type of thing. It makes a lot of sense to lean into whatever it is that makes you human.
I'm now writing I'm using the PDF feature to write long carousels about my opinion. If you'd asked me a year ago, I was doing much more top of the funnel quotes, much more sort of forgettable things. And I and that's kind of a long a macro bet that I have based on chatbt.
We are going to London. hope not. No, this one.
Look at this guy getting insecure cuz I'm filming myself. Look at how insecure this guy looks sat there with his massive camera and I got this little ET handheld and it's 4K baby. We've been in New York for two days and now I'm flying back to London because I'm having Chris Eubank on the podcast last minute straight into the podcast.
Then I'm getting in the car driving up to Manchester straight into Drgonstone. Busy busy busy times. How was that for you, Chris?
Therapeutic. Good. It's one of my all-time favorite conversations on the podcast with Chris Eubank today.
Um, I'm about to pack my stuff up, jumping in the car, driving up to Manchester for Drgon's Den. And on my way to Drgon's Den, I'm going to call my friend Scooter Brawn to talk to him about this idea I have of investing into people's obsession. I don't think this has ever really been done before in the way that I'm thinking about it.
And this kind of links to everything we've been saying in this episode about AI. In a world of AI where the cost of making things, whether it's a video or software or pictures or images, goes to zero. And what is the advantage?
I think the advantage is distribution is having an audience. So instead of investing in their ideas, right, in their ability to create, which is how investing used to be. You'd invest in Facebook because they'd coded this incredible software.
Now I think the big advantage is who has the audience to distribute creativity. There's no longer really a big advantage, a big moat as we call it in business in just being able to create something cuz anybody can create things now. What's still going to be scarce is who has the audience to distribute those things.
We're seeing it happen all the time. Like this week we saw Haley Bieber use her audience, her distribution to build this big company and then it just sold to ELF. We've seen KSI and Logan Paul, Alex Cooper, Mr Beast, who we invest in.
We've seen all of these incredible creators. They're now building billiondoll companies because they have distribution. There's something going on with the creator economy.
I think the first innings of influencer marketing was that people like Mr Beast were basically billboards. Brands paid the money to post. The second innings of influencer marketing was when you saw like Molly May becoming the creative director of Pretty Little Thing.
They saw influencers as employees. The third innings was equity deals. So many companies give influencers and creatives a little bit of equity to promote them.
And I think the fourth innings is creators are now fullyfledged entrepreneurs. Mr Beast's empire of businesses is staggering. He has built an empire that is reportedly worth 5 something billion dollars.
And it all started with his obsession. So what if we could invest in obsession? Because obsession equals audience, and audience equals distribution.
And distribution in the world we're heading towards, I think, is going to be the hardest thing. I'm going to call my friend Scooter Brawn, who you probably know because he was the guy that spotted Justin Bieber. He's worked with the biggest artists in the world.
I'll put some of them up on the screen right now. Call him. I'm going to talk to him about this idea, get his take on it, and if he thinks it's a good idea, we shall see.
For the last decade, everybody's tried to in find a way to capitalize on the value that creators have. And so they've done that by backing their ideas and it has failed. What if you could just invest in the fact that this person has a massive audience and that they're going to do something good with it one day?
I agree with that. But that's only a very few people. Yes.
Extremely limited amount of people. My thinking is that we're investing in entrepreneurs who happen to have an audience. What do you think of the idea?
I think it's a good idea if you find the right ones. You know, I I think you don't want to spread yourself out over a lot of people. I think you want to be very selective.
You know, this the Warren Buffett thing, you know, the thing he always said, if you if you knew you only had 20 punches in your entire life, you would invest very differently. Okay. Well, I'm looking forward to our episode, bud.
Yeah, so am I. Really, really looking forward to it. And thank you so much for your time.
I appreciate your thoughts. Thanks, man. Bye-bye.
Take care. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, um just driven. It's taken roughly 5 hours to get to Manchester from London.
Um it is now 2:00 a. m. in the morning.
It is a Tuesday or a Wednesday or something like that and I am spiritually exhausted. Tired in my bones. Let's have a talk.
Let's have a talk. It's just been really intense. Really intense.
Filming Drgon's Den and trying to run my businesses is very very very very very hard. Takes a lot out of me. Over the last two to three weeks, I've really not been myself.
And I feel it. I feel it in how I respond to things. I feel it in how how I think.
I feel just feel it. I just don't feel myself. When I had Lisa Feldman on my podcast, she talked about this idea of a body budget, which is the formal term is called alostostasis, but the metaphor is body budgeting.
It's your brain is running a budget for your body. It's not budgeting money. It's budgeting salt and glucose and oxygen.
If your energy budget goes to repair and growth, so you get if you get taller, you need more cells. When you learn something, you have to thicken up your myelin and your your neurons. You've got to grow more receptors and stuff.
And then the rest of it is all for anything effortful. What is effortful? Like work or going to the gym, dragging your ass out of bed in the morning is effortful.
Learning something new is effortful. So those are the three things that make up your energy budget. And the really important point, you as an organism have a fixed amount of energy that you can produce in a day.
And I think I've been experiencing a bankrupt body budget for the last 3 weeks. I think I'm running on empty. You know, building um Flight Story, I think it's my last innings.
This company is going to be so undeniable and so impactful. It's going to require so so much so much so much. I'm smirking because um I was just thinking about how like since I was 18 years old, I've always chosen the chaos.
Like I could have just I could have such an easy life. Like oh my god, I what could I be doing right now? I could be in my home in another country in Cape Town, let's say, just in the pool with my girlfriend and my family, my nieces, playing by the pool, total relaxation.
And I could just be there writing and listening to my favorite music, but I'm not. It makes no sense objectively. Like, what I just said makes no sense.
I guess I'm just another person who is in search of meaning. And meaning is like the rainbow. It moves off into the distance the closer you get.
The problem is if you spend your whole life chasing meaning that you might end up missing some of the most meaningful things that were right beside you the whole time. Thank you for being here for my crazy rant, my late night rant. I appreciate it.
Good night, lads. Good night, ladies. Thank you for being here.
The thing that I love doing is the thing that brought me all this stress and the reason why I'm getting these dark circles around my eyes and I'm looking older. The Woot Five hashtag investor hashtag ad tells you your biological age and mine says I was 30 32. 7.
Bro, I'm 32. 6 invested in this goddamn company and insulted me. Come on.
Oh gosh. What the hell is going on here? Thank you for being here for my crazy rant.
My late night rant. I appreciate it. I'm just talking Alex and Müll are probably never going to publish this.
They're probably just going to watch it themselves and think, "Oh, that was crap. " and delete it. This is literally how this vlog works.
I don't control what they put out. I just record loads of random and then they decide what they're going to put in the video. So, maybe this will make it, maybe it won't.
Maybe no one will ever see this and I just wasted 13 minutes of my life sitting here recording it. Who knows?
