Making A Point (Ep. 247)
My conversation with Jay Reno
My guest on Infinite Loops this week knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur from the time he was buying and selling things on eBay.
Jay Reno claims he didn’t know what the word ‘arbitrage’ meant back then, but if you tug on the colourful threads of his career, you’d reveal the kind of tenacity and resourcefulness that allows special founders like him to repeatedly find value in places that have long been deserted by everybody else.
If you listen in on today’s episode, it will become apparent why O’Shaughnessy Ventures invested in Jay and his current venture. Jay is the CEO and Founder of Pointhound, which helps people find amazing deals on flights and travel using their credit card points and miles. He’s also a partner at 645 ventures.
Among other fun pursuits, he’s spent the last ten years building all sorts of cool things; like a same-day grocery delivery service, a craft coffee company, a restaurant and bar reservation app, and a furniture rental service for city dwellers.
We spent our conversation talking about his advice for first-time founders; his learnings from building Pointhound; the whimsical world of credit card point programmes; his thoughts on consumer psychology; and much more!
We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links and a full transcript.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
Highlights
Picking the right investor-partner
Fund names don't tend to matter very much, unless what you need is the PR of that brand fund name to help you drive sales of your core product. Now, if you are a B2B SaaS company, having Sequoia on your cap table is really nice, because other startup founders know who Sequoia is. As an example, if you're building a consumer business, no consumer knows or gives a shit who Sequoia is, right? One of the better VC firms, just using them as an example, could be anyone else. No one gives a shit. So really what matters at the end of the day is actually not the name of the fund. It's really the human who you would be working with on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis that I've found to be what matters most.
How to think about ‘points’
But ultimately, the way you can think about booking flights with points is it's kind of like an outlet store. So there might be the Nike store on Broadway and Soho, and you're paying top dollar if you walk in the Nike store to buy your Nike basketball shoes. Nike also has outlets all over the country, where you can go to a strip mall in Topeka, Kansas and buy that same shoe for 50% off at the outlets. Well, that's what airline points is for is to put butts in seats, at a substantially discounted rate, because they're flying planes quarter full, half full, three quarters full, and want to actually fill the plane. So there's still a lot of room to go for the airlines to optimize filling planes and utilizing the planes that they already have through this point system, that a 10%, 20%, 30% influx of people using points for airlines is actually going to help everyone in the end.
Cultivating customer ‘aha’ moments
They see the results and they're like, "Wait, the retail price of that flight is $5,000, but I can get it for 50,000 points? In my AMEX portal, it says it's 400,000 points." And they're like, "But here it says 50." And we're like, "Yeah, we've been trying to tell you that all along, but for some reason right now, you're getting it." And figuring out that moment of, their aha moment, and bottling that and bringing that as early as possible in the user journey is critical to getting people to use your thing long term, because they have that aha moment sooner and don't drop off before they actually get to the place where they might have that aha moment.
On organic growth
I would like to spend as little money as possible on paid ads, mostly because I've seen what that heroin can do to you where you think everything's good growing top line, but the reality is your margins are just shit. Or your LTV to CAC lifetime value divided by the cost to acquire your customer is not very good because you're paying too much for people. You're taking a machine gun and just machine-gunning fish in the water. You're like, there are these things called a net, which it's pretty cheap to buy a net and throw in the water. You don't need to use these M16 caliber bullets to kill a fish. You are like, "Have you tried a net?" So I think that's one of the core learnings having built consumer companies over the last 15 years and invested in them too, is how do you build something and/or invested in something that is growing organically or that can grow organically, and how do you put those levers in place to make that happen?
Transcript & Links
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, hello everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another Infinite Loops. I have a very special guest today. Disclaimer, I am an investor in his company, so I might not grill him to the extent that I often grill others. Actually, Jay, I'll probably grill you more just to show no favoritism at all. My guest is Jay Reno, the co-founder of Point Hound, which helps you earn and redeem credit card points for free flights. I know and knew nothing about this when Jay convinced me that, oh, there's a huge arbitrage opportunity available here. But more importantly, Jay, you're also a multi-time founder. You're a success successfully exiting, et cetera. You also are an investor. You lead seed and series A investments for 645 Ventures.
And so, if you don't mind, my first question is to be, we got a lot of younger people who aspire to be entrepreneurs. And I love one of your lines. You knew you were an entrepreneur all of your life and your first thing was on eBay. But if you don't mind, we're going to start with a lot of young people want to be founders. They have great ideas, they have great skills, but they never get there. As a coach player, what advice would you give on how to actually take the idea and get it funded and move to an actual thing like Pointhound? That is a really, really cool idea. And first welcome.
Jay Reno:
Well, yeah, thank you first, Jim, for having me on your podcast. Big fan of yours and of the podcast. Yeah, I mean, I think first really the reality is a lot of people end up getting tripped up on just getting started. It's funny, ideas are a dime of dime a dozen. Why? Because we all have generally good to great ideas. But what sets, I guess, an entrepreneur apart from just the average person is we actually just take action on the thing we care about. Now, because we take action, does that mean that it's going to be successful a hundred percent of the time? Absolutely not. No. I mean, the reality is I have tried, false started, and failed at a variety of different things in my life, in my career. But the reality is, you just need to take that first step or those first few steps to see if your thing has any legs.
I don't think we talk about this enough in public. The news certainly doesn't talk about this because they really only want to report on the things that either are spectacular successes or spectacular failure. Something that's going to be interesting. It's not interesting to most people to hear, "Oh, well, I tried starting a food delivery company in 2010 that I just put a website together and saw if anyone gave a shit. And it turns out no one gave a. So, I closed the thing down." Who knew about that thing? Probably nobody. Maybe a few of our customers did, of course. But yeah, I guess just to answer your question, really getting started, just making those first few steps is weirdly the thing that holds most people back, I've found.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And I work with a lot of younger people who are really interested in being founders, and that seems to be the number one thing. The number one thing is the fear of making a mistake in public. And I went so far as to actually write a piece called Mistakes Were Made and Yes, By Me. And I've never met a really, really successful founder or really anyone in life who had not made huge mistakes. And I always try to guide the people I'm chatting with to the understanding that listen, novel mistakes are the most learning-rich environment that you can find yourself in. And if you want to have a perfect record, you won't have a record at all because you won't have made any mistakes and therefore, you will have done nothing. What advice do you give for getting over that hump when you're talking to younger people? Or older, let's not make it an age issue.
