Back in September 2024, I stumbled across on the front page of the Wall Street Journal with the following headline:
“The 27-Year-Old Billionaire Whose Army Does AI’s Dirty Work”
First off… KILLER headline, amirite?
This is one of the reasons why the WSJ is my go-to news source…
You can always count on banger headlines.
That aside, the substance of the article was also fascinating:
It was about this company called Scale AI and how they’d amassed this army of 100,000+ contractors to label images, summarize news, and do all kinds of other gnarly grunt work to train AI systems.
The founder was a young guy named Alexandr Wang.
And get this:
At the time of the article, the company was already valued at $13.8 billion dollars.
Which is insane.
I don’t how many self-made billionaires have gotten there in their 20s.
I’m guessing not many.
This guy was clearly a talented operator.
But since then, he’s gone on to even greater heights…
Because he got “acqui-hired” by Meta less than a year later in a deal that valued the company at $29 billion dollars, more than 2X its valuation in 2024…
And then became the head of Meta’s new AI Superintelligence Lab.
In case you haven’t been plugged into the AI frontier horse race…
Meta’s been at the back of the pack for the last few years.
Experts were writing them off, saying they were toast…
… That is, until they released their personal agent Muse a few weeks ago.
It’s since become one of the fastest growing consumer tech products of all time.
Oh, how quickly the tables can turn!
Anyway, when I saw David Senra, host of the Founders podcast, recently had Alexandr on the show…
I listened to it immediately.
And it did not disappoint.
One thing he said really resonated with me…
He said that every business falls into one of two categories:
You’re either running a diamond mine or building a skyscraper.
“Skyscraper” businesses are all about streamlining operations and stacking incremental gains over time.
Think Costco, Toyota, or UPS.
Meanwhile, “diamond mine” businesses are all about taking big swings.
Usually, you come up empty.
But every so often, you find a diamond, and those “diamonds” pay for everything else a million times over.
These are like venture capital, movie studios, and drug companies.
A brilliant analogy, I thought.
And as I chewed on it some more…
It struck me:
Building an email-based business with paid ads is the best of both worlds.
It’s got the “diamond mining” aspect with hooks, angles, emails, and offers that offer huge asymmetric upside when you find a winner…
And it’s also got the “skyscraper” side of things with incremental optimization in the ad account.
Pretty cool, right?
The dual nature of it definitely appeals to me.
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Jim Hamilton
Learn how to build a profitable daily newsletter with Email Storyselling. Read by 5,000+ subscribers.