ALEX MEHR: LAUNCHING BUSINESSES AND SUCCEEDING IN THE USA

Hey guys, welcome to Silicon Valley, today we're in Beverly Hills and I'm filming dr. Alex, he has about 30

businesses

and I have a lot of questions for him because I only have four and I'm wondering how he handles everything and I guess he's handling it well because look at the house let's go in and talk to him hey thanks. I have a beautiful house hi Lexi hi nice to meet you Dimitri and aaalac oh my god look at this studio all the lighting though the cameras like everything is set up there is a huge office there it's like a dream house Dima yes yes cross your fingers For me oh fish oh my god for the next 30 minutes please don't disturb so you came to USA what 20 years ago mm mm mm 19 years ago yes has english ever been a problem for you?

Oh, when I moved I couldn't speak at all. Oh really, so you moved without English. Well, I could read and write, but I couldn't converse. Wow. so the American dream came true, that's true, look at that, look at what's happening, it's your responsibility. I'm so impressed, it's the first time I like such a big house. Wow, amazing, has an accident ever been a problem because, like with investor relations, you feel? that's a problem, I mean, not now in the past, so when I moved here I couldn't, so I moved to the US to go to grad school and I couldn't understand what the people were talking about. teachers. in class I couldn't understand TV at all, it took me about six months to get there, but I still had an accent and didn't feel very confident speaking.

First of all, I banned myself from speaking my native language for about a year or Within two seconds I started basically giving any talk in the car, recording myself and listening to myself and then trying to figure out what it was, if you're not a native speaker and you have a strong accent, actually works against you. because many times I think that when you talk about a deep concept maybe it doesn't hurt you in your day-to-day activities, but when you give a speech or you are presenting your company to an investor when you talk with an accent in addition to talking about a complicated concept like People's brains don't like it because first they have to understand what you're saying and then they process like they're going to fall and their eyes are going to glaze over.

At least you have to get to that level or it's not a big effort for a native speaker to understand what you're saying, not getting to that point takes practice, so record yourself listening to yourself and trying to solve the problems, yes. exactly that's what I did the best speaker of all time he was the best speaker of Hellenic Greece his name was democracies he was actually born with a speech impediment so what he did was put gravel in his mouth and went in front of the sea and speaking he spoke to the ocean with gravel in his mouth to make it harder for him to speak and he got so good that he went from being someone with a speech impediment where most people couldn't understand him. for the best speaker of the Hellenic era, so think about that, yes, that is the control you have over your own abilities in terms of speaking, if you really put energy in time, yes, someone told me that I would like to practice the accent American, put a little. nuts in your mouth because you feel more relaxed after that, you recently moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, okay, in July of last year, what does the sun feel like?

I take vitamin D, yes, I like it a lot in terms of vibes because we also think. about moving to Los Angeles one day, but we still love that Silicon Valley vibe, you know, the startups that I said have positive aspects are negative, so they are positive and the reason I moved was because I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2005, so for 12 years. I've lived in San Francisco, which I like, so over the last 12 years I've watched San Francisco become more and more expensive, and in that sense, it becomes more and more expensive to start a business, you know, and initially Yes, there are advantages to being in San Francisco but at the same time the cost of starting a business is very high, office rents are very high and your team is based here.

I moved oh you look young, 50 yeah. Peter Thiel did the same thing, by the way, yes. so did you move this thing from the surface or are you about to... I don't know, but moving to Los Angeles is just that San Francisco has a lot of advantages, but the disadvantage is the employees, the cost of living for them is very high and that's why. It's just that the cost of

launching

and running a business is very high in San Francisco. The positive side is that there is a huge and robust ecosystem supporting startups. I think if you're a first-time entrepreneur, if you're just starting out.

There are advantages to being in San Francisco, but the moment you know the lay of the land, all the things you need to know, then you can start anywhere, really yeah, I like the setup here, so you live in this house. and you also have a team that's amazing and what about starting the companies that you've started so many companies like the right 30 products, a lot of products, but also quite a few companies, yeah, I like your approach where you're not really focused on how to make a perfect product, you focus on failing, the right thing is that your strategy, yes, actually, the best way to think about it is that the great ideas shine again, it becomes very clear, very quickly, that they are good ideas mm-hmm, you know, I don't.

