Ideation Bootcamp, Bitcoin Thieves Steal Billions, Stonks.com, and More

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@theSamParr) discuss Sam's new course on coming up with business ideas, Stonks.com, the key to building a billion dollar internet business, and finally they discuss the couple that stole billions of dollars in Bitcoin... and just got busted. ----- * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Show Notes: (00:25) - Bill Gates jumping over a chair (02:40) - Sam's new course - Ideation Bootcamp (16:00) - Stonks.com (29:30) - Squared Away (36:50) - Cal.com (42:45) - Anywhere School (49:45) - The great crypto heist of 2022 ----- Links: * Bill Gates chair video: https://youtu.be/KxaCOHT0pmI * Sam's new course: https://maven.com/samparr/ideation-bootcamp * https://stonks.com/ * https://www.gosquaredaway.com/ * https://cal.com/ * Milk Road on Bitcoin thieves: https://www.milkroad.com/p/billions-money-laundering-yc-rappers ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  They they find a bunch of burner cell phones. They find like a bag of like $50,000 of cash. They find a bunch of like the hardware wallets that had the Bitcoins in them. And then they found like folders on their computer that were like fake passport ideas and like places to go, places to run away. Like they found like folders that said that shit on their computers.

• 0:28Sam Parr?

  I don't even entirely understand what happened, but I have a backstory about the people.

• 0:32Shaan Puri?

  Today's edition of the Milk Road, you will get the full backstory and 10 bullet points.

• 0:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you need to go earlier.

• 0:37Shaan Puri?

  So but we but we did bullet point and what so here's what happened. 2016, this crypto exchange called Bitfinex got hacked. And at the time, I think like 120,000 Bitcoin got stolen. That was like $70 million got stolen. And it was like, it was bad. That was like a big hack. The price of Bitcoin that week dropped by 40%. So it was like a it caused like this huge, you know, like a fear shock in the market. But the thing about Bitcoin is Bitcoin is on a public ledger, right? Like it's a it's a public blockchain. So everybody could see the coins. Everybody saw all the the coins are in this wallet. And like, and so all the other exchanges were like, look, this is bad for the industry.

• 1:19Shaan Puri?

  We will try to prevent like if that wallet tries to cash this out, we won't let them cash out the money. So for many years, that money kind of just sat in those wallets or was moving in like really small, small transactions back and forth between like a web of wallets. Clearly, somebody was trying to like launder the money. Essentially, they were trying.

• 1:38Sam Parr?

  But but how did he? How did they even get it in the first place?

• 1:41Shaan Puri?

  So there I don't know. I don't know what the exploit was that let them hack the accounts. And they didn't hack all the accounts on Bitfinex. They actually just hacked like some of the whale accounts. So they were able to take 120,000 Bitcoin from not all the accounts. And the funny thing is Bitfinex didn't have the money to like make those users whole. So what they did was they they reduced everybody on Bitfinex's balance by 33% or something to like balance it out. Something like horror. Like imagine if your bank did that. That would be like insane. I'd be like, oh, they robbed that guy's vault and you're taking my money away to like even it out for everybody? Like, no, thank you. So anyways, it was bad. And this is the reason why Bitfinex is not like, you know, the biggest exchange now.

• 2:20Shaan Puri?

  So anyways, that the money kind of sat there. Now, fast forward five and a half years go by. Last week, people start to notice bigger transactions coming from the the Bitfinex hack wallets. And so they like, there's these alerts on Twitter like whale alert, whale alert. It's like the coins are moving. The coins are moving $100,000, $1 million of the coins are moving 10 million, whatever. And so, and so the Fed go or not the Fed, sorry, Department of Justice goes kicks down a door in New York into this, this, this husband and wife couple's house. And they look like, you know, your complete like average Joe clean cut like this is not like, you know, doesn't look like a grimy criminal mastermind operation.

• 3:03Shaan Puri?

  And I'll explain a little bit more about that in a second, the funny bit about that. But basically they seize like their computers, they they find a bunch of burner cell phones. They find like a bag of like $50,000 of cash. They find a bunch of like the hardware wallets that had the Bitcoins in them. And then they found like folders on their computer that were like fake passport ideas and like places to go, places to run away, like they found like folders that said that shit on their computers. And and they seized three and a half billion dollars worth of Bitcoin because the price of Bitcoin has gone up so much. So that 70 million has become three and a half billion dollars worth. And so these guys were trying to launch, they don't think these are the hackers, but they were trying to launder that money. They may have been the hackers. I don't know. That's not proven.

• 3:48Shaan Puri?

  But they were trying to launder the money and the DOJ had been like, if you've seen that meme of Charlie from It's Always Sunny where they had like the cork board. And he's like trying to like find the find the crime or solve the crime. That's what they had been doing because they had this web of all these wallets. And finally, they found that, oh, it's trying to cash out in this wallet owned by this guy. Ilya Dutch Lichtenstein or whatever.

• 4:11Sam Parr?

  But how, how did, what, what type of idiot would use his name?

• 4:14Shaan Puri?

  Eventually, you need to get the money out. And so the problem is like, they were trying to get the money out through like Walmart gift cards. They were buying like $500 Walmart gift cards with Bitcoin. They were doing like PlayStation games. They were like, they were trying all these small things, but they could never move the bulk of the money. So if you want to move like in mass, you got to do something that had that lets you move size. And usually those.

• 4:36Sam Parr?

  Could you buy an NFT and then sell it? No. Well, you could do that either.

• 4:40Shaan Puri?

  Eventually, you need to get the money out of the wallet. That's the problem. So, so, so the problem, so in order to do that, there's like an off-ramp, right? How do you get it into, you know, US dollars? For example, if that's what you wanted to do. And, you know, he left it there for five and a half years and they were probably living off it and spending it in some ways. But like, you wanted to actually like, get a lot of it out and get, get it, uh, remove the paper trail of the blockchain. You need to get it as an off-ramp. But to get it as an off-ramp, you have like a, um, you know, your, like these exchanges, they, they require you to upload your license and like, they have laws they have to comply with called KYC, know your customer. And so eventually they found that somehow the DOJ, they didn't explain exactly, but they, they identified that the money was moving towards a wallet that was owned by a known person. That's how they ended up finding these guys.

• 5:26Shaan Puri?

  Now, the funny part is.

• 5:27Sam Parr?

  That's awesome.

• 5:27Shaan Puri?

  All right, go ahead.

• 5:28Sam Parr?

  So that, well, so the, I, when I read about this, I was like, wait, that name sounds so familiar. Both their names sound familiar. So the guy, his name is Ilya, I-L-Y-A, I think it was like a very like weird name. His last name is Lichtenstein. So he spoke at the first HustleCon. I never talked to him, but, um, he had a company called Mixrank, which was just a normal startup, went through YC. And he spoke at HustleCon and then his girlfriend or wife, she was a copywriter. And I remember talking a little bit with her because she, her name's Heather Morgan, I think. And she had a, um, a website all about writing sales emails.

• 6:04Shaan Puri?

  Totally.

• 6:04Sam Parr?

  Is that right?

• 6:05Shaan Puri?

  Remember her? For the hack?

• 6:07Sam Parr?

  She had like a red dress.

• 6:08Shaan Puri?

  She had like a LinkedIn post on like five hacks for your, your cover letter for your job interview. Like, you know, like that sort of thing. And so, yeah, she was doing that. She, and so they, and the funny thing is like, the reason the internet kind of went crazy with it was because here you had two very unlikely characters. So, um, we had a bunch of friends text us or text me, because I was writing this, this edition of the Milk Road. And I was like, um, anybody know this guy? And you, you knew him, but some other people knew him. They're like, dude, you would never get vibes of like, this guy might just go launder billions of dollars. It was like. Smart, like kinda quiet, dorky guy, like engineer type.

• 6:45Sam Parr?

  Uh, he like, he like showed very little emotion. No, I did not think that this guy like.