Jay Reno:
Yeah, older people by definition had to have failed more times than younger people. I mean, you've been around longer to have more successes and failures. Yeah, I mean for me, that first company, I poured probably 80% of my savings, though it wasn't that big at the time, into this company, it goes to zero. My savings at that point were a little above zero. And what was a better learning experience than trying, running, failing at a company? I learned more than I could have ever imagined at the time, because those things become much more ingrained in your psyche when you realize, okay, don't do that thing again or definitely do that thing again because it was very good. You take that with you to the next step, or the next company, or the next product, or job, or whatever it is that you want to do. Those things become much more ingrained.
So, I guess the first thing I would suggest is, again, it's really more of a mental barrier that people have around getting started or doing something. Like you said, failing in public feels very uncomfortable. I think the reality though is your thing is probably not going to become very public for the first year that you're doing it, two years. Even with Point Hound, we've been around for a bit over a year. And I would say we are still not like a company that everyone has heard of yet. And so, if this company tries and fails, even after we've raised some capital, and have gotten to tens of thousands of users, most people aren't going to look at me and be like, "Oh, shoot, you started and you failed this thing."
So, backing up, I guess, the first thing you can do to get started is just commit to yourself that you want to do the thing, and you want to try, and you want to put your effort into it. Getting over that mental hump is the biggest obstacle that I find because the fear of failure in public is so strong and real. Again, the reality though, for those taking those first steps, no one cares. No one cares like you do. No one's looking at your thing or you like you are. No one is as self-critical. You walk around in public being like, "Am I having a bad hair day or whatever?" And no one is looking at your hair. No one cares. "How's my dress? Is my shirt on right?" No one's looking at that. No one cares, but you, you are hyper aware. So, I think having some level of awareness of these psychological situations you're in is a helpful way to just try and put some of that aside, knowing that we're human and are going to be so self-critical.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
My mom, I was very lucky I had a mother. And when I was a teenager, I was not immune from... I mean, especially when you're a teenager, that hyper awareness of how other people perceive you and it's this hat screwing up my hair, et cetera. And my mom would always say when I was obsessing over some little thing, she'd look at me and she'd say, "It's nothing a man on a galloping horse would notice."
Jay Reno:
Yeah. Or even just anyone who's staring at you for 15 seconds, which most people don't do anyway, they're not going to look at the thing where you're like, "Oh no, I have a zit," or whatever. They're not. No one's hyper aware of you like you are. So, working through that is the best way to get started. Aside from just actually incorporating a company or actually trying to design or mock up the first thing yourself even if it's complete dog shit, just do it, just try and see if anyone cares. That's the step one that I think people get hung up on, is they think they need to go out and raise a million dollars, and hire three engineers, and a designer, and whatever in order to make the thing. But there are a lot of ways you can build a minimum viable product or an MVP without having to raise a bunch of money or have it be perfect on day one.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And you've been successful with Y Combinator. Do you think that for first-time founders, taking that route is preferable to trying to raise the money in a direct to the investor type model? And by investor, I mean seeking out VCs and trying to build it that way versus the Y Combinator model?
Jay Reno:
I would say yes, I think so. Two items there. Raising money from investors. I don't think I have ever successfully gotten investor on board who I have reached out to first. And I've spoken to hundreds and hundreds of investors, more than that, I don't know, over my lifetime. And it's always the ones that come to you who are already interested in you for some reason, or interested in your company for some reason that get over the hump of whatever their fears are about the company and realizing that this could go really well. So, I would generally say that putting yourself out to attract interest in a variety of different ways where you're not necessarily sending a bunch of cold emails to investors, but maybe putting yourself in a position where they will see you is generally the way I found to be successful at raising capital. Now, that could be through an accelerator program like Y Combinator, where you have this three-month period of working together with a bunch of other companies, and your group partners, and-
Jay Reno:
...Together with a bunch of other companies and your group partners and really figuring out what the core problem is that you're solving, how to address that with the product, and see if you can get your first few users or customers or whatever. And then, when you finish that program or programs like it, you have these demo days that attract people to want to come and see what you're working on. Well, Y Combinator being a very good example of that. You have thousands of people who are looking at that, who are generally investors, either angel investors or venture capitalists looking in on your thing. And while Jim may look at a company doing AI for SaaS, whatever that is, Jim may be like, "That's not interesting to me." But Jim might be like, "Okay, this company that is addressing a problem I have or something that I know about, this is really interesting to me. I'm going to go pursue that company." That's where you'll have a lot more success than just cold emailing or cold reaching out to folks.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
That also just brings up an interesting follow up question. You've identified the biggest hump is just getting started for the entrepreneur. What has been your experience in identifying investors that are going to be great to have on the cap table and investors who you would actually really not want to have on the cap table?
Jay Reno:
Well, earmuffs, Jim, you can't hear this, okay? You've got your earmuffs on. Hopefully this thing's blocking out the sound. No, actually, the reality is, for most founders, anyone who believes in your company, who will write you a check, is someone you should probably take money from in the earliest days, at your earliest stages. As you start to have the ability to be more discerning, whether that's because you've been a founder who's had an exit or your company is growing like wildfire already and people know that and think it's a great company or product or you seem really great, whatever, things start to change, and you can choose your investors more than in other situations. So that being said, what I always look for and the most important thing in my last company, where we raised a seed series A, series B and talked to a lot of different folks, it was really the human behind the fund.
Fund names don't tend to matter very much, unless what you need is the PR of that brand fund name to help you drive sales of your core product. Now, if you are a B2B SaaS company, having Sequoia on your cap table is really nice, because other startup founders know who Sequoia is. As an example, if you're building a consumer business, no consumer knows or gives a shit who Sequoia is, right? One of the better VC firms, just using them as an example, could be anyone else. No one gives a shit. So really what matters at the end of the day is actually not the name of the fund. It's really the human who you would be working with on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis that I've found to be what matters most. Now, having a network that they can intro you to is kind of table stakes for most investors.
Like, "All right, I can provide you value." Well, at the end of the day, as an investor, we, I'm an investor too, you're selling money, right? " Hi, I have money, will you buy my money?" It sounds like such a weird thing, but that's the reality of what's happening is you're like, "My money is different than his money is different than her money." So in the end, who you are is what differentiates you more than what you can do for people usually. And I think people get generally tripped up over the fund name or the investor's name, because they've invested in Google or Uber or whatever. And therefore, if they invested in you, that means you're going to be the next Google or Uber, that's not how it works.
