"Sara's List" Update: 12 Startups Where Stock Grants Will Make You A Millionaire

Episode 365: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) give an update on "Sara's List." Sam Parr's wife, Sara, came up with a list of 12 established startups who had the potential to 5-10x over the next 5 years. Find out how much these companies are worth today. And a new Billy of the Week. ----- Links: * Amit Agarwal * Carl Allen * Carl Allen's YT channel * "Sara's List" YT * 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: (01:40) - Millionaire from Google plugins (07:35) - Billy of the Week (13:20) - Make your 12-year old self proud (19:15) - Update on "Sara's List" ----- 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?

  So he lives in India and he is a one man company that makes something between 15 and 30 million dollars selling simple plugins for Google Docs.

• 0:11Sam Parr?

  If you, if you have 20 million dollars a year of income, that is a huge unheard of song.

• 0:23Sam Parr?

  All right, we live. What's going on?

• 0:25Shaan Puri?

  All right, I got a couple interesting things for you. I'm going to start with this one man company. So I got a, I saw a tweet. I got tagged in a tweet a bunch of times.

• 0:35Sam Parr?

  Same, the exact same one.

• 0:37Shaan Puri?

  And I think we should talk about this because this was very.

• 0:40Sam Parr?

  Is it the Google plugin guy?

• 0:42Shaan Puri?

  Yes. Yeah. So, all right. So this guy, John Davids tweeted out a great thread and his handle is real, real John David. So shout out to him for doing this. And he's basically like, dude, I discovered this guy. And let me just tell you some things about this guy. So.

• 0:57Sam Parr?

  How funny is it that something like this happens? And I, I know exactly what you're talking about because we, I got DM'd, the amount, the same people probably DM'd me.

• 1:06Shaan Puri?

  Well, that's when you know you're doing a good job. When people see something and they think of you. I tweeted this out. I go, people think you create content like a podcast or YouTube channel to become well known. Right? Oh, you want fame. You want to become well known. And some people want that. And there is some benefits to that. But that's not my goal with this stuff. My goal is to be known well, which means people know you really well. That means when they see something, they'll know to send it to you. They'll show it to you. They'll share it with you. They'll invest it. They'll tell you to come invest in this deal with them. When you're known well, it's because you've put your brain out there on blast. People know how you think. And so when they see something that they know you'll love, they immediately think of you and they come share it with you.

• 1:49Shaan Puri?

  And so I would say the, even if you create content and you're never famous, it never takes off and you become well known. You will become known well, and that alone is a big enough benefit to justify creating content. All right. Anyway, so we were known well because these, a bunch of people tagged us in this, this guy. So this guy, what is his name? So his name's Amit Uggarwal. So he lives in India. And he is a one man company that makes something between 15 and 30 million dollars selling simple plugins for Google Docs and Google Drive and the Google, the G suite of apps. This is crazy.

• 2:27Sam Parr?

  I didn't know that high. That, that, that is, that is, that is, dude, making, if you, if you have 20 million dollars a year of income, that's like the equivalent of, I would have to think about this and maybe someone who's thought about this is going to say I'm an idiot and I'm getting it wrong. But making 20 million dollars a year in income is probably the same as being worth like 500 million dollars.

• 2:49Shaan Puri?

  Lifestyle wise, it definitely is.

• 2:52Sam Parr?

  Like, it's a huge, that is a huge unheard of song.

• 2:56Shaan Puri?

  So this guy, basically he's a, he goes to IIT, which is like the Harvard of, of India. He's a computer science guy. He moves back to his hometown. So he goes to the big city, comes back to his hometown. And in 2004, he starts off as like a tech blogger. He's just writing tips and tricks on how to use G suite. And he creates a Gmail plugin that lets you do what's called a mail merge. And mail merge is basically like, you want to email a hundred people the same thing, but not in one group email. And not even as a BCC because you want to customize some component of their names.

• 3:28Sam Parr?

  Of this product.

• 3:30Shaan Puri?

  And so he created a plugin that just let you do that in Gmail. Cause there's a lot of services that will let you do that outside of Gmail, but like a lot of people just want to run it inside their inbox. And not like use some third party app to send, send emails. So he creates this thing and that's I think his biggest hit. But he just starts writing like, you know, how to guides on his website. His website's called digital inspiration. And so it'll be like, you know, how to calculate the percentage score in a Google form. How teachers can email your parents, the email parents using Google forms or something like that. And it's free, but then he has like a paid tier, $39 a year, $79 a year to get rid of like the branding and stuff like that. Email, you know, go past a limit of emails, something like that. And so his main mail merge thing has been downloaded seven and a half million times.