• 6:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and, and then her, she's like this like super strange Kanye West level weird. Uh, you know, like person, she, she basically, she had like an alter ego that was called Razzle Khan. And Razzle Khan was her rap name. And then she has like these super fucking cringey rap songs on YouTube like. Dude, okay, I have, you know, I have, you know, I think it'd be cool to be a rapper, but if I hear myself, there's no way I'm publishing that because. It sounds so bad.

• 7:31Shaan Puri?

  And so, uh.

• 7:32Sam Parr?

  It's horrible. It, it's so bad. The, the top comment was Paris Hilton. I'm gonna prove to everyone that you can have, uh, that having money means you can rap good. And then it said Heather Morgan, hold my beer.

• 7:45Shaan Puri?

  I didn't even know Paris Hilton has, has like a rap song.

• 7:49Shaan Puri?

  So, yeah, yeah, there's just like, she's like one of the strangest characters. Like I watched, I, I went deep dude for this. I was writing this thing and I was like, oh, let me get some examples. And then I couldn't look away. Cause like the, the train wreck.

• 7:59Sam Parr?

  Dude, it's weird. She's so uncomfortable.

• 8:01Shaan Puri?

  And like she, she like forced everybody to like, they built like this golden. Mini Taj Mahal that she sat in and then her bridesmaids lifted it up on her shoulder and brought her in. But even the, the audience at her wedding is like uncomfortably clapping like offbeat. Cause they're like, uh. This, is this normal? There's like, and there's like clearly only 14 people in the room. And then she does a rap performance at the wedding that was like equally cringey. And she's just like humping the air.

• 8:28Sam Parr?

  Oh my god. To the guy, Ilya, Ilya, what was his name? Dude, this freaking guy, uh, I'm looking at these pictures.

• 8:39Sam Parr?

  That's hilarious. This woman's really hard to look at.

• 8:43Shaan Puri?

  That should have been her rap name, Cringe City. That would have been like, okay, I get it. You're gonna be the cringiest. Cool. That's like Henry C. Hudo.

• 8:53Shaan Puri?

  The king of cringe. Yeah, that's what she should have done. Like, it is super strange. But, but yeah, basically they recovered it. And so now what's gonna, anyways, there's a bunch of interesting little bits to it. So the DOJ is going to give the money back to Bitfinex, it looks like. Bitfinex had, when they, they launched their own token at one point in time called the Leo token. That's like used in their, if you trade in their exchange, it'll give you a discount using the Leo token. So they had to put in a thing when they launched a Leo token, which was like, hey, if we ever recover anything from that hack, we'll use 80%, up to 80% of it to buy back and burn our Leo token, which will cause like the, you know, Leo holders to benefit from if we ever recover from this. And so now they're going to get like three and a half billion dollars to buy back. So the price of Leo token,

• 9:35Shaan Puri?

  like shot up like whatever 60% in 24 hours. Cause people are like, oh wow, that's going to be a lot. But they said, we're not going to just cause a bunch of sell pressure in the market. We're going to do a controlled sale over like a multi-year period. So that it's like scheduled and doesn't like affect the Bitcoin market or whatever.

• 9:54Sam Parr?

  God, this is such a good story. This would make, this is

• 9:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. That's what everyone was saying. It's like, here comes, you know, incoming, incoming Netflix stock.

• 10:03Shaan Puri?

  Have you seen this? I saw, I just watched this clip like every day for the past three days. And it just absolutely cracks me up. I was hoping Ben can play it in the thing, but I don't think it'll work. I don't think the sound will come through. So have you seen this clip of this interview of Bill Gates back in the day?

• 10:21Sam Parr?

  Jumping over a chair?

• 10:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Have you seen this?

• 10:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 10:26Sam Parr?

  Wait, like just a normal one of him jumping?

• 10:29Shaan Puri?

  Just the, so he's doing some interview with some woman about Microsoft. And she goes, she goes, is it true that you can leap over a chair?

• 10:38Sam Parr?

  Is that that impressive?

• 10:39Shaan Puri?

  And he goes, well, first of all, it is impressive for Bill Gates to be able to do that. Second of all, just, I don't know why this is being talked about. And then he goes, so she goes, is it true that you could jump over a chair? And he goes,

• 10:54Shaan Puri?

  It depends on the size of the chair.

• 10:57Shaan Puri?

  So, you know, just like, and then it cuts, it's like a hard cut to a chair. It's clearing it.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Is it true that you can leap over a chair from a standing position?

• 11:09Shaan Puri?

  It depends on the size of the chair. I'll cheat a little bit.

• 11:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah. That's an old clip. You've just now seen that.

• 11:17Shaan Puri?

  I know, I came back in my life because I was thinking, somebody had said something like, oh yeah, you know, back in the day or, you know, in the good old days, somebody said some phrase like that. And in my head, I go, what are they even thinking about when they, when they say that? And I go, I'm gonna have, I was like, what's the funniest back of the day thing? And I, that clip came to mind. And so I decided anytime somebody says back in the day or, or, you know, in the good old days, I'm gonna think only of that moment where Bill Gates says, depends on the, depends on how I had the chair.

• 11:45Sam Parr?

  I always just think of Uncle Rico. The Uncle Rico clip in Napoleon Dynamite where he goes, I used to be able to throw pigskin over them mountains. All right. So listen, I did something that I did not think I was ever going to do. So last year in 2021, or no, 2020, whenever COVID happened. I launched this course that I, I don't even know if I ever talked about it called the ideation bootcamp. I did it with Goggan. I invested in his company, just like you did in Maven. You have already done two of them, I think, and you have a third coming up. I decided to launch one. I launched one the other day. I only talked about it on Twitter. I've not talked about it on here yet. But so if people want to do it, it's called the ideation bootcamp and it's basically my research.

• 12:31Sam Parr?

  My research framework and how I research stuff. It's, but it's a, you go to maven.com. So Maven, how do you say ma, how do you like, you say Maven, it rhymes with like Raven.

• 12:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 12:43Sam Parr?

  With, with an M.

• 12:44Shaan Puri?

  But with an M at the end. No, no, that's right. That's right.

• 12:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And you could see, my name is on the front page, but what they don't have yet, and this is what I told Goggan. They, so me and Sean both invested in this company and as part of investing in it, he made us promise to do courses.

• 12:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Sam Parr?

  Which was actually a good kick in the ass because now I actually had to do it and it has been fun. But he needs like custom URLs. He doesn't have that yet.

• 13:08Shaan Puri?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like maven.com slash blank slash whatever in order to get to your thing. But I just have, they made it for me. They made a power writing. Powerwritingcourse.com.

• 13:19Sam Parr?

  They're gonna make it for me, but they

• 13:20Shaan Puri?

  That goes there.

• 13:21Sam Parr?

  But they have to make it for you. But I'm doing this thing. It, I think it's gonna be pretty badass. I think I'll continue doing it maybe once a year, but maybe I won't ever do it. I don't know.

• 13:30Shaan Puri?

  Give an example. So give a teaser of like, okay, so, so this is about coming up with a great idea, figuring out. So coming up with ideas and then picking the ones that seem like better ideas than worse ideas in a short amount of time. Is that the hook?

• 13:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'll give one old example. So basically when trends launched, I wrote this article about plants. And I'm like, man, I think someone could build like an online nursery or an online plant business. And the reason why I came up with that idea is I read the annual report for 1-800-FLOWERS. And they said the of, and 1-800-FLOWERS is a big company, does a billion or something in revenue. So they've got a large perspective. And they said that our fastest growing segment is millennials buying succulents online. This is growing like crazy. And then I looked on at their financials and it looked like the, the majority of the profit came from people buying accessories, so chocolate or fancy pots. And I'm like, well, there's the fucking idea. You make succulents and you make it like really cool pots that are artists. And you like figure out what the contribution margin is. And then what Alex said about, what did Alex say yesterday in the podcast?

• 14:27Sam Parr?