So again, ultimately, the human behind the money is what I care most about. And so, this is why I wanted you to earmuff. I didn't mean to praise you on your own podcast, but we had offers from other funds and decided to work with O'Shaughnessy Ventures, because of the humans behind the firm and not the brand name. So I think, as an investor, yeah, you got to bring your best self to the table and your honest self, and people will notice that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, being as susceptible to flattery as anyone else, Jay, I thank you for that, but no doubt, we will crush those excellent expectations by really fucking something up in the future.
Jay Reno:
Right. Well, you've got a strike or two, so go ahead, use it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Exactly. Now, let's get into what intrigued me about Pointhound. That was a world I knew nothing about. I knew zero about it. But I had an unusual situation in that my daughter, Kate, knows everything about how to do... She is like a magician. And in fact, when we were considering Pointhound, she was my go-to, and it helps that she is married to one of my senior guys on our venture team, Chris Denny-Brown. But she picked everything apart. She pointed out like, "This might not work, this might not work." But then, the list was much longer for every, "Wow, this is really cool." But she said something interesting to me, and she said, "I just hope this doesn't ruin it for those of us who actually know how to use these point systems." Are you hearing that from anyone else? Or is that unique for my daughter?
Jay Reno:
Yeah, no, I'll give a quick overview of what points are and address the question, which is, if Pointhound is extremely successful, does this ruin the points game for everybody else? So first of all, what is the points game? Or what are points Probably, everyone has heard of credit card points. Most people have a credit card, and if you don't, you're probably thinking about getting one. Or if you have one, you're probably thinking about getting another one. The best way to earn credit card points is by swiping your card and earning points in multipliers that you get from swiping a credit card. So if you have an Amex Gold, it gives you 4X points on groceries and restaurants when you spend at grocery stores or restaurants. Whereas if you spent that Amex Gold card at an online store, buying a shirt, you would only get 1X point, while there's another card that might give you 2X points for online shopping. So there's this whole world around earning points and making sure you have the right credit cards, so that you're earning points. Pointhound helps you do that part. On the other side is, once people accumulate points, they end up, which a lot of people have, they have maybe 50, a hundred, 150, 200,000 points just kind of sitting in their Chase account or their Amex account or their Capital One account, and once you have those points, there are a variety of ways for you to redeem those points. You could turn those points into statement credit. Let's say you had a hundred thousand points, you could turn a hundred thousand points into about $600 to $700 of statement credit. That's nice. You could turn those a hundred thousand points into gift cards worth about 750 to $900. Okay, that's fine. That's not bad. Or you could use those points inside of the bank's travel portal.
So if you're in Amex's travel portal, your hundred thousand points would be worth a thousand dollars for flights booked through the travel portal. Oh, that sounds even better than all the other ones, right? Well, if you were to take those points and transfer those points to an airline and book literally the exact same flight with an airline, you may be able to get $8,000 to $ 15,000 worth of value out of those a hundred thousand points, which of course, is a lot more than a thousand dollars worth of value, by using them inside of the travel portal. So people like your daughter, Kate, have figured this out and said, "Wait, why don't I just find a flight with an airline, where I can transfer my points from the credit card to the airline and book with that airline?" Sounds somewhat straightforward, right? I would say about 1% of the population has figured this out, or 1% of the American population anyways figured this out.
And of course, by simple math, that would mean 99% of people have not figured this out yet. So what we are trying to do with Pointhound is make it extremely easy for people to get free flights for free by transferring your points from your credit card issuer to an airline and helping you facilitate that whole process. And we built a search engine that searches 150 different airlines and returns the results in points. So you don't have to try and go on every single airline and see how much something's going to cost. It's kind of like Google Flights, but for points. Now, hopefully, you're still with me here, but what Kate is saying is, well, if the whole 99% of other people, or let's say even 10% of people, were to move over and actually figure out how this works, what happens to the industry as a whole?
Does it break it? The reality is no. Why is that? Well, the airlines are pretty tied to the government in a lot of different ways. They used to be government run organizations. Back in the sixties and seventies, these airlines are government funded. Now, they're private companies. But during the pandemic, we found out that the government literally stepped in to keep the airlines alive, because no one was allowed to travel. And as it turns out, airlines are treated a lot like banks now. So the too-big-to-fail banks, can you imagine if Delta or United or American went under? The government actually won't allow that. So in this points game, the reason why this is the case is because airlines right now are flying planes at a significant loss and they make a significant amount of profit by issuing points and credit cards to their customers.
So if you have a Southwest card or an American Airlines card and you're swiping that all the time, because you're earning points, you're actually propping up the airline and making the airline profitable, while flying the planes, which is what airlines are supposed to do, is extremely unprofitable for them. So this industry can't actually change if we start extracting value and helping the average user get more value out of their points, it's going to slowly devalue the value of the airline's points programs. But what's going to happen is they're just going to change the pricing and the structure of the points a little bit over time. So this game won't go away. The dynamics will change in that airlines will release more award availability to be booked with points, and that additional award availability may be slightly higher in price, slightly lower in price. But ultimately, the way you can think about booking flights with points is it's kind of like an outlet store. So there might be the Nike store on Broadway and Soho, and you're paying top dollar if you walk in the Nike store to buy your Nike basketball shoes.
Nike also has outlets all over the country, where you can go to a strip mall in Topeka, Kansas and buy that same shoe for 50% off at the outlets. Well, that's what airline points is for is to put butts in seats, at a substantially discounted rate, because they're flying planes quarter full, half full, three quarters full, and want to actually fill the plane. So there's still a lot of room to go for the airlines to optimize filling planes and utilizing the planes that they already have through this point system, that a 10%, 20%, 30% influx of people using points for airlines is actually going to help everyone in the end.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
The thing that attracted me to your company and you is I saw you as somebody who really was able to see arbitrage opportunities and then, more importantly, take advantage of them. And the second question I had is that, in finance, if there is a purely mathematical anomaly, for example, used to be able to buy Royal Dutch, I think it was, which was co-listed on the New York Stock Exchange and on the London Stock Exchange. And one of the oldest arbitrages in the world was the prices were very different often. And so, if it was selling at 10 bucks in London, but selling at 12 bucks in New York, you bought in London and you sold in New York.
