5 Big Ideas for a Business with Greg Isenberg

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) sit down with entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Greg Isenberg (@gregisenberg), to talk about big ideas for a new business and much more. ----- Links: * 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. * Will Smith slap: https://youtu.be/z4t1CC7-UFE ----- Show Notes: (02:30) - Reaction to Will Smith slapping Chris Rock (15:10) - Business Idea #1 (25:50) - Business Idea #2 (27:50) - Business Idea #3 (33:20) - Business Idea #4 (37:20) - Business Idea #5 ----- 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.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  Why does everyone hate on getting rich quick? Get rich quick schemes are the best. I want to get rich quick. I don't want to get rich slow.

• 0:16Greg Isenberg?

  It's actually colder here than the Arctic Circle.

• 0:23Sam Parr?

  Why do you live there?

• 0:25Greg Isenberg?

  Well, I mostly live in Miami IRS, if you're listening to this. But I'm sometimes in a mountain town in the middle of nowhere. Sam, I saw you posted today that you've got about 20 acres in Texas, but I'm staring out at 95 acres of Arctic winterland right now.

• 0:48Sam Parr?

  Is that cool or no?

• 0:50Greg Isenberg?

  I mean, I love it out here. I'm from here. So for me, it's it's slow living. It's nice. Yeah, I love it.

• 1:00Shaan Puri?

  Is that why you look like a pilot right now in the cockpit? Or what's going on here?

• 1:07Greg Isenberg?

  I mean, Sahil makes Sahil Blue, my co-host on the Where It Happens pod. We do it together and he always makes fun of this, but I'm a gamer. So I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid to admit it.

• 1:20Shaan Puri?

  Be who you are, man. Be who you are.

• 1:24Shaan Puri?

  Greg, so you're here because I don't even know why you were talking. We weren't even, I don't even know what we were saying. We were talking about the Will Smith thing. You had some hot takes. Sam had some hot takes. How can we start with anything else but the bitch slap of the century? Will Smith bitch slaps Chris Rock for making fun of his wife.

• 1:44Shaan Puri?

  We, I think we have a different opinion on each one of these things. Sam, give me your first, where were you when it happened? How did you hear about it? What was your first take?

• 1:51Sam Parr?

  I was laying in bed and I hear Sarah goes, oh my gosh, you gotta come down and watch this. This is crazy. And I saw it and here's the thing.

• 2:01Shaan Puri?

  Are you the type, by the way, do you just go or do you wait? You ask, what is it?

• 2:05Sam Parr?

  No, I go right away. I can tell.

• 2:07Shaan Puri?

  All right. That's a good guy right there.

• 2:09Sam Parr?

  So here's the thing. Listen. I tweeted about this right away. People were like, well, what would you do? The truth is maybe the same thing. I maybe would do the same thing, but that's wrong. And if I would have ran up there and bitch slapped Chris Rock, I would have been tackled and taken away. And he should too. That's what should have happened. I wanted to see him tackled and taken away, or at least not allowed to be on stage for five minutes to an accepted award. That is ridiculous to me. I cannot believe that happened.

• 2:41Shaan Puri?

  Greg, give me your, where were you? What was your initial reaction?

• 2:46Greg Isenberg?

  So my girlfriend texts me and she's like, you're not going to believe what just happened. Will Smith just slapped Chris Rock. And then she's like, wait, I don't know if it was a slap. Maybe it was a punch. And so there was this confusion. There was this like five minute confusion where people didn't know what it was. So first place I go to is on Twitter. I'm on Twitter. And I, I looked at the video and I was like, I couldn't believe it was happening, right? It was like, you remember when Janet Jackson with the whole Super Bowl thing?

• 3:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 3:16Greg Isenberg?

  Like, I feel like I remember what hap- where I was with nine 11. I remember what happens when the Janet Jackson boob incident of the Super Bowl.

• 3:24Sam Parr?

  It's like, OJ.

• 3:25Greg Isenberg?

  And then now Will Smith. Yeah, now Will Smith. So I wasn't happy with the videos that were coming out. But I found the Japanese and Australian videos. Did you guys see those?

• 3:38Sam Parr?

  For sure.

• 3:39Shaan Puri?

  The uncensored, uncut versions?

• 3:42Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and that one where you got a better view of the punch. You know, I needed a better view.

• 3:50Shaan Puri?

  It was, it was a slap though. I don't know how good your view was. It was a slap.

• 3:54Greg Isenberg?

  It was, yeah, okay. It was a slap. But what bugged me about the whole thing, and I'm glad you invited me to talk about Will Smith, because you know, that's why I'm here, is I think that, okay, obviously it was a douchey thing of Will Smith to do. But I was.

• 4:15Greg Isenberg?

  Unimpressed with how Chris Rock wasn't able to make a joke of the whole thing and he could have made comedic history and he didn't. And I expected more from him.

• 4:27Shaan Puri?

  Wow, disappointed with Chris Rock. That is not the take I thought was gonna come. That's why we bring Greg on for the, when everybody zigs, you zag with the new take.

• 4:35Sam Parr?