I don't know if you've heard that thing where they say you can't polish a turd so you can have a bad idea and you can spend years trying to polish it yeah, well, well and it just doesn't work so what I do is sometimes I throw a lot of ideas around. parallel mm-hmm and then we look at what are the good ideas that instantly stand out and then you just chase the good ones, what about the bad ones? Do they affect your personal brand? No no no. If so, for example, the Prada bullshit and the marketing of it and people would be like, "Oh, I'm not buying from it anymore because that was here for years." This is what happens if your product has that much effect, then the thing about the world is the world doesn't care about you or your products and generally mm-hm, so when you launch a product, basically most of the time what happens is people don't even care to buy it, that's the definition of that product, so no one even knows that you launched, yeah, so none of my flops, no one knows I'm dark, okay, so what you do is you just kill it, okay it's buried under the rug but do you think that's a good strategy to get some people to just focus? a company or I would recommend all entrepreneurs to just try, that's the test.

I think everyone should test and let me tell you why, so there are examples, some, I mean, I don't know, maybe there are when I think about it more. People who have a very successful business also tried several times and succeeded, but at the end of the day it's a matter of luck, so it's like the game of poker, right? You can go all-in on any hand you are dealt. let's say without even seeing your hand you are all in, so you pick up your cards and go out, you have gone all in and you continue with it and sometimes you win mm-hmm, you might get dealt as pocket aces, but the chances are less , so what I do is I try to see a lot of hands, because just because someone had an idea and they pursued it and they were successful, it doesn't mean that if you do the same thing you will be successful. because a lot of ideas are really bad, no matter what you do, that guy got lucky, you might not get lucky either, how do you handle that?

So when you have the idea, who doesn't hire, how does it work now? It's easier because I have a team and our team tests and kills, it's the same team for every decision, so we rotate, we have marketing people, we have products before we have engineers, they just rotate from one product to another, but even when we were smaller The career started as an entrepreneur in 2007. I was going to Berkeley to get my MBA at the time we launched a company that was a market research company. Do you know my previous company? Zeus called the publicists and said it was a big successful yes.

I still have it, but the first car, yeah, I didn't start as an online dating company, I wasn't even planning on doing it, but in 2007 I saw the rise of apps like it was the beginning of apps, people didn't know what it was the apps and there weren't a lot of people developing it, I was just starting out, yeah, and even before iPhone apps were generated, we started a market research company at the time and I had this whole thesis about why a Market research is a great idea and I raised money based on that also a small amount like four hundred thousand and we started, but then I looked and thought maybe this is not like that.

This is the question if it is your first time playing poker and you have a delta hand. but you don't have a point of reference, you don't know if that hand is the best hand you will be dealt. An unwise move would be to play that hand regardless. I look at my hand and say, well, this is good. We were making like $200 a day or something, which was all income and I was fine, but I'd never started a company before, so maybe I'll come up with a better idea, which is like the idea of ​​not betting on Lane on this. hand and we didn't kill it I just said Oh okay we were nice and I had this rule every Saturday we need to release an awesome new app so I love them yeah we did it we did it and we started I mean September 2000 maybe October 2007, we started October, November, mid-December, so I liked quiz apps and a lot of other things, we did the sports game and then in mid-December 2007 I had an app that was like dating, not exactly, but it took off mm-hmm I thought and this was probably one of the first dating gaps and now you're making like 200 million one hundred and seventy-five million yeah you're still doing it or I might abort how long does it take per week? no less than one hour a month, so your attention is focused on boxer mentor.

My focus is on several startups. mentor box is also being automated a little bit like an hour a month. no mentor box is probably an hour of data, so basically the job. So it depends on what you are trying to do in life, there is no right answer. Sometimes once you have a good idea, the right response is to continue pursuing that good idea, but I like to automate and get out of that business, so let someone else do it. hey we want you to be hands on and mentor like yeah I don't have a lot of investors right now so if you're trying to raise funds like do you think that could be a problem?