  Like opportunity of value or value of opportunity? Like he like phrased it actually better than I've phrased it historically. But basically you could do a bunch of math. It's really like simple arithmetic and you're like, in order to get your repeat purchase rate, the total adjustable market times your contribution margin. And like, that's how you can come up with a good idea in that space, just off that one insight. And so that's an example. So I just list out all like my frameworks and how I research.

• 14:51Shaan Puri?

  And it started with reading, reading the annual report for 1-800-FLOWERS, which that sounds like the most, you know, kind of unique starting point for finding, not even just finding specific opportunities, but just like training your brain to think about the world wider than the, the way you currently think about it. That's, that's how I would phrase it. Cause like, I don't think you necessarily find the best ideas by being like, okay, I'm gonna go read, you know, the HBS Business School, the Harvard Business School's annual report, and in there, I'm gonna find a business idea. I think that's a little too hardcore.

• 15:24Sam Parr?

  No, the way it works is you have this general thing. So this general thing is basically, what's this combination of things that I'm interested in, things that I'm good at, and things that can make money? All right, I know what that general I thing is. I'm gonna go to very particular places to find information that's gonna help guide this, and what it's gonna do is gonna help me find a handful of problems that I'm interested in solving, and these problems for sure have demand for them.

• 15:49Shaan Puri?

  I'll give you an example of this, how this played out in my life. So I invest in this company. The guy actually came to our podcast, our live podcast show in San Francisco, which was like in your office, very, you know, it was a very small crew, maybe 50 people, 75 people, something like that. I don't know what it was, but it was the very first live thing we ever did. And this guy comes up afterwards, and he's like, hey, that was great. And I'm like, yeah, what do you, cool, what's your story? What do you do? And he's like, oh, I'm, I currently run the perception team on the self-driving cars division of Uber.

• 16:21Sam Parr?

  He was very charming, very good looking. I was sold to.

• 16:24Shaan Puri?

  Handsome guy, very, very confident. So he wasn't like, hey, Kishan, can I just pitch you my idea? I really just want to tell you, like, that, that's always like, sure, man. You talk while I think of a way to escape is usually how that conversation goes. And so this was different. This guy was, you know, he, I was genuinely interested, then he started saying things. And then I was like, oh, so he's like, yeah, but I'm leaving to work on my own startup. Okay, what is it? What is it, Uber Artificial Intelligence guy, you know, like a guy who works on the AI team at Uber? And so he was starting his own self-driving car company. And he's like, you know, here's what we're gonna do. We're focusing on, he's like, you know, it's funny, I was, you know, I was looking at what we were doing at Uber, and he was like,

• 17:07Shaan Puri?

  What stood out, what jumped out to me, and this is kind of like one of your ideation things is like, sometimes a stat will come out and at Twitch, the CEO Emmett, he used to call the, he used to say, sometimes you look at data, not for a specific answer, but just to find something that makes you go huh? Or like, that's weird. It can't be right, can it? And, and so he used to, the CEO Emmett, he used to mention, like, you don't always go looking, do a, write a sequel query just to get a specific answer. Sometimes you just browse until something jumps out at you as being like, not what you, not on trend. And so anyways, this guy had said 75% of all Uber rides are like, you know,

• 17:48Shaan Puri?

  one passenger going less than, it was like 60%, 60 something percent were go, were one passenger and 60% were going less than three miles. So it's like short trips of just one person inside of a dense city. And he's like, you know, so it's kind of crazy, right? We have this like four person, maybe six person, six seater car. That weighs thousands of tons with a, with one driver driving one person, one mile. Like, that seems inefficient. And so he was trying to create a, a new vehicle that was like a one person vehicle, one or two person vehicle. That was electric and self-driving and optimized for very short trips. And I was like, oh, that's really cool. Anyways, I invest 50,000 bucks. You fast forward like a year and, uh, you know, he's like grinding away in this garage in San Mateo.

• 18:34Shaan Puri?

  Trying to get a car to drive itself. And I would go down to the, he was working literally out of a storage unit. So I would go to the storage container, like kind of a, what's it called? Like, uh,

• 18:44Sam Parr?

  Like public storage or something?

• 18:45Shaan Puri?

  Public storage. Yeah, literally. And then he'd roll up the garage on like unit 333 or whatever. And then he'd put me in it. He'd be like, all right, let's see if it works. And then we'd drive in a circle around the storage facility, uh, storage's like a parking lot. And it was like, whoa, that was bizarre to sit there and just like have the thing drive me. Yeah. So it was working, but it was very, you know, like, that's a closed environment. It's pretty easy to get that to work. But he was working on, okay, now let's take it out a mile. Okay, now let's go get a sandwich from the shop. And like, that's what he was doing for like a year. So anyways, um, he, at the time, the idea, the initial idea was like, to be kind of like an Uber competitor, right? Like, somebody will just push a button, this ride will show up, roll up to them with no driver inside. They hop in, they actually drive themselves to the location, then they leave, they just walk out and the thing will drive to the next passenger by itself.

• 19:31Shaan Puri?

  I was like, wow, that's really cool idea. We were trying to figure it out and I felt like we were hitting a wall and this is where something like your course will help because if you're if you're if all your ideas are boxed into your own life experiences and you're like a you know 27 year old engineer who's worked at you know tech companies like your life experiences are pretty narrow. And only once we got out of that and started like figuring out these little like you know, like these, these, these, these unique spots like when you, when you read an annual report, you go huh. So I was reading annual report, uh, we talked to, we just took a random meeting, we took a random meeting with some transportation lawyer. And he mentioned that he does work for this company and I looked up that company and it's basically like this.

• 20:15Shaan Puri?

  I don't know, like 30 billion dollar company that I've never heard of. And what did it do? They partner with like 15 cities and they go to the city and they say, hey, um, you need buses and scooters and ferries and trains and all that stuff. Yeah, you just commission us, we'll, we'll bid for your, for the right to run transportation in your city. And they would get, and so this, the whole 30 billion dollar company or whatever was like off of like 15 city contracts. And then I thought about, I was like, oh, of course, like San Francisco doesn't run their own buses. Like, you know, or whatever, not every city is going to want to be in the transportation business, they just contracted out to some vendor. And I was like, man, that's an amazing business because that vendor now has lock in like the city is not going to change, so they're just going to like, they just get to eat up, they have a monopoly on city transport.

• 21:01Shaan Puri?

  And then that got me thinking about those city bike share programs, if you've seen those city bikes. They're awesome. And then their annual reports were online and I went and I read about it and City Bike did the same model. They went to New York and they built like a hundred million dollar revenue business doing city bikes in New York and they were the only ones who had the license to do it. And then they did it in San Francisco and then they sold to Lyft for, I don't know, some hundred millions of dollars. And I thought, that's a really cool model. And so then we started brainstorming, dude, could you go to a city that needs this type of transport, like a different type of transport than what they already have with their buses and whatever? And just say, we'll be the vendor for you. That's exactly what they did. They went to Las Vegas. Did it work? Uh, yeah, is, well, I, I haven't talked to him recently, but yeah, they got a contract basically with Las Vegas.

• 21:43Shaan Puri?

  Where the city was like, yeah, we have this thing called a transportation desert. It's like a place where our routes don't really go, but a lot of people need to go in this area. And they're complaining to us about it. So, you know, yeah, we'll pay you guys, we'll, we'll pre-buy, you know, like quarter million dollars of rides from you. Um, and so it's like, instead of trying to get half a quarter million people to download your app like Uber. You got one city official to say, I'll buy $250,000 worth of rides. And that'll last us a few months and let's see how that goes.

• 22:10Sam Parr?

