Chase Mohseni (00:01.038)
Dude, last night, so my buddies are all at one of my homies' bachelor parties, I couldn't make it. It's like 10 of them and they, what's it called? They FaceTimed me last night and had the throw out and they're like, holy fuck, haven't seen it.

Rabah (00:02.757)
So my buddies are all at one of my homies after parties. I couldn't make it. It's like 10 of them. And they, what's it called? They faced popular last night and had the fro out. And then.

Rabah (00:22.989)
Is that me? I lost you for a second. Let me close out a bunch of shit. Yeah, let me close out a bunch of shit Is it me? I just thought you're fuzzy though now. It can't be me. My internet's usually fucking good. Hold on. Let me Yeah ish isn't me yeah, I just had to close it but I did the same thing Same dude same

Chase Mohseni (00:26.125)
You good?

Yeah, I had, I closed the phone.

Chase Mohseni (00:36.174)
How about me? You have me? I might have to close a bunch. Let me close a bunch of shit. I'm gonna just close all this shit. My computer has been really slow.

Chase Mohseni (00:50.35)
It's really weird. Let's see what else.

Rabah (00:52.429)
I think it is... Okay, you're coming in way better now. I'm nuking a bunch of shit as well. Oh, it's definitely not me. Maybe it was my computer. You look great and sound great now. So I don't know, whatever you did, it worked.

Chase Mohseni (00:57.97)
same

Chase Mohseni (01:04.47)
All right. Yeah. I just closed a bunch of a bunch of shit.

Rabah (01:08.347)
I kill dude slack is slack is so resource heavy. It loves to fucking just eat my resources

Chase Mohseni (01:13.302)
But you know, it's crazy what you're saying that I have way too many. I'm going to let me just sign out of some of these things.

Rabah (01:19.085)
Yeah, it just nuked everything basically. Dun dun dun.

Chase Mohseni (01:25.194)
I'm turning off a bunch of these slack things.

Chase Mohseni (01:31.811)
Way too many slacks.

Rabah (01:36.345)
Good, good, good. Got him. So you're outraging last night? You burnt a little midnight oil?

Chase Mohseni (01:38.419)
All right.

Chase Mohseni (01:41.994)
No, I was working, they FaceTimed me. They're in Wisconsin, my buddy's dad owns a Frank Lloyd Wright house.

Rabah (01:45.593)
loved it, love it.

Rabah (01:51.478)
to Frank Wood Whitehouse. Ooh. He's in California, I thought he was in the Midwest.

Chase Mohseni (01:52.887)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (01:56.646)
No, these guys are in they have like a no, they have a house on Lake Wisconsin. That's a Frank Lloyd Wright house Yeah, yeah Yeah, so yeah, it's sick. So they're all over there partying acting like degenerates and just FaceTime me three times a day

Rabah (02:02.969)
That's right, yeah, yeah. Up there in the, yeah, that's gas.

Rabah (02:10.158)
phone.

Rabah (02:15.249)
standard falling water falling water is one of the most iconic homes ever built I think I love me some Frank Lord Wright he's a G

Chase Mohseni (02:16.357)
standard.

Chase Mohseni (02:21.034)
Yeah, man. Oh, it's incredible. Yeah.

All right. I'm going to just jump in because if we, if you and I, if you and I do it, then we'll, you know, we won't, we won't actually record this. Um, all right. Back number 12 Austin LA connection, Robert right. He'll chase most. Any guys, we're going to go hard today. We have been, him and I have been talking about this subject of hiring, which is going to be our core topic for like, well, I mean, forever, but

Rabah (02:29.349)
Crank it baby. Game over.

100%.

Rabah (02:47.877)
hard.

Chase Mohseni (02:55.294)
As a topic on the show for like two months and we're finally getting there. Um, and it's actually kind of funny. The episode of Lenny's podcast you sent me yesterday and how first of all, epic it was, but how important it also is for this. Yeah, absolutely. So we're going to talk about that a little bit. So topics, uh, today we're going to dive into a few little news, news topics that I think we thought were pretty interesting. Uh, we're going to talk about hiring it's importance for your orgs and then, uh, product of the week nugget of the week and go forth and conquer.

Rabah (03:06.897)
Tiffbops the man.

Chase Mohseni (03:25.146)
and make sure you guys do the same. So my brother, how are you?

Rabah (03:29.189)
Dude, I'm doing really well, man. Doing really well. Life is good. We're getting a little bit, I mean, it's still triple digits here in Austin, but it's cooling, it's cooling a bit. But no, I mean, life has been good. I'm trying to make a, and this will actually dovetail a little bit into the product of the week, but trying to make a little bit more push into my social life. Now that I'm doing a lot of work from home stuff, and I can kind of go like a couple days or something without interacting with people, like.

Chase Mohseni (03:37.11)
Yeah. Ha ha.

Chase Mohseni (03:56.365)
Yeah.

Rabah (03:56.613)
personally, because I'll go to the gym, I'm not working out with people. So Kenny, who is an absolutely social butterfly, shout out MentorPass, has been really helpful as well, kind of showing me the light of like, dude, I gotta have some more balance in my life. So that's been my new kind of initiative. And then we just had like a hour and a half call last night, which was incredible, gave me a bunch of insights into.

Chase Mohseni (04:21.602)
Yes.

Rabah (04:23.849)
some things that I've been always kind of thinking about. You know when people kind of coalesce the ideas that you had in my head, that's kind of what you did for me where it's like I've always had these things but I couldn't really articulate them and more so I couldn't put actionables behind said premise. And so yeah, got a lot of awesomeness, chill weekend ahead, so gonna just do a lot of life building optimizations and hopefully some.

Chase Mohseni (04:41.82)
Yeah.

Rabah (04:50.509)
some cool explorations as well around the city to start to boost those social points. What about you?

Chase Mohseni (04:55.406)
100%. I'm great, man. I think it's such a funny, it's a funny one because you know, we get into so many business tactics on here and we rarely dive into the personal. I think we did like episode two, we did a whole kind of history session on us for about 30. But I think it's really important to recognize what you're talking about, how important it is for your business to actually be dialed on your personal because like the whole, that book, if you've ever read it, the body keeps score.

And it's like your body is your mind, it's your physical body, emotional, all of that other stuff. And you're never able to be and unlock all of the business stuff that you want to actually do if you don't take care of that, because eventually the bill comes due. Like I've paid the bill many times, you've paid the bill. And it almost, I don't wanna say it's not worth it because there have been great things that have been outcomes for both of us out of pushing ourselves, but also kind of coming back.

Rabah (05:24.73)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (05:52.226)
from those things is really difficult and there is a better way, there's a better paradigm. So what you're doing is 100% the way. I have a lot of family stuff coming up this weekend that I have just been put on my calendar. My wife just sends stuff to my calendar. It's like, oh, we're doing this. I guess we're doing this. And we have our, because my boys are all together, we have a live fantasy football draft. So I'm gonna be like sitting in the driver's seat of our car driving.

Rabah (06:16.869)
Let's go.

Chase Mohseni (06:21.118)
are drafting on zoom through Google sheets. So that'll be fun. My team will probably be atrocious. But say what are you going to do? But yeah, man, all incredible stuff first two weeks in heat map. So that's been, it's been a blast, really, really fun. Amazing to kind of just get like business reset and see things with fresh eyes again, because you kind of you're not

Rabah (06:28.11)
Yeah, same.

Rabah (06:37.15)
Let's go.

Rabah (06:43.865)
Yeah, of course.

Chase Mohseni (06:47.426)
carrying the yoke of multiple years of being inside of a business and like pencil was the greatest experience of my life, but it's just an incredible like opportunity to reset and say like, Oh, wow, like the world is bigger and easier and all of these things than I thought it was. So it's a great way to segue into our into some of the some of the news we've been looking at. So one thing I sent you that I thought was super interesting that company I've seen a lot of companies like Target, I think is one of the

Rabah (06:51.569)
policies, politics, etc.

Chase Mohseni (07:16.722)
earliest, um, purveyors of this where I think Walmart does this a little bit where they, um, they will go into cities. They'll make these targets city locations and they're kind of like, it's like target light. Um, so it's convenient cause it's in a little location, but it's also kind of like, well, dude, I want my fucking like, I want my palatial target experience. And so what I sent you was Ikea is rolling out their first one in downtown San Francisco in this like three story, small, smaller building.

Rabah (07:28.581)
Yes.