Well, as communication got faster, that disappeared, because that was a pure mathematical anomaly that you could arb away. And as you've just explained, this is an arbitrage opportunity, but I think that it's much more difficult, for the reasons you just stated, to arbitrage in away. And so, it also leads me to the next question is, why isn't everybody joining Pointhound or joining other arbitrage opportunities that entrepreneurs have identified, that you can see will persist even if people are taking advantage of it? Is that a hard sale? And if it is, why is that the case?
Jay Reno:
Yeah, I think everything comes down to consumer psychology in the end. Doing something new and novel presents another opportunity to fail for people. There are the early adopters in tech who will just latch onto anything new and just try it because they love trying new technology or new whatever ,it could be in retail, people who love new shirts, I don't know why I keep using shirts as the example here today, but here we go. We'll go with it. There are people who love trying the new thing, and that's probably, again, sub-one percent of people who are those early adopters. It's then the mass market who gets hung up about doing things differently than they've done before, because it is challenging to do things differently, when most people are on a similar track and know what they do. Having to alter that track means I can't go out and have fun with my jet ski on the lake tomorrow.
I am thinking about doing something new, where I'd rather just keep the blinders on. This is what I've learned about consumer psychology and building my prior company, Feather, which is a furniture rental business, and renting your furniture when you're in your twenties and thirties makes a lot of sense mentally. And almost everyone who heard the idea was like, "Wait, instead of having to buy and sell my furniture, I can just have it ordered, delivered to my house or my new apartment. It could stay there for a year or two like me, and then, get picked up and move away when I'm done. I don't have to deal with selling it for nothing or moving it or whatever?" The answer is yes. The core challenge with that business was changing behavior, changing consumer behavior. And even though it was a lot easier, simpler, and actually more cost effective for people to rent their furniture versus buy it and try and sell it, a lot of people were just like, "I love that idea, but it's not for me."
And you're like, "But you literally just said all the reasons why it's perfect for you. Why is it not for you?" And they would be like, "Yeah, just sounds tough." There's no good answer. They've just described why it makes sense for them. So I think the same is true with a lot of things that try and change behavior for people. I would say Pointhound included, to some degree, where people today, they might have a credit card or two and they're just happily swiping away on the card they have, their Southwest Airlines card that's just earning them Southwest points, even though they're losing significant value, like five to 10 times the value that they could be getting, which would be like five to 10 times more economy or business class flights for free, that they could be getting five to 10 more vacations per year, if they wanted to, if they could take that time off of work even, by just doing one thing differently, which is, instead of using this card, you use these other two cards in place of that card to earn lots of points.
Or as another example, taking the points that you're earning and transferring them to an airline to book with the airline directly or with one of their partner airlines, versus using those points inside of their credit card's travel portal, to save them five to 10 times the value or to give them five to 10 times more value for their points. Yeah, it's a funny core challenge, which is to just be able to teach people the nuances and slowly pull them in the right direction. And that's generally what I've seen work best is to create those simple education moments and to give them the carrot, so that they end up just realizing it themselves and doing something about it themselves, versus just keeping things the way that they're used to.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I've long studied our human operating system. And one of the things that I've concluded is that we habituate virtually our entire life. And getting away from a habit is... I was rereading Nikola Tesla's autobiography, and he had concluded that he himself, he said, "I'm an automaton," meaning a robot, right? "I do everything, because I'm programmed to do it that way." And so, for me, there's a universal unlock here that you're getting at. If you can understand that and you can understand that, as weird as it sounds, people will literally say, "Yep, no thanks." "Hey, do you want 10 times the value on your money?" "Yep. Nope, thank you, I don't." When I say that to people, they're like, "Oh Jim, you're exaggerating. That's crazy." And I'm like, "No, it is absolutely true."
And then, I actually use you as one of my examples with, why isn't everyone doing this deal here? And when they go through it, they're like, "You mean this is hard to get people to sign up?" And I'm like, "Well, he's doing a great job, but you would think that people would be falling all over themselves to maximize that benefit." We are not optimizers. We are much more comfortable doing what we've already done. So what did you learn from Feather, where you also had to kind of break through those habituated ways that younger people were doing furniture, that you were able to pour it over to Pointhound?
Jay Reno:
Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think that's the core insight as to why I'm one of the right people to build this company is I've spent a lot of time understanding the consumer psyche, which is an absolutely irrational being. It is an irrational being. Working with businesses, on the other hand, they are completely rational. They don't care how something feels. They'll just do it if it saves them money.
Jay Reno:
They'll just do it if it saves them money, or if it saves them time, time and money even. Whereas with the consumer, again, yes, it takes tugging on their emotional strings to get something. So what I learned, and what we've applied at this new company is in order to get them to do this new thing, you need to make them feel the value themselves, and they need to have it click themselves in whatever way they think. So I'll give an example. We do these one-on-one Point sessions with our users every day. We have requests for eight of them a day, but I can't spend all my time talking to our users all day every day. We've spoken to about 300 of them, and I've given them feedback and guidance on which cards to get and then how to use points.
After that 30-minute session that I have with them, they're in a much better place because they feel heard and understood. And if you can make someone feel heard and understood, then they are yours forever in a lot of ways. Happily, they're like, "Okay, I just needed to voice this to someone." And they would literally, they just need to say it out loud, something that they've read or seen on our website and they're like, "Just tell me that I'm good, that I'm doing this right." And I'm like, "You are, you just followed the steps that we have on the website about how to transfer your points," whatever. And they're like, "Okay, good. I was just worried about doing it wrong." And so rewarding people along the way with these little nuggets of, "You did it, great," is the reinforcer where they're like, "I did? Okay. Okay, good. All right. I was worried that I didn't do it right, and therefore all of my money is gone. My bank account just closed and someone siphoned all my money away." And it's like, "Well, that wouldn't happen," but that's how we feel.
So showing those little reward moments is extremely valuable in, and specifically talking about building a consumer business where you need to get someone to do a new behavior or have a new behavior. I'd say the other example is just people, again, you need to get them to have the realization in the way that they think. So example of that is, people on our site often, when I have our Point sessions, they come onto our Point sessions and they might need to see something visually, or they might need to hear something, or they might need to read something in a certain way, or they might need to actually see that there is an actual flight that does what we say it's going to do.
