Stig Brodersen (04:12):
Yes, it was a wonderful story. Reeves, talk to us please about the early days of WeWork. How did it happen?

Reeves Wiedeman (04:19):
Adam was trying to figure out how to build a successful business, and the baby clothes company wasn’t really working. And so he, in this way, had moved to Brooklyn. He was trying to save money. He was cutting costs. And met a guy there, Miguel McKelvey, who was an architect who worked in the same building as him. And they connected, they were both very tall. They were both about 6’7″, 6’8″. They ended up just talking about ideas together. And one of the ideas that came about was Adam had heard about another person, a friend of a friend he had met, who was running an office space business. Where it was essentially renting out a space in Manhattan and cutting it up into these little offices. And from there, being able to charge more. And so Adam was interested in this idea.

Reeves Wiedeman (05:08):
Miguel is an architect and had the design background and ability to do this. And I think from there they were able to come up with this idea or focus on this idea of starting a company like that. And so they, through some real negotiation with their landlord, I mean, this was not an easy sell to get someone to buy into this. They started a company called Greendesk. And Greendesk was the first iteration of WeWork. It was a great success very, very early on, and right away. And then from there, Adam and Miguel both had this dream of trying to start something big and new, and on their own without this landlord there overseeing things. And so they went their separate ways and came up with the concept for WeWork, and set about trying to find a building.

Stig Brodersen (06:04):
We were talking right after the financial crisis a lot of people have been laid off. It was the perfect time to start this community feeling, we’re in this together. It just seemed like the right time, such a microcosm of the time. We can say a lot of people double down on at Adam Neumann this point in time. We have Stripener, I think he counts himself as one of the co-founders who agreed to a post valuation of $45 million at a time where they more or less had nothing. They had a good idea. He counted for a third of it. I don’t think he put in all the cash, but he was definitely a very important part of this beginning.

Stig Brodersen (06:40):
And you had a lot of people that doubling down on Adam Neumann at this point in time, not just him. Perhaps one person more than anyone else. Because at this point in time Adam Neumann has just been on his first date with his later wife, Rebekah Paltrow. Could you please talk to us about the first meeting? It’s like an accounting meeting they had. And the role that she would play, not just in Adam’s life, but also in the creation of WeWork.

Reeves Wiedeman (07:02):
The first date is canonical in the mythology of WeWork and Adam Neumann. He was this Playboy 20 something New Yorker running a baby clothes business, just trying to become rich. And he met Rebekah through a friend. And as they like to tell over and over again, on their first date Rebekah told him he was full of shit. And that he didn’t have passion in his life. He didn’t believe in what he was doing. He didn’t believe in his baby clothes business. And so eventually they would talk about this as a foundational moment for Adam and how he saw his work, and what he wanted to do. That he wanted to do more than just make money. And Rebekah was key in the growth of WeWork in several ways. She would fund some of the early days of the company by both, just by the fact that she came from a wealthy family, and being able to help with some of the funding. And also connecting Adam too to her circle, her social circle.

Reeves Wiedeman (07:58):
So instantly and very quickly, Adam was in a circle of people in New York who had money to invest in something like a young real estate company. And so she was crucial early on. And later on, she would come to play both a role in creating some of the things about WeWork that were great. Some of the mottos like, “Do what you love.” And these things really attracted people to the company. And then in many ways, as you can imagine with a founder partner being involved in the business, that produced a lot of problems and chaos as well.

Stig Brodersen (08:31):
And anyone’s like, doesn’t that sound familiar? There is this relationship between her and her cousin Gwyneth Paltrow, just in case people are wondering. So definitely a very wealthy family, invested around a million dollars at a time where they really needed the cash. Let’s go to 2011. WeWork has just opened its third location in Manhattan’s meatpacking district. And Adam Neumann was already talking about how he was building a $100 billion business. He’s never been shy with his ambitions. And WeWork had this unique style of culture, and it really started to form. One of the things that really just make me smile whenever I read your wonderful book, was that whenever WeWork employees joined the company, their role very much required more construction work than the job description typically suggested. Could you talk to us about the culture of WeWork during those early years?