  But dude, Chris Rock, crazy impressive. He took it, man. He did handle it. He took it. He did tear up. He did, like, when you get punched in the face sometimes, you're not like crying, but your eyes water. None of that happened. He kept smiling and he was a pro man.

• 4:51Shaan Puri?

  Sam, you know what happens. If you get hit in the side of the head, what's the first thing that you feel or hear?

• 4:56Sam Parr?

  You, your ears hurt and you want to like grab your face.

• 4:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you, you hear this ringing buzz, like the sound. You hear this just giant ringing and then you gotta touch your face. He didn't touch his face. That, you gotta give him respect for the chin that he showed.

• 5:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, the round, that was a 10-9 Chris Rock round.

• 5:14Shaan Puri?

  But then Greg's right, actually. He had, I mean, the world was his oyster with all the potential jokes that he could have gone with, the one-liners.

• 5:23Sam Parr?

  Like, I can't believe, I can't believe they had you in Ali or something like that.

• 5:28Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. You know, I don't even know what the joke should have been. You know, Greg, what, what, what direction would you have gone with the joke?

• 5:36Greg Isenberg?

  I would have said, and the winner to the biggest bitch slap award 2022 goes to William Smith.

• 5:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. Could have given him the Oscar for bitch slap of the year.

• 5:50Sam Parr?

  Wait, but honestly, what was your take, though?

• 5:53Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so I'm, I'm outside of a cold stone, just gave my daughter some ice cream. We're trying to get back to the car. I don't know if you know how it is, getting kids in the cars, like, that's the battle every day. That's, that's the battle. In fact, there's a great Louis CK joke where he's like, The greatest moment of any Father's Day is the like 30 seconds from when you close the door and you have them in the car seat and you walk around the car back to the driver's car seat. It's like the 30 seconds of peace that you have in that moment. That's everything. So I'm trying to get in the car and my wife is stopped. She's stunned. She's doing the like, oh my God face, looking at her phone, almost to, it was like a cartoon character. And I was like, what? It can't like, whatever it is, it can't be, can't be much. And then she was like, no, Will Smith just punched Chris Rock. I was like, what?

• 6:38Shaan Puri?

  And so then I watched the video. She made me pull over. We were driving. I pulled over to watch the Japanese uncensored version because we just had to like debrief it in the moment. And I was team Will Smith. I thought it was awesome. Frankly, the only part that I thought was not cool. The only part I thought was not cool was that when they first said the joke, he's laughing at the joke. So, bro, you can't laugh at the joke, admit that it's funny. And then basically two seconds later, build up this rage and then pretend it was so not cool when it was, you were laughing. Like, we caught you on camera laughing two seconds before that.

• 7:14Sam Parr?

  You don't think that he should have any consequences?

• 7:16Shaan Puri?

  No, no, I didn't say that. He should have consequences. Sure. Okay. Sure. Lock him up. Throw away the key. Whatever you gotta do.

• 7:21Sam Parr?

  No, no, jail times. I don't even think, I'm not, I don't even want, I don't want handcuffs. I don't want jail. Just like a, hey, Will, you can't hit someone. You gotta leave. Like, that would have been, that would have been sufficient.

• 7:31Shaan Puri?

  Well, the thing they showed in the, I don't know, the Taiwanese cut, they had the, the commercial break. I don't know if you guys saw this. Somebody comes running up to him. I think, oh, wow, they're gonna be like, dude, what the fuck? We need to get you out of here. Sorry. It's his publicist just immediately giving him notes on how to play this. And so when he goes up for his speech, what do you know? The first line he says is, you know, Richard Williams was a fierce, like protector of his family. That's the publicist handing him the, feeding him the line of how are you gonna spin this to your advantage? Who hates a guy who protects his family?

• 8:06Sam Parr?

  Dude, I think-

• 8:07Shaan Puri?

  And guess what? It worked.

• 8:08Sam Parr?

  I watched his speech. I think he's losing it. So in a way, I feel sorry for him. I definitely feel a little sorry.

• 8:15Shaan Puri?

  He looked a little off, right?

• 8:16Sam Parr?

  He looked a little off. He looked like he's kind of, he's getting a little, little, something's going on. And I hope he could, I hope he works through it and gets back. And also there, dude, him and his wife, man, that's some weird stuff. Like what's going on? Like, hey, did you see that thing called Red Table that her show where she just like, did a whole show with him on there, talking about how she cheated on him and everything like that. And then she went to an award show.

• 8:39Shaan Puri?

  But I watch everything that's trashy like that. So yeah, I saw it. I saw it twice.

• 8:42Sam Parr?

  Man, so like, that's weird to me a little bit. So, uh, there's like a, but this dynamic is, was weird. He's got a lot of pressure on him. I think he just kind of snapped. I think he's working through some stuff, but dude, but so I feel a little sad for him.

• 8:55Shaan Puri?

  Everybody knows a couple that's like this, where they're like, kind of toxic. They're like toxically in love with each other. It's like they got some weird Bonnie and Clyde shit where they're like, they're kind of like, they like make the wrong decisions. Sometimes they even like, you know, hurt each other's feelings. But then they're like, if anybody else ever tries to encroach, they like will murder for them. And it's like, bro, where's the balance here? It's like us against the world. They love this, like us, there's these us against the world couples and they're definitely one of them.