  And that's what you and I do to people. So because we just study and break down stuff, I think you, you and I go through the same discovery and aha moment. I hope that our audience does, which is basically you see it. Once you know what's possible, or once you know, like what other people is possible, your standard of what's possible kind of changes. And you're like, well, of course I could do that. They did that and they did by doing this, this and this. I already know exactly how they did it. It's like, um, it, it would kind of be like me telling you, well, just go get big muscles. It's like, I don't, I can't get big muscles. Like, I don't know what that means versus like, well, just lift this weight. Do it four times a week and, and here I'll remind you every single time and you could do it. It's like, when you know, like a specific routine or you know what's possible, it definitely changes your perspective on what you should be doing.

• 22:55Sam Parr?

  And, uh, hopefully that's what the podcast does, but that's what the course will be doing, but, uh, I don't know. I wanted to.

• 23:02Shaan Puri?

  So go sign up. Where do they go? Maven.com.

• 23:04Sam Parr?

  Maven.com.

• 23:04Shaan Puri?

  They'll see your face.

• 23:06Sam Parr?

  They'll see my face.

• 23:07Shaan Puri?

  And it's called the.

• 23:07Sam Parr?

  It's cool. And then you have one too on the, it's called the ideation bootcamp. You have one too. The, the power writing course. This is your third time doing it.

• 23:14Shaan Puri?

  My third time doing it. Yeah.

• 23:15Sam Parr?

  And you did it because you're like, uh, people like, I think Goggins said that you have the second highest rated course.

• 23:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 23:23Sam Parr?

  I forget who had number one, but he said.

• 23:25Shaan Puri?

  And, uh, you know, uh, second place is the best place. Uh, I still have some of the reach.

• 23:32Sam Parr?

  Is it second?

• 23:33Shaan Puri?

  But I'm still at the top.

• 23:35Sam Parr?

  I don't remember which one he said. It was like either one or two.

• 23:37Shaan Puri?

  I think we don't, uh, I don't really care about highest rated because I was like, you know, honestly, people's rating will be more based on themselves. Like it's just like, actually to use your gym example. Um, most people aren't like, if, if you're out of shape, it's not because you have the wrong workout program and trainer. It's because, you know, most likely you're not even going to the gym. Then if you are going to the gym, you're not working, going consistently. If you're not going consistently, if you're, even if you are going consistently, you're not working out with intensity. And then comes the program for back buys and shoulders. That's going to help you get the most gains. It's a similarly like. I had, um, it's like, yeah, we had a high rated course, but then I looked at, I was like, man, 15 or 20% of people just never showed up to a single one. They paid and never showed up. Like, damn, that's, that's on them.

• 24:20Sam Parr?

  I don't think, I don't think you could solve that.

• 24:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Well, you know, and I, and I luckily I was wise enough to not have heartache over that. Cause I was like, that's actually just like a completely common pattern with all online education. Is people don't finish or they don't start for something that they'll even pay a bunch of money for, which is really wild. So it's like of the people that come, what, what kind of experience do they have? And then, you know, six months, nine months later, are you still getting emails being like, yo, I used your thing. It was, you know, I got this outcome out of it. That's like, that's the only real true measure of success. And I don't think of a hundred people go into the course. It's not going to be a hundred people who have that. 20 people aren't even going to show up. You know, 60% of people, 60 of them are going to forget everything within a year or never, never implement it. And really it's the like, the 15 to 20 out of a hundred that go like, use the thing and better than, better themselves.

• 25:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it sucks. Um, do you want to talk about this Bitcoin, Bitcoin couple? What do you want to talk about?

• 25:15Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I have, okay. So I have a couple of ideas and then I have a couple of random topics, but let's do ideas first. Um, so I want to get, I want to shout out a couple of ideas that I saw other people saying that I thought were kind of interesting. So, uh, here's the first one. So you invested in this thing, uh, stonks.com, right?

• 25:33Sam Parr?

  I did.

• 25:34Shaan Puri?

  And, uh, explain for people who don't know what stocks is, explain what it is. Cause it's actually kind of like, pretty dope. I, I had the opportunity to invest. I know the guy super well who started it. Uh, he was our biggest competitor when we were doing my startup. Uh, so I was like watching them. I like, kind of saw how they operate. So I knew these, these guys are really good, but I didn't get the idea fully right away. And the valuation was really high because they have a good track record. So I was like, ah, okay, I'll just pass. I'll be a user, not an investor. You invested. So explain what it is.

• 26:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so it's like Shark Tank meets Angel List. And so Angel List is a platform where you can, if anyone starts a company, they can go on and they can get investors and they make it easy. So anyone could invest like a thousand dollars into your company. And you know what Shark Tank is. And so basically stocks, you it's spelled like, the reason I was like, is this gonna work? Because it's spelled like a joke.

• 26:22Shaan Puri?

  Like a meme?

• 26:22Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it looks like it's like spelled like a meme and like their logo is like a silly, it's like the Wall Street Bets guy. But it's a so once a how often, what's the cadence now? Is it every day or once a week?

• 26:33Shaan Puri?

  No, I don't think it's every day. I think it's once a week or so.

• 26:35Sam Parr?

  So once a week, but then they have like big ones that are once a month and they do some pre-vetting and they find interesting startups and all types of investors are on the phone or on the call listening and they could ping in with a question and a whole audience can watch in real time. And so I've been a guest, I've been an investor or they call it investors where you're like, you're able to ask questions. And I've seen people write checks for 50 and a hundred thousand dollars live.

• 27:01Shaan Puri?

  The experience is like a live, like a Twitch channel, basically.

• 27:04Sam Parr?

  Like an auction.

• 27:05Shaan Puri?

  So a startup goes up, they pitch their thing, the investors, some investors can ask questions in the chat, some are asking questions live. And then you just see in the chat, it's like so and so is investing $10,000, so and so is putting in $40,000, so and so is putting $2,000 in.

• 27:20Sam Parr?

  Have you seen one where people?

• 27:22Shaan Puri?

  They'll raise like, I think somebody raised over $10 million in 10 minutes. Is that right?

• 27:26Sam Parr?

  I think, well, the company raised 10 million stocks.

• 27:29Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:30Sam Parr?

  Raised money from guys like me, but and then Andreessen Horowitz, just like angel investors, and then they let their users invest and they raised like 10 or 15 million dollars in a few hours.

• 27:40Shaan Puri?

  And so, so what is, what's cool is you're a founder. Normally, your fundraising is like this multi-month process that you're almost dreading getting started with. You're like, okay, I gotta first get all my ducks in a row and then I gotta start reaching out and figure making a list, a pipeline to reach out to, then asking people to go out to coffees or asking for intros and following up and then pitching and then follow up meetings. This shrinks that three month process into like seven minutes on stage. That's what's dope about this for the, for the founder. For the investor, it's also a time saver, right? Because

• 28:14Shaan Puri?

  My job is to look at interesting companies. So these guys, if they're doing the hard work of curating them and putting them on stage and letting me make a snap decision, they're creating a demo day, basically, where they they pack in a bunch of good startups and in theory, right? And the whole, it's either going to work because they curate great startups, or it's going to not work because the great startups don't want to do this.

• 28:34Sam Parr?

  How did you not invest in this? When I talked to him, I was like, oh, this is a no brainer. I only invested $10,000, but it was because I would I would have done more, but this was a no brainer.

• 28:43Shaan Puri?

  He told me early on, he was like, you know, it's Twitch for Twitch for angel investing. And I've just seen every other live streaming. I had too much battle scars. Like, I've seen so many live streaming products fail. And I was like, bro, why are you going into this? You know that as well as I do, you know, like, that's so hard to do. I didn't really understand what he was saying as the idea. And then he I was like, so I asked him a couple of questions. He sent me the memo, and I saw the valuation. I was like, ah, so I think it's a dope idea. Okay, so now here's the the riff on it, right? So that's cool in and of itself. So Elaine Zelby, who's been on the pod a couple of times before, and she has, she's, she's an idea person, just like us. So she had this idea that I thought was pretty cool. She goes, stonks.com for other things.

• 29:25Sam Parr?