Chase Mohseni (07:45.634)
to essentially give IKEA light. And I'm gonna be fascinated with what happens because obviously there's the city dwellers who don't wanna go out to bumfuck and deal with that. And I also think it actually won't be an issue because people aren't going in there for their daily things that they're looking for, like a Target. When they go do that, we're like, well, dude, the section that I'm used to having isn't here anymore versus, dude, I need a nightstand. The nightstand will be there.

And maybe they're not actually using all the stuff that they need or the space that they need in those Ikea's that are so massive. So do you think this is like something that's going to continue to happen where intercity smaller locations for these big things are going to happen? Or is this like a one off and you think they're just going to crash and burn on this idea?

Rabah (08:35.345)
That's a great question. Yeah, I remember Target doing it a while back and they kind of like to your point, do a little bit of the Target lights. Walmart has kind of the neighborhood stores. I think it actually is called Walmart neighborhood or Green Market or some shit like that. And then Whole Foods has kind of a quasi-esque play here as well where they have kind of like almost these tweener stores. It's interesting because

Chase Mohseni (08:46.358)
Yeah. Yeah, it is.

Rabah (09:04.121)
For Target, I don't think it's as big of a deal. I do get your point of like, oh, I lose a lot of the selection. But I think Target could do some pretty interesting analysis in terms of inventory and figure out like the best stuff to put in there. The furniture store is interesting because one of the cool things about IKEA is you just go in, you get all the stuff and you're done. And so that does seem a little bit, it's almost like a hardware store. Like,

Chase Mohseni (09:25.847)
Yes.

Chase Mohseni (09:32.677)
Mmm. Mm-hmm.

Rabah (09:33.177)
I don't know if a small Lowe's works, you know, or a small Home Depot works because part of the value prop is like whatever you need we have it. So that makes me a little wary. I do think there might be an interesting play in the sense of, again, they're high velocity products and it becomes a showroom where one of the challenges of buying furniture is what's the fabric? What does it look like? How comfortable is it? Et cetera, et cetera. So

Chase Mohseni (09:58.923)
Yeah.

Rabah (10:01.949)
It could possibly be like a Apple Store play of like, hey, this is just a showroom. We actually don't sell you anything here. Cause I, with those small footprints, there's no way there's warehouse and on-prem. Like, so that, that probably cuts that out. So I think it could be interesting. What would be fascinating for me is if they almost made it like IKEA Couture or something where it's almost like a budget West Elm.

Chase Mohseni (10:13.175)
Oh, no, no.

Chase Mohseni (10:26.414)
That's sick. Yeah.

Rabah (10:28.929)
and they only have very high end furniture in there that you can touch, buy, feel, and then they just have it shipped to your house. I think that could be interesting play, but in terms of like the value props of IKEA or the kind of, I sent you that podcast, the jobs to be done for IKEA, I think is a one-stop shop budget play. And so it's kind of counter to both of those, right? Where it's like, you can't buy everything there. The selection,

Chase Mohseni (10:33.538)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (10:39.438)
Yeah, I dig that.

Rabah (10:59.081)
small and you can't get it that day and There so like I think those two big value props and again if they're doing that kind of higher-end ticket sale Or their higher-end pieces that takes away the budget. So It's interesting. I think I would just have to know more about what What the impetus behind that was doing because I totally agree with you like the IKEA in Austin

is almost a 30, 40 minute drive out of the city. Like it's in the suburbs because they need that big footprint, right? I mean, the store is absolutely massive. But there is also the aspect of like, all right, cool. If I do need stuff, I know I'll be able to find something there. I can go, whatever, I'll take a day, ruin the day and go buy all this furniture, but at least I get it done in one sweep. So I don't know, where do you land?

Chase Mohseni (11:50.05)
ruined the day. So I think what you brought up is really fascinating, which is like this idea of it being more of a showroom, almost to the like Apple or Tesla, the way that they run their business or even Peloton, where you'll go into those locations, you're just checking things out. It's to touch and feel it. Glossier tried to do something similar to this. I think it really just comes down to the jobs to be done for the customer with the expectation of the brand.

And I think that's probably like, I worked at a brand. There's my first job out of grad school and they were selling like $100 shoes and for women and they went and they're like, Hey, we want to go make, because we know what our margins are. We want to go and take say 15, 20% of these customers and move them up to $250. Shoes. We're going to make them in Spain and Portugal, yada yada. But no one from that ICP wanted $250 shoes from this brand. So they want to spend a fuck a grip.

of capital to get there. Shoes were beautiful. And DO fucking A. And I did it just an insanely good marketing. Like photo shoot was beautiful. Everything was set up. We got everything ready for all the trade shows, yada yada. We sold them in hard to these people who didn't even want them to case packs, charge back city, all of this. And my question becomes like, if that is the play, let's just say they go showroom and higher end. Is that something that anyone actually wants?

from IKEA? Am I, I don't know if a brand, this is a question actually for you, you're more of the brand whisperer than me. Can a brand that's been established for say 50 plus years, even like Nike, any of these kinds of guys, but like IKEA, which is known for efficient cost, go up market and expect to see any sort of impact if there's a meaningful amount of budget and spend behind it?

Rabah (13:36.494)
Mm-hmm.

Chase Mohseni (13:46.706)
or is it a long play for them? So I know we're kind of dovetailing off of this, but I'm curious what you think about that.

Rabah (13:53.937)
Um...

I think it becomes more of a challenge for the Ikea's than the Target's because this is exactly what Target did. They just started stocking like, some of Target's clothes now are actually like not that budget anymore. Some of Target's brands are like really nice. And so Target I think has moved, I don't even necessarily move that market. That was essentially I think their product, or their brand differentiation where I'm old. So like back in the day, it was like Kmart, Walmart.

Chase Mohseni (14:01.226)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (14:08.492)
No!

Chase Mohseni (14:24.026)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Rabah (14:24.749)
was this kind of like, you know, like the lower level people and then like the fancier bougie people shopped at the Tarjay. And so, yeah, so I think that as a kind of retailer, it's a little easier to move up market when you're just a function of the products you house. Whereas IKEA is much more integrated into their supply chains. And so I think there's...

Chase Mohseni (14:31.542)
Yeah, it's Tarjay dude. Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (14:46.322)
Yeah.

Rabah (14:54.829)
I don't know, I think it's gonna be a challenge. I think it would have been interesting for them to create maybe like a sub-brand. So we have a grocery store out here called HEB. It's a massive grocery store. It's actually an incredible grocery store, but it's very analogous to like an Ikea or a Walmart or something like that, where it's just all the selection, really good prices, not necessarily, and then some of them are like the super Walmarts as well, where it's just this incredible store.

Chase Mohseni (15:09.282)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Rabah (15:22.213)
but they also have this sub-brand out here called Central Market, which is a smaller store and it's really focused on health, wellness, like people, think of it almost like a competitor to Whole Foods, right? And so I think that would have been more interesting if again, it was like IKEA Couture or like some sort of budget West Elm because there's just connotations to like, oh, you have IKEA furniture and that's not like a

Chase Mohseni (15:50.998)
Yeah.

Rabah (15:52.133)
bad thing or a good thing, but it's not West Elm. It's not a level of like, oh wow, this is amazing. I think that would be because furniture is such a long, or it's such a purchase that lasts in your life for such a long time, that I think some sort of sub-brand or extension of IKEA would have been a more interesting play here because what the brand conveys and all the jobs to be done that the brand

Chase Mohseni (15:58.507)
restoration hardware.

Rabah (16:21.633)
you would hire this brand to do, you can't hire this Ikea small store in the city to do those. And then the question becomes, what are you hiring this store to do, right? Because if you do like this stuff, but it's like, dude, well, you know what, fuck it, I'm just gonna go again, go to West Elm or Anthropologie or some other high-end furniture store, because I get not only...

the product but the clout. And I think that is one of the headwinds that IKEA might see in the smaller store footprint because it's kind of what we always talk about, right? Like you either wanna be really cost efficient or you wanna be luxury slash premium and in the middles where you go to die. And I think this is one of those tweener kind of plays of like it's not a high-end boutique. It has a budget brand attached to it.

Chase Mohseni (16:49.73)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (16:55.978)
Yeah, completely agree.

Rabah (17:14.133)
I don't know. We'll see how it plays out, but I don't yet understand the big, big play here. Maybe there was something around, they saw a lot of online traffic with abandonment where people were like, the reason I didn't buy it because I didn't see it, I didn't touch it, I didn't feel it. So maybe they're, yeah, so maybe that is an interesting play, but it'll also be really interesting if they break it out in terms of.

Chase Mohseni (17:30.018)
Yeah. I was in this area. Yeah.

