“Contrary to Apple's belief that bravery is taking a headphone port away. My belief of bravery, my definition is the ability to leave something that is safe and step into something that is unknown.” - Chris Lema

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Chris Lema:
Chris's Website: chrislema.com
Chris on Twitter: @chrislema


Brian Casel:

Brian’s company, ZipMessage

Brian on Twitter: @casjam

Thanks to ZipMessage

ZipMessage (today’s sponsor) is the video messaging tool that replaces live calls with asynchronous conversations.  Use it free or tune into the episode for an exclusive coupon for Open Threads listeners.

Quotes from this episode:

Quote 01:

Chris Lema: The single most important thing that you need to learn how to do is to make money. You have to figure out, you know if you have nothing if you know how to make money. Craft an e-book, build an online course, create a membership site, seller reports, provide some coaching, and do some consulting, if you know how to make money, then you're never locked into the situation that you're in.

Chris Lema: And and you know, contrary to Apple's belief that bravery is taking a headphone port away. My belief in bravery. Right. My definition is the ability to leave something that is safe and step into something that is unknown.

Quote 02:

Brian Casel: I think it's so interesting like your transitions that I want to talk about your recent one in 2022 but even just going back to those early days you were you were CTO at some other sort like non WordPress, some other software and you actively started blogging and becoming well-known in the WordPress space and it was almost like building the bridge for you to go cross over into the WordPress space.

Chris Lema: Yeah, it's.

Brian Casel: Like, like 2008 or 09?

Chris Lema: It's a desire. Yeah. It's a desire to continually create opportunities. Right. So years and years ago, a long, long time ago, I wrote a patent and the patent I wrote was with one of the top five decision scientists on the planet, Dr. Ralph Keeney, and Ralph was the chair of Decision Science at Duke, which is the Decision Science School.

He had been a professor of Decision Science at USC, another well-known school. This guy is the God of Decisions, and he's written several books on decision value-based frameworks and all the stuff in his point. Right, which I internalized and learned was most people are really, really bad at decision-making. And the reason they're bad at decision-making is that they let other people put them in decision moments.

Quote 03:


Brian Casel: Yeah. I mean, I could see how like when you're at a point where you're feeling kind of burnt out, you've been doing this thing for multiple years and, you know, and it's like a new, totally fresh problems that an opportunity just kind of lands on your lap.

Chris Lema: And it's and here's, here's the crazy thing. In the last three in the last three months, I'm involved in buying a company which I've done 40 times already. I'm involved in investing in a company which I've done 30 times already. I'm involved in starting a new startup, which I've done seven times already. And I'm launching a product which I've done probably a hundred plus times already.

Right. I literally don't have to prep to walk into any meeting. I walk into the meeting and I'm like, I have a framework for that. I have a strategy for that. I've done that before. Here are the questions I would ask these lawyers how to use this is how we do it. I would do this tranche and then do this flip and then do this convertible note and then do the benefit of having done a whole lot of work for a lot of years is that you know, if you get the opportunity to work in a job where you're like, I've never worked harder, but I've also never it's never been easier because it's leveraging all the things that I've done before.

Brian Casel: A lot of business fundamentals just don't really change no matter which space you're in. And you can apply what happened on that deal over here, right? Yeah. Very cool.