• 4:14Shaan Puri?

  And so if you assume like a, you know, 5% conversion rate to paid, he's doing 1.5 million in ARR just off of that one plugin and he's got 13 more plugins. So he's got like his whole set of things. He's got this document management app called Document Studio and it lets you create documents, certificates, invoices using Google Sheets and it's $79 million a year, 6 million downloads. He's got a notification app, $49 a year, he's got 10 million downloads. He's got a YouTube app, 8 million downloads. And then he creates one-off apps for big companies like Airbus, LinkedIn, Disney. Even the US Embassy has paid this guy to create custom G Suite things just for them. Like if you kind of blend this all together, you start doing some estimates like I DM the guy. I was like, hey, could you confirm what the numbers?

• 4:59Shaan Puri?

  I don't want to say the wrong number, but I'm going to tell the story on the pod. He didn't, he didn't reply yet, but he, um, it's pretty safe to say this guy's doing more than 10 million a year. And it could be as high as 25, 30 million. If you're like really aggressive with how much he's getting from the enterprise customers. And, um, but somewhere between 10 and I'd say 25 million is a fairly safe bet.

• 5:18Sam Parr?

  How does he have?

• 5:19Shaan Puri?

  And I saw that he had Simple useful things.

• 5:21Sam Parr?

  He had a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. Is he famous for some reason? Like what, what's, because a guy like this seems under the radar.

• 5:28Shaan Puri?

  I think his blog has a good amount of, uh, traffic. So I'm going to go open up his blog. Yeah. So his blog gets about 150,000 hits a month, uh, visitors a month. And so I think he probably just says, hey, this is made by B and then people go follow him or something.

• 5:42Sam Parr?

  What's the, uh, tax rate in India? Do you know, is it comparable to America or is it way worse or way better? What?

• 5:47Shaan Puri?

  I don't know, but I, I remember hearing at one point that only 2% of the Indian population paid taxes.

• 5:53Sam Parr?

  Really?

• 5:54Shaan Puri?

  The majority of the population just simply didn't pay taxes. This is a big problem in India because they're not banked either. So it's like, there's no way to track anything. Cash economy, you don't have a bank account. It's like, there's like, not exist.

• 6:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Taxes, no, it's not for me.

• 6:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's optional, but I think that might have changed. This was like 10 years ago. I heard that stat and I was like, what the hell? So I'm sure that's changed over time.

• 6:15Sam Parr?

  Dude, what a baller. You know, this is so great. I think that the reason it's great is because it kind of breaks your frame on what's possible because he's like, when you're in Google Docs, there's so many times where I'm like, man, I wish I just do this one thing. This just is one very, very specific thing. And I would never think this should be a product because I'm like, it's just me experiencing one tiny issue that if I learned how to program or learned how to do like this other thing, it would work perfectly fine. And this little, you know, thing is only going to save me five minutes. It's not a big deal, but this is a good example of that. That's sick. I use some of his products. They're really good.

• 6:53Shaan Puri?

  By the way, now that the paying rate, I think is 6% of the population filed the tax return.

• 7:00Shaan Puri?

  And when was this? This was 2020.

• 7:05Sam Parr?

  So you think, wow, well, good for this guy. Hopefully he's one of the 94%.

• 7:13Shaan Puri?

  Even if he is, dude, if you have like a million dollars in India, like you're a king. You know, you don't need that much money to just ball out in small towns in India. Like you are set.

• 7:24Sam Parr?

  Well, I like this guy. What's the, who's Carl Allen?

• 7:27Shaan Puri?

  All right. This is my Billy of the week.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars.

• 7:40Shaan Puri?

  This story is kind of incredible. Also came to me from a Twitter DM. The guy's name is kind of like hard to, it's not like his real name. I want to give him credit, but like, you know, I don't know what to, what to call him. His, his Twitter handle is Euro Repay, R E P E. So Euro Repay, he goes, I got a Billy of the week for you. Carl Allen. He goes, sold a garbage bag company for 100 million.

• 8:05Sam Parr?

  I got this one too. This is so funny. I got the exact same one.

• 8:08Shaan Puri?

  Full-time treasure hunter in the Bahamas. Okay. So who is this guy? You know, like the, I don't know if you watch Game of Thrones, but in Game of Thrones, it's like a song of ice and fire. This is a song of garbage and treasure. This is, this guy basically is kind of an insane story. It's very hard to even find information about this guy. I don't know if you looked him up, but there's not a lot about this guy.

• 8:30Sam Parr?