Rabah (17:42.317)
square footage, which is actually more profitable. The big warehouses, because there is those big cost centers. But at the same time, there might be a similar cost structure, because even though it's smaller, it's in such a high density population that you're gonna be paying a nut for that rent versus having, yeah, that's why Walmarts are in these big areas that aren't necessarily in the city centers because the economics doesn't work out. There's also logistical issues, right? Like going down downtown streets with these massive semis,

Chase Mohseni (17:55.722)
Yeah, the premium. Yeah, the premium of that ram.

Rabah (18:11.345)
It just doesn't work, you can't do it. So you need to have this distribution hub. Anyways, I'm kind of in the weeds. If I would give it like a kind of robbery and I would be bearish on it. I don't think that this is, I would be more bullish on it if it was an extension of the IKEA brand to try and penetrate up market.

Chase Mohseni (18:11.362)
Dude.

Chase Mohseni (18:20.97)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (18:27.958)
Yeah. I gotta get something like catchy, like a Robin rating. What do you, we gotta figure this out. This is an offline conversation because we could probably spend the next four minutes trying to figure this out. I don't wanna do that to people. All right, you sent me something that I thought was hilarious and dope. Was like 7-Eleven and Oscar Mayer apparel. And it's so hilarious because it almost brings me back to remember Sugar Ray, like those shirts that the guy used to wear. What was his name? Mark, what was that guy's name?

Rabah (18:38.271)
And we absolutely would.

Rabah (18:53.465)
Yeah!

Rabah (18:57.197)
forget his name but it's Sugar Ray.

Chase Mohseni (18:58.858)
Whatever you know. I mean, again, the kids won't know about early in the morning. But every morning anyway, don't want to go down that path. But like talk about this. I think it's really interesting to take these kind of like, I don't know, low end iconic brands make apparel. Like what's your take on this?

Rabah (19:07.294)
Mm-mm-mm.

Rabah (19:18.661)
I, Mark McGrath, I, I love it. I not only, so we'll have to take it in two parts. One, so these, to your point, these are both what I would kind of consider legacy brands. Older brands, very pervasive, Oscar Mayer, 7-Eleven, everybody knows them. The execution and the output of what the 7-Eleven merch drop because they did a whole golf collection.

Chase Mohseni (19:20.042)
Mark McGrath! Yes!

Chase Mohseni (19:25.634)
Hahaha

Rabah (19:47.705)
Dude, it's better than most fashion brands I've seen. I mean, it is really, really top floor. So I absolutely love that. And I just think that there is just, it's a win-win for everybody. Like if you start to put 7-Eleven back in the zeitgeist of being like the place to be, like all this stuff, like I don't know if it necessarily has like massive business impact, but just for the brand because 7-Eleven's a franchise. And so you can make kind of like the franchising sexy again. Like, I don't know.

Chase Mohseni (20:06.08)
Oh yeah.

Rabah (20:16.905)
I candidly, I love it. I think it's fun, it's awesome. It's a super low, you know, terms of cost structure. It's not a huge deal. And 99% sure that the 7-Eleven proper, like 7-Eleven corporate, internalized these costs. It had nothing to do with any of the franchisee owners. So I love it. I think it's awesome. I think the execution was top, top floor. I actually bought one of the bowling shirts. It's on Shopify as well. Shout out, Harley.

Chase Mohseni (20:32.138)
Yeah.

Rabah (20:46.617)
Yeah, I couldn't be more excited. And I think these big brands that are legacy, this is a great way to infuse some excitement, some youth, some vibrance back into what might be seen as kind of an old crusty brand. Again, I don't know what the actual kind of direct line business impact is, but in terms of brand awareness, in terms of brand affinity, in terms of just like, fuck with it type of thing, 100% on board, 10 out of 10. I was...

Chase Mohseni (21:01.26)
Yeah.

Rabah (21:15.181)
really, really impressed with the execution from whoever did the 7-Eleven golf collection. It's really top floor.

Chase Mohseni (21:23.374)
It's funny, I got these shirts, there's this company called Eleven Paris, I don't know if you've ever heard of that brand. And they did this collab with Star Wars. I bought a bunch of fucking shirts because they just did the coolest shit. I mean, obviously Star Wars doesn't need to be like made cool at Star Wars. But I'll send you a picture of sure it says like, New Hope came out in 77. So it says Jedi on the back 77. And then it just has like.

Rabah (21:28.837)
Mm-mm.

Rabah (21:36.417)
Yeah.

Rabah (21:49.346)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (21:51.074)
from one of the original posters, like when Luke is holding up the lightsaber in the air, it just has his hands in the lightsaber. People are always like, what is that shirt? You're like, is that a lightsaber? Because it evokes something for them. And I think, I will just say this, I wear a lot of, on weekends, I wear a lot of graphic tees that have old movies on them. So I have one that has Land Before Time. Dude, people stop me every day. I wear that shirt four or five times. Like, my God, that movie, oh my God.

Rabah (22:09.549)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rabah (22:18.321)
cried before that in my movie.

Chase Mohseni (22:19.646)
Rocky, same thing. I have a bunch of Rocky shirts. People stop for those things. So like, I love when anyone can bring back nostalgia because just think about it, dude. How many times were you being a fuck boy and you went to 7-Eleven from age like 12 to say age 22, like to get some fricking Gatorade because you were like thirsty, you wanted a Slurpee, something like that. Like it's just, there's just so much nostalgia that goes with it that I think is like, they're tapping into. It's so great, dude.

Rabah (22:48.277)
I couldn't agree with you more, and I think it's really interesting because 7-Eleven is one of those weird brands where there's almost more product affinity than there is brand affinity, where it's like almost everybody knows the Slurpee, right? And you go to 7-Eleven to get the Slurpee, so I think it's a really interesting take there. But yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. I think it's really interesting, and I think more brands could really benefit from doing...

Chase Mohseni (22:58.124)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Free Slurpee. Yeah.

Rabah (23:13.069)
some of this just moonshot style marketing. But again, you have this really capped downside. Honestly, I think they're funding it through pre-orders because you can't buy it yet. You're actually pre-ordering. So there is essentially zero risk in the profile, right? It's like, okay, we got 100 pre-orders and nobody's gonna bitch. Like if I don't get this shirt in a month or two, it's like, dude, it's a gag gift. Who cares? It's not like this when I.

Chase Mohseni (23:22.294)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah.

Chase Mohseni (23:31.65)
Dude, you don't give a... Yeah, yeah.

Rabah (23:35.117)
Like my heat box where I was like really excited to get they still have I've emailed them three times about a return They still haven't hit me back. So fucking if anybody out there is that heat hit me back because it's gonna be charge back city if not

Chase Mohseni (23:36.446)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (23:41.334)
Oh, oh yeah, yeah. We should, we should just do it. We should, yeah. Um, okay. Before we jump into main topic, what are your top three? Oh, Wiener schnitzel. Yeah. Go, go, go. Wiener dog. Yeah.

Rabah (23:50.729)
We got to talk about the wiener. We got to talk about the wiener dog. Yeah, okay So this is also another something that is I think in the same vein of jumping on the zeitgeist of like paper straws the hate for paper straws Kind of environmental stuff like that so Oscar Meyer it dropped I couldn't get one, but they dropped a hot dog straw where it's essentially a hollowed out Oscar Meyer wiener To use as a straw and I think it's just the most brilliant use of marketing

Chase Mohseni (24:19.042)
Yeah.

Rabah (24:19.909)
Gag gift and again, I don't necessarily know the brand impact But both of these are kind of in that CPG realm of like as long as I'm in the decision set and you're thinking about me I've won and So I think it's amazing. I'm kind of any Oscar Meyer plugs out there I really want one of these fucking hot dog straws, but I think it's again sensational play

Chase Mohseni (24:31.95)
Oh, fantastic, dude. Yeah.

Yeah. But I mean, think about all the, all the amazing, like social that people can do with it. Forget the company, like, yo, I'm drinking from my weenie. Like, you know, just like, it's just incredible. Like I did that. I just, that was off the cuff. Right. And that's not even a good, that's not even a good version. And I get a chuckle out of it. Right. Like if you can make, if you can make someone laugh, they will always remember you. Or if you can, like whatever you can evoke some emotion.

Rabah (24:46.527)
Incredible.

Rabah (24:58.654)
That's so good.

Chase Mohseni (25:06.678)
But there's negative or positive. You're always going to have more high, like a higher brand recall. And so, yeah, this is 100%. I mean, we're talking about a weenie straw on the show. That tells you how impactful it was. Right.

Rabah (25:19.681)
I would never, dude, I don't eat hot dogs. Like, and so 100% with you. I think it's fantastic. I love this kind of stuff.