Reeves Wiedeman (09:25):
Yeah, it is very much a startup. It was very much all hands on deck in good ways and bad ways. I think it was a very exciting place for people to work early on. Especially, this was an era when a lot of tech startups were coming up. So if you wanted to be a developer, or program, or engineer, there were plenty of opportunities for you to go work at some fast-growing, fast-moving startup doing something cool. WeWork was a place for people who didn’t necessarily have those skills. It was a lot of designers. It was a lot of operations people. And it was, frankly, just a lot of recent college grads who were smart and ambitious and didn’t know exactly what they wanted to do, but this sounded like a cool company to work for. So those early days were a lot of nine to five doing your job.

Reeves Wiedeman (10:09):
And then at night, you’re staying in the office, drinking with your friends who are your coworkers, and painting a new WeWork space. It was a lot of all these different things, everyone doing everything all together. And I think, especially early on, there would be frustrations later. Adam made a lot of promises about how rich everyone was going to get from their stock options and things like that, that obviously didn’t pan out. But for a lot of people early on, it was the most fun they’d ever had working at a job.

Stig Brodersen (10:40):
One of the stories I really enjoy was how he was drinking tequila shots with employees, and then promise them stock options that never materialized. But it just seemed very much like a… Let’s just call it unique culture. One more thing really to talk about what’s unique and what probably most companies do not do. Could you talk about the summer camps, because they were infamous special event? Could you please talk to our audience about that?

Reeves Wiedeman (11:07):
Early on, I think around 2012, WeWork started holding these annual summer camps. Which were for both employees and people who worked at WeWork, and at least at the beginning. And it was literally a summer camp in upstate New York, a few hours outside of New York City. They brought people there to do archery, and go swimming and canoeing, and do a lot of drinking. And essentially these became big parties. They were meant to be community bonding events. But in so many ways, community bonding at WeWork meant drinking. There were not a lot of other opportunities for building community, and that was the default way of doing it. And summer camp was this just this… The biggest example of that, it grew every year that they did it. While early on it was a really fun weekend for everyone. It eventually, for a company that has a lot of liabilities and has a bunch of its employees at a summer camp drinking a lot of alcohol, problems can emerge. And that was certainly the case, as the event got bigger and bigger and the company got bigger and bigger.

Stig Brodersen (12:13):
As I was reading the book, I was trying to envision how it would look like. I don’t think I really understood it before I was watching this Hulu documentary. There’s a wonderful documentary out there, and they have recordings from those events. And I don’t know, it was a lot crazier than I thought. And I think you explained it pretty well that it was pretty crazy already. It was absolute madness.

Reeves Wiedeman (12:34):
Yeah. This was not a quiet company holiday party, this was a full-out rager.

Stig Brodersen (12:40):
Right. Let’s go to March 1st, 2012. WeWork rented a nightclub, obviously, on the lower east side called The Box. And Adman Neumann, his vision of WeWork being the first physical social network. And so from a marketing perspective, this made sense because if you are a real estate dude, you could perhaps convince investors to value your company at five times your revenue. But if you’re a tech valuation promising exponential growth, you could command a much higher valuation. WeWork caught the attention of the reputable Silicon Valley venture capital company Benchmark. This is a company that previously invested in eBay, and they saw something there. Because even though that the sustained revenue growth wasn’t apparent, which was also the case with eBay in the early days, they had this really strong community route, then they had to count for something. The Benchmark investment became very important for Adam Neumann and WeWork. Why was that?

Reeves Wiedeman (13:36):
It really established the company as a serious player. And before that, Adam had gotten money from friends, from friends of friends. And wasn’t until Benchmark came in and gave its stamp of approval on the company that people had to take it seriously. And in particular, had to take it seriously as something other than a real estate company. Because Benchmark, as you mentioned, was a tech investor. They had this famous sleep great bet on eBay. And they were invested in Uber and Snapchat, and these kinds of companies. They didn’t invest in real estate companies.