  I agree. Can I tell you what one of our friends, Mois Ali tweeted something? And it needs to be for homes. Stonks for homes. Like, it's because the the cool thing about Stonks is you could see what other what questions other smart people are asking. And with cars, so bring a bring a bring a trailer, my favorite car website, it has a comment section, and I could see what smart people are asking, like, is this a 67 or a 1967 or 1968? Because the 1967s offered this thing, and the real collector's items are 68s. You know what, I'm just picking that up. But with and with houses, it's the same thing. Like, I remember our home, like, our realtor was saying, like, is this made out of stucco or this other thing? And I'm like, I don't know what any of that is. And then they're

• 30:09Sam Parr?

  like, did you guys like, spray the installation? Or is it like, I'm like, I don't know what that means. I wish I could see like, what questions I knew smart people were asking. And I wish you could do that live. Okay, that's I wish I could, I wish. And then you could have an up vote, an up vote. And I think I would like it to be for houses.

• 30:26Shaan Puri?

  So I think, okay, that's interesting. The one that she had said that I thought was pretty cool was hiring. So stonks.com for people. Okay, so how does that work? So? Okay, there's general hiring, which is like, you know, our hiring is like this like large spectrum from like temp staffing, where I just need like an hourly employee to show up today. And then like tomorrow, they may not come back to like Craigslist to uh then you get to like LinkedIn and Indeed, which is kind of like mass market. If I'm a if I'm a, you know, junior, you know, or I'm a mid-level marketing manager, I might get job opportunities on LinkedIn or Indeed, that might be where I go look. Then you have like Angel List, like vertical places where it's like, if I want a job in startups, I won't go to Indeed, I'll go to Angel List, because that's where the startups hire or that's a job board for startups.

• 31:10Shaan Puri?

  And so then you have this one like really interesting thing. And then you have like headhunters, which do executive placements and kind of like, uh, you know, how do you find a CMO? You hire a headhunter, you pay him a ton of money and then they get like a huge cut. So somewhere in there, I think there's an opportunity to let people hire like top talent live like this. So if you were able to essentially, it's like a reverse job interview. So instead of me going and interviewing with

• 31:34Sam Parr?

  You know what this kind of reminds me of, but it's kind of, I'll say it though, this kind of sounds like a like a like a slave.

• 31:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I knew you were gonna say, I knew you were gonna go there. And actually

• 31:42Sam Parr?

  It makes me, it makes me a little, this makes me very uncomfortable, actually, like that, I mean, like a talent auction, is that what we're gonna call it now?

• 31:49Shaan Puri?

  Dude, yes, at will, bro. It's like you get paid or

• 31:54Shaan Puri?

  like, that's like saying employment is slavery, right? It's not. Um, it's a so, but there was a website, I don't know if you saw it come out that called, it was called Developer Auction. It was controversial for this exact reason. So this came out maybe six years ago or so, it ended up, um, it got really hot. So what they were doing was they're saying, look,

• 32:12Sam Parr?

  How did you know about this company?

• 32:13Shaan Puri?

  It was like part of Y C or they were, they piggybacked on Y C in some way. I don't remember if they were a Y C company or what they did was they were like, we're only going to take developers or we're only going to let Y C companies hire from this place. So it's like, if you're a dev who wants to work for a Y C company, come onto Developer Auction, you get the highest dollar bid because these guys have money and they want great devs.

• 32:33Sam Parr?

  Which, which was just a little bit of icing on the douche cake. Like you're doing, you're doing Yeah, you're doing an auction now, you're doing it only for Y C. That's the lay, that's the cherry on top of the douchebag cake.

• 32:47Shaan Puri?

  The douche and the leche cake. Yeah. So basically they They kind of did that. And so what was happening was developers were getting way more money on this. And they also didn't have to do like a multi-week job interviewing process. It was like, they say, hey, yeah, I was at Reddit early-ish, first 40 employees. I worked on the fraud fraud system and this and this. I'm interested in, you know, companies doing machine learning. And then boom, job offer and job offer at a 20% premium. A developer auction, all they had to do was just say, they just had to be like Harvard. They just had to be selective. It's like, no, not any company can just apply here. We're going to pick and then, no, not any developer can apply here. We're going to pick now. Ultimately, I don't think the model worked because they're not like the biggest thing ever now. I think they ended up like kind of pivoting or softening it.

• 33:32Sam Parr?

  Well, all talent marketplaces are really hard businesses, I think.

• 33:35Shaan Puri?

  To scale. Yeah.

• 33:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, to scale. I think that you could have a lot of, you can have like, you can be a just a recruiter and make millions of dollars a year. You could be just a job board to make millions of dollars a year. But if you want to be hired.com, then it, I don't know if it can, it's really hard to work.

• 33:49Shaan Puri?

  So I think the trick here is to do it with something that's visual. So, okay, Stonks is cool because it's a live video stream. So one question is, what, in what, what category does having a visual screen that's showing you something? Work way better than a resume that was attached to an email or a job board? And so I think like potentially designers or even something like more niche than that, like three D designers, video editors, graphics, something like that. Like this could be maybe how like the video game industry hires or something like that. I don't know, there's, there's something there to doing this.

• 34:21Sam Parr?

  That's what she said, Elaine, she said.

• 34:23Shaan Puri?

  I don't know, I didn't, I didn't see which exact example. She had the example of hiring and I didn't even read on. I was like, yeah, great idea. Let me just like riff off that.

• 34:31Sam Parr?

  That's pretty interesting.

• 34:32Shaan Puri?

  So I thought that was cool. And then I think there's probably some other areas where you could do that. And I think the trick is normally the reason live streaming products fail is because the viewers, you're competing, like you don't want to compete for viewers with people who are just doing this for leisure. Because they have a ton of options, they could just open Tik Tok, they can, you know, go for a walk, they can do anything. You need people, you need the viewers of the buy side. For this to be their job. So that's why actually real estate or real estate investors, instead of maybe even, maybe it's not just for buying my home that I'm going to go live in, but maybe it's like multifamily properties get auctioned off in this way. And it's multifamily investors that are showing up to buy pieces of that action or something like that.

• 35:12Sam Parr?

  I think, I think that'd be cool. I think I told you this hypothesis I had in 2012. I remember when I was in the apartment business, we had to go an apartment finder thing. And I was like, I'm pretty sure that people, it's not that far away that people are going to start renting homes and buying homes without ever seeing them in person. Like, like, like, this was before Matterport was around. And I think we're there. Like, I, I would buy a house. Would you buy a house without seeing it?

• 35:38Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 35:39Sam Parr?

  I would maybe not mind rent. I for sure would rent a place without seeing it.

• 35:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 35:45Sam Parr?

  I maybe would buy, but I think I, there's a world, I think, where we're going to buy them soon without ever seeing a house.

• 35:51Shaan Puri?

  Right. The other one that's kind of out of left field here is, did you ever watch the Zoom Bachelor? That some of our friends did. Sheil was the Zoom Bachelor. Did you ever watch it?

• 36:01Sam Parr?

  Uh, no, I don't watch that shit though.

• 36:03Shaan Puri?

  I play real sports.

• 36:05Sam Parr?

  Well, I just don't watch reality TV. You know, I watch good stuff.

• 36:08Shaan Puri?

  It was like, it was like just people. It wasn't real TV even, but it was basically like,

• 36:13Sam Parr?

  I know.

• 36:13Shaan Puri?

  Here's Sheil. He's a, he's an investor. He's single. He's a good guy. We think he's great. And so as a, as a joke, as a kind of a lark, they created a live stream. And they curated a bunch of single women and they were like, all right. And they basically, in the course of an hour, it was like, here's six women. They introduce themselves. He cuts two. It's like, all right, of the four women. Now he's going to ask you a question like, all right, what's your ideal Friday night date? What would we do? And then one girl's like, oh, I think we would whatever, like just,

• 36:43Sam Parr?

  How many people watched it?

• 36:44Shaan Puri?