We have a very competent manager for the company who is actually running the company effectively and he just talked to him or you talked to the whole team, the team is small so it's like you work together but basically Don is late today, so he's now pitching with the same team he pitched before. Is he

launching

new products? Yeah, so yeah exactly, I mean, we've launched several, we launched a healthy grass-fed beef subscription product or we ship frozen beef products from our farm in Virginia to customers, so I got into the market. of direct-to-consumer grocery products, which is a business that is working very well, it is small but it is growing, we have many other companies in which we are working to brand several products, yes, but the idea is very similar, so we launched

businesses

, you let them sink or swim basically, so it's like good ideas stood out immediately when I saw the online dating gap in 2007, I got traction.

I liked. It was not so? It didn't even take me 48 hours to realize that this, oh this is better than all of them, it's basically like you're playing poker again using the poker analogy for the first time and then you get the hand that's like 10. Jack's same suit, no, it's okay, but it's not the best and then the next one and suddenly you have pocket aces and you know you're a pocket ace. I know very quickly the potential of the business, some of them need to be eliminated. mm-hmm maybe a better term would be close less violent term some of them have to be but they defect they have to prove they deserve your attention does that make sense?

Yes, it makes a lot of sense. My next question is about networking. you managed to rate Hofmann, yes, Rihanna liked all interesting people. I know you've had a lot of traction before so it's actually been easier, but any advice on networking don't try to sell the first time, that's actually me. I am a person who does not sell much. I try to give value before I even ask for something and I do it a lot and honestly I don't expect anything in return so what I do is I just try to give and I have a friend of mine Patrick Lee, a good friend of mine, he actually took a course complete about networking to get money as a mentor.

He is the founder of the former CEO of Rotten Tomatoes. It's super networking. His advice is to basically give and give and give and expect nothing. It comes back but it always comes back, it's just not if you expected it, you try to force it, it doesn't work, so you just give and give and give and give and give.networking because I was doing like a startup, you know, that conference and everyone is trying. to pitch you his idea, yeah, yeah, literally, don't ask, it's one of the best workshops, like the most popular workshops on Mentor Box, and people come up to me and him too.

He is a super expert in networking and he does it by connecting the people he knows. someone and he says, you know, hey, instead of saying oh, here's my company, invest in me, then he says, you know what you do, let me learn more about you and then he says, you know what, there's a person I know I can help you with that let me make a presentation. I have never eaten alone, yes, exactly, that person next time I would introduce someone like that and see what I mean. This could be in the middle. My last question would be about similar income, what is it? the minimum amount of money for you per month you need to feel comfortable yo, that's not it.

I have a very expensive life. Yes, I mean for a person to live comfortably they have to earn at least $10,000 a month and $10,000 a month is very easy to earn, it's as easy as if you can eliminate me completely and I will earn $10,000 a month. just with nothing, your time is definitely worse than $10,000 a month. I mean, unless you literally have no skills, if you have any skills or intelligence you can do it, yes, but this is like we're getting to another topic. I won't cover it, but I just wrote a post on Instagram as an infopreneur when you teach something that also has a lot of hate and you're like balancing that or people would hate you or I tell you this isn't the case.

I feel like I'm kind of an expert at this, it's a very specific thing, yeah, so I post a lot of ads daily on all social platforms and I've been doing it for 10 years, the more people notice you, the more hate you get. In fact, the amount of hate you get from online trolls is exactly proportional to the amount of income you make, so you learn to ignore them. I literally love it because it means my marketing is effective. Bad marketing is not noticed by the public. world the best formula to be ignored by the whole world is to try not to irritate anyone like me exactly how people expect you to be then you are exactly nobody and nobody notices you and therefore your marketing is ineffective good marketing divisions the world is divided mostly by lovers and some haters, yeah so you say it's actually 50/50 to stay relevant, it's like yeah, it's a 50/50, it's actually how many people really hate It's a very small minority, but they are a cloud, yes, yes, they did it. his love, in fact there is a psychological study that can send you the link, there is an actual psychological study that looked at the correlation between online trolling, online hate and psychopathy and other dark dimensions of psychology, it's not even that hate you, they are literally They have psychological problems, yes, because no normal person would go online and leave copies like they are copies, only normal people don't do it, they don't even care, even if they don't like you, they still don't care enough to continue. spews hate online, yeah, so people who do that actually have psychological problems now scientifically proven.