Reeves Wiedeman (14:11):
And there was some resistance from the Benchmark side, is this really the kind of company that we want to invest in? But once they did, it gave WeWork this sense about it that they were a tech company in some ways. And they were, if not explicitly a tech company, they were part of what at the time was just the booming tech startup industry. I think the money was crucial. But just as crucial, if not more so for WeWork, was who Benchmark was. And being able to say that these types of investors were investing in WeWork.

Stig Brodersen (14:46):
We talk a lot about Adam Neumann. I don’t think we more or less have talked about Miguel, his co-founder. With this deal, the ownership structure was skewed because Miguel wanted this deal probably more than Adam. He wasn’t really happy about the valuation. And so they made this deal where, and please correct me if I’m wrong, I want to say around $100 million. Whenever they reach that point in terms of valuation, some of the ownership would skew towards Adam. Also because at this point in time Miguel saw the writing on the wall, he was tying himself to this Adam Neumann [brothership 00:15:21]. And even though he wasn’t happy about everything that was going on, he could see where this was going, and who was driving this ship. I wanted to mention that.

Reeves Wiedeman (15:33):
I think this was a crucial moment where both Adam and Miguel saw virtue in the deal in one way or another. But it was a moment where Miguel did feel strongly about the deal, and doing it. And was willing to give up some power to his co-founder that would have consequences for years to come at WeWork.

Stig Brodersen (15:53):
And let’s remember, these are very early days. They were making very little money. They made a $1.7 million profit in 2012 which was, by the way, the last profitable year in the company’s history. So these were early days. It was incredible they could raise that kind of money. And just a fun backstory, at this point in time they had a 16-year-old kid who was director of IT. Talk about being a tech company, right? And so it was all marketing. It was just incredible. Let’s fast forward to 2014. So WeWork has secured a private post valuation of $5 billion. And it might be a little surprising to learn that WeWork had only two dozens of spaces producing close to $150 million in revenue. Because they had a far higher valuation that says International Workplace Group. They brought in $2 billion in revenue, they showed a profit and had more than 2,000 locations. So we have a lot of investors out there and they might be like, this makes no sense. How can that be worth $5 billion? So let me throw that over to you, Reeves. What was going on?

Reeves Wiedeman (16:58):
I think you have to think about WeWork within the broader context of where this was all happening, and when this was all happening. And this was an era where companies were becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, very fast. And these were no longer companies that were growing slowly and responsibly. The ethos of the era was to grow as fast as you could, as big as you could. And once you did that, you could figure out how to make a sustainable business out of it. That was the idea behind WeWork. If we funnel enough money in to this company, that they will be able to grow big enough to figure out a new way of operating or a real estate business that allows you to make more money. What actually separated WeWork from IWG and other competitors like it, WeWork was cool.

Reeves Wiedeman (17:50):
It’s hard to remember that now. It was very cool. They were hip offices. There was something to the energy in these offices in a lot of ways. An IWG office, the printer is going to work and the coffee will be there, but that’s kind of it. It’s a boring ho-hum space. WeWork took a lot of care to try to cater to younger workers to make it a cool place to be. That was the, what was in theory, supposed to separate WeWork and make it the leader in this was the attention to detail. Whether that justified the valuation, I mean, I think clearly in hindsight it didn’t. But there was just this notion, both that if you grow big enough and fast enough, you could figure out a way to connect all these things. And there was a belief in Adam, there was a belief in him as this entrepreneur/founder who was a visionary and could make things out of nothing. And do the impossible. And so people wanted to make those kinds of bets. Because when those bets paid off, the rewards were huge.