• 9:22Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it was messed up. Do you want to talk about, uh, Alex Hermosy? Hermosy? Mosey?

• 9:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. What did you do? You were like, bro, I'm going deep on Alex Hermosy. I was like, we are, so would have been nice to do before we had him on the pod. You do it like 10 episodes later.

• 9:38Sam Parr?

  I had a call with him today. Greg, you know who this guy is?

• 9:43Greg Isenberg?

  I don't know who's that.

• 9:45Sam Parr?

  All right. Actually, I feel bad. I consider him a friend, but I don't, I don't know if it's pronounced Mosey or Mazi. Alex Hermosy? Is it? No, Mazi. Alex Hermosy.

• 9:53Greg Isenberg?

  It's one of those things where it's like two, like you've known him for a decade. And it's like, you can't ask him now.

• 9:59Shaan Puri?

  You know, you gotta be like, ah, I just call him Maz. I just go by Maz.

• 10:05Sam Parr?

  Dude, one of my best friends' name is Siav. I don't even know how to pronounce his last name. So, and I've been best friends with him for 10 years. He's in my wedding. So anyway, this guy Alex, so basically he had this company called Gym Launch. And it was really interesting because some people, and I wouldn't call myself totally on that side, but I understand it is, it appeared a little scammy, but actually I don't think it's scammy at all anymore. He ended up-

• 10:29Shaan Puri?

  Wait, wait, wait. Sam, you gotta describe the guy's look first.

• 10:32Sam Parr?

  So he's got, he looks like a straight version of the construction worker in the village, in the village, what's it, the village people. I mean, he looks like a construction worker, so he wears flannel. He's got this beautiful thick mustache, long, awesome hair, like a, like a Persian Samson. And he is just yoked. He's jacked. He's huge. And he's like, good looking. And he just, he's like, looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger a little bit. And he created this business called Gym Launch. And basically you would pay either $4,000 for one thing, or $20,000 for another thing. And it was for people who owned small gyms, whether that's a CrossFit gym or a personal training gym.

• 11:13Sam Parr?

  And he would basically teach you how to make your gym better because he owned gyms. And he would promise you something like, uh, you'll gain at least $75,000 in new revenue. But for a lot of people, he averaged that they would improve by $200,000 in revenue. But the business model that he had was crazy and the results were even crazier. So the business was, by the time the business was four years old, he bootstrapped it and had paid himself $45 million in dividends. And then on the fifth year, I believe, he sold it and he netted something like 50 or 60 million dollars. And so he was like, yeah, I paid myself $45 million. So I had about 25 million just in cash in the bank. Then we sold and I netted like another 50. And that story alone is crazy. Is that right, Sean?

• 11:57Shaan Puri?

  I don't know if those exact numbers are right. It sounds like you talked to him, so let's go with that. I don't really know, but, but yeah, but you got the, the product right. The, the, the kind of the hook or what's interesting is most gym memberships are like, you know, pay $20 a month and you get into a membership and like, it's hard to sell people that. And what he was ended up doing was he was like, all right, well, people don't want a membership. What do they really want? They want to lose weight. They want to lose weight in six weeks or less. They want to lose weight so they look good on the beach. All right, so I'm going to basically sell you a program that's going to make you look good on the beach in six weeks. And he like, he, he got good at selling for his own gym where he's like, oh, I can get people to pay like three grand upfront for like a fitness training package with nutrition meal plans and stuff like that.

• 12:43Shaan Puri?

  And then someone pointed out to him, I think like Russell Brunson or whatever, the ClickFunnels guy pointed out to him like, hey dude, instead of just opening gyms and doing this yourself, you should just teach other gym owners how to do this. Like that's a better product is helping a gym like add a hundred grand in revenue in 30 days is a better product than like trying to open your own gym and use that method. So then he started doing that and then that's kind of how he went. Now he owns something called acquisitions.com where he'll like buy your business if you're doing, I don't know, five million or more revenue, something like that.

• 13:10Sam Parr?

  Well, so he's buying course businesses and like applying his methodology. And so, but basically what he sold was, and this is where things got, I went deep on. I was like, how did this work? This is crazy. So he basically sold not a franchise, but like an operating system. And so he used HubSpot as his backend and he would get people to sign up to these ads that he was running and you do an onboarding and you pay 20 grand, you get four months. Then after the end of four months, you could decide to stay in part of the group and it's 45 grand a year. But you get this, after you sign up, uh, you get this checklist of things that you have to do. So it's like raise your price to this, sign up for this software, use these emails, this shrimp campaign, get them, get this many people to sign up by doing X, Y, and Z.

• 13:55Sam Parr?

  Here's the ad campaign that you can just copy and paste and already use. And then he had a Facebook group where all the members could talk and that was it. That was the business. It was super simple and it was doing tens of millions a year in revenue and also tens of millions in profit. And I thought this was crazy fascinating. And I wanted to ask you guys, what other? He told me a little bit, but what other niches would you use this for? And also, does this model even interest you? It seems pretty amazing to me. I've never heard of it.