Chase Mohseni (25:31.497)
What three brands do you want to see do something like this?

Rabah (25:35.274)
That's a great question. Do you have three? Can you fill some time for me while I think? You don't have three.

Chase Mohseni (25:39.466)
Uh, what do I want to see? Uh, so I would love to see, this is like not such a brand like this, but I would love to see a Dom Perry on do some, some gear. I would love a hat. Yeah, that's, that's gas. Uh, cause you know, they're like the way they write stuff, they have a cool, like, you know, sigil, um, I think, um, another one I've seen some, I think it would be kind of fun, like maybe it's more for kids and stuff, but I think Coppertone, if they did some stuff, cause it's just like such a part of

Rabah (25:49.945)
Oh, that's gas.

Rabah (25:54.402)
Oh yeah.

100%

Rabah (26:06.52)
Oh.

Chase Mohseni (26:07.522)
like our childhood and kids' childhood and stuff like that. To be transparent, I think they are trying to do some licensing stuff. Also, one that I think is really fun, it's like Chuck E. Cheese. I would love Chuck E. Cheese gear.

Rabah (26:23.729)
Oh, that's the nostalgia brand as well, where you can get both ends of it, of the younger generation and the older generation. I think that's a really interesting play.

Chase Mohseni (26:29.729)
Yeah.

Yeah, dude, it's still around. There's one by my house. My wife keeps going, like, I keep trying to get her to go. I'm like, dude, the pizza there is sensational. I just want to go get a slice. Yeah. All right, what brands do you got? I just went off the cuff and let it rip.

Rabah (26:41.337)
Sensational.

Rabah (26:47.293)
Yeah, you let it rip. Who would I think would be cool? Maybe something around like some Doritos gear and you could have like some themed flavor shirts. You could do some cool ranch shit. I'd probably fuck with that. Who else do I got? I think that would be interesting. I think there might be something really fun around some semblance of like Nat Geo.

Chase Mohseni (26:55.825)
off.

Chase Mohseni (26:59.65)
That's a cool ranch shirt, dude. Yeah, I would buy that. What was that?

Rabah (27:16.069)
doing something like, I don't know if it's like a tour of food around the world or something, but some sort of quirky thing to bring Nat Geo in, or even they're doing great on their social feed, but like the national parks, and the national parks having some sort of really cool, either merch line or collab with somebody to do some sort of like memorabilia style thing or taking this or whatever. I mean, you said three, who else do I got for you? I'm trying to see here.

Chase Mohseni (27:16.499)
Aww.

Chase Mohseni (27:27.722)
Yeah, dude. Oh, that would be fantastic. Yeah. Love that.

Chase Mohseni (27:37.303)
Yeah.

Rabah (27:45.777)
This is such a good question. You usually don't stump me like this. What would be my third one?

Chase Mohseni (27:50.486)
I want Trump's mugshot on the shirt, bro. Just epic. Just iconic.

Rabah (27:56.302)
Incredible. You know, I think would be really interesting and this is more so a collab than anything, but having AP do the watch brand do like a really exclusive whiskey. I think that could be a really cool overlap of like here's a $50,000 bottle whiskey or $20,000 bottle whiskey, super high-end, super expensive.

Chase Mohseni (28:14.286)
Oh.

Chase Mohseni (28:19.371)
Yeah.

Rabah (28:23.169)
And then you could even do it in a way of like pairing it almost like original grain style of like, this is the watch that pairs with this whiskey. I think that could be really interesting as well, where you don't necessarily need to, super expensive cast up like, oh my gosh, this bottle is super expensive, but it was brewed particularly for AP. I think that could be interesting one. It's a good, I'm gonna have 7 million great answers once I stop thinking about it. That's such a good question though. It's such a good question.

Chase Mohseni (28:26.294)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (28:30.858)
Yeah. Like a, like a McCallan, McCallan 70 or something. Yeah. Cool.

Chase Mohseni (28:44.14)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (28:48.094)
Oh, I mean, I'm expecting a thread now. Yeah.

Rabah (28:52.053)
Yeah, I'm actually making a note for myself because that's a really good question. I think it's more meaningful for brands that need to inject themselves with the TRT. They're getting a little older, they still got some muscle mass, but hey, let's juice it up, get to the gym a little more and start to penetrate these different things because I think you're right. We're in that interesting era where nostalgia can be a...

Chase Mohseni (29:02.762)
Yes.

Chase Mohseni (29:06.558)
Yeah.

Rabah (29:19.913)
nice money grab because the people that will have the nostalgia now have the resources to purchase the products.

Chase Mohseni (29:25.694)
Yeah, 100%. And I mean, I think the older generations, when there was the opportunity, there wasn't the distribution network that we have now. So it's just like, it's just this perfect confluence of there's distribution, there is share of wallet, and there is the ability for some of these legacy brands to tap into this because they have the data to like make sense of it.

Rabah (29:48.129)
agree with you more and I would take that even a step further is that there is more value extraction for the user because whether you like it or not when you post on social media and you get likes and comments feels good man it feels good I don't know what that says about society but

Chase Mohseni (30:00.166)
Oh, bro. Absolutely. Oh, I mean, I'm saying like I wear that. Oh, bro. I mean, I'm saying that land before time shirt, dude, it got a hole in it because it's a cheap piece of shit. I bought a new one that day when I saw the hole in it. Like, absolutely. You get that kind of social. You get that social currency from wearing that. So like, I'm down. It's the it's literally the Simon Sinek with the Apple with the Apple computer on your lap. People just nod at you because they know that you know, it's just absolutely.

Rabah (30:12.549)
Yeah.

Rabah (30:26.629)
Yeah, you're not a green bubble. You're not a green bubble. You actually make money. This is interesting.

Chase Mohseni (30:29.618)
Oh, dude, you know, you know who's the I'm gonna call out very hot man. He's the green bubble guy. He ruins every chat. Yeah

Rabah (30:35.513)
Oh no, one of my really good friends who's actually fairly affluent, has a really great business, et cetera, et cetera, we have this little entrepreneurship group here in Austin, only guy, only Greenbubble guy, and I think we're gonna gag gift him, and we're all gonna pitch in and be like, dude, you gotta get, and the reasons why are so odd, where it's just like, dude, you're just lying to yourself. There's some other.

Chase Mohseni (30:47.406)
Dude, you can't be...

Chase Mohseni (30:55.282)
Great tip.

Rabah (31:01.029)
belief that you are not servicing why you don't have an iPhone because like you're good looking, you're well spoken, like you have all the attributes of an iPhone owner and you're walking around with a green bubble, come on, come on.

Chase Mohseni (31:11.946)
Yeah, by the way, is that not one of the greatest product things that anyone has ever done? Make sure that there's just a different color. Because look at what you just did. You're affluent, you're good looking, why do you have a green bubble? Like that is a, the simple fact that is even a thought in both our heads, by the way, is one of the greatest product development genius moves I've ever possibly, like chef's kiss, absolutely chef's kiss. So

Rabah (31:18.34)
smartest thing ever.

Chase Mohseni (31:38.482)
Okay, we're going to go transition because I think we could probably do the whole episode on this section just because of our passion for it. I think we're here for we're here for hiring. And I think both of us have like pretty strong takes on this. And we talked about we talked about I remember even on the first episode, we were talking about the SEAL teams and how we look at having teams of people to be able to drive impact. Like, just on a I guess.

What is your thesis around hiring in teams and how has that changed over time? I guess it's like my question for you and I'll share on my end as well.

Rabah (32:19.533)
Man, you're on it. The fro, the looks, the questions. I wasn't ready, kids, I wasn't ready. I would also like to make a quick caveat here. If you are interested in any of this stuff, there is a really smart guy named Nick Harris all over the Twitters. Connect with him, he's been so meaningful and inspirational and he's like a Yoda around business operations and hiring. So with that being said and out of the way, and the Nick plug, he was actually on the ROAS podcast, so go check it out. Has a bunch of bombs to drop there. The first,

Chase Mohseni (32:24.238)
Hahaha.

Chase Mohseni (32:34.2)
off Nick the best.

Rabah (32:49.165)
kind of thing that I would say about hiring is.

Do not hire into the future. Well, I don't wanna give proclamations. It can be very challenging to hire into the future, especially at a hyper growth company. So that would be my first kind of thesis, hire when you have pain, not to, don't skate to where the puck's gonna go, like hire where the puck's at. And if you need more hands, then you hire. We got over our skis a little bit, and let me tell you, it's much easier to hire up than it is to fire people. Like it just sucks to let people go.

Chase Mohseni (33:24.59)
Yeah.