  The only thing, like they didn't cover his business. They covered the fact that he was buying like a huge yacht. Which is a great sign.

• 8:37Shaan Puri?

  All of it's about his yacht. So, all right, so here's what I do know. All right, so Carl Allen, he basically, he starts off working at this company called Heritage Bag. And Heritage Bag makes plastic trash bags. So like, they do it not just like normal trash bags, but like for medical waste, or like hospital waste, but they'll make like anything that's like, you know, ice bucket liners, you know, like they'll make takeout boxes, anything that's like mass production manufacturing for, for like this really core utility, very similar to like eggcartons.com, the story that we told on the pod before. And so, medical waste bags is their thing. He actually started off just like working there and he worked kind of like, it's like one of those stories where he worked his way up from the mailroom.

• 9:19Shaan Puri?

  He had like one job, then he climbed up, then he got into business development, then he became the director of business development. Then eventually he becomes the CEO and eventually he buys the company. And I don't know how he pulled this off. I tried to find this. I could not find how this employee ended up owning the company, but he did. He ends up owning the company and it's a boring business based in Dallas, you know, selling trash bags. And then he sells it for something like 300 or 400 million dollars to, I think, a private equity firm. So they've, they've got 800 employees, they've been around for 30, 40 years, something like that. And they sell. And, and so they, you know, they do this and then he's like, all right, what do I do with my life now? And at the age of 12, he had visited the Bahamas and he was like, wow, I love the Bahamas. This is just a magical place. He always had this idea.

• 10:05Shaan Puri?

  And so he, he looks at this place that, this island and he calls up the owner and he's like, hey, you know, are you, would you ever be interested in selling? They're like, no, we've been asked before, we won't sell this thing. It's a 92 year old woman. She's like, no, we won't sell it to some big corporation that's just going to ruin it. He goes, no, no, no ma'am, I'm not a big corporation. I'm a family guy, I'm a family owned business.

• 10:27Sam Parr?

  I'm just a rich guy.

• 10:29Shaan Puri?

  I'm just a guy with a handful of yachts and I need a place to park them. And basically he convinces this woman to sell, they sell 50 years after they had originally bought it. He buys this island and turns it into like his own little fishing, boating and exploring place. So he's got now three parts of his business. He's got philanthropy, he's got his family office where he invests. And now he's got his island business, his yachting business, his fishing business. And he owns a handful of yachts. He's got like 80 foot yacht.

• 10:59Sam Parr?

  He calls it an exploration business.

• 11:02Shaan Puri?

  Well, he's got his, yeah, he's got his exploration business, but I think he also calls his investing his exploration business. I don't know. It's a little confusing, but Alan Exploration, I think is the owner of them. But either way, go to his YouTube channel. Did you watch any of his YouTube videos?

• 11:15Sam Parr?

  Sick. Yeah, the guy's, the guy's amazing.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Let me tell you a story about a young man with a dream.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  A dream of sailing the sea, living life with the ones he loves. Discovering all the world has to offer.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  A dream of exploration.

• 11:58Sam Parr?

  It only has 41,000 views.

• 12:01Shaan Puri?

  41,000 views and it's basically his channel where he is, he believes that there are billions of dollars of lost treasures in the sea. He's like, there have been three million shipwrecks. He's like, and when something is lost at sea, it's not lost. It's just at the bottom. He's like, it's still there. It didn't go anywhere. It's still there and we just have to go find it. And he did this because he met some guy who was a treasure hunter who had made millions of dollars finding treasures in the ocean. And he was fascinated by this guy and he's like, let's do this. I want to do this. And so he started doing this and he's looking for like these treasures where it's like King Philip from Spain had this like. You know, Armada coming over and it got lost at sea back in the whatever,

• 12:43Shaan Puri?

  you know, the year 1200 or whatever. And he's like, we gotta go find that because there were these like crazy gold things and whatever. And he wants to create a museum of the things that he finds and he's found a bunch of treasures. He's found this long gold chain. He's found like all kinds of stuff down there and he puts it in his little museum on his island in the Bahamas. And it's just like, and it's a public, it's a private island. I mean, he owns it, but he keeps it open to the public. It's not like nobody can come. And so people can come, they can visit, they can park their boats there, all that stuff. So isn't this kind of amazing? Like what a dope life this guy is living.

• 13:16Sam Parr?

  It's, this is amazing for a couple of different reasons. One, it's so fun to give in to these obsessions. So you say like, well, what's the point of spending your life looking for treasure? It's like, cause it's sick, cause it's awesome, right? Like it's exciting. That's an exciting chase. You should do that. And it is actually, I'm sure there's some like historical value. Uh, I actually had a guy send me a pitch deck on investing in his like hunt. And I was like, no, I'm not even gonna.