Stig Brodersen (18:58):
Well said. So much go into the narrative. If we just take another two years here, we are in 2016 here. At this part in time, the wave of funding that ballooned since the recession has fallen off. And Neumann and WeWork, at this point in time they burned through a lot of money. They had investors from all over the world, Israel, New York City, San Francisco, Beijing. At this point in time, because they were burning so much cash, it seemed like the only option was to IPO. Then also open WeWork up to public scrutiny.

Stig Brodersen (19:29):
And both Miguel and Adam Neumann wanted to keep the company private as long as possible. Which, hindsight is always 20/20. But if you knew what was going on, it probably makes even more sense why they wanted to do that. So there were in this intriguing situation. And then all of a sudden, perhaps the only person in the world who could save the company showed up. Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank. A lot of people might know him as Masa. But for those of us who are unfamiliar with him, could you please introduce Masa and how he eventually invested more than $4 billion in WeWork? Because this is an interesting guy.

Reeves Wiedeman (20:05):
Yeah. Fascinating guy. Masa is a serial tech investor/entrepreneur, he grew up in Japan and had built this large company from scratch by himself. And SoftBank initially was just a company that sold software and became ultimately the biggest distributor of computer software in the 80s in Japan. And eventually, Masa moved into bigger and bigger parts of the tech world. He got into broadband internet early on. He got into mobile phones after that. He made one of the most successful venture capital investments of all time, which was his small investment in Alibaba, which paid off in billions and billions of dollars.

Reeves Wiedeman (20:52):
And so he was just someone who liked taking risks and liked making these big bets, much like Adam Neumann. Masa famously in the late 90s, during the first tech bubble, had one point become the richest man in the world if you look at his holdings. And then he promptly lost more net worth than anyone in history when the bubble burst, and because so much of SoftBank’s wealth and his wealth was tied up into these tech stocks. So he was just this person who liked to dream big and thinks big. And that is one of the main reasons that when he met Adam Neumann, he and Adam connected in a way that Masa liked to connect with the founders that he invested in.

Stig Brodersen (21:37):
There were a lot of things in this story that really makes me smile. And I think that Masa wanted Adam Neumann to be crazier and more ambitious. I really liked it, it takes one to know one. I wanted to mention that. But then one funny story is the story about the digital napkin. I’m sure it’s going to hit home with our audience. Could you just briefly go over that story? It’s just a wonderful story about these two characters.

Reeves Wiedeman (22:02):
WeWork and SoftBank had been discussing a potential investment. Masa was at the time investing the hundred billion dollar vision fund that he had raised, and WeWork was a potential bet to place. And the story, as it goes, which the account from all sides is that it’s true. Is Masa showed up at WeWork headquarters one day for a tour to meet Adam, to get a look at what WeWork looks like. It was supposed to be a couple of hours long meeting, Masa was late. He actually ended up meeting with Donald Trump in New York that day, who was the newly elected President of the United States.

Reeves Wiedeman (22:38):
And by the time Masa got to WeWork headquarters, he only had 12 minutes to go on a tour, is what he told Adam. It was basically, you got 12 minutes, sell me. They went on a tour. Masa said he had to go, told Adam to join him in his car as he drove to his next meeting. And basically, right there on an iPad, they drew up an investment that ended up being $4.4 billion. And those were the numbers that they were talking about right there that Masa and Adam, I mean, that’s not a legal document, but it’s better than a handshake agreement that these two men had come to for $4 billion over half an hour.

Stig Brodersen (23:15):
Wow, that’s unbelievable. So Reeves, SoftBank’s investment was officially announced in August 2017. And that took WeWork’s valuation from 17 to $20 billion. Perhaps the biggest winner was Adam Neumann. He cashed out $368 million, and nearly three times the smarts as every other WeWork employee was able to cash out combined. Some of that money was earmarked for the more lavish lifestyle that he and Rebekah were living. Something that might sound a little odd, because at the same time they were talking about living an acid lifestyle and being hippies living off the land, as Rebekah phrased it. How did the Neumanns live?