  Watch movie, whatever. There was like, I don't know, like 500 people live watching it, which is a pretty big like live stream channel.

• 36:49Sam Parr?

  Pretty good.

• 36:49Shaan Puri?

  Um, and this was like, again, it was all kind of done as a joke. It was just friends. I don't think that any of them really wanted to date each other, but it was just like to do the show.

• 36:59Shaan Puri?

  Well, maybe there's something like that, right? The Bachelor is one of the highest rated shows ever. And then you see stuff like,

• 37:06Shaan Puri?

  there's like a matchmaker show on Netflix. That's like Indian Matchmaker or something like that. As people pay thousands of dollars to like, to matchmakers to find like, kind of like eligible candidates. Like, that's a, that's a, that is a niche thing that exists in every city.

• 37:19Sam Parr?

  You and I have a, you have an, you and I have a single friend and I, for a gift, I nearly bought him a $4,000 matchmaker. And I didn't end up going through with it because it's like, I don't know if they're gonna like follow through with this. And that's too much money to spend if they don't do it. And I don't know if they're gonna find it insulting. But I was like, I interviewed this lady three different times. I'm like trying to figure out this would be the right fit for our friend. I think that, I think they're interesting. I think more people should use them.

• 37:44Shaan Puri?

  So I think that if there was a private version of this, that was, you know, it was more expensive.

• 37:51Sam Parr?

  Well, so now we're talking about auctioning off sex.

• 37:54Shaan Puri?

  Yes. Well, we're talking about auctioning off the things people want, right? So, yeah, it just so happens to be talent, sex, things like that.

• 38:05Sam Parr?

  That's cool.

• 38:05Shaan Puri?

  There's a great quote, by the way. Ev Williams has said this quote. Ev Williams started Twitter and blogger before that, Medium now. He, he goes, here's the recipe for a billion dollar internet company. Have you heard this quote before? He goes, here's, here's the recipe for a billion dollar internet company. Take a human desire, preferably one that's been around for hundreds of years. Use technology to remove steps. And that was his whole thing. He's like, you know, so he's like, that's how I built Blogger, Twitter, everything else. Twitter took out a bunch of steps for a human desire that people had. And, and I think that's just like, you know, sounds stupidly simple, but is actually true.

• 38:45Sam Parr?

  Let me tell you about something that I saw. I did not research this at all for this talk, but I wanted to just bring it up because we were talking about something similar. I'm trying to find, I'm trying to figure out how I'm gonna manage. So I bought this farm. I need to like get a manager to help run it. And there's these property management companies, but they don't really have like the touch. It's a little sterile and like to make this work the way I want it to work. I want someone that's a little bit more close to it. So in your brain, in your head, what, when I think of an outsourced person, like what's like the image that you're, that I, that you get? Can you explain that to me? No, no, just, just tell me like what outsourced VR, a virtual assistant.

• 39:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like, I don't know, somebody in the Philippines or India who's, you know, sitting at a desk, you know, tapping away for.

• 39:34Sam Parr?

  Like in a call center style environment?

• 39:36Shaan Puri?

  Style, exactly.

• 39:37Sam Parr?

  Okay, now, when I say military spouse, military spouse, what comes to your mind?

• 39:45Shaan Puri?

  Patriot, American patriot, a woman in America, white blonde hair, speaks great English, sitting, you know, in the comfort of her, you know, her home office, talking to, you know, customers.

• 39:59Sam Parr?

  What attributes are there?

• 40:02Shaan Puri?

  Loyal, organized, trustworthy, things like that.

• 40:07Sam Parr?

  Exactly. So there's this company called Squared Away. So Google Squared Away.

• 40:12Shaan Puri?

  We've talked about them on here before, by the way.

• 40:14Sam Parr?

  Yes, we have, but I didn't get it. We talked about one episode, we did one, we did one episode where we talked about, like, a cool way to come up with a type of company that you want is, who would you want to hire? Like, what demographic do you want to hire?

• 40:29Shaan Puri?

  Who do you want to serve? Right? That's another one, right?

• 40:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 40:32Shaan Puri?

  Ultimately, you're going to be serving a customer, and so it helps a lot if you care about them and, and understand them and want, want more of them to be around you every day.

• 40:41Sam Parr?

  So, go, what's it called? Go Squared Away. I don't know why it's called Go Squared Away, or maybe it's just called.

• 40:47Shaan Puri?

  The business is Squared Away, the domain, they just couldn't get SquaredAway.com, probably.

• 40:51Sam Parr?

  And it's the most expensive, the cheapest tier is $200 for five hours.

• 40:55Shaan Puri?

  Great copy on this website. Look at this. So what?

• 40:58Sam Parr?

  It's great. It's great.

• 40:59Shaan Puri?

  So what's another, what's another outsourcing company? Can we just find like?

• 41:03Sam Parr?

  Upwork.

• 41:04Shaan Puri?

  Like, go to, let me just Google, like, outsourcing, or let's say, virtual assistant for, yeah, virtual assistant.

• 41:16Sam Parr?

  If they show up on the top of Google, they might have good copyrighting. But while you're looking for that. So the copyrighting on this page, so you go to squared away, it says, the best company perk is personal assistance for your entire team. Our, our team of military spouses gives you your time back. And it's a picture of a lady holding up her sign, waiting for her husband to get off the plane from like coming home.

• 41:39Shaan Puri?

  So compare this screen. So Ben, open up flexjobs.com. This is, this is just a perfect example. Flex jobs not terrible, right? Like it showed up at the top of Google. It's not, I've never used the service. I'm not saying that. I'm saying just the website. It's not horrible. But it's not special and it doesn't make you feel anything, right? So I can't read it. So just compare the feelings. Okay. So, and if you're on, you should be watching on YouTube to be able to see this. So if I go to flex jobs, I see this kind of like blue and orange tacky site with stock photos of literally men and women in corporate outfits.

• 42:12Sam Parr?

  Running away.

• 42:13Shaan Puri?

  Running away, like doing a ballet leap away from you. And then it says, the number one job site to find vetted remote work from home and flexible job opportunities since 2007. So that's okay. Great. And then, and then it's like, good morning, America, CNN, Wall Street Journal, whatever. Okay. So this is, it's okay. And the headline is find a better way to work. Generic, vague, doesn't make me feel anything.

• 42:38Shaan Puri?

  And you know, just this is, this doesn't do it. Now go back to go squared away. Go squared away. What do they say? The best company perk, personal assistance for your entire team. So already they're selling the benefit, right? You who's coming here is probably looking to hire a personal assistant. And they, and they focus on, they frame it as this is the best perk you can offer your employees. Instead of just find a personal assistant, which assumes you already know you want a personal assistant. They sell you the benefit of having a personal assistant, that you're providing the best perk for your team. Then they have this like black and white photo of like a military mom, holding a child's hand with a sign.

• 43:19Shaan Puri?

  You know, you know, like I'm thinking of, thinking of you daddy as you know, as he leaves for the plane. She's like at an airport hangar, right? Like an emotional scene. And she seems like somebody who you would want to support. You would love to like help this woman out. And that she seems like somebody who you would want, not like, you know, this, this stock photo of a corporate person running away from you.

• 43:42Sam Parr?

  How crazy is that? This is beautiful branding because I don't know how many people are in the military, but like a military spouse is not like, I mean, uh, that's a, it's not that, uh, uh, it's not that rare. So like I, I may hire these people for doing all types of jobs and they are a military spouse. But as soon as they brand it as I, I'm like, oh, well, you definitely are, are a good person.

• 44:06Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 44:07Sam Parr?

  Like even though I've, it doesn't necessarily mean they're a great person, but for some reason I think that even though.

• 44:12Shaan Puri?

  Dude, you're a good person for bringing this company up. Yeah, right. Bonus points.

• 44:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 44:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you're, you're, uh, you know, you, you get free, free virtue for, for having brought this company up as something cool.

• 44:22Sam Parr?