• 14:24Greg Isenberg?

  I think that if you did this for agencies, like digital agencies, that this is a no brainer. So, you know, we're, I run an agency called Late Checkout. We're about 50 people, so we're starting to really hit some scale. And

• 14:40Sam Parr?

  Can you say your revenue?

• 14:44Greg Isenberg?

  I mean, I don't want to say my revenue, but we have 50 people, so you can do some of the math yourself.

• 14:53Greg Isenberg?

  I will say that, um, yeah, we work with some of the biggest brands in the world, and it's very lonely to be like the CEO of an agency. Like, I don't know if I'm overcharging or undercharging. I don't know if I'm, you know, you know, doing the right thing. Should I be doing more marketing, less marketing? So like, would I pay two, five, 10 grand a month to, for like, something like this? Like, probably, if the ROI is there.

• 15:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's basically a sales machine, right? So what he, what he said was, if you have a business and you have whatever number of customers you have, if I could get you more customers, that's clearly of value to you. And I think he basically tried to get like, capture 10 to 20% of the value that he was giving. So, you know, if, if I'm gonna, if I'm gonna generate a hundred thousand dollars in new incremental sales for you, how do I capture 10 to 20,000? And I, and I'm taking the risk. If I don't do that, then I don't earn anything. I think that's kind of how he started it, at least. And so, agency is a perfect one like that, because every client you sign is cash in the bank. And typically, the agency might be good at one thing, but not necessarily good at going and getting new clients.

• 16:01Sam Parr?

  So what, uh, you just read this guy's book, Sean, Alex's book.

• 16:06Shaan Puri?

  I'm reading it right now.

• 16:07Sam Parr?

  What, what do you think about it?

• 16:10Shaan Puri?

  The book is good. The book is good. It's basically a, it's like a marketing book, right? So it's essentially a marketing book. He does a good job of breaking things down, being simple. It's not altogether new information, but, but who gives a shit? It's like, it's good information presented well. And if you're running a business right now, it'll help you. Now, the thing I think that he over indexes on is like, he uses like the gym launch example really hard. So it's like, yeah, this, this is clearly, he talks about, basically, he says, you, the secret to sales is make somebody an offer so good that they'd be stupid to refuse you. Okay, how do you do that? It's like, how do you get them to perceive that there's a lot of value and that they're going to get it in a short amount of time with,

• 16:53Shaan Puri?

  with, with not a lot of cost and that it's highly likely to happen. And so his model was like, hey, gym owner, I, on, I've worked with 100 gyms. On average, I could bring them each 100,000 in new, new sales. I can do that for you in 30 days. And if I don't do it, I don't, if I don't hit that mark, I don't get paid. How's that? And so, yeah, that is what he calls a grand slam offer, because it's gonna work. And if you, if you have a grand slam offer, you can win a lot of business. You can grow very fast. But I don't think that works in a whole bunch of other product categories. So I think it works in the like, agency consulting world, which is where he was.

• 17:27Greg Isenberg?

  It's services, I think. It works in.

• 17:29Shaan Puri?

  Services, yeah.

• 17:30Greg Isenberg?

  All services.

• 17:30Shaan Puri?

  You know, if I'm selling shoes online, it's very hard to create a grand slam offer for selling shoes, because, you know, I can't tell you how much more money this is gonna make you, right? So already the offer is a lot, like, I'm telling you, it looks cool, you know, that people might like your shoes. That's just fundamentally less compelling. So I just think it's like, really, really good for a service business, especially a service business that's in the business of helping other people make money. But like, if, like, for example, I wanted to send it to my accountant, it'd be like, hey, you're charging me like five grand or six grand a year. You should really be charging 50 grand. And if you did this method, I think you would have, you know, like, 10 times more clients and make 10 times more money off them. If you presented your stuff this way, because you're an accountant,

• 18:15Shaan Puri?

  you're saving people money on taxes. You could basically offer a no brainer offer like this and take more value and grow your business faster if you did it this way. But it doesn't work for everything. It's kind of the takeaway.

• 18:28Greg Isenberg?

  I think the, I think the, the pitch is, is taking a consultancy from a consultancy and turning it into selling luxury. Like,

• 18:40Greg Isenberg?

  That's the opportunity for a lot of these people, right? Like, I think when you look at McKinsey, McKinsey isn't a consultancy to me. McKinsey is selling like a luxury multimillion dollar contracts. Like that, you're buying confidence when you're buying a luxury product.

• 18:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's exactly right. He talks about that pretty extensively in the book. But I guess, so I am reading this book and I have two kind of like my two, like my right hand man and my left hand man. I have Ben and then I have this guy Andre. And I told him, I was like, guys, is this good stuff in this book that we should be using? And so I created like a little mini book club inside of our company to do this. Have you guys ever done that? Like, have you basically, and I've been wanting to do this with podcasts as well. Sometimes I'll listen to a podcast that's like fucking amazing. And I, what I want to do is just stop listening to it myself and be like, hey, guys, we're going to do a meeting, but the meeting is us listening to this podcast. And every time they say something good, I'm going to pause and we're going to talk about it. And it might take us like six hours to get through this one hour podcast, but I'm telling you, it's going to be,

• 19:40Shaan Puri?

  we're going to actually apply the thing versus just, I share the link, you read it, I read it. We each kind of move on with our day and we're busy. Have you guys ever done anything like this to like get more juice out of the, out of the fruit?