Reeves Wiedeman (23:54):
They had a very asset-heavy lifestyle, to point it. They had at one point seven or eight homes, employees kept finding out about new homes that they had. They had three different apartments in New York City, two homes in the Hamptons, a couple of homes in upstate New York. Eventually, a home in San Francisco that was gigantic, so large that it had a particular room that was shaped like a guitar. And they had spent tens of millions of dollars on homes. They had multiple nannies for eventually their five children.

Reeves Wiedeman (24:27):
In many ways, WeWork, which by the time the Neumanns were as wealthy as they were, was a giant company with thousands of employees. They ran it a little bit like a family business. Adam convinced the company to buy a $60 million private jet, that in theory was for the company’s use, but in practice was essentially only used for Adam’s travel, work, and occasionally personal. In the Neumanns’ case, the blend there was hard to separate. So Adam lived the life of someone who was a billionaire before he was actually a billionaire. And in part, because he thought that’s where he was headed.

Stig Brodersen (25:04):
That’s such a wonderful story. As you were saying, it was a, let’s just call it somewhat lavish lifestyle. And keep in mind that in 2018, WeWork was on pace to lose almost $2 billion. And it was already running low on cash despite raising more than $5 billion since 2015 when Neumann said that WeWork wouldn’t need any more private investment. One of the inventions to manipulate investors, if you can BS candidates, was to create a new metric that he called community adjusted EBITDA. For instance, in 2017 it turned a loss from $933 million into a profit of 233 million. What is a community-adjusted EBITDA? I never heard that before, it sounds interesting.

Reeves Wiedeman (25:49):
Neither had anyone else when WeWork announced it. Essentially, what community-adjusted EBITDA tried to do was to make the case that when after WeWork opened a new building, and got it to a point where it was operating as it would, which was a period of 18 months to two years after opening a building. Their point was, you need to factor out all the money we’re spending on free rent that we’re giving to people to get them into the building. On broader marketing expenses, on the construction, on things like that they argued would go away over time. And so the better way to think about how much money the company was actually making was through this metric.

Reeves Wiedeman (26:34):
There were two problems with it. One, the name was bad. And the name seemed cheeky and fed into the notion that this was not a serious company in a lot of ways. And then the other problem with it was that those costs weren’t going to go away. Some of them would obviously diminish over time, but this was a metric that imagined a pie in the sky scenario where the marketing costs of needing to fill a building with people were going to just completely disappear at a certain point. And that just wasn’t the reality of the way that WeWork’s business worked.

Stig Brodersen (27:08):
Reeves, in April 2019, and this was just a few months before it all came crashing down, you met Adam Neumann in person. Whenever you’re reading Billion Dollar Loser, it’s easy to make fun of his lofty goals. And we also have to remember that the difference between being a visionary leader and a leader having visions, that’s often just success. Thinking about if we had Steve Jobs and he was saying everything he did, and it didn’t succeed. If you just make that thought experience. Keeping that in mind, do you think that Adam Neumann was a true believer in his lofty goals? Or whenever you met him, do you instead think that he played a long con knowing that he could continue to sell out his shares with each round of funding, making himself a multimillionaire, and then turn a billionaire if he just kept up appearances?

Reeves Wiedeman (27:54):
I think it was a little bit of both. I think Adam believed what he was selling at WeWork. He believed that the spaces were communities that made people’s days better. He believed that his company was making the world better. He believed that he was making the world better. At the same time, he understood all the reasons why people should be skeptical of WeWork. And he was very good at telling an alternate story. He was very good at telling the version of the story where this was something other than a real estate company. Where this was a free coffee and all the cool people. And the beer taps were not just decorations, but they were actually part of building something that was a new way of thinking about real estate. And a new way of thinking about the way that we work.

Reeves Wiedeman (28:41):
And he told that story, and I think he believed it. Now, did he believe that his company in a rational world was worth as much as some people were willing to say that it was? I think to some degree he did, to some degree he thought it should be even bigger. But he also knew he was selling a story, and would often say that was the key to selling WeWork.