  Is this beautiful branding or what? Like, why, why did we even, why did we talk about this before?

• 44:26Shaan Puri?

  Uh, we talked about it before, same thing. Uh, we were talking about, uh, the stay at home mom workforce and like, how do you tap into that? Like labor markets that are under, underutilized. So excess talent that doesn't, that's, that's looking for a job. And we talked about, you know, what could you do to stay at home moms? And then we brought this up and they actually shared the clip because they were like, hey, this was cool. We got like featured on this thing. And so that's how I remember that we've talked about it before, but, uh, how did we get here? What were you talking about? So you were talking about.

• 44:50Sam Parr?

  Oh, well, I don't, I don't remember. We were, we, I think you were talking about like talent, like talent marketplaces. And I was, and I just, I, I, I didn't even research, I'm, I signed up for, uh, what, what's it called? Get squared away. Squared away. I entered, I'm waiting for them to call me back, but I signed up because I, but when I went to it, I was like, oh my God, I'm in love. I want, I want to hire this woman in the picture.

• 45:11Shaan Puri?

  I feel like if I hire, if I use the service, it like washes away the fact that I like, don't do compost. That I forgot to recycle that bottle.

• 45:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And I feel like the, the woman's just going to have my back so hard. Like she's just going to like, just so much loyalty.

• 45:27Shaan Puri?

  She's not your spouse, dude.

• 45:31Sam Parr?

  No, but she's my partner. That's like how I feel. And I just thought they, this website, I've never seen, I've never felt this way about a job website.

• 45:41Shaan Puri?

  Oh, Jonathan brought up, you were talking about managing your ranch. So you were saying you, you might use this instead, or just kind of, it reminded you that nobody's doing that in the property management space of making you feel the way that this makes you feel about assistance. Is that right?

• 45:53Sam Parr?

  I don't even remember the angle that I had, but yes, I think I'm going to use this to manage my ranch. But I thought, I thought that'd be.

• 45:58Shaan Puri?

  Cool company and good example of a, of a landing page. So, uh, all right, so let's, let's go to another one. So. Can I tell you, or I'll do a quick one. I just want to get your take on this. So I followed this guy. And I don't know if this is his name because it sounds like a fake name. I've been talking to him. I just sort of realized, I don't know if this is his real name. But his Twitter handle is Pierre Rich and I don't know if he's, if his name is Pierre Rich.

• 46:22Sam Parr?

  His name is Al.

• 46:24Shaan Puri?

  Okay, his name is.

• 46:27Shaan Puri?

  His name is Pierre Richardson.

• 46:31Shaan Puri?

  Pierre Richardson. So that's his name. So anyways, he, he's, he's another guy who tried a talent marketplace and now has pivoted to something sweet. So he initially, he had a Y C company and it like didn't work out. And then he like, as a like, they just needed money and they were like, yo, we just shut down our company. You can, you can hire us. We're a Y C duo. You can just hire us. We'll do a project for you for like, as a contractor for like two weeks. Costs money, but like you're getting a Y C founder duo. Where can you hire that?

• 46:59Sam Parr?

  Oh my God.

• 47:00Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, dude, this is fucking amazing. I was like, I would love to hire Y C founder duos. And I was like, if you think about it, like some number, maybe 20, 30, 40% of Y C companies are going to shut down. And like, you know, those people might just go get jobs, but actually it might be cool for them to like, continue to brand themselves as a Y C company, as a Y C founders. And be able to be hired, be able for hire. So they did that for a little bit and I thought that was cool. That's how I got in touch with them. Now he's doing something called Cal.com. Have you seen this? It's a competitor to Calendly.

• 47:31Sam Parr?

  Cal.

• 47:32Shaan Puri?

  Great, great domain, domain, just C A L.

• 47:35Sam Parr?

  All right. All right. So scheduling infrastructure for absolutely everyone.

• 47:39Shaan Puri?

  So basically what they are is we've talked about Calendly, Calendly before. Calendly basically gives you a little, a link that's a calendar where somebody can book you. And so that's great for like a salesperson. Who's like, hey, I would love to chat about, you know, how we might be able to help you out. Here's a link to my calendar. Grab a time that works for you. And it like lets you go, pick a time and emails both of you a calendar invite. It like takes care of the whole like booking process. So Calendly had become like a, I think a billion dollar plus company.

• 48:07Sam Parr?

  Uh, recently

• 48:09Shaan Puri?

  Two billion dollar company and there's, aren't they like, weren't they bootstrapped for like a really long time or something crazy? They had like,

• 48:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah, the guy was an African immigrant who uh bootstrapped it for like 20 million in revenue, raised around at like a billion and then recently raised another round at like two or three or four.

• 48:25Shaan Puri?

  So that business is working. So Cal.com I think is a great competitor. So I'm going to invest in this because I believe in this model that they're doing, which is commercial open source software. So Cal, Calendly is not open source. Cal.com is, is open source. What does that mean? That means you can, A, you can read the source code. B, you can basically like self-host it. So a lot of companies don't want their kind of like data and for information in the hands of another company. They like to be able to self-host the software that they're using. And also be able to fork it or remix it in some way that like is customizable to them. And so these guys are growing fast. I switched over from Calendly. Now I use Cal.

• 49:04Sam Parr?

  Is it awesome?

• 49:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's a sick product and you could, you embed these on your website. So it's like, if you have a website, you're like, I don't know. You give people, you're, you're a lawyer and you need people like, instead of saying, here's a contact us form and then one of our humans will reach out to you. And then we'll try to schedule a time and by that time you already forgot how interested you were. So what this does is that, dude, just embed your, your booking calendar right here. And it reads your existing calendar. So it won't let anybody book a time that's already taken and you could set up rules like, don't do meeting, like I need a minimum 10 minute gap in between meetings or whatever, right? You set some rules. You just embed that right here. So in the heat of the moment, when somebody's interested, you can grab that lead right away and get them booked for a meeting. And so.

• 49:45Sam Parr?

  Do, but how do you use it? You're not a company. You're just a guy.

• 49:48Shaan Puri?

  So I'll use it either for, if I'm going to invest in a, if I'm, if I'm doing, talking to a founder and it's like, hey, yeah, would love to chat sometime next week. All right. You know, here's my calendar. Feel free to grab any time that works for you. Um, and some people find that like offensive, whatever. I don't know. People are too sensitive about shit like, you know, just trying to be, it's for trying to, trying to make it flexible for the other person to pick whatever time works for them without requiring for email back and forth or pawning you off to my assistant who's going to like take it from here. Um, and you'll have to email them four times to find a time that works. And so, uh, so I use it for that. I'll also use it for like random meetings. So I'll have a Calendly that's just, you know, like I'll have, like, you know, just backslash Sean and I'll put like a one hour of random meetings once per month that anybody on the internet can go book.

• 50:31Shaan Puri?

  And so those are ways that that I just add a little like randomness and serendipity into my life. That's like in a controlled fashion of when it when it can happen.

• 50:40Sam Parr?

  This is cool. You they did a really funny flex. So if you go to the website, you see a thing that says, claim your username. And when you refresh consistently, you see different names in the autofilled example. And it's all people who are well known, and I bet are investors of the company. And you see that and you're like, oh, well, James Burcher is a naval this person.

• 51:08Shaan Puri?

  Those guys are they are investors.

• 51:11Sam Parr?

  Isn't that funny how they did that?

• 51:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's cool. And I think there if you if you look, by the way, this is a common model. There's a closed source winner. And there's an open source winner for a bunch of different categories in software. So this is just like a very simple way to find good deals is if you if you missed out, or you see a great company that's like completely closed source, just Google for the commercial open source company. And then if they have a great team behind them, there's usually like a separate segment of the market that's quite large that they can go to attack just by going from this like open source self hosted model.

• 51:42Sam Parr?

  These guys have exploded. They went from like nothing to a lot of traffic.

• 51:45Shaan Puri?

  They're growing fast. Yeah, you should invest too. I can introduce you.

