Soon you’ll hear about that room, but first, a question.
If you had 30 days to launch a trash company — truck, bins, customers, revenue, the whole thing — could you do it?
Could you wire $40,000 to a stranger for a garbage truck off Facebook Marketplace, learn hydraulics on YouTube, convince 200 neighbors to prepay for service… And do it all while your wife is 9 months pregnant? (Not recommended, by the way.)
But Spencer Scott figured it out.
Now, another question: Could you build one of the most valuable tech companies of the century, used by governments and Fortune 500s? Could you stare down lawsuits and fierce critics, all while scaling to a ~$450B public company?
Joe Lonsdale did.
One guy in tech sales turning neighborhood complaints into a dirty, high-margin local business. The other in boardrooms, turning data into billion-dollar platforms with global reach.
At first glance, they sound like polar opposites.
But study their stories closely and the same patterns emerge: selling before building, embracing chaos, solving hard problems, and betting on ownership.
Different arenas. Different scale. Same DNA.
So, what do a billionaire and a garbage man really have in common?
A playbook worth stealing.
Here are 4 rules they both live by…
Spencer didn’t start his business Lone Star Trash with trucks, licenses, or capital. He started with a Facebook rant.
His neighbors were furious about their existing trash service provider.
So Spencer, the curious man he is, ran the numbers:
400 homes × $33/month = $13,200 in monthly recurring revenue
…for ONE pickup day a week.
Instead of guessing, he tested. He spun up a pre-made Webflow template for trash businesses, embedded a payment system, and borrowed a referral trick from Harry’s Razors:
His pitch:
“If 200 people prepay for 3 months, I’ll launch the company. If not, I’ll refund you.”
Two weeks later, nearly 200 households had put real money down so he could buy a truck. Proof > perfection.
https://youtu.be/MMG6vtscSeI?si=Qw5y-12G4WPdp7IU
Joe Lonsdale applied a similar principle with his business Palantir.
When Palantir started, it wasn’t some polished, enterprise-ready platform on day 1 like this:
It was a small team with rough prototypes and a bold vision.
Rather than “build it and pray,” they embedded alongside their earliest customers, like the intelligence community and other government agencies.
Those customers helped shape the products, and their early contracts provided both validation and funding.
Builder’s Principle: Prove demand exists. The smartest builders test cheaply before they invest heavily. Bonus points if the customer’s down payments help cover your build costs.
Spencer had no choice but to learn fast.
His first truck? No idea how to operate it.
The bins? Shipped from Michigan, hundreds of them stacked in his driveway.
The operations? Pure trial and error.
“I had no idea what I was doing,” he said.
But each problem solved pushed competition further away. More than that, Spencer’s chaos became his marketing differentiator.
He documented trash day online. People loved the behind-the-scenes of broken trucks, stickered bins, and his “learning through fire” approach. His scars built his credibility.
Lone Star Trash became a true brand, not just a service.
But what about Joe?
Palantir’s early days were also far from simple.
Palantir was, by many conventional measures, an unappealing place to work in its early days:
But these are also the same reasons Palantir managed to pull in some of the brightest engineers on the planet. Why? Because game recognizes game.
Builder’s Principle: Don’t confuse turbulence with failure. The builders who keep going through breakdowns and blowback emerge with stronger teams, thicker skin, and moats competitors can’t cross.
Of course, for Spencer, the opportunity was literally garbage.
His neighborhood looked stuck with one trash provider. But when he dug in, he discovered that their “monopoly” could be broken if enough neighbors opted out.
And neighbors were already fuming.
Facebook was full of complaints: missed bins, sloppy pickups, lousy service. Spencer saw the problem in bold letters and underlined right there in front of him. He just turned that frustration into fuel.
Joe’s version of “garbage” was different: taboo markets.
At the time, defense tech was radioactive in Silicon Valley. Too political. Too messy. Too controversial. Joe leaned in.
Joe and his team built Palantir to crack “impossible” problems: counterterrorism, fraud, and battlefield intelligence, and Palantir has grown into one of the most important defense companies in the world.
Builder’s Principle: Some great opportunities can emerge when customer demand is obvious but builder appetite is scarce. Hard problems scare off competitors and build movements.
Spencer started with a blank page.
That back-of-the-envelope math was enough to prove Lone Star Trash could work.
Joe recently applied the same thinking to the U.S. Navy.
One of America’s hardest national security problems? Shipbuilding. It still runs on designs and processes that date back to World War II.
Here’s the reality: the U.S. built just 8 ships last year. China’s capacity is roughly 250x greater. If America keeps following the legacy playbook, it loses fast.
So, instead of copying a century-old naval playbook, Joe asked: “What’s the cheapest, fastest way to project naval force today?”
Answer: fleets of smaller, autonomous vessels. So Joe backed Saronic, a company building fleets of small, autonomous ships. (Disclosure: we’re investors, too).
Builder’s Principle: “Best practices” are often just fossilized thinking. Don’t copy incumbents. deconstruct the problem to its fundamentals. Ask: if this business didn’t exist yet, how would I design it today?
Now here’s where this gets really cool…
Remember the room we mentioned?
It’s called Main Street Over Wall Street, and the guest speaker list is ridiculous (Joe, Spencer, renowned CEOs, investors, government officials, and entrepreneurs all plan to come).
This is not a “conference.” This is a true call to arms. You’ll rub shoulders with:
Early Bird pricing ends soon. Secure your spot and check out the speakers, schedule, and more here:
❇️ Join us next week for our FREE virtual masterclass with Codie on her 10 Steps to profitable business ownership.
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The information contained here is educational, may not be typical, and does not guarantee returns. Background, education, effort, and application will affect your experience and the profitability of any business. Individual results may vary.
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