• 13:41Shaan Puri?

  No way.

• 13:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah. I was like, not, not a chance. Like I don't know anything about this. This sounds like this. Of course this sounds intoxicating and I love it, but like I have to avoid that. But number two, I've been thinking about this phrase. Make the, make 12 year old me, make 12 year old Sam proud. And I, cause I remember like making some money and I remember someone being like, and I was like, was fretting over like doing one thing or the other thing. And it was an awesome thing, but I was like, it costs too much. And someone's like, yeah, but it's sick. Like it's awesome. Like what, well, like, you know, if, when you were 12, this is what you always wanted to do. And I'm like, you're right. Why am I being such a boner? I should just do this thing.

• 14:19Sam Parr?

  And, and now like, I do think that's a good life motto, which is like, whatever 12 year old you wanted, not all things, but some things. You gotta give into those indulgences and this guy is awesome. I'm a big fan of.

• 14:32Shaan Puri?

  Well, the, we get this question a lot. Oh, what would you go back and tell your 20 year old self, right? Well, if you were 21 again, what advice would you give your 21 year old self? And you hate that question. I know you.

• 14:43Sam Parr?

  I hate that question because I say, no, they say, if you had to start over again, what would you do? And I'd be like, I would have done the same thing. Cause that's what I'm skilled at. And that's what I'm good at. You want, you want me to give you an easy answer? Like I don't know what you're good at.

• 14:54Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so you're like, that's the question people always ask, but I, I'm with you. I want the opposite, which is what advice would your 21 year old self give you? Cause it's very easy to lose the plot. The older you get, the more responsible you get, the more practical you get, the more like you get lower energy, less risk, all that stuff. And there's like a version of you that's like, I don't know if it's 12 year old or the 21 year old, but in either case, that like, the goal was to have the most fun and do awesome things. And it wasn't thinking about like, how to save for retirement. That's not, that wasn't on your mind back then. And so I think that for most people, the risk is not that they're playing life too risky. It's that they're playing life way too safe.

• 15:37Shaan Puri?

  And that the 12 year old view or the 21 year old view, you would look at yourself and be like, oh man, I grew up and I got kind of lame. Ah damn, like, I'm just kind of like this out of shape guy who complains a bunch and like, you know, is like saving money for when they're even older. Like dude, you're already old. And so like, you know, I, I think that for most people, they actually need to go the other way. They need to have more fun. They need to live more childlike. They need to have just more silliness, fun, adventure in their life, and they need to take a little more risk and play less safe. I would say that that is the majority of people. And actually people treat it like it's the opposite. They think, I need, they think that the, they think the advice is you need to be responsible. You need to play it safer, right? Life needs to be more serious.

• 16:22Shaan Puri?

  And it's like, no, actually life needs to be way less serious.

• 16:24Sam Parr?

  Have you ever seen a, that one of the very, it's about 10 years old. So it was one of the early viral YouTube videos and this, this guy, he's in his 30, at this point in his 40s, he, when he was eight, he recorded himself saying, hey Jonah, what's going on? And he, he's like, as an eight year old, anticipated that he wanted to make a video in his 30s, where he was going to have a conversation with himself. And it's, you know, older and is now, at the time 30s Jonah, having a conversation with eight Jonah. He's like, hey, what's going on Jonah? And he's like, are you still playing with this? And he like held up a toy and he was like, and the older Jonah was like, no, I'm not. And he's clearly sad. And the younger Jonah was like, because you really love doing this. And we love drawing it and we love reading cartoons about this.

• 17:09Sam Parr?

  And right now I think I want to grow up and be a cartoonist where I talk about this. And the older Jonah's like, Oh, man, I kinda like quit doing that when I didn't have time, but I actually still love it. And this video went viral and I believe it kinda kicked off his career where he was able to start making movies and cartoons like he used to be into. And whenever I watch that video, I get inspired. I'm like, what would, when I was eight, like, what would he say? Like, whoa, you said you were gonna do this. Why aren't you?

• 17:36Shaan Puri?

  Right. And I actually, I don't think the answer is you do what the 12-year-old you wanted to do. Cause maybe 12-year-old, you just wanted certain dumb things or only knew about certain things. But it's more like, if I was just explaining this to the 12-year-old me, would they nod and be like, okay, that's dope. I didn't know that. Hopefully, you know, that's crazy, but like, that makes a lot of sense. Like, that sounds awesome. That sounds fun versus like, just do what the 12-year-old wants. And I think you're absolutely right that like, people, in general, the happiest people are the ones who are most childlike. What are the traits of a child? A child is generally very curious about the world. They don't just like think that they know it all, right? A child is generally like looking to have fun. They're looking to play, not just work and grind, right?