They see the results and they're like, "Wait, the retail price of that flight is $5,000, but I can get it for 50,000 points? In my AMEX portal, it says it's 400,000 points." And they're like, "But here it says 50." And we're like, "Yeah, we've been trying to tell you that all along, but for some reason right now, you're getting it." And figuring out that moment of, their aha moment, and bottling that and bringing that as early as possible in the user journey is critical to getting people to use your thing long term, because they have that aha moment sooner and don't drop off before they actually get to the place where they might have that aha moment.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And I was a fan of the neuro-linguistic programming tribe that sprung up in the late '60s, '70s, and they make that point again, and again, and again. People, you have to learn how to communicate with people in their preferred mode of communication. And when you first read that, you're like, " What do you mean?" And then they go on to say, "Listen, most people are visual communicators, but there are others like auditory kinesthetic," the way it makes you feel. And then they would say, "Saying to somebody who is an auditory listener or communicator, 'Can't you see the big picture,' is they literally can't, but they can hear the bell ring." Right?
And the kinesthetic types, which are the smaller of the cohorts and the way people communicate and understand things, it's how it makes them feel. Right? And so, I suspect also doing the thing that doesn't scale, like doing these sessions, scales in another way. And that is, are you creating ambassadors for Pointhound that go out and proselytize? When I find something that is really cool, I will not shut up about it to the point where my friends will be, "All right, stop." Is that the same experience that the people who participated in the sessions have?
Jay Reno:
Yeah, 100%. I mean, they are designed both for the user to have their questions answered in a 30-minute session, and equally designed for us, the company to, one, know what the hell people are worried about, what their problems are, where they get stuck. And for us to then create these loyal ambassadors who are like, "I spoke with the founder," or, "I thought it was just going to be some rando I was talking to, but it was one of the people who started the company. And this was amazing. I now get it. Did you know that I get it? Hey friends, I get this, I get it now, I get this new thing." And their friends are like, "What new thing?" And they're like, "You can get free flights for free." And they're like, " Free flights for free? That sounds too good to be true." "I know, that's what I thought."
And then they just kind of go off and tell other people. So I mean, we're seeing this in our data. We 3x'd our user base from July to August with no paid advertising spend, probably because of, I mean, all word of mouth, but I'm guessing a lot of it has to do with these hundreds and hundreds of sessions that we've given to people that are helping them find their aha moment, hopefully, in that 30-minute period, or if not, then the next time they're on our website, and they've had their questions answered. So yeah, the human psychology is everything in building a consumer business, it's wildly important to understand that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Totally. And it's something that we did when we developed a way to customize portfolios called Canvas at OSAM. We limited the early users to people that we knew would give us honest feedback, first, number one. And then one of the failings I've found in some entrepreneurs that I admire and everything, but they don't quite get there, is they are so committed to their vision of the way this should work, that it's almost like they have shields up even if they don't intend to. They might have shields up to ideas that conflict with the way they think it should be. And so I always believe that I'm generally wrong most of the time. And so it helps to interact with people who are actually using, in our case, Canvas, in your case, Pointhound.
And one of the things we found was, boy, is that the right way to look at it? Because things that we thought were going to be the North Star for why everybody used it didn't even make the list of the people who were actually using it. So at Pointhound, what have you learned from the sessions with users that surprised you? And then do you have a fast iteration cycle that incorporates that into the platform?
Jay Reno:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, what you're describing comes back to, as a founder even, we're human, and we don't want to change the way we're thinking about things either, right? Because that would mean we were wrong, and we are failing. Which, yes, you are wrong and you might be failing, but if you alter course, it's possible that if you go over here now, or if you speak about something in a different way or you build the product a little bit differently to address your customer's problems, then you may not fail, and you may actually be successful. But it's very hard to do that because I want to be right. I don't want to be wrong, it hurts. And bringing up the change piece, I don't want to change the path. Do you know what changing the path means? That's a lot of work. I'd rather just go down the path I'm going on and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but at least I didn't try that other thing and failed that other thing too, because that might even be wrong. I only failed at this one thing. Think about that.
So I mean, yeah, when we have these Point sessions at Pointhound, the goal is to incorporate that feedback as best we can. Now I will share some bookends. So if you take every single piece of feedback and you try and implement every single piece of feedback, you're going to be running around a chicken with your head cut off, because someone's going to want, "I want to be able to filter your search in this way." And someone will be like, "I want it to filter this way." And you're like, "That is directly opposing each other." But if you changed it, you're like, "All right, cool. They want it to filter that way, we'll make it for them." And this other person's like, "We want it like this." "Okay, well, great, we'll make it like that," then you're just all over the place.
But I think the nuance, though, is doing nothing is also bad. Make no changes is bad. Making all the changes is bad. So somewhere in between is the sweet spot, and that sweet spot is once you hear things multiple times over from a variety of different users in different use cases, that's when you're like, "Yeah, we should probably change that thing." Maybe you've had a hunch about it too, and they confirm it. Or maybe you've heard it four times, and you agree with them, that's when you actually start to implement that feedback.
I think the other really important piece there is to mention that user type, because your users are generally not, especially in a consumer business, they're not all coming with the same background, with the same needs, and maybe Point's beginners, or maybe they're Point's experts. And you have to kind of choose which company you want to build. Do you want to build for the expert, the intermediate, the beginner? Because if you're building for both sides, you're going to build a product that is for no one. Because the experts are like, "I want this extreme tooling, and I want it to be able to, I want to do all these different things." And the beginner's like," I don't know what a point is."
So if you're talking to the expert, you're like, "All right, so here's what a point is," they're like, "Shut up, get out of my face." And if you're talking to the beginner and you're like, "But here's why you want to tweak and tune this thing, and this is how you should search." They're like, " I don't know why I should even not use my debit card." You're missing everything. So you got to just focus on a core user, know who that user is too, who's giving the feedback, and then incorporate that based on what you are trying to build and who you're trying to build for. That is one of the incredible nuances that I have taken a long time to learn, and have only learned really at this company even.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And what are a couple of the things that met that criteria? You heard them from different use cases, you heard them from different style users. What were a couple of the things that really surprised you like, "Fuck, I'm wrong and I can't believe I'm wrong and I've got to change this"?