Rabah (33:26.953)
The other thing that I would say is, as a marketing leader, as just a leader of a vertical or an org, understand if you're a leader or a manager because there is a certain transformation that happens after a certain head count and there's just not really any way to combat it. And so I'm of the belief, like five,

to seven direct reports, that's kind of the upper, five is really the upper limit, but I know some people that run seven and it's just, it's a lot. So I would understand like, what are you good at? Are you great at leading or are you great at managing? And some people can be both, but I was not. I was a terrible manager, fantastic leader. And so that would kind of be to color what I'm about to say now. So with that being said, I had a ton of success

Chase Mohseni (33:59.15)
Hmm.

Rabah (34:19.977)
in terms of going back to that military analogy of not being a general, but being a SEAL Team Six commander of like, hey, I have five to seven killers, tell me what to do, tell me when you need it, I'll deal with the how, like that's what the money's for. And the other thing was I was not a big believer in pedigree, I think there is a time and place for pedigree, maybe like in very...

expertise driven fields such as maybe like medical engineering things of that nature. But I was really more about vibe, what have you built? And then I would take that to another level in certain roles. I think there's no other way to find talented people if they're not in it. And so for example, if you're hiring a social media person and they're not active on social media, super red flag.

Chase Mohseni (35:15.902)
Yeah.

Rabah (35:16.241)
Like there's certain verticals in that marketing org that I think you need domain expertise and you need to be active within said domain. So yeah, those are kind of the big pillars for me is basically Vi, Pedigree wasn't that big of a deal. When I was hiring, you need to understand if you wanna be remote, hybrid or in office. And so make sure that's really clear. The other thing is you really,

Once you make that decision, then you need to understand if it is like on-prem. Are you Okay with losing talent over geography. So at triple whale we wanted to build out hubs in the early days So we had the Austin hub for marketing. We had the main HQ in Columbus And then we had all of our Devon engineering out of Jerusalem But there was also a certain aspect so like we hired Sonder who was just an absolute killer

Chase Mohseni (35:56.16)
Yep.

Rabah (36:14.157)
and he was remote. He was gonna move here, but then he ended up staying in Utah. And so we made the decision that yes, we wanted to hire in hubs, but those hubs would have the caveat of talent over location. And so I think walking through those decision trees will get you into a really good place where you don't, the worst place you can get into is you find a candidate that doesn't have one of those things. And so it's way better.

to get in front of that where you can exclude people before getting down this path and then understanding like, hey, I love you guys, but I'm not moving to Austin. I'm super happy here in San Diego or New York or whatever. And so I think understanding those things, vibe check for me was really important. One of the questions that I would ask myself is like, hey, if this person and I were at an airport and the flight got delayed or canceled, would I be mad? Like, do I wanna hang with these people? And again, this is...

Chase Mohseni (37:08.994)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rabah (37:10.881)
a function of my management style, the team sizes that I prefer. And so that's gonna change. You're not gonna love everybody if you're on a 20, 30, 40 person team. There's just a certain aspect of headcount changes culture, headcount changes processes. There's just no way around it. But I've been rambling a little bit. I have so much more to say, but I kinda wanna get where your head's at and how you think of kind of building up a team. Because another thing,

that we should talk about was the four things of kind of making a really awesome environment in terms of keeping retention. And then the other thing is I also wanna get into how you connect with your team and manage your team as well. But first, give me your hiring kind of theses or foundations.

Chase Mohseni (37:53.738)
Yeah. 100%. So I'll, I'll give you my thesis. Let's do the four and then, um, connecting. I think it was like total great framework there. Um, so I have worked now three straight, uh, remote and the last one I did was hybrid cause my team was in San Fran. So I was in office a couple of times a week. Then I go to San Fran a couple of times a month and I was just working at home and I would just go into the office. Cause I didn't want to like be alone.

at the time and I wanted to connect with some other people, but no one was on my team at the at the LA office, not San Francisco. So my experience is always kind of like, let me just find the best talent I possibly can. The downside to this is like culture and making people feel connected. And so I think this is probably, if I had to say with hiring, for me, the biggest thing I look for.

Rabah (38:23.117)
Yeah, yeah. Yes.

Chase Mohseni (38:51.654)
is does someone have grit and there is the work grit because startups are fucking hard. But then there's also the emotional grit to be able to like handle loneliness and being working in a vacuum because you're alone. And also the grit to actually be tenacious enough to get things done when I'm not standing over your shoulder and you're like, Hey, what the fuck? Right? And yeah, I have no thoughts. I'm the anti micromanager.

Rabah (39:15.025)
I have no tolerance for that.

Chase Mohseni (39:20.082)
actually makes me miserable when I have to micromanage people. Um, like it is a huge, if, if someone feels like they need to do that, like they need that for me, like I'm not want them on my team ever. And it's happened by the way, where you think someone's like that and you realize like, shit, I gotta just be up their ass and it is sorry in this org chart, I'm more important than you. So I'm going to make the decision whether you need to be here or not. I remember I had a, uh, like a,

an outsourced person that we brought in house because she was incredible. I would just say like, hey, do this, no instructions. And she'd come back with these fully fleshed out things and she'd have some questions, but it was like 80% done. And I had given her 10% instructions because I was just couldn't be bothered to like deal with it. And that's not good management, by the way, let me just say that's a terrible example, but I knew that I could just count on her. So if I gave her like

30%, 40%, 50%, like what's the multiple on what she's gonna output from there? And so I did do it at the beginning as a little bit of a test, like what's the threshold of like my effort to her impact? And it was like, oh, okay, so I just give her a little more, she's gonna be incredible. Like conversely, this also can have the inverse relationship where you have to give 100% and you still only get that 10% and you're like, yo dude, you're an energy vampire. Like calling back to our conversation yesterday, you're an energy vampire for me.

Rabah (40:40.206)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (40:43.558)
And my mind needs to be freed up to think about things that have asymmetric like yield for the company. And if I'm dealing with you, I'm not actually providing the value that has a good multiple on what my hourly units cost the company. And so I'm always thinking about that and then fanning it down. So I always try to tell people, my biggest thing is grit, like the same thing pedigree. Actually, a lot of the people who have pedigree, fuck it, suck because they think their shit doesn't stink.

Rabah (40:50.51)
Yes.

Rabah (40:59.267)
Yes.

Chase Mohseni (41:12.498)
and they don't actually have a creative way that they solve problems. And so I'm kind of, like the top, like there's always that cream that rises at the top, like what's the upper quartile? But like they're probably not gonna work with us because we can't pay the money that someone else can pay. You know what I mean? At the beginning. So grit, I don't care about those things. I wanna make sure that you're not someone who needs to be micromanaged. And I think the other one you mentioned was,

How do I feel about them as a person? And especially when you're starting out small, the do I wanna have a beer with you is such an important, it's like everything. When you get bigger, it still matters, but essentially like everyone's off in their own SEAL team. And so like, if they work for someone that ladders up to me, I'm good if I don't love that person as long as they understand the impact multiple that is expected from them and they deliver.

Like I don't care if you're a douche, as long as you don't make other people feel terrible and you deliver on your work so that the person that reports into me doesn't make my life hell. Like that's really kind of how I look at the tree there.

Rabah (42:21.609)
No, I think that's beautiful. And I couldn't agree with you more in terms of, so everybody on my team, so I had five direct reports and then they got to hire whoever they wanted because I essentially didn't deal with that person like nor did I want to, right? Like it was just like, hey, these people are to enable you but the buck stops with you. Like you are still responsible for your stuff and I'm expecting more out of you because now you have more resources here.

Chase Mohseni (42:33.398)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Rabah (42:50.677)
I couldn't agree with you more on the lower level hiring. And I also agree with you on the higher level hiring where all my lieutenants needed to be able to run with an idea, right? Like that as a marketing leader, you become the idea person, you become the synthesizer of perspectives. And I'm not to say like other people can't have ideas that get greenlit, but that's really gonna be your main value add and understanding. I think it is helpful though to put systems around this

Chase Mohseni (43:19.564)
Yes.

Rabah (43:19.801)
So we would call this swoop and poop, where you just, the boss comes by your desk and like, hey Chase, can you do X, Y, and Z? You're like, yeah, okay. And like, that's not super meaningful. And so one, because I was super notorious for this. And so one of the things that we did to alleviate that without having a constraint on the ideation and the freedom of thought was, if something wasn't in notion,

Chase Mohseni (43:30.594)
No.

Rabah (43:44.773)
That's where we did all of our task management and tracking, et cetera, et cetera. Or if something wasn't on the calendar, it didn't exist. And so that was a way of really starting to bracket people into not being able to do the swoop and poop. And then it also gave you a really good insight into people's bandwidth, where if you see somebody has 20 projects, so we did something called RACI. It's a little MBA, but it's actually really cool.