• 18:20Shaan Puri?

  Like, I've never heard a 12-year-old on that grind set. You know, like 12-year-olds are looking to play. They're looking to have a blast. And like, guess what? That's what you should be trying to do too. And so, you know, everything, I think about like, if I went back to the 13-year-old me and I was like, dude, this is our wife. And they'd be like, what? It's like, yeah, yeah, we get to be with her. Like, she likes me. And he would be like, oh, dude, awesome. Like, wow, this turned out amazing. That would be like something I would brag to my 13-year-olds up like, dude, we pulled this. Like, that would be so sick.

• 18:55Sam Parr?

  You get to have sex?

• 18:56Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 19:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, dude, it happened.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Our software is the worst.

• 19:08Speaker 04

  Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled together mess. But HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot, grow better.

• 19:22Sam Parr?

  You want to do this last one?

• 19:23Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah. Okay. So the last one I wanted to do was an update on Sarah's list. Okay. So for those who are new to the pod, back, I don't know, how long ago was this? Like a year ago?

• 19:34Sam Parr?

  Only a year ago. I was in New York. Yeah, it was a year.

• 19:37Shaan Puri?

  So let me go look at this video. So we did a video. It's on YouTube. September 7th. Oh, almost exactly. September 17th, 2021 is September 19th today. Wow. So two, you know, basically a year to the day. We did this thing, 12 startups where stock grants can make you a millionaire. And this was inspired by your wife, Sarah, who basically was a self-made millionaire. And we said, oh, how'd she do it? Did she invent the next big thing? Did she make this crazy investment that paid off? And you're like, no, she just like worked at good companies. And like a good job, not, she wasn't CEO or C-suite.

• 20:12Sam Parr?

  Normal job.

• 20:14Shaan Puri?

  Normal job at a good tech company. And like, yeah, like, think about it this way, like, you know, they give you a job offer that will pay you, you know, let's say 50K, just to use round numbers, 50K a year in stock compensation. So you maybe you make 150, then you get 50 of stock. So over four years, you got 200K of stock. Well, if that company goes up 5X in value during those four years, which many tech companies do, it's a million dollars of stock that you got. She's a self-made millionaire.

• 20:42Sam Parr?

  A lot of, and a lot of these companies will give you like maybe a hundred thousand dollars a year in stock. And Airbnb's case, that, I don't know what it went up, but I think it probably went up five or six times. I don't remember.

• 20:55Shaan Puri?

  And your wife had done this at Facebook. She worked at Facebook. She worked at Airbnb. Did she work at another one over those?

• 21:00Sam Parr?

  She worked at Everlane, but I don't think they've had an exit yet.

• 21:04Shaan Puri?

  And so she had done this and I was just like, kind of, and it's also like, dude, those were obvious. It's not like she was like, oh, she was one of the first 10 employees at Airbnb. It's like, no, she joined and Airbnb had how many employees? It was like hundreds, if not thousands, right?

• 21:17Sam Parr?

  No, it was, I think it was either 900 or 1,000. It was six years ago, maybe. So they, they weren't new.

• 21:24Shaan Puri?

  And do you remember the valuation at that time, like roughly?

• 21:26Sam Parr?

  I think it was 18. I think it was 18 billion. And when they IPOed at the peak, I think it was worth 110.

• 21:35Shaan Puri?

  Okay, yeah, 100 billion. So let's say 5X there at that peak. And so anyway, so she had done this and I just thought that was amazing. I thought this is like the most underreported story in like, you know, podcasts or tech news or Twitter.

• 21:49Sam Parr?

  Well, you're missing the, you're missing one of the big parts was the reason it's underreported is it's not that unique, you know, there's thousands of people who work here. There's hundreds of thousands of people who collectively work at maybe it's millions, actually millions of people who work these types of gigs.

• 22:05Shaan Puri?

  She's not a programmer either. She's not like a engineer. There's not like some barrier that you needed. Oh, I can't do it. I'm not, I don't know how to code. I can't work at a tech company. No, she's a non-technical person. She's skilled, but she's non-technical at a tech company. And so anyways, we were like, we basically made a list called Sarah's List, which was what are the, what are the dozen companies that we would bet on today that we think if you just went, you got that job, you got that stock package that's worth, let's say a quarter million dollars today, that that can 4X, it could turn into a million dollars over your four-year vest. So.

• 22:38Sam Parr?