Jay Reno:
Yeah. We have this incredibly powerful search tool on our site that allows a user to put in their home airport and search a month's worth of flight inventory from that airport all in one eight-second search. So basically you can say, "I live in San Francisco. Show me all the places I could go and show me the cheapest points for all of the month of October or for this weekend in October," or whatever, "but just show me all the results." It's something that Google Flights doesn't have, it's a very kind of unique feature to surface the best deals to the top. Well, once you get the results, you get tons of results that then need to be filtered down by country. You could be like, "All right," or continent, "I want to go to Europe, so let's get all this South America stuff out of here, and this North America stuff out of here. I just want to go to Europe."
What a lot of people have told us is, they want to be able to put in multiple origins that's not just your home airport, but maybe they want to because their home airport might be, I'm just going to use Topeka Kansas again. Their home airport might be Topeka Kansas, and the results from Topeka Kansas are generally less interesting because there aren't that many good direct flights and stuff from Topeka Kansas. So maybe they want Chicago, I don't know if that's the closest airport, but let's just assume Chicago's the closest airport. And they might actually put in Topeka and Chicago, and then search both of those at the same time because their airport is smaller and doesn't have as many good results. That's one we've heard a bunch of feedback about where we're like, "That makes sense. People want to use the tool."
Beginners intermediates and experts are all kind of saying this in unison where we're saying, "Okay, great. Let's figure out a way to make that change." So that's one example. Another is round trip flights. In the Point's world, searching one way is really the best way to search for your flight because you may be, there's really no such thing as getting a discount for doing a round trip flight like there is with cash fares when people are buying a ticket with cash, which is how everyone buys their flights. Right? So people are saying, "Hey, can I get a round trip? I want to be able to book this round trip." And what we say is, "We could build that feature for you, but having that round trip functionality is actually not going to help you because you might not want to fly back from the same airport that you flew into to get a really good deal on business class flight back to your home airport.
You may want to fly from a different airport in Europe where you took a little tiny plane to get to that, and then you took the long haul flight and business class all the way back, or economy, or whatever." So these are some of those things where we've heard from a variety of different user types, "Hey, this is what I want." And in some cases the answer is, "Yes, that makes sense, we get it." And multiple people are saying it across multiple user types. And sometimes we hear, "Okay, here's how we should do this," or, "Here's what we want," but we have to figure out a way to say, "Yes, we can build this for you, but it might not be the most useful feature for you." Right? So that's kind of like, those are a few examples and where you can get into the nuances of user feedback being extremely useful, but also not something you should just always be running after to fix right away.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And as I was listening to you, I was thinking about the balance of, for example, the streamers. The streamers, okay. The streamers have destroyed their UX to the point where I get really pissed off when on HBO now, for example, not just to pick on them, I'm including all streamers here. But the most recent irritation was with HBO, they spent what, $30 million to change their name to Max. Again, just stupid. Anyway, my wife and I were re-watching a series on HBO, and in the old days, you could pause it when you wanted to pause it and shut it down, you're going to watch it again the next day. And you'd go back to HBO and, boy, there it was, you just hit play. Now what it does is they've turned into Grifter Central, they put you back to the beginning of the series, play it even though you're not watching it, so that they can gin up the numbers.
And this kind of stuff just drives me crazy. Same thing, just to prove that I'm not a universal hater of HBO. I'm not. Like Apple Music, they so destroyed their user interface as to almost make it unusable by, I had all of my music on Apple Music, then I switched everything to Spotify because Apple music was just so fucked up. Why does that happen? Is it because engineers who have super deep domain knowledge know that by changing it this particular way, you can do that really one cool thing, that know people like me either know or care about that one cool thing.
Jay Reno:
I think in this particular example, what came to mind for me was the publicly traded company might need to up their user numbers this quarter, and they got that feedback from their CEO, then the COO, then the executive vice president, then the senior vice president. There's a game of telephone that was like, you ultimately need to, "We need to get these numbers up, or our stock goes down 20%." And they're like, "Oh shit. Okay, well, how can we game that?" Not, "How can we make the user experience great, and organically attract more people to it because it's good product?" But, "How can we juice the numbers," or whatever. And so you see products at scale fall for that bait all the time, which I get on a short-term basis, you're like, "Happy. We increased our subscriber count by 10% and now Wall Street's happy with us," but then you're like, "Next quarter's going to suck when we don't have that stupid lever to turn anymore." I have a feeling that there's a, not even have a feeling, you can see it, a lot of this is going on behind the scenes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And how do you guard against that as a founder, right? So let's just say we wave a magic wand, Jay, and you have millions of users, and then your engineers come in and they're like, "Hey Jay, we can do this really cool thing." Are you the final line of defense there? Are you and your senior team the final line of defense?
Jay Reno:
I think it's ultimately making clear that you should be focused, well, should be. I think looking at your business long term, and thinking about the long-term impacts of the decisions you make in the short-term are, or how you get around a lot of this, the heroin that is a growth trigger or a growth lever. If you're building a venture-backed business, and you need to show growth up into the right, I don't know which way that is for you, on the screen, but you need to show that. Right? And so what are the shortcuts you can take to grow your business up into the right so that you can get your next round of funding so that you don't die? That is happening at the venture level. And if you saw this little thing where you're like, "Well, retention would be shit, but we could drive a ton of traffic to our site if we just juiced the advertising budget, and just drove a ton of people."
It's true. You could make your numbers go like this. Now any discerning investor might be like, "Okay, cool. Let's see what your advertising spend was. Let's calculate the CAC lifetime value to CAC and see." There are ways to look past just this headline number of, like, "We just went to the moon." But when someone looks under the hood and they're like, "You spent a lot of money to go to the moon. Is that sustainable?" Probably not. I've been tempted to do that with a variety of companies. In fact, when you have raised venture capital, certain scale, you have to keep growing otherwise your thing stalls out and dies. So you get tempted to take those shortcuts all the time. Just like publicly traded companies are meticulously picked over for growth numbers and whatever, where they're like, "If we can just juice this little thing, no one will really notice except the user," but the user isn't paying our bills, the user isn't making my stock go up 10%. I mean.
Jay Reno:
Isn't paying our bills. The user isn't making the stock go up 10%. I mean, they are, but the user itself, the user experience isn't necessarily making the stock go up 10%. It's the user numbers that drive everything. So I think taking that long approach, that long-term approach, which is I think Jeff Bezos did that really well. I think Steve Jobs did that really well, to just really think deeply about, "Hey, I know, investors, it's 2002. Yeah, our numbers look like this, but we're actually making all of our decisions long term."