Stig Brodersen (29:07):
Let’s go to the second week of May here in 2019. So this is a few days before Uber listed its shares at a $70 billion valuation. Goldman Sachs gave its presentation to WeWork with a valuation of $96 billion. At this point in time, there were calling WeWork to be the lead underwriter of this upcoming IPO. Goldman Sachs even had a slide called “Your path to a trillion dollars.” Then there were comparing WeWork with Salesforce, Alibaba, Google, and Amazon. With this ego-boosting modifier, you are scaling faster. Which is interesting because this was a real estate company that by definition have a harder time, time scaling. Real estate is already a fragmented industry compared to something like Google, for instance, that’s very scalable. But these valuations were much higher than the latest round where WeWork was valued at $47 billion. An already outrageous valuation considering that it was essentially an agreement between Masa and Adam Neumann that both had an incentive to boost the valuation.

Stig Brodersen (30:06):
This was this famous napkin deal. They both want to boost that valuation. So in the second week of September 2019, at JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs told WeWork that the company had to go public all of a sudden with a valuation closer to $20 billion. And the press wrote about even lower valuations. At this point in time, the Uber thing really didn’t work out, their valuation. A lot of stuff going on. Before the end of September, Adam Neumann’s fate was sealed and he had resigned. So bombshell, what happened around this time so many things were going on?

Reeves Wiedeman (30:42):
It was a lot, it was a complicated storm of things. But I think when you look at it, a few things happened. And basically, things caught up to WeWork. They had been losing money for years. Eventually, they were losing $2 billion a year, as you noted. And suddenly that was a lot of money. And there were other companies that were losing lots of money and were being given the benefit of the doubt. And maybe WeWork could have survived that. But at the same time that this was happening, the public was learning all about Adam Neumann, and learning all about the stranger parts of his company. And the strange way that Masayoshi Son was propping up the company. All of the stories about the drinking and the partying, and the weirder parts of WeWork’s business. WeGrow, the elementary school that they started.

Reeves Wiedeman (31:27):
WeLive, the apartment buildings. The way Adam Neumann talked about WeWork as an agent that was going to change the world. And so all of these things came out in WeWork’s S1 document this document that was eventually released to the public as part of any kind of IPO. In that document, all that stuff became clear. And in the coverage about it, there were all these conflicts of interests. In the document, Adam and his family, Rebekah as well, were being given a huge amount of control over the company. And I think that just gave this impression that this company was not serious. That it was not actually what it was selling to the world. And the stock market and the major investors who drive the stock market weren’t willing to take a risk on it. And when that happened, it became clear to even Adam Neumann’s biggest backers that the only way forward for the company was without Adam. And he was pushed. Basically, a coup was staged and he was pushed out of his own company.

Stig Brodersen (32:28):
Reeves, what was the deal? I know I’m putting you a bit on the spot here. And we don’t need necessarily accurate numbers. Because I think a lot of it is unraveling these days as we are recording this. This is the 9th of July. Some information comes out later also after the publication of your book. What was the deal that he signed whenever he was ousted?

Reeves Wiedeman (32:49):
He signed a deal at the time that was going to allow him to sell roughly a billion dollars of his own stock. In addition, he was going to be able to get some loans, paid back hundreds of millions of dollars of loans that he had taken out. He was going to be paid a $185 million consulting fee for several years, which was particularly galling to a lot of people. And all of this just to get him to leave, to get him to leave his own company. All those amounts have been subject to various legal back and forth over the past year and a half. And it now looks like Adam’s going to end up getting about half that, which is not the billion he thought he was going to get, but it’s also not nothing. And I think in that sense, it’s hard to look at Adam Neumann’s story as a failure. In fact, for him personally, he’s become wealthier than you ever could have imagined.

Stig Brodersen (33:38):
So where does all of this leave Adam Neumann? Today, where does this leave WeWork?