• 19:54Greg Isenberg?

  I haven't, I haven't. I've done a book club that I feel like book club is, it's like, you know, a lot of people go in the gym. It's like you start going to the gym and then you kind of like stop. Like, it's really hard to create a really well-designed book club that keeps people engaged.

• 20:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we did book club, but it was the same thing. No one fucking finished the book. So I actually think if we all just listen to a podcast together, it might be a lot easier.

• 20:22Greg Isenberg?

  It's a lot easier.

• 20:23Sam Parr?

  It's like when you go to school and the teacher brings in the TV. That's like how I would feel going to this meeting. I'd be like, oh, hell yeah.

• 20:30Shaan Puri?

  We're rolling in the TV. Magic school bus, baby. The, um, yeah, at Amazon, they do this too, where like, uh, people write all kinds of docs inside companies, like memos, plans, whatever. And then it's like, hey, did you read my plan? And then you're like, oh yeah, either I kind of did, or I didn't. Very rarely is it like, I read it, I remember it, I took notes on it and I'm ready to take action from it. And so at Amazon, they basically hack that process, which is the rule is you have to write, if you're going to make a plan, if you're going to try to do anything, you have to write your memo. But the memo gets read in the meeting itself. So every meeting, if it's an hour, the first 10 to 20 minutes are silent reading. Everybody reads it together at the same time and there's zero expectation for you to ever read something beforehand or afterwards.

• 21:12Sam Parr?

  Was that effective for you?

• 21:14Shaan Puri?

  Meeting itself.

• 21:16Shaan Puri?

  Oh yeah, it was, it was huge. Uh, like, and also while you're reading your, you know, you're taking notes because you know, right after this reading period ends in 20 minutes, like, it's a bit like school. It's like, I'm going to have to have something to say, right? Like, I need to have, I need to be bringing something to the table from this. And so, um, yeah, that was huge. And I think, I think way more companies should do that. It was like, one of the few big company things that I was like, this is a process that is so much better than what I used to do at, at, at our startup.

• 21:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah, well, I think that podcast idea that you just had is actually fantastic.

• 21:50Shaan Puri?

  Cool. All right. We lost Greg for a second, but let's, let's keep going. Uh, did you have anything more on Hermazi or you wanted to go on?

• 21:55Sam Parr?

  No, that's it. What do you got?

• 21:57Shaan Puri?

  I was thinking about doing a like, a kind of like a summary slash lessons learned because I have a whole bunch of like screenshots and highlights from the book. I might do a separate pod that's just that, if you want to do that.

• 22:05Sam Parr?

  I'm down. I just, I just, I just bought the book. I've been watching a lot of his YouTube videos. There's just something about this person. He's very interesting to me. He's very interesting. He's so transparent to the point where it's weird almost like, it's like I, I like, he reveals so much.

• 22:21Shaan Puri?

  I don't believe you.

• 22:22Sam Parr?

  No, I believe him. I believe him for sure, but he's revealing so much that I'm like, are you sure, man? You want to be talking about this? This is crazy. Like you, like, it's just weird. It's just weird, right? I mean, he talks like.

• 22:34Shaan Puri?

  I don't think it's weird. I think it's smart. And that's why I say like, uh, do I believe this? It's not that I think he's lying about anything. I think he's telling the truth. It's that when somebody is that forthcoming, it's sort of like, well, what's in this for you? And I think clearly it's, I'm trying to get you to trust me. And so I'm going to be like, kind of like explicitly transparent about something because I, there's a, there's a motive behind that. And I think that's okay. Uh, but I think a lot of people are like, wow, thanks dude for the favor. It's like, there's no favors. People do things because they have a motive. They want to build their brand in a certain way. They want to attract more, more readers or viewers, or they're trying to, build trust in a way so that they can get some advantage, you know? That's okay. I think that's a, it's a good thing. I, I do it too. I do it all the time.

• 23:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Yeah, I've got, I've gotten to know him over the past few weeks. I'm a fan, man. I'm a fan of Alex's, but what do you got?

• 23:25Shaan Puri?

  Well, actually, we should. So Greg, I told you, bring three or four bullets. I don't know if you had time to do that, but I have some if you don't have any, but I'd like to use yours if you do, because you're here. You're the guest of honor.

• 23:34Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I mean, I always have a notes file with some ideas. I can tell you, I'm not going to say they're great ideas, but let's, let's start with that. And I'd love your feedback.

• 23:43Shaan Puri?

  All right, let's do it.

• 23:44Greg Isenberg?

  So went to a restaurant two nights ago, saw that a bunch of kids were playing these, like picture like an Applebee's and picture a bunch of vending machines.