The people who buy into that, whether they're your investor stakeholders, your employees, your co-founders, all of that is really important to build so that you're building something for the long term. And if you're trying to get a quick buck, there are solutions for that. But it's going to come back to bite you in the ass next quarter or the quarter after that or whatever.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And I'm always intrigued by these lessons that can be extended universally across industries and across the... So for example, in investing, which is where I spent most of my career as an asset manager, hyperbolic discounting, right? Everybody just looking at the quarter gave me such an edge. And it was an edge that didn't go away. You could talk about it, I could go on CNBC and explain it quite simply, like, "Hey, I'm not focusing on this quarter.
I'm focusing on the next 10 years." And people are like, everyone nod their head, "Oh yeah, yeah, of course, of course, of course." And it just continues to persist. It's one of those great kinks in human behavior that you can, again, arbitrage and continue to arbitrage.
I used to say the reason that I have any edge at all is because I can successfully arbitrage human behavior. And if you can do that and it persists, it can ultimately be a goldmine. But it doesn't look like a goldmine when you're starting. God, no. It looks like, "Ooh, who would ever want to walk down that path?"
Jay Reno:
Yeah. It's funny to think about it from a public equities' perspective too, where you can look at a company and be like, "I see what they're doing here." And maybe what you're doing, you could be like, "I'm going to go take a million dollar short on Apple's next user growth because I think they're juicing it," and next quarter or in the quarter after that is going to drop significantly because you can see through it. That's fascinating.
Maybe I should get into public equities at some point, because this is... Yeah, I feel like I have a lot of these insights at this micro startup level relative to putting hundreds of millions of dollars of capital to work on a tiny, little short play. It's like, no, no. They're juicing their numbers. I've been there. I've seen it. I'm a product person. I know what they're doing. It's not science. I mean, it's science to me. Just wait for two quarters from now.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. What do you think when you look around, and without naming names, what do you think are the big mistakes that people make when they're designing a product for the consumer market? And we've covered all of the obvious or not so obvious ones, like human behavior's very difficult to change, all that type of thing. What do you see that you just would like, oh God, if you know the person, I'd really want to text them and say, "Oh, don't do that." Or if you don't know them, like, "Oh." Unless they're a competitor, and you're like, "Yes."
Jay Reno:
Yeah. I mean, I see this happening in our space too. I think paid ads, paying Meta, Google, Instagram for prospecting, for driving traffic to the site is it's that's the clear indicator of we need to grow and we need to grow at all costs, literally at all costs, at high costs. That is a slippery slope. I mean, at Feather, we definitely spent 10 to 15 million dollars on paid ads over the course of our company's history, which drives short-term growth, but is it profitable and sustainable growth?
Right? Or are there potentially more creative ways you could acquire users who would be very happy using your product versus the people who you pay to come to your site and then just kind of churn relatively quickly? Because they may have been grabbed by the flashy thing on Instagram and like, "Ooh." And then they get there and they're like, "Oh, yeah, not for me," or, "I don't know why I would use this right now," and then just move off.
That is like, I've been there and we've spent too much money on that. I would like to spend as little money as possible on paid ads, mostly because I've seen what that heroin can do to you where you think everything's good growing top line, but the reality is your margins are just shit. Or your LTV to CAC lifetime value divided by the cost to acquire your customer is not very good because you're paying too much for people. You're taking a machine gun and just machine-gunning fish in the water.
You're like, there are these things called a net, which it's pretty cheap to buy a net and throw in the water. You don't need to use these M16 caliber bullets to kill a fish. You are like, "Have you tried a net?" So I think that's one of the core learnings having built consumer companies over the last 15 years and invested in them too, is how do you build something and/or invested in something that is growing organically or that can grow organically, and how do you put those levers in place to make that happen?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I had that.
Jay Reno:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. Part of your business model also involves getting people into the right credit card, and by right I mean the maximum amount of points and benefits for what they're spending on. Does prestige play any part in that? You've got, Amex is the perfect example, right?
Jay Reno:
Yes. Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It used to be the platinum card with-
Jay Reno:
Still is.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
"Ooh, he's got a platinum cards."
Jay Reno:
Still is.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But then. No, I know. But then they did the black card, the... which I don't even know its name. It's got some silly name. But ooh, that one's like... And of course, no doubt comes the diamond card or the whatever. And how do you deal with that and the prestige factor on credit cards?
Jay Reno:
Yeah. That, it's funny. This is all, again, human psychology and it's smart by the credit card issuers. Amex created this card called the Amex Platinum, which probably a lot of people have heard of. And what makes that card different? Well, it's $695 per year, so it's basically the highest annual fee of a credit card that exists. What's different about it? It's a metal card. It's heavy.
So when you drop it at a restaurant and you accidentally drop it from too high, which is what you do, it clangs around and hits the silverware. And it means that you are a big person, a very important person who has made it. Right? No, first of all, anyone can get that card if you just apply for it and you are willing to pay $695 for it. That card is exactly what you're talking about, which is people will be like, "Oh, well..." They'll come to our point sessions and say, "Oh, yeah, I'm good at earning points.
I use the Amex Platinum and I just need help redeeming the points that I earn." And then I'll ask them, "Well, what are you spending on?" And they'll be like, "Well, I mostly spend on food, groceries, my utilities. I shop a lot, so online shopping and clothes and stuff like that. And then I'll stay in hotels and fly randomly." And I'll be like, "Nice. Well, that's great." The Amex Platinum earns you one point for every dollar you spend in every single category except lunch.
So why are you using that card for all the things you just mentioned? And it's like, "Well, because it's the best card." You're like, "Well, it's not the best card for you actually, if the one category that it earns five X points on flights. So if you are booking flights with dollars, it's the best card for that one thing, and you should use it for that if you have it, for sure.
But for literally everything else, you get one point. Whereas if you used the Amex gold, which is not actually a lesser card, but people think of it as maybe a lesser card because there's platinum, and then there's gold maybe, the gold will earn you four X points at restaurants and four X points at grocery stores and three X points on flights." And most people are spending on restaurants and groceries. So that card actually would earn them three times what this other card that's more expensive would earn, but it's gold.
So it's not as cool, right? That's the psychology that we have to get people over sometimes where they've ignorantly committed to the wrong card and are maybe a little bit too steadfast to say, "Well, yeah, I would like to take three more business class flights per year." Would you like to? Yes. If you get this card and if you spend the same amount on this card instead of this card, you'll get three times more free flights. They're like, "Yeah, okay. I'll think about it." Right? I'll think about it? It's half the cost. It's three times the benefit. All it takes is using the other one.