Chase Mohseni (43:50.902)
Yeah, so smart.

Rabah (44:11.689)
So each project, so we had this big projects database. The projects were either personal projects, so if you just had little tasks, they would just roll up to you, or they would be some sort of multifunctional project. And RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. And ultimately, everybody would get assigned some level of that, and so responsible is the people actually doing the work, accountable is the person you yell at or high five. Accountable can only be one person. So all these other...

The are the C and the I can have multiple people accountable. There's only the buck stops of that person This is the person you yell at or high-five And then you have consulted so these are people that need to be that would have interesting perspectives to help you Actually get your goal done or achieve the mission of the project, but they have no actual Executional responsibilities and then informed would be somebody that

it might be something that might impact their product or their business line or whatever, and you just need to see like, hey Chase, X, Y, and Z is coming down the pike, you can track the whole project here. And that was a really, really efficient way to work and it really helped, again, solidify what the silos of responsibility were, but also keep that level of ownership with the accountability, because I think when you start to fractionalize ownership, people start to care less.

Chase Mohseni (45:07.83)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rabah (45:32.153)
But when you give a product owner or a project owner, man, when people care about things, standards don't really matter because they're gonna do their best, especially if they're top performers. And so I think that was one of the things of helping understand my management style wasn't conducive without these processes built around it. But once we built these processes, there was a lot of team cohesion.

Chase Mohseni (45:40.202)
Yeah. That's a bar dude. That's a bar.

Rabah (45:58.445)
and everybody could see what everybody's doing. And again, you had this barometer of bandwidth where you can't be working on, you can't be responsible for 20 projects. Like that's, you are overstretched. But you also like, why are you only working on one project? Is that project that big or whatever? Let me dive into it. And so again, it was this really nice way to understand the bandwidth of the team, to give ownership to the team, to give clarity and details to leadership if they wanted to pop in or pop out.

And it also took my ability away to swoop and poop. So net-net, it was a huge win.

Chase Mohseni (46:33.23)
So you said something about swooping, like the swoop and poop, super interesting. I always tell people like the chain of command, the reason you have a chain of command and why it's so important to keep working with it is if the CMO comes and says something to a social media specialist, no matter what they're doing, even if the thing that you have come to them with is like fifth on their chart of like impact, it's the most important thing they're gonna do that day.

and you ruin their entire flow, right? So like, for instance, you're talking to VP of product and that Max and AJ come to you like, hey, we wanna do this thing. And it's like, it's important, but it's a two weeks from now kind of conversation. You're still gonna go do it right away, even if you have a product launch that's coming up that you need to prep for. And it's actually not, it's not their fault that they're having this conversation because you guys should have the conversation. It's more around.

Rabah (47:05.082)
So well put.

Chase Mohseni (47:29.422)
them not understanding the context of where their situation sits. And like, I know we're diving off the hiring thing, but this is such an important part is as you hire and build teams and orgs, making sure that you understand the context with which you're communicating your requests, et cetera, because if you don't, you're just gonna be shooting things into the ether and you're gonna fuck up everything that you've been trying to build. Like legitimately, you are.

Rabah (47:56.969)
Such an important point that I didn't bring up that you did. This is why this is such a great Duo bromance. So at the beginning One of the things as a leader I did not do well and I think it is your job as leading a vertical is to shield your team and So what would happen would be I give my team? These objectives these resources these timelines and then to your point max or AJ will text my team outside of going through me

Chase Mohseni (48:12.139)
Yes, dude.

Rabah (48:25.889)
And then my team goes, dude, the big boss man just asked for X, but I'm supposed to do YZ. What do you want me to do here? And so one, to AJ Maxx's credit, like I just had a nice candid conversation with him. I was like, hey guys, I love you. You love me. It would be really helpful to put any requests of marketing just come through me and then I can distribute it in the most efficient manner to make sure that you get the outcome that you want. So that's really helpful. But it takes a conversation because a lot of times founders just want to...

Chase Mohseni (48:45.982)
Yep.

Rabah (48:54.809)
get to the root and like, oh, Rob is busy. I'll just ask the person that does the thing. And that is not necessarily the best way to operate. So definitely if you are dealing with this, just have a nice candid conversation with your boss and say, hey, my job as head of marketing, VP of marketing, whatever, is to allocate my resources and capital to achieve the business objectives. When you ask my team to do stuff, that gets priority.

Chase Mohseni (48:59.041)
Yeah.

Rabah (49:21.825)
and then that messes up all of my plans. And so if that's something that you really wanna do, and then the other thing is, again, if it's a founder, CEO, or whoever doing this, and they won't adhere to that, it is what it is. You can kind of figure it out, but one of the things that you can then do is empower your team to say, okay, cool, Chase, I understand that you want this, that's awesome, but then they can fire up the project's database and go, okay, cool, but I'm currently working on X, Y, and Z.

these are my priorities given to me by Raba, I won't be able to do your thing and do these three things. Do you want me to, what would you like for me to drop off my plate? That's something that is, I think, innate in a lot of really awesome founders is that they think that as their ideas happen, that people's plates grow. Your plate doesn't grow. And so if your plate's full, you need to tell your manager or you need to tell...

Chase Mohseni (49:52.821)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (50:13.482)
No.

Rabah (50:18.069)
the C-suite leadership that who is making that request. Hey, that's a really awesome idea. This is fantastic. However, my priorities are X, Y, and Z. I won't be able to accomplish those if I take this on. Do you want me to take this on at the cost of X or Y or Z? And so just bringing up that trade-off, 99% of the time kills the ask, where it's just like, oh, I don't want it. Because then it gets into a place that they feel like they're messing with.

Chase Mohseni (50:44.802)
Yeah, yeah.

Rabah (50:44.857)
the actual marketing plan, which is a little bit counterintuitive, but that's such a huge call out. And I think that is, it was something that is, I think, fraught a lot of places. And again, you, your job as a leader of an org is to shield your employees and you need to understand, like at the end of the day, you are the reason they're giving you the money is because you can make better decisions with those resources than they can.

And so if that starts to diverge, then that's a whole nother conversation of maybe that might not be the right fit for you, or maybe the skillset that you have isn't requisite for what they want. But nine times out of 10, you are the right fit, and you have the requisite skillset. It's just a management issue of like, hey, information should flow through me, and then I can disperse it to my team in the most meaningful way. But that's such a great call out, Chase. It was...

It happened a lot at the beginning and it was really challenging because you're operating already on these thin margins of resources Right, and then these resources are being commandeered as well It's like dude we're fighting on the eastern front and now you want to take half of my army and go attack Rome Like we need to have more cohesion here. So just kudos to you for that call out because it's a real thing well Then you're not really leading the department like then are these really my direct reports like

Chase Mohseni (51:44.823)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (51:53.718)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't fuck with my flank, man. Yeah, don't fuck with my flank, yeah.

Rabah (52:05.169)
No, because like my direct report should report to me. That's why they're direct report. And I get to decide what the best way to distribute those resources are. And so again, if, if there starts to become pushback there, you might either be in the wrong position or that management style might not be where you want to build your career.

Chase Mohseni (52:25.57)
Yeah. So, I have two tactical things I've tried and done that have been super successful and then I want to move over to the four quadrants that we were talking about. One is if this is something you see kind of happening over and over again, say, look, let's create a executive level Slack that's private that only say five, six, seven people are in. And if you have like a question that, you know, sometimes cross-functional or pop it in there. So, say it's like marketing directors and up.

Right? Hop it in there and say, hey, look, you know, at Robba, at whoever, I want to do this thing and then just make sure that they say the context with which they're doing it in. And it's a small knit group where they're essentially saying that thing. They can give you the context of why they're thinking that. And again, you can kind of go through that framework you're talking about, like, well, we have this, we have this, and this person is working on this. And if I do this, this project, you know, goes out a week and we need it for these things. And essentially like.

just push them into this is your context, this is our context and like, we've been here. So that's a really impactful one. The other thing I have spent a lot of time doing, I do this thing where I do communication training. And so it's a little bit of an ask in terms of your time, but the multiples are really huge, especially if you have any outward facing people where you teach them how to communicate with customers, with...

Rabah (53:38.749)
Ooh, that's interesting.