• 51:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah, do it. I would love. I love this stuff. Can we talk about the Bitcoin thing, please?

• 51:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's do it. By the way, I didn't even say his idea. All right. That whole thing wasn't even the thing. Oh, what's the idea? He goes, I wish somebody built this called the anywhere school. I think this is just kind of interesting. So he goes, the anywhere school is for people who want to travel the world, but they don't want their kids to education to suffer. So here's how it goes. And he put out just like a one page PDF memo of just like, here's what it would be if anyone's building this, like, you know, take this and run with it and let me know. And so what it was is like, you join a classroom, but it's a traveling classroom around the world. So the classroom is going to be like, we're going to spend three months this year in Paris, you know, three months in Bali and three months in wherever, you know, like Thailand and three months in in

• 52:36Shaan Puri?

  South Africa. And the family and the kids go with it. So the kids get a consistent structure. The teacher stays the same. Their friends stay the same. But they get to experience a year of world travel. And and so it's like for for people who want to have travel, but don't want to wait or don't want to trade off their kids' stability and education. And I actually think that's a kind of a cool idea. And I don't think this is like a huge, huge business. Maybe it's bigger than I think, but I just think that's awesome. And that should exist. So the anywhere.

• 53:04Sam Parr?

  That's pretty cool. I'm on board and that and I also think that's a while I was Googling anywhere school. And there's nothing interesting.

• 53:11Shaan Puri?

  It's a great, great name, right?

• 53:12Sam Parr?

  I think that's a great name.

• 53:14Shaan Puri?

  Okay, let's, let's do the Bitcoin thing.

• 53:16Sam Parr?

  I'm on board with any school. Wait, really quick, before we get to that, what were you going to say about Strauss Zelnick?

• 53:22Shaan Puri?

  Dude, you're gonna love this. So you know.

• 53:24Sam Parr?

  I know.

• 53:25Shaan Puri?

  So do you explain who he is?

• 53:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so there's this guy named, so there's this guy named Strauss. How do you pronounce his name?

• 53:31Shaan Puri?

  I think is right.

• 53:32Sam Parr?

  Zelnick, I'm, I'm just doing this off memory. So correct me. I think he's the CEO of a take two interactive, which is basically the owner or creator of Grand Theft Auto and like, and like eight other games that are of that caliber. So like, maybe like a five or $10 billion a year company that owns like the biggest video games in the world. And he's probably in his mid to late 50s. And he looks like a G I Joe. So he's this like jacked dude who gets up at like 5 a.m. in New York and works out really hard. And a lot of people are invited to go work out with him.

• 54:16Sam Parr?

  But it's all like high caliber, get after it type of folks.

• 54:20Shaan Puri?

  Exactly right. So he created a kind of like, I call it the breakfast club, but it's basically like a morning, a morning workout club. And Ben, you can Google this. So there's a YouTube video that's called Strauss Zelnick's Invitation Only Fitness Club. It's a two minute video, so it's just like really easy to watch. And you could see basically when you go to it, it's like. He goes, he goes, I made a decision that I was going to treat fitness as a like important part of my schedule. So like, okay, I'm a CEO. If I had a board meeting, I'm not going to skip it or move it because I'm feeling tired. Right? So he's like, I'm going to treat fitness the same way that I would treat like, like, like a meeting or family time or whatever. Like, I'm going to put

• 55:00Shaan Puri?

  it like first order importance. And then he's like, but you know, how do I like juice this up? And I'm a big fan of this. This is a big life hack, which is multiply activities. So, you know, like I've done this before too, which is you want to hang out with cool people or have friends, but you don't, you know, you only have maybe that one hour of recreation a day. So are you going to choose fitness or friends? Well, even better, let me just find friends who like fitness and let's work out together. Right? You do this all the time. I do this too. And so what he did was he was like, all right, we're going to wake up at five or six in the morning in New York and they go somewhere and do a different fitness related activity. It doesn't matter how fit you are, although the pictures that they share, like everybody's got like a six pack.

• 55:43Sam Parr?

  Everyone's jacked.

• 55:44Shaan Puri?

  And then it's called like the program and it's basically like kind of networking, kind of friends hanging out and kind of fitness all at once. But instead of being kind of each of them, actually, that's the wrong way to say it. It's, it's like the hundred percent of each of those, because when you work out with somebody.

• 55:59Sam Parr?

  It's like the New York banker.

• 56:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. And so they get up, they do something different every day. And, and he like would pay for it. So he's like, all right, if we're doing this activity, like money is not going to be the object that stops somebody from doing this. So I'll just cover it for our whole group and we'll just go do whatever the heck activity we want to do. And so the guy's in great shape. He's like, oh, I love it because I get to hang out with like a bunch of like really interesting, motivated, like kind of 20 or 30 year olds that are like pushing me to A, be more fit and like, don't be the old man. But also like, these are really talented, ambitious people who are, who see the world differently than me. Right? And so I thought this is just a fantastic idea. And Ben told me a friend of, a friend of a friend of his was, was doing it. And

• 56:43Sam Parr?

  I was invited when I was in New York, but for some reason the scheduling didn't work out. I couldn't go. But they get up early.

• 56:49Shaan Puri?

  Well, that's the beauty of it, right? So how do you prevent this from being just the moochers show up who just want, you know, just the networking and all that? You make it at 6am. And you make the fitness thing kind of hard. That's the filter that will self-select for the type of person you want to be around for this kind of thing.

• 57:06Sam Parr?

  I just hate working out at 6 a.m. I hate working.

• 57:08Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I thought you'd be all about it because like, you know, the harder the better for you.

• 57:13Sam Parr?

  I, yeah, like I would go, but like the problem with my, my issue with working out at 6 a.m. means I've got to wake up at like 5:20, which means I've got to go, go to bed at like nine. And if I have to go to bed at nine, I'm in bed at nine and I'm so anxious saying, saying to myself, if I don't go to sleep now, like I'm not going to be able to wake up. Like it's so anxious about waking up early that it makes it not fun.

• 57:35Shaan Puri?

  Totally, totally.

• 57:35Sam Parr?

  You know what I mean?

• 57:37Shaan Puri?

  I, I, I don't work out early. I work out as a midday break every day. So I, I work out at 3 p.m. every day. And, uh, and actually I, I pretty much stopped working at that point. Then I come back and I start working again at like 11 p.m. or midnight. And so I don't have to wake up early and I have a bunch of energy when I do that. But the, the, the takeaway for this for me, the voice in my head, when I heard this, I go, oh yeah, I forgot. Sean, build your cult. And, um, I think that's just like the takeaway.

• 58:06Sam Parr?

  I think that's good.

• 58:06Shaan Puri?

  You gotta build your cult. It's like, do the things you want to do. Uh, open them up so that others can do them with you. Do them in a way that's like slightly hard. And everybody's making a bit of a, everyone's stretching themselves in some way. Because that's the sacrifice and the buy-in, the blood oath that you want in your cult. And like, just fucking build your cult. Be around the type of person you want to be around.

• 58:30Sam Parr?

  Dude, this is, this is why I bought a farm.

• 58:31Shaan Puri?

  You're building your cult. That's a great example.

• 58:33Sam Parr?

  I was doing it.

• 58:34Shaan Puri?

  The general assembly guy, what did he do? Uh, daybreaker?

• 58:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah, daybreaker. It was like a 5 a.m. party with no alcohol.

• 58:40Shaan Puri?

  Build your cult, right? Like what do I want? I want to start my day.

• 58:43Sam Parr?

  And people loved it.

• 58:44Shaan Puri?

  A bunch of energy, dance, blah, blah. But I don't want alcohol and music. I don't like nightclubs. So I'm a, I'm going to build my own cult.

• 58:50Sam Parr?

  That's awesome.

• 58:51Shaan Puri?

  Uh, all right. Did you have anything else you wanted to do or should we wrap it? Uh, that's good. Could have some.