  Are we going to recap this and see how we did?

• 22:40Shaan Puri?

  Yes. So I have the numbers, I have the numbers here. So I'm going to read you the companies and then I'm going to read you where we were right, where we were wrong. Cause one of the companies on here just got acquired. So the reason this came up was Figma just got acquired. And Figma was on our list. It was number seven on our list. They weren't in order. It was just like one of the ones we listed. And Figma got acquired just now for $20 billion. And when we had done the, the thing, Figma was at 2 billion. So that was a 10X.

• 23:09Sam Parr?

  Was it really?

• 23:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Figma was at 2 billion later, like 12 months later, it got valued at, or sorry, in between, it had also gotten valued at 10 billion. So it's kind of depends on the timing, but when we did the pod, the last known valuation was 2 billion, I believe. And so that was their series D. And so.

• 23:29Shaan Puri?

  So yeah, so basically that's a 10x from where we were at. So you go get that $200,000, you know, stock package.

• 23:35Sam Parr?

  Which is, yeah, they invest over four years. So $200,000 stock package is $50,000 a year, which is incredibly reasonable for.

• 23:44Shaan Puri?

  That's like a, yeah, more like an entry level, very junior position there. Whereas you can get 100K a year. So you might've had 400K in total stock. That'd be 4 million that you're sitting on. It's so hard to make $4 million in cash. Like, it is not that easy. And this is one of the like, you know, easier ways to do it. So, um, so I think that's kind of underrated. All right. So let me give you the companies on the list. We had Flexport, Zapier, Uniswap, Anduril, the defense company, Replit, the developer tools company, or the developer company, Airtable, Figma, Rippling, Openstore, Fair, Next Health, and OneTrust. Okay, so those are the companies. Now I'm going to read you where they were at and where they're,

• 24:26Shaan Puri?

  where they are, where they are now. Um, out of the 12, I'll just tell you right now that all but two of them, I believe, all but two of them are up. Um, and the other two, it's just they haven't raised another round. So we don't know, but there's a reason to believe where they might be up. One, Uniswap might be down just because crypto has like gone down in total value. Um, so Uniswap might be down, but only Zapier and Uniswap are not marked up. So already you're up if you're, if you're in any of these.

• 24:57Sam Parr?

  And Zapier is not marked up because they, their whole shtick is they don't want to raise, they're like, we bootstrapped, we raised this one round of funding, we're not raising anymore until we go public.

• 25:06Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So you're still likely up, it's just not marked. Okay, so Flexport, when we had done it, it was at 3 billion, it's now at 8 billion. So almost a 3x markup. Um, okay, Zapier and Uniswap we talked about, okay, Anduril, when we talked about it was a 4.6 billion, now it's at 6.6. So not, not huge markup, but you're up, you know, whatever, 50%.

• 25:28Shaan Puri?

  Um, replit, replit, when we had done it, um, when we had talked about it, I think the last known valuation at that time was 200 million. It raised again at 800 million. I invested in that round. So I, and, and so I know that it's actually worth more today because I get emails and phone calls from these groups that are trying to buy my replit stock. They're like, hey, we are willing to buy $5 million, up to $5 million of your replit stock. And so I think that replits probably valued today on the open market more than 800 million, but that's the last one they, they know that. So at least a 4X markup, likely more like 8X is my guess on replit. Um, airtable, airtable was at 2 billion when we did it 2.3.

• 26:09Shaan Puri?

  It's now at 11. So a 5X, 5X jump on, on, on airtable. Um, Figma, we just talked about 2 billion now, it got bought for 20, so 10X. Um, rippling, rippling was 6 billion when we talked about it. It's now at 11. So double. Open store was 250 million when we talked about it. And that was the only exception. It was the one that was lowest when we talked about it as a valuation. It's now at $750 million.

• 26:34Sam Parr?

  What was it? What was it when we started?

• 26:36Shaan Puri?

  250.

• 26:37Sam Parr?

  And now it's what?

• 26:38Shaan Puri?

  750. Wow. 750. Um, fair, fair was at 7 billion. It's now at 12.5. So a little under double. Um, next health was at 400 million. Now it's at a billion. So a little more than double, two and a half X. And one trust was at 2.7 billion, now at 5 billion, uh, 5.3 billion. So another, another 2X.

• 27:00Sam Parr?

  Pretty good. We did good. Yeah. All right.

• 27:03Shaan Puri?

  Good. Yo, where's my Larry David clip?

• 27:06Sam Parr?

  Pretty good. It's pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.

• 27:12Shaan Puri?

  Pretty good.

• 27:13Sam Parr?

