Cameron Herold
speaker
284 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Cameron Herold’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Thank you, Ryan. Appreciate it. Looking forward to it.
Okay, so there's a couple of interesting points here. One is, you know, I've been following Trump since probably 1989 as a business person and a negotiator and, you know, the way he operates and works with the press. I think I first read The Art of the Deal back in 1988 or 89. And then secondly is Elon. I've known Elon since 1995. Elon Musk's younger brother worked for me in 1993.
I was a reference for Elon and Kimball in their first round of funding for Zip2 in January of 95. So I've known him as a business person before, you know, most people on the planet knew that he existed. And it's just because his brother worked for me at College Pro Painters and his cousin, Peter Rife, who built SolarCity.
So I'm particularly interested in what Trump is doing right now on the business side of politics. And look, I'm not necessarily a fan of him as a person. I'm Canadian. I'm a little less glossy. I'm a little more augie shucks. I'm You know, Canadians, we apologize before we can even hit on a girl. Like, sorry, I think you're beautiful. So I don't like the ego behind a lot of Trump. I never did.
I don't like the gold faucets. I don't like the fancy ostentatious. Put all that stuff aside. He's doing something that absolutely needs to be done in politics and it needs to be done in every business. And there's a lot of waste. And I think a lot of business people miss how much waste there is inside of our company.
So when we were building 1-800-GOT-JUNK, I was the COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, took them from 14 people to 3,100 employees in six years. We had at the leadership team a financial review meeting every three months, and the leadership team reviewed the general ledger, which is every expense
on the P and L. So we looked at every expense in entertainment, every expense in travel, every, we looked at all the credit card bills. And as a team, we discussed stuff that kind of jumped out at us. We looked at software licenses 24 years ago.
So there's so much waste that they're cutting right now that I think both the left and the right have to look at that and go, yeah, it's pretty hard to argue. 95% of that waste is really waste. You know, we don't need a new embassy in South Sudan. And I think there's a good lesson in there for entrepreneurs is to be very ruthless and to inspect what you expect.
And I think it's very hard for an entrepreneur to go out to their company and keep saying, oh, we need to get more revenue. The only reason you need to get more revenue is to pay for all the stupid expenses that you don't really need in your company. And in government to say we need more taxes. No, we don't need any more taxes. In fact, if we operated properly.
If we operated efficiently, we could probably reduce the taxes. So one of the big reasons why I exited Canada 10 years ago and then left the U.S. four years ago, I'm now a resident of Dubai. My company is based in Dubai. It's because the royal family that owns the country doesn't allow for any waste, right? They don't allow for the frivolous spending.
And I think there's something that's really good that's happening there. A rambling answer.
But let me, yeah, let me speak to that. So I, and, and I have a lot of ties to New York state. My grandmother was from peak skill. I used to go down to Cornell at Ithaca all the time. My school that I was at was in Ottawa, you know, lived across the border from Buffalo. So a lot of ties into New York state.
Again, I'm going to go back to college pro painters, which was the first business that I helped build and scale. It's where I hired Kimball and, and his Peter or cousin, Peter, the founder of college pro painters said a leader has to say no. more often than they say yes. And it's very difficult to say no.
It's very difficult when we're trying to be inclusive, we're trying to let people's ideas matter, but I think good companies have learned the skill of being able to say no because we can't afford it, no because it's not attached to our strategy, no because it's not aligned with our core values, no because it's not aligned with our current cash flow, and we're good at handling conflict.
government has said yes to everything. They've said yes because it's easier to say yes, they don't piss anyone off. It's easier to say yes because they don't have to pay the bills. It's easier to say yes because somebody else is constantly giving them more money. It's easier to say yes because they buy themselves votes.
It's easier to say yes, and the top 2% are only making $300,000 a year or more, which means 98% of the people basically are kind of middle class or lower class. So it's easy for 98% of people to say tax the rich. There's not more money to get. In a business, you can't say, well, just go get more revenue. It's really hard to get revenue.
So business people and homeowners, if you're a normal homeowner, you can't say, well, let's just go borrow more money. The bank won't loan to you, right? So you have to live within your means. So I've taught my kids to save 50% of all the money they ever make when they're living at home has to get invested. When they move out, 20% of all the money they have to make has to get invested.
I'm teaching them that mentality. Teaching them as a business, right? Take a portion of your money, invest in growth. Take a portion of your money, invest in savings. Take a portion of your money and decide where to spend it. Use zero-based budgeting. So if a business operated the way government does, we'd be bankrupt every single year.
So good businesses operate with a level of rigor that is very different. And I think that's why Trump... It's why David Sachs, it's why Elon Musk, these people that are involved now in Doge and in the crypto and making big decisions for government are able to identify a lot of the waste is they're not approaching government like typical bureaucrats will. They're approaching it with like,
We're bankrupt. We gotta make some tough decisions right now. And sadly, we're gonna go through another period of about 12 to 18 months of stagflation, which is recession plus inflation at the same time. Hasn't happened since 1974. No, the government is not gonna be lowering interest rates. You're completely dreaming it on crack, thinking that we can keep printing money.
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