• 23:59Greg Isenberg?

  Like, you know, those games that you can play. I'm thinking NFT vending machines. So you have to pay like 100 Doge to get in. You can win a board ape. Instead of winning, you know, collectibles, you're winning digital assets. Is there a business to be created around that?

• 24:19Shaan Puri?

  You're talking about the thing where you would like, the old way is, you know, you put your quarter in and there's a bunch of plastic balls. You get one out, you got this little shitty toy and it's like, I think in Japan, they call these the gotcha games. Is that right? Like gotcha mechanic where you have this sort of variable reward. You might win the good thing, but you almost never win the good thing. And then you kind of keep wanting to open up these boxes and see what you get.

• 24:40Greg Isenberg?

  Exactly that, but with Doge.

• 24:43Greg Isenberg?

  And winning.

• 24:45Shaan Puri?

  And NFTs inside.

• 24:46Sam Parr?

  Greg, do you own any NFTs? Are you on board with us or no?

• 24:50Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I mean, I've got hundreds of NFTs.

• 24:55Sam Parr?

  That's crazy.

• 24:56Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Shaan Puri?

  I think the problem is Doge. I think not enough people own Doge. You know, so I kind of feel like it's like, you need to Apple pay to quickly, like instantaneously buy Doge and then use it, use it in the game, basically. Like you need some way for their phone to just buy the thing and then just keep swiping their phone.

• 25:15Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I guess like what I'm particularly interested in here is like, what are, you know, in real life experiences that you can create that connect with crypto?

• 25:26Shaan Puri?

  Hmm. Yeah, another version of this, by the way, because I don't need it restaurants anymore. I just deliver everything. So it's like, you know, a QR code that comes with DoorDash that I just scan and I get to play the game on my phone, right? Like, why do they need to buy a screen? When I carry a screen in my pocket. So like, really, all you just need is a QR code to do this game. You don't even have to build the, you don't even have to build the vending machine necessarily.

• 25:50Greg Isenberg?

  It's true. It's true. All right, I got another one. So I moved out of my apartment December 15th. It's now March 28th. And my landlord

• 26:04Greg Isenberg?

  Hasn't returned my security deposit.

• 26:07Sam Parr?

  Is that in America or?

• 26:09Greg Isenberg?

  It's in Florida. Yeah, Miami.

• 26:11Sam Parr?

  Oh, there's a bunch of laws around that California.

• 26:14Greg Isenberg?

  Well, there's laws around it in Florida, too. And I Googled it and there's a whole process you can go into it. I'm sure it's probably not as intense as California, but you know, you have certain rights. There's a whole process that you have to go and eventually you go to small claims court, et cetera, et cetera.

• 26:31Sam Parr?

  Well, how much was it?

• 26:34Greg Isenberg?

  It's a few hundred dollars, but it's just like the pain to like go through it. It's not really worth it. My security deposit is $5,700.

• 26:43Greg Isenberg?

  So what I really want to do is scare my my landlord, basically. Right? That's what I want to do. So I want to, I need to get his attention. That's what I really need to do. So I Googled,

• 26:59Greg Isenberg?

  you know, sending a lawyer letter. I didn't want to call my lawyer because I was like at $750 an hour or whatever. It's going to cost like two grand for this lawyer letter. So the idea is a $99 lawyer letter on demand. Go scare, go scare someone, basically.

• 27:18Greg Isenberg?

  What do you think?

• 27:18Sam Parr?

  Have you, um?

• 27:19Shaan Puri?

  Scary letter. I love it.

• 27:20Sam Parr?

  So listen, we got to talk about this, Sean. You know where I'm going to go with this, right? Do not pay.

• 27:26Shaan Puri?

  Going to petty court?

• 27:27Sam Parr?

  Well, I like petty court.

• 27:28Shaan Puri?

  Do not pay.

• 27:29Sam Parr?

  But I'm going to go do not pay. Great. Have you not heard of do not pay?

• 27:33Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. So is do not pay that service that like, if you have a parking ticket, you like, send it to them and they like, they deal with it and you get a percentage of it back or something like that?

• 27:45Sam Parr?

  They do a bunch of stuff, but that is one of the ways how they started. How do you explain this company now, Sean? Now that it's kind of, they have so many features?

• 27:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think it started, basically, it's just trying to save you money from shit that you shouldn't have to pay for, you don't want to pay for. So it started with like subscriptions you're not using. All right, cool. Unsubscribe me from a bunch of subscriptions I'm not using. Then it became, then they also added, you know, like, go contest this parking ticket. Cause like, I don't know, 20 or 30% of parking tickets are like filled out incorrectly. And you actually shouldn't have to pay. And if we save you money, we will keep a little bit, but it's just, you do no work. And you'll get, they just keep a portion of the savings that they get, that they earn for you. And then they expanded into like 83B election, like, hey, we'll do that for you for your startup. So they're just like trying to do, they're basically just trying to eliminate the busy paperwork that nobody wants to do.

• 28:37Shaan Puri?