Chase Mohseni (53:50.43)
across teams and communicate up. And so you share like, hey, look, let's do, let's role play. Like if a person says this, what would you say? They say that, they're like, well, what outcome do you expect to get out of that? No, I don't do this. Hey, we're in this conversation. I know you didn't like how this went. Let's try three different scenarios. Oh, how does this person communicate? And you start kind of getting people to understand how to have those conversations so that if you're not in the room, they can be really, like they can make valuable call-outs and you can essentially say,

Rabah (54:01.637)
Mm-hmm.

Chase Mohseni (54:19.858)
I'm still SEAL Team Six commander, but let's just say I'm over there in this other room, I know that they can make a split decision if they're three rooms over in another house on a mission, right? And I know that they're going to be able to essentially, you know, we talk about the, like the evangelists, they're going to be able to evangelize the way that we do business. And so it's the same thing of like, the other thing I've found is the multiple on how much people love that stuff. Cause the same thing, if you set, help someone build a personal brand, you help someone understand how to communicate. You're essentially saying, I'm going to teach you how to make more money.

Rabah (54:29.926)
Beautiful.

Chase Mohseni (54:49.59)
And people really, really appreciate that. So that was one thing. Again, it's a bit of a time suck, but the more you invest in people, the more they can actually give you a higher ROI on their time and make your life exponentially easier. So it's a bit of an investment, but I think it's really powerful as well.

Rabah (55:05.893)
Well, again, I think you hit on such an interesting vein as well, because one of the things that you'll realize very early on is people are receptive to different types of feedback and different types of communication styles and being able to modulate what those are for different people is really important, especially kind of for guys like me and you where we're kind of loud, gregarious, very extroverted. It can be challenging sometimes to...

Chase Mohseni (55:25.898)
Yeah.

Rabah (55:35.313)
Do you get the truth essentially from people versus like them telling you what you wanna hear? And so one of the ways that I found that was really helpful was a kind of dual prong approach. So every week I would meet with my direct reports for an hour, if we didn't need the whole hour, we would just nuke it. But before they came to meet, they had to fill out a weekly Notion doc and those subject line or the kind of places that they would fill out.

Chase Mohseni (55:37.805)
Yeah.

Rabah (56:03.237)
What was your biggest win for the week? What was your biggest opportunity for the week? What are you looking forward to most? Doesn't necessarily have to be work related to building some personal rapport. Are there any blockers or decisions needed? And then, is there any progress updates on anything? And then we would just go through those things and then we would have this nice, and the reason I say I like to have that, not only because I'm a big, like, no meeting agenda, no attenda kind of guy where I just can't do the masturbatory small talk.

Chase Mohseni (56:27.926)
Yeah, yeah, same.

Rabah (56:32.633)
but also it gives introverts a really great way to communicate because for my introverted employees, I would basically just read the Notion doc, like, okay, cool, it wouldn't be this like one-on-one interaction versus my extroverted employees. The Notion docs are very svelte, but there was this huge information transfer during the one-on-one. And so that's a really nice way, I think, to modulate between your...

your management styles and giving introverts a way to really shine and then giving extroverts a way to communicate with you. It's a really big deal and kind of going back to what we talked about at the top, one of the other things that I hired for was the ability to take feedback because that was something that I just, I'm not, we talked about it like I think our dads were very similar, like I'm just not wired for that empathetic.

kind of person when there's not effort and there's not a desire for excellence. And so those people were just not gonna make it in my org because of my management style. Not to say that they weren't talented, that they couldn't produce outputs, it was just I knew my management style and I knew the type of people that I needed to have on my team to not only do the best work that they can do, but to also create the culture of excellence.

and transparency and feedback that I wanted to foster.

Chase Mohseni (57:51.863)
Yeah, man.

Chase Mohseni (57:57.674)
Dude, so this is maybe this is like a lesson if there are any kids listening to this or anyone who's having has had some trouble. So I'll give a little uh Uncle Chase story here. So my career wasn't going like terribly well because I wasn't focused to be honest with you. That's the first thing and I had a big moment happen where my company that I was working for wasn't happy with me and it was like swift kick in the nuts. Um

And I remember very distinctly them being like, so are you angry? I was like, why would I be angry? I'm not doing well, you're telling me what I need to do to prove that I can do well. This isn't a great conversation. I said those exact words. And the manager, who's a VP, was like, no one has ever responded like that to a conversation like that in my entire career. And it changed the entirety of the way he looked at me to the point where he hits me up for advice now, right?

If you had seen that person in that situation, it was also a wonderful kind of reminder, like do no one cares if you're nice, just produce. If you're nice and you produce, cheat code. But just being nice, you'll never go that far in your life. I'm sorry, but people want results. And so what I'm reminding people of is essentially the ability to take advice on and take feedback, critical feedback on, action on it, and also show the respect.

that you appreciate someone being willing to have a hard conversation with you is a huge advantage in your life. And don't take it like, by the way, we all have this kind of visceral reaction inside, but if you can keep calm, not show any emotion, and just say thank you, I'll fix it, and then action on that, you have a cheat code in your life forever. The minute you start getting emotional, gesticulating like crazy, like...

Rabah (59:32.166)
Huge.

Chase Mohseni (59:50.686)
You absolutely are showing it. So this is why, I wanted to actually ask you this and caveat and then we'll go to the framework. How do you feel about when people do these like nine person interview panels? Because you know why they're doing it. They're trying to find a chink in your armor, right? They're trying to figure out like, under pressure will you break, right? It's not about, can you do these analytics? Like that's kind of stock and trade. Yes, they wanna see that, but that's just like, that's table stakes.

They want to see like will someone. So I remember I interviewed for Amazon for Ring and I crushed every interview. And then they have this one last one. They have it, I think it's called like the, the bar razor is the last thing that they have. And I just took my foot off the gas. Cause I'm like, bro, I crushed this. This guy's a random guy. He's not even in the org. And I didn't understand it was before. I was super analytical about like going through this process and I fucking bombed that meeting. And I could tell I bombed the meeting at the end.

And I've talked to the guy who was the hiring manager afterwards, we're boys now, random. And he was like, yo, do you crush everything? And that guy was like, nope, no shot. He's not serious, because I wasn't, right? And so they're just trying to find a chink in the armor. So I'm curious how you feel about that like intense interview process, because you're hiring for the things we're talking about, which is like grit, ability to take feedback, ability to pivot, like all of those things that are.

Rabah (01:00:59.429)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (01:01:13.046)
you kind of don't figure out until you're in the job a lot of the times if you don't do it. So I'm curious what you think about that process.

Rabah (01:01:19.137)
Yeah, now I'm going to take this question in a probably a different direction. I actually think some of those are necessary evils and let me tell you why.

Chase Mohseni (01:01:29.227)
Yeah.

Rabah (01:01:32.453)
The person that is hiring you is not gonna be the person that's managing you usually. And so it's one of those things like when you have the, if you think of like software and users, the farther away the software sale gets from the user, usually the worst the software is because they're convincing a decision maker, but then that decision maker is forcing said software onto the user.

Chase Mohseni (01:01:38.85)
Yeah.

Rabah (01:01:58.785)
And so I think of it that in that same way is that they're trying to do due diligence because they don't have the advantage of their CMO or whoever to touch that higher, understand that higher, get that vibe check. So they have to build this huge almost pasteurization system to catch all the bacteria and things that might fall through the system. Personally, do I love it? No. Personally, do I ever want to work at a massive company? No. And so again, those are just different. But.

Chase Mohseni (01:02:15.735)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (01:02:19.298)
Love that.

Rabah (01:02:28.629)
from the outside looking in, I understand the intention. I just don't vibe with that because I don't wanna be on a hundred person team where I'm just a number and I have a manager. I wanna be with people that I care about, with people that I like, with people that I can do great work with. I don't wanna be a cog in a machine and there's nothing wrong with cogs in a machine. It's just, what lights you up and where do you think you can make the most impact?

Chase Mohseni (01:02:32.982)
Yes.

Chase Mohseni (01:02:48.796)
Yeah.

Rabah (01:02:56.045)
choose those styles of organizations. So kind of like a non-answer answer, but like.

Chase Mohseni (01:03:00.678)
It is totally an answer. I think it like they are, it is necessary. It just, it kind of sucks, but you, I mean, I see why they do it. I've done it. I've literally done it. Do a project. Let's talk about this. What would you do in this situation? I mean, we were hiring salespeople. We would do this role play. And I like, I would always be, we'd be slacking. Who should I, what character should I be today? And they're like, be a dink, you know? Like be the asshole who doesn't want to buy. I'm like, oh, this is my favorite person to play. I don't like playing the nice guy. So.

Rabah (01:03:21.677)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (01:03:29.582)
100% agree it's necessary, because dude, what's harder? Hiring again and teaching again, or just keep going through the hiring process because you're already in the rhythm, dude. It's 10 times harder to do the former, not the latter. So yeah.