  Keep in mind, we made these predictions at the beginning of like the best tech bull market, not of all time, but a really good one. So a lot of these valuations could be completely nonsense. You know, like at that time, we could have thrown at a dartboard and picked 10 random startups and the likelihood that they would have raised us.

• 27:32Shaan Puri?

  And, and now it's down, but the valuations I'm giving you are the afters are all 2022 valuations.

• 27:38Sam Parr?

  Wow. All right. So a few takeaways. One, exponential growth, hard to completely understand. Like thinking like, can this two or three or four X? For most people, myself included, it's a, it's, it's an exercise to understand what that means.

• 27:53Shaan Puri?

  Read the Figma, read the Figma revenue numbers. You have those, right?

• 27:57Sam Parr?

  I don't know if I can.

• 27:59Shaan Puri?

  They're publicly available.

• 28:00Sam Parr?

  Oh.

• 28:00Shaan Puri?

  They're out. When this deal came out, they came out.

• 28:03Sam Parr?

  All right, keep talking and I'll find it.

• 28:05Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so basically, you're right, exponential growth is astounding. And so you look at these companies, I've talked about this before where when we were getting acquired, we had a chance to get Discord stock. And it was like, oh, Discord is valued at 2 billion. Wow, it's already at 2 billion. It's like, well, we need to believe for us to take this deal. It's like, well, we need to think that it's going to get over 6 billion. I don't know. Its last valuation was 15 billion. So even me, who's in the, in the industry, in the space, I am a tech investor. It's just hard to fathom these companies becoming worth not just billions, but tens of billions, not just tens of billions, but even up to 100 billion in value. That is just very, very hard to fathom.

• 28:44Sam Parr?

  Here's Figma's growth. And the reason why this is astounding is because I heard what their valuation was, which was 10 billion. I thought, that is ridiculous. I heard these numbers and then I thought, huh, that's actually not that crazy. So in 2017, they started charging customers. In 2018, they're at 4.1 million in revenue. In 2019, 23 million. 2020, 77 million. 2021, 100 million. And check this out, 2022 goal, and they're on pace to hit it, 450 million dollars. So in the course of six years, they went from 0 to 450 million dollars in very

• 29:29Shaan Puri?

  Recurring revenue.

• 29:30Sam Parr?

  Sticky, sticky revenue. Like, and their product does everything. They built a ton.

• 29:35Shaan Puri?

  Some of those jumps. What were the first jumps? So it goes 0, then it goes from 0 to what, 2 or 4?

• 29:40Sam Parr?

  4, 20. So here's the order. 4, 25, 75, and then this sucked, 100, and then 450. 100 to 450 is astronomical. That is huge.

• 29:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think there's the, there's like a, a thing in SaaS that SaaS investors look for is called triple, triple, double, double. I don't know if you've seen this, but basically.

• 30:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they like triple, triple, double, triple, triple.

• 30:07Shaan Puri?

  Well, they did more than a triple. They did from four to 20, something that's five X. So they did more than a triple. Then they did 20, 20 to 75, 25 to 75 or whatever. So then they did a triple for five, five triple. And then they did double. And then they did another double, then they did a, another 4.5 X. So it's just kind of insane.

• 30:26Sam Parr?

  It's crazy. So.

• 30:28Shaan Puri?

  And obviously helped by like, you know, remote work. Cause like Figma is basically like a tool for designers and product people to share designs. Um, like, you know, a designer will send me a mock up. I add my comments. I can move stuff around. I could see their mouse moving. It's almost like we're working on the same thing together right next to each other. Even though we're miles and miles apart. And, uh, and by the way, amazing story. This is also another teal fellowship, uh, win. And so.

• 30:51Sam Parr?

  It's crazy.

• 30:52Shaan Puri?

  This guy started this thing when he was 21 years old, like 19, 20, 21 years old. And, um, you know, was been building this. There was like a five year buildup where he, they didn't make any revenue. He was just building the product slowly, but surely, and then got to a private beta and then a public beta, and then finally started charging people. You know, I think the company was founded like 2011 and then it started making money in 2017.

• 31:14Shaan Puri?

  Even if I had this idea, there is no way five years later, I'm still doing this idea in the middle of that. By the way, there was the ICO boom in, in crypto in 2017. You know, guess where my head would have turned? I'd have been like, oh, whoa, I should be doing that over there, right? In between then there's like, you know, just waves and waves of other interesting, exciting, sexy things that, and he just didn't take his eye off the ball. They just kept going, kept building and, and they won.

• 31:38Sam Parr?