  And they're like, we'll just take care of that shit for you. How would that feel? And a bunch of like people like us who are like millennials who are like, ah, I just don't know how to do it. I don't want to do it. I don't like printing things or going to the post office and like doing all this shit. Yeah, please take care of this for me. So it's a time saver company is how I think about it.

• 28:53Sam Parr?

  And Greg, I had a landlord, I had a $16,000 deposit. This was for our office when COVID shut, or our office lease just so happened to end right around when COVID was happening. So we got really lucky and we just canceled it. And this guy would not give me the 16 grand. I found out, dude, I got crazy on him. I found out where he lived and I showed up at his house and he wasn't there. I found out where he worked and I showed up there and he wasn't there. And I used do not pay to send him like a, like a letter. And finally he got back to me. It was like, oh yeah, you know, it just slipped my mind. Like he was like, no big deal about it. And I was like, dude, I've been hating you for six weeks, man. Where's this money?

• 29:31Shaan Puri?

  And so they, they have that feature where you can just send a scary letter?

• 29:35Sam Parr?

  You send a scary letter and it worked. And so we, I got my 16 grand, but legally you're supposed to get 16 grand plus interest, which I did not get. And I, I thought about like fighting over this just out of principle, because I love petty shit.

• 29:50Greg Isenberg?

  So I feel like the idea is really, you know, do not pay, obviously is getting really big. It's like the unbundling of do not pay. And it's taking this idea and it's like, okay, I'm going to run a bunch of Google ads against like getting security deposit back Florida, getting security deposit back California. And I think there's a big business to be created here. Cause then that's a, that's a good wedge to sort of expand a bunch of different services.

• 30:17Shaan Puri?

  And I think there's the other version, I think we've once said, which was like, call my politician. There's all these things where it's like, ah, this bill could get passed. That's bad for crypto holders. Make sure you call your politician and let them know you don't want this. It's like, ah, I don't know. I don't want to call my politician and like, who, what if they pick up? What am I going to say? Like, there's like, there's all kinds of problems with this idea of calling, I don't like calling. What happens if they pick up? You know, I really want to go down that road, but I would happily, you know, sort of tip, you know, 10 bucks to just have someone annoy the shit out of my politician about this issue that I care about. Like if my donation funded like 18 annoying calls, like if there's just a website that said, would you

• 31:00Shaan Puri?

  like to donate $10 to the cause? And that will fund 18 annoying phone calls from Sri Lanka to this politician? I'd be like, fuck yeah, put me down for 20. And so I think that's the other version of do not, do not pay is like, go hassle for me.

• 31:15Sam Parr?

  That's awesome. I'm on board with that.

• 31:18Shaan Puri?

  Can you, all right, what else you got, Greg?

• 31:19Greg Isenberg?

  My other one, it relates to law, actually, a little bit. So, you know, we've been, and Sean, I know you're into crypto. So I've been spending a lot of money on, you know, crypto accounting and crypto law firms. And I think that there's an opportunity to create a web three crypto accounting firm and a web three crypto law firm. But all you have to do is basically you find an existing law firm that understands securities law. And you're like, hey, you know, you, you're a shop of 10 lawyers and you're like, you know, you understand securities law. Maybe there's some,

• 32:03Greg Isenberg?

  you know, up leveling in terms of learning specifics about NFTs, etc.

• 32:10Greg Isenberg?

  I'm going to be the like marketing engine for you. You know, use things like the milk road and use things like lay checkout. And I'm going to send you leads. So the customer is happy because they're like, wow, this is like a web three related, you know, law firm, and I want to work with someone who's.

• 32:29Sam Parr?

  What does that mean? I don't know what you're using. You're using words that I don't have no idea what they mean. What does a web three related law firm mean?

• 32:37Greg Isenberg?

  Okay, so let's just say you're creating an NFT project, but you want to make sure that you don't go to jail. So like you don't do any SEC violations. Do you feel comfortable calling up your regular lawyer who's might not even know what an NFT is? Or would you specifically want to talk to a law firm that lives and breathes web three?

• 33:03Sam Parr?

  It depends if they have, um, what's like, for example, if I, what's the term? If I follow something my lawyer says, and they're supposed to be the expert, and I get in trouble, sometimes I can like blame them. What's that called? God, I can't remember that. I can't remember, but.

• 33:20Greg Isenberg?

  Scapegoating.

• 33:21Sam Parr?

  No, it's like, um, it's like, it's like when you hire a C. It's like when you hire a C. If you hire a CPA and your CPA screws you like blatantly, sometimes you're not always, you can, you know, that goes, that you're taken to account like, ah, dude, I thought he was doing it right and he's a CPA. So like your CPA can actually get in trouble, not necessarily you. So it depends if that lawyer has that, but I don't know. I'd rather just go to a legal for a lawyer that's special. Yeah, that specializes in this thing, but I don't know why you'd call it a web three.

• 33:52Shaan Puri?

  That's what he's describing.

• 33:52Sam Parr?

  But he said a web three law firm.

• 33:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like they specialize and they, they know the laws around. They specialize in advising.

• 33:59Sam Parr?

  I thought you meant like.

• 34:00Shaan Puri?

  Around this.

• 34:01Sam Parr?

  Web three.