Rabah (01:03:46.375)
It's way easier to not hire than have to unwind a bad hire for sure. And the higher you go up in the hierarchy, the more detrimental it is. You can't just hire a C-suite. When you see somebody leave a C-suite in 12 months, 18 months, that was a miss and they just didn't want to have a lot of signaling risk of like, oh my gosh, this person left so early.

Chase Mohseni (01:03:50.23)
Yeah, dude.

Chase Mohseni (01:04:06.561)
Yeah.

We fucked it up. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Rabah (01:04:10.917)
Yeah, you asked her essentially a resignation, leave through the back door please, nicely, quietly. This just wasn't a match.

Chase Mohseni (01:04:18.122)
Yeah, 100%. It's, yeah, it's one of the untold things you wish you could get give people when they're being hired is kind of all of this like the playbook of why do you hire? Why do you not hire? And let people understand that stuff. And I feel like just even if you give it to them, people think they should hire me. It's like, No, it's much better to say no, it's the same thing with software, by the way, dude, why aren't they buying my software? Like,

Well, it's harder to actually onboard onto a software and keep it around and just say no and keep doing what you're doing just based on the, like the downside risk. It's why they have implementation teams and all this kind of stuff to get software, even when it's simple. So anyway, we're running long, but I want to get to these, these frameworks. Um, what do you like the, the framework we're talking about, we kind of both listened to this pod. I thought it was incredible. How do you look at this? Can you explain it to everybody?

Rabah (01:05:10.029)
Yeah, I'm gonna go through it real quick because I actually have a hard stop in like four or five minutes. So let's go through this real quick. We'll drop the link to the podcast and you guys can listen through it because there is also a bunch of really other amazing kind of personal self-development stuff in there. Not hippie-dippy, actually very actionable. But ultimately this guy, Neil, he wrote a bunch of books, just really awesome, fun, loving guy. But he basically broke down retention into four things. And you can almost think of it

Chase Mohseni (01:05:17.763)
So good.

Rabah (01:05:40.157)
as hiring as well. So what's the story? What's the social component? What's the structure of the job? And is there the stimulation of the job? And so he calls those the four S's. And if you nail all four of those, you're basically essentially never going to have churn. And so I think it's really interesting where, especially as a startup, you have to sell the story. Because to your point, you're not going to have the economics to compete with the big boys. You know, you're going to pay market maybe a smidge and above market, but you're not going to get these blockbuster.

Chase Mohseni (01:05:59.255)
Yeah.

Rabah (01:06:08.517)
Contracts that a Google Amazon face meta can give you Yeah, exact Netflix. What's your you know, the social atmosphere? Is it something that people want to be a part of do they feel included? Is it something that is value-generated to them? What is the reporting structure? So what is the structure? Like how do how is their success being measured? Who do they report to who reports to them super necessary? I'm candidly not a big believer in flat orgs. I

Chase Mohseni (01:06:11.737)
Yeah, Netflix, yeah.

Chase Mohseni (01:06:35.905)
Nope.

Rabah (01:06:36.353)
I think Tony Shay's a G, R-I-P, but I thought the flat org, it's like kind of the same thing as open floor plans. I think they're like communism, great in theory, terrible in execution. And then the last one is stimulation. And I think that's one of the hardest ones to get right, is because when you are hiring well, a lot of times you can get into the frustrated genius problem, where you have a really epic killer.

You're just actioning and unleashing them in an incorrect manner and they feel like they're constrained and things of that nature. So, the frustrated genius is a real problem where you get really talented people in boxes that don't need boxes. They just need initiatives and timelines. So that's kind of at its core. It's social, story, structure, and stimulation.

Chase Mohseni (01:07:22.882)
Yeah. You did a great job of this, by the way, dude. Like, uh, it's giving people, um, is giving people that space and making, like letting frustrated geniuses, quote unquote, have open pastors to be able to run and do their thing. Um, like, I mean, we talked about the all-star team, right? Like just everyone running in a direction building, like you, it was kind of this ubiquitousness, you know, but it comes from intentionality, dude. Like you have to go into the entire process saying, I will create this structure.

because I know what the multiple is going to be on it. So it's like kudos to you, dude.

Rabah (01:07:57.177)
Thank you for that. And I think to extend the sports analogy, I think this is such a perfect bifurcation between a leader and a manager, where if you took coach K, so Mike Sieszewski at Duke, you could take absolutely A players and he could put five A players together and it would work. That's a leader. When you take somebody like Bob Knight shot out Indiana.

Chase Mohseni (01:08:03.852)
Yeah.

Chase Mohseni (01:08:15.734)
Yeah.

Rabah (01:08:20.165)
Bob Knight really couldn't handle a lot of talented people. Like they just butted heads with him. But what Bob Knight was great at is taking C and B players and making them A players. And that to me is a manager. And so those are the bifurcations. A leader is essentially just leading talent. And again, to your point, like you just go almost like herd dogs, right? Like fucking put the dog up, there's the herd, go get it.

Chase Mohseni (01:08:28.49)
Yeah.

Rabah (01:08:43.777)
I'm out of your way where Bob Knight was just so in the weeds managing. And again, there's no judgment on either and or. And you can have a mix of both, but I really think that when you have high functioning, high, you know, compensated teams, a leader is more impactful than a manager, whereas as you get down the pay scale, a manager is a little bit more impactful because

you get away from the ownership, the excitement, and you really get back to, you know, for lack of a better term, and I don't want it to be derogatory, but more of that factory worker mindset of people are clocking in, clocking out. And so that manager needs to make sure that those workforce hours are producing where like all my team was on salary. Nobody, there was no hourly rate there. And so it was basically about impact and impact alone. And so...

Chase Mohseni (01:09:21.512)
Yeah, yeah.

Rabah (01:09:36.514)
Anyways, that just brought up a really interesting paradigm for me because I think it's your spot on there

Chase Mohseni (01:09:42.038)
So guys, we both have to run. So we will add the product and the nugget in the show notes. But I think, does it even matter because of how good this episode was? Like, I don't, I mean, just value on value on value. So.

Rabah (01:09:53.233)
Come on. Come on, people.

Chase Mohseni (01:10:00.738)
Follow, subscribe. This is Rob as usual section. So you wanna lead us out.

Rabah (01:10:05.613)
Yeah, so absolutely. We will quick plug product of the week, Clay. Go get your social network in place. Go get, leverage your social network. It's really, really cool. YouTube channel coming soon or we're not up yet, right? Coming soon. So we'll start to have all the pods on the YouTubes. We got the Newsy coming out and then, yeah, just follow us on the Twitters. We're both on MentorPass and you can grab some time with us.

Chase Mohseni (01:10:18.882)
Coming, coming, in the next month, yeah.

Rabah (01:10:32.505)
And we're really excited for you guys. We have season two in the works, which is gonna be pretty amazing. We'll probably start to do maybe like one guest every month. And then if you guys do have any awesome topics that you want us to dive into, pontificate on, or if you see brands doing cool things, dumb things, anything that you guys want us to riff on, just let us know on the socials. We not only have our personal socials, but also the Growth Vault. So go follow us there. And if you can, leave a review on the Apple Podcast app.

helps us out and actually saves a unicorn and I think that's it and then tell me how good chase's hair looks I guess you can't because you guys can't see you can't see the YouTube. Oh in the social clips. You'll get it. You'll get it, but It's amazing. So from Austin to California to all of you beautiful people all over the world We need to do a geo breakdown and see where all our listeners are. We really appreciate you tuning in every week We're we're like I said gonna get a little bit more regular. We've had some kind of personal professionals

Chase Mohseni (01:11:07.74)
Oh god man, I mean the YouTube is gonna go crazy.

Chase Mohseni (01:11:22.722)
Dude, wild.

Rabah (01:11:30.265)
stuff moving around where we had a couple misses here and there but we are committing to another season two and we'll see you guys out there and out there next week and go crush it go buy you a hot dog straw go get you some seven eleven drip and just go be a good human go put some go spread some light into the world smile at a stranger not in a creepy way but just be that be that guy there's a great Marcus Aurelius line of stop arguing what a good man should be and just be one so

Chase Mohseni (01:11:43.358)
11 merge. Yeah.

Rabah (01:12:00.145)
We'll leave it there.

Chase Mohseni (01:12:00.214)
Oh dude, I love that quote, 100%. I'm gonna go be a good man right now. Love you brother. Yeah, appreciate you. Bye.

Rabah (01:12:05.273)
Let's go. Amazing. We'll see you. Love you too, bro.