It's like there are those funny little, again, human psychology foibles I guess, that we have that we can't really get over and we don't like failing and we don't like being told we're wrong, which even in a good, kind, loving way is still really hard to hear. So I try and do my best to be like, "You can do whatever you want with your money." Right? "I'm not your financial advisor for sure, but if you came to us and do you want to earn three times the points at half the cost, then you should probably do this thing."
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And the other thing that I know you spent a lot of time on is, and again, it's probably the same set of foibles that lead people to prefer the cash back type card versus the points card. And I remember when I originally was talking to you, I was like, "Really?" I had no idea that that was the case. And so how do you educate and convert the type of people who were like, "Yeah, this looks really cool, and I do travel a lot, and yeah, I'll use the gold card instead of the platinum, but for the visas and master cards of the world, I just want the cash back."
Jay Reno:
Yeah. The cash back is an interesting one because most people want a currency that they can use for anything that they want, right? Cash. And they want a currency that they understand, which is cash. At least US American dollars, people know the value of a US dollar. If you go to Mexico and you get pesos, you're getting whatever, 40 pesos per dollar. I think it's probably a lot more than that. I don't even know.
But you don't know what the value of a hotel stay is in Mexican pesos. When someone says, "It's 50,000 pesos," you're like, "I don't know. I don't know." Just like with points, you're like, "It's 50,000 points to book this business class flight." They're like, "I don't know what that means." So you do have to normalize a currency for people to get them to understand what it means by putting a retail price in dollars next to the price in points and teaching them that this is a really good deal or this is not a good deal.
So to your question on cash back and how do you convert cash back for people who are using cash back to points, it's simpler. It feels simpler to get cash back. Let's say you spend $10,000 on a cash back card that earns you 2% or $10,000 on a points card that earns you 2% points back, 2% back of $10,000 spend is $200, I guess. Quick math. Good.
And two X points on $10,000 spent is 20,000 points, two times one 10,000. Okay. So you're sitting here with either $200 of cash back that you could use for whatever, that you know and is comfortable to you. "Ah, I've got $200. I could buy a shirt, two shirts, great." Or you have 20,000 points, which are fun, play money to most people. They're like, "Points? Ah, I don't know, whatever. It's just like fake money I have stored in an account." That is how points feel.
They feel like they could just be used for fun things, which generally they can be used for. But 20,000 points could be a round trip economy flight from, let's say, JFK to Rome and back. Or JFK to Paris and back. You could get that for under 20,000 points. Now when you think about it in those terms, it becomes a bit more clear to someone when they're like, "Okay, I kind of know what the value of a round trip flight to Europe and back is relative to my other option, which is $200. I think that's worth a lot more than $200."
Right? But so you have to frame things in a way that matter to people and in a way that they get versus saying, "Well, what do you want? 20,000 points or $200?" You're like, "I don't have any idea. I don't know." But if you're like, "Okay, well do you want a round trip flight to Europe or $200?" Then someone can say, " Okay, I can make that decision." So the cash back card is basically a like cash back card for a like points card. Through our product, you're going to find way better uses of your $10,000 of spend than you will getting cash back.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
You mentioned earlier that maybe you should try public markets. Maybe you should, Jay, because it seems to me that you have just a natural ability to find the arbitrage in a situation. And that is an incredibly useful skill, which is ubiquitous. Right? It can apply to points, right? It can apply to a lot of different things though. And yeah, maybe in your next life you'll be a titan of Wall Street as well.
Jay Reno:
Maybe so.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
What are the next things that you're looking forward to in the coming year for the company or just in general?
Jay Reno:
Yeah. Maybe get back to my roots of buying and selling things on eBay when I was like 11. That was straight arbitrage. I didn't even know what the word arbitrage was, but realizing that there was an opportunity to make a bunch of money to buy a car or do other things. I was like, " I would love to do those things when I'm that young." So I just started doing that, I guess, and finding these little arbitrage opportunities as a kid.
It was fun and also rewarding because I needed a car or whatever. Yeah. So in the next year or two, I think for me, we're just trying to make, so going back to Y Combinator's motto is "Make something people want." That's what I keep coming back to every day. I even have a mug that I usually drink coffee out of. I don't have it today, that just says, "Make something people want" on it.
And I sit next to that and look at it pretty much all day because it takes me a day to drink half a cup of tea. So that's it. It's continuing to iterate on the product and growing our user base as organically as possible. And hopefully we're teaching more and more people about the benefits of using your credit cards to earn points and to use those points for flights. I like our tagline. Our tagline is "Free flights for free," because we don't charge them anything for all of this. This is all free as of the time of recording of this podcast. So...
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I love the caveat there. Well, we will make sure that in the show notes, we have all of the links to the website and to your personal stuff. If you've listened to the podcast in the past, you know our final question, which is we're going to make you the emperor of the world, Jay. You can't kill anyone, you can't put anyone in a re-education camp, but we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it.
And the two things that you say will incept the entire population of the world. Who's going to wake up whenever their next morning is, and they're going to say, "You know what? Unlike all those other times that I had these great ideas, I just had two of the greatest ideas, and I'm going to actually act on each one of these things." What are you going to incept into the world's population?
Jay Reno:
Yeah, that's great. Number one is get started. So whatever it is you want, it could be anything. It could be a company building, it could be making shirts, it could be anything. Just get started on something that you care about. And number two is be yourself, which is way harder than I ever thought is to just be authentically yourself as much as you possibly can. And when you do that, you feel a lot better. Other people notice it. And I think good things come to those who are authentically themselves.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I love both of those. The second one reminds me of Oscar Wilde's quip, "You got to be yourself because everyone else is taken."
Jay Reno:
Yeah. That's a good one. That's a good one.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, Jay, this was a lot of fun. Thank you for taking the time and really looking forward to seeing whether all these arbitrageable opportunities continue to persist. I think they will, because I think that they're far more the creatures of human behavior than some mathematical anomaly that people can just say, "Oh yeah, that's crazy. Let's get rid of that."
Jay Reno:
I think so too. Yeah. Thanks Jim, for having me on the podcast today. This has been fun.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Absolutely my joy and a lot of fun for me as well. Thank you, Jay.