Reeves Wiedeman (33:44):
Their stories are now obviously connected, but different. And for Adam, he’s mostly been laying low. He hasn’t really talked publicly about anything since leaving the company. He’s been quietly making investments, a lot of them in the real estate world, a lot in the residential real estate world. So he seems to think that may be the area that he wants to try to disrupt next. And I think in a lot of ways he is just the person who investors are going to be willing to put money behind because he is that ambitious visionary entrepreneur.

Reeves Wiedeman (34:15):
For WeWork, the pandemic was not great for an office leasing company of any kind. They struggled a lot through this. It did give them a chance to reset things. And the thing they’re now pitching to the world is the flexibility that WeWork offers. It is a company that, what they offer is different kinds of office space in different sizes and shapes. Their bet is that people now, after the pandemic, will want a variety of options. That you may not want all your employees coming to one central office all the time, maybe all you need is a couple of WeWorks. So that’s the bet they’re making, I think it’s going to be a hard one to pull off. But that’s the one they’re going to try to make in our post-pandemic world.

Stig Brodersen (34:58):
Fantastic, Reeves. We started building this here on this show, no surprise, that is the name of the show. There are so many great books that we read and we say you should do XYZ. And this is how this billionaire became successful. We had Charlie Munger, the vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. And he talks about invert, always invert. And that was with that mindset I started reading your book. That’s probably not the way you want to become a billionaire. But it-

Reeves Wiedeman (35:24):
That’s fair.

Stig Brodersen (35:25):
Right. But it’s such an amazing story. And I’m holding this up to the camera here, which probably works better if you’re watching this on YouTube than on a podcast. But a lot of doggies here. This is truly an amazing book, a fantastic story. And it’s one of those things where you just need to read it to figure out how crazy this store really is. With all this said, Reeves, thank you so much for speaking with me. Where can the audience learn more about you and Billion Dollar Loser?

Reeves Wiedeman (35:55):
They can learn about it at billiondollarloserbook.com. The book is available anywhere. It is available for audiobook, for anyone who prefers to listen among your listeners. It’s available anywhere books are sold. And actually, the paperback edition of the book just came out this week, so this is good timing. And I hope the book has lessons for aspiring billionaires to learn from, and avoid some mistakes.

Stig Brodersen (36:21):
Well said, Reeves. Thank you so much for making time to speak with me here today.

Reeves Wiedeman (36:25):
Thanks, Stig.

Stig Brodersen (36:27):
All right, guys. Before we end the episode, I wanted to talk about an interesting opportunity to work with us here on TIP. A lot of things have happened since it was just Preston, me, back in the day doing the podcast. We have more than 50 million downloads now of the main show, 18 people on the team, seven new job openings. So a bunch of stuff happening. And we would really like for you to join us on this journey. One of the positions I specifically wanted to talk about is the position of the new YouTube host. As a YouTube host, working from home, you’ll be asked to ideate, strategize, and record native YouTube videos. And be a part of both live and online events. Really, as the YouTube host, we expect for you to be a talent.

Stig Brodersen (37:10):
And then we have a small team of designers, we have three designers working on the YouTube project right now. They will do all the creative work around the video. We’re looking for someone who has a very entrepreneurial mindset and ambition. We want to grow the audience first and then figure out how to make money next, sort of like what we did here on the podcast too. And if we can just mention one more thing that’s very important, is that you enjoy learning yourself, but you also enjoy teaching others. That’s basically the position. When we’re talking about YouTube host, we are talking about someone who can also educate our audience. You can read more about the position at theinvestorspodcast.com/careers. And if you do get the job, the plan is that you will be trained by me personally, here in Denmark, the first week of your employment. Please send your application or any questions that you might have to stig@theinvestorspodcast.com. That is stig@theinvestorspodcast.com.

Outro (38:05):
Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to Millennial Investing, by The Investor’s Podcast Network, and learn how to achieve financial independence. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.