I guess it's like there's literally a graph that shows the correlation and the way I think about it is kind of a sign that you're having success. Don't know. I get a lot of hate, but when I think about how we even launched a course, we had like a thousand people on a course and two people wanted their money back, which is like only two people, but I was still wondering why you're not happy. I'm going to make this perfect, so here's a simple rule that I actually teach in my business classes. I think every year you have to fire 1% of your clients mm-hmm every year like it's kind of like self-cleansing like your body does it a lot of times, but some of the things you eat are a percentage that your body doesn't needs and you have this system in your body that constantly gets rid of things that you don't need. the business should have the same thing, you have to fire him, sometimes we had a floor that was customer service and sometimes I would go to our customer service floor.

I was using the name of some customers that were like the same people that I had heard so 30 million people, yes, we are daily on my customer service team, we are talking about 10 names. I'm wondering: can we remove these 10 people from our database and blocked them? And yes, there are times when you have to say goodbye. a small percentage of your clients, I think the rule is about 1% a year, that's great advice, Dad, do you think we should and implement the linguae travel team. All companies do that and you save a lot of energy in people's business hours, yes.

Facebook Instagram Google, I see you look at all of these, they say they don't want some advertisers or they just say, "Sorry, it doesn't match any companies." You have to do it, you almost have to do it. Actually, there is a great call. target fixation I ride motorcycles motorcycle driving phenomenon so if you are riding a motorcycle and you are going around the bend it moves so if you focus on the tree on the side of the road when you are making a turn you will end up hitting the tree If you look at the brake lights of the car in front of you If the corner of your slabs are brakes you end up hitting the back of that car If you look at the ground you've probably experienced falling if When you ride a bike, you look at the ground and you you fall, so basically, whatever you look at you end up there.

That's why when you ride a motorcycle they tell you not to talk, don't obsess over the problem. the solution, so you look at the route around the car that just hit the switch and you didn't do it automatically, but if you turn around or if you're making a turn, you look at the open road versus the tree on the side. of the way, then you end up falling, yeah, not the problems, if you focus on the two that want a refund and are like screaming, you actually end up just making business decisions based on those two people, instead of you should be looking at 998 others .So can you give some advice to people who are not from the US or just like us who are trying to come here?

How did you do it? What helped you the most? An advice. I am a big believer in cultural assimilation. I tell you exactly what I mean by saying that America is a great country in the sense that it is a melting pot. The positive thing about that is that it basically represents a lot of people and makes a lot of wonderful people feel at home. That's positive. The negative is that you can be from another country and come to the US and literally live in a small community of people who speak exactly your language, are exactly like you and you never bother to assimilate into a larger country and just live in this micro little bubble, yes.

I stay there forever. I strongly advise against it. I firmly believe in the cultural assimilation of language. Everything just respects your history, but at the same time assimilate, learn and try to be part of this great nation. Thank you so much. It was great. interview I think we're going to sit down and write all that down, like smart sauce, thank you, thank you, thank you for coming, thank you, it was so helpful, my god, it's like one of the most helpful interviews I've ever had, we got something. special for you in the comments below comment which book you want to see in the mentor box and in the mentor box you will not only get the book but you will also get the author who actually tells you about what is in the book so write a comment. below with a book you want to see and we will pick a random winner in a week and you will get a free subscription to the mentor box yes yes yes comment below guys do it this is a really informative interview.

I'm very happy. I've asked questions that bothered me and the guys, if you're looking to read more, if you're looking to get information from the authors themselves, mentor box, it's Alex's current company. I love what he is doing and I think online education books are the future. to learn the link will be below thank you very much for watching this video if you are not yet subscribed to Silicon Valley girl and you are an entrepreneur. I think you need to subscribe because I'm going to be interviewing a lot more interesting people from Depot. the link is below, like this video if you liked it and see you soon in the next vlogs, bye.