• 34:01Shaan Puri?

  Not a digital law firm.

• 34:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, okay.

• 34:03Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, all this is, is like, I mean, this is a marketing challenge more than anything. And, you know, one of the hardest problems about running a law firm is, you know, or an accounting firm is getting clients. And we talked about this with the agencies, the same thing is true with, you know, law firms and accountancy firms. I think, you know, I don't know the, like, I don't know the margins of some of these businesses, but I imagine they're quite big. So I think there's something there.

• 34:31Shaan Puri?

  So I considered doing this with my, before I did the milk road, I was like, all right, what do I want to do? Like, I got this audience that's growing, right? It's like Twitter's, Twitter's pretty big now, so I got a quarter million followers. Newsletter's growing. I could just like, you know, make no money off this, that's fine.

• 34:46Sam Parr?

  How big was your newsletter?

• 34:47Shaan Puri?

  Put some ads in the newsletter, that's, what's that?

• 34:50Sam Parr?

  How big was the newsletter?

• 34:53Shaan Puri?

  It was like a 30, 40 K, something at the time. I could put something in there.

• 34:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, before milk road. And, uh, and I was like, I could teach a course. So I did that, I taught a course, I was like, all right, that's cool. It makes way more money than ads, but it's more effort. And then I was like, you know, what's like the highest value business? What's like the best fucking business? And I was like, so I started making a list of like places where I spend a lot of money that I feel like they're just kind of like rinse and repeating the same stuff for me. And so I, I narrowed it down to two, I'll give you the second best one was accounting. And I was like, I could just start a bookkeeping firm for, uh, for startups and entrepreneurs. Just in my own portfolio, if I invested in 45 companies last year, just within that, I bet I could get 14 clients of just companies that don't have a bookkeeper, because most companies don't have bookkeepers right off the bat.

• 35:42Sam Parr?

  You were considering starting a bookkeeping service? That's like the worst idea for you. That's a horrible idea for you.

• 35:51Shaan Puri?

  I was just going to be the marketing front end. I wasn't going to operate it. I was just going to buy or hire like a good bookkeeper and be like, cool. You're going to do the books and I'm just going to send you clients and you just close the clients and we split this 50 50 or whatever. And, um, so that was one idea. The, the better idea is insurance, because insurance is like the best business of all time. And, um, because for insurance, you don't even really do insurance. You just broker the insurance with another like carrier, basically. And, um, and most businesses don't have, uh, most like, especially like e-commerce businesses, you need business insurance. And you don't know, like, I didn't know exactly which insurance I needed, how much, uh, how much coverage I wanted. Most traditional insurance firms don't cover e-commerce, which is insane to me.

• 36:34Shaan Puri?

  And so I was like, all right, well, I could just do that. And so that was another one, which is, you know, startup slash. E-commerce insurance was another one. I basically did the math and I was like, I could make so much more money doing that than if I ever did like ads in my newsletter. If all I did my ad was say, hey, by the way, don't go to jail. You should have a bookkeeper, you know, like, hey,

• 36:55Shaan Puri?

  don't lose your business because somebody, you know, whatever chokes on a button.

• 37:00Sam Parr?

  What was your math for the insurance? What was your math? First of all, I think that's, I think you made 100% the right move doing what you did because those businesses do not fit your skillset or mine at all of like insurance, like that, like being on top of things like crazy amounts, sweating the details.

• 37:19Shaan Puri?

  But you're assuming I'm gonna run it. I'm not gonna run it. You're gonna be gonna find a good person.

• 37:24Sam Parr?

  You and I both know it's never that easy.

• 37:26Shaan Puri?

  Send them leads.

• 37:27Sam Parr?

  But all right. So what was your math behind it?

• 37:31Shaan Puri?

  Oh, I don't know. I have to pull up all the spreadsheets, but basically just with my existing audience size, I think it netted out where it's like, I could be easily clearing, you know, three to $5 million a year in profit if I like, kind of like hit all my marks.

• 37:46Sam Parr?

  Tell me more about this. This is actually really.

• 37:48Shaan Puri?

  Full capacity.

• 37:49Sam Parr?

  This is actually really interesting. So what were you going to call it? Like Sean Insurance?

• 37:54Sam Parr?

  What was the name?

• 37:55Shaan Puri?

  It was gonna be something, I don't know. The name was the last thing on my mind.

• 37:59Sam Parr?

  Okay, so.

• 38:00Shaan Puri?

  I even talked to the, I had this one lawyer, one accountant who I really loved. There's this like Ukrainian woman who was like this like amazing accountant. She was the first accountant I talked to that felt like they worked for me and not like as a, they weren't just like a narc. And so they were like, she was like, have you thought about this? You know, like, does your business need a vehicle? Cause I think right now, just last week of the year, if you just bought a vehicle, we can actually like depreciate that and use that against your books here. Like she was giving me ideas that were completely legal, but she wasn't just sitting there and saying, yeah, if you give me all your paperwork and your receipts, I'll, I'll file your taxes for you. It was the first person who was saying, wow, you're paying a lot in taxes over here and over here. Let me just make sure I'm