  So the two more things that are harder to understand. The, the first one I said was it's hard to understand exponential growth. Number two, it always seems late. So if I bet a lot of reactions, if we go and read the comment section was this seems overvalued. This is already too big. You know, there's no meat up left on this bone. It always seems too late and that goes back to exponential growth is hard to understand. So like, if I told you like your home that you're in right now might be worth $10 million in 20 years. You'd be like, there's no way. And you say, well, that's just like, you know, 4% growth for the next 20 years. And it's already grown 4% for the trailing 50 years. Like, they're like, okay, I understand logically, but like when you say that number, it's quite hard to understand. And the last thing, which is every startup we named.

• 32:20Sam Parr?

  It's not like they're unknown. It's all pretty obvious shit. If you Googled best startups to work at, I bet you six of the 12 that we named were on some type of list. And granted, we're not playing with our lives here. We're just naming 12 things and we got 10 out of 12, right? You know, like, if you're in that 11th or 12th one, that might stink, but like, we're not that smart. We're 7.5s out of 10 in terms of industry knowledge and we got, like, it wasn't that hard.

• 32:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, totally. And so I think, I think there's a couple, couple other takeaways with this too, which is, you said, you said it right. It's really easy to think you're too late on these tech winners. And what I would say is when there's actually a tech winner, when they, when they actually have the fundamentals, they have a great product and they're winning in the market and their growth rate is like, you know, real. These things can get a lot bigger than you think. I remember reading when Facebook got valued at 15 billion by Microsoft and they had like no revenue at the time. Very, you know, or they had like, I don't know, maybe a few hundred million in revenue, but it wasn't like, it just seemed like, how big is this social network thing gonna be? And like, if somebody at that time was saying, and I'm sure there were a few people, but somebody at the time was saying,

• 33:32Shaan Puri?

  yeah, this is gonna end up being a trillion dollar company. I'd be like, there's no, you know, is there such a thing as a trillion dollar company? That's insane, right? Like, I've told the story before, one of the biggest mistakes I made, one of the worst investments I made was an investment I made right. And that means I invested in Tesla and Tesla was at 2 billion. And I put all the money I had straight out of college, I put it into Tesla at 2 billion. And I rode it up till it was at 7 billion or something like that and I cashed out at 3X. And I remember at the time thinking, okay, General Motors and these other, whoever the biggest ones at the time, I think they were at 20 something billion, maybe they're 25 billion. I don't remember the exact numbers, but something like that. And I was like, one day Tesla could be, you know, half as big or maybe even as big as those companies. It just seemed like that was the roof. That was the ceiling on how big these could be.

• 34:18Shaan Puri?

  And then Tesla went up and became at one point a trillion dollar company. Now it's come back down to like, you know, whatever half, but.

• 34:25Shaan Puri?

  My 2 billion could have been, become a trillion, basically, in terms of

• 34:28Sam Parr?

  What would you have made, you think? How much did you put in 25,000?

• 34:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I had like 25 grand in it.

• 34:33Sam Parr?

  And so what's, what's that?

• 34:34Shaan Puri?

  Something like that.

• 34:35Sam Parr?

  Is that 100? I can't even do that. Is that?

• 34:37Shaan Puri?

  I had done the math at one point, and this wasn't the peak. But at one point, it was like, I would have had $6 million from that 25K. It was like a great angel investment. And again, this felt late, like Tesla was already out, successful. Elon Musk was a, he's not what he is today, but he was a known person, right? Like, I'm talking about, this was back in probably 2013-ish, 2012, 20, something like that.

• 35:00Sam Parr?

  Dude, we should do another one of these episodes, because I think there's a lot of great companies right now that valuations are low, where in 10 or 15 years, when there's another great market, things will be drastically different. You know, this will be one of those things where you're saying, in 10 years, you're going to wish you would have done what we're suggesting.

• 35:19Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 35:20Sam Parr?

  And we should do another one of these.

• 35:21Shaan Puri?

  I even had people build me like a website for this, like a sick-looking website. I think we should do this. Me and you, I think, should own a job board called Sarah's List, and we should just keep this updated.

• 35:31Sam Parr?

  Well, did you think that I tweeted? I tweeted out, I was like, yeah, like, I think this is a great way to make wealth. Whereas like, but like researching these is a bit challenging. And that tweet got seen by millions, not millions of people, hun- many hundreds of thousands of people, and a lot of really good replies. And there were some cool things, startups that were mentioned, and different job boards, but nothing where it's like, perfect, where, where, where, where I think it needs to be. But yeah, I agree.

• 35:58Shaan Puri?

  All right. I think that's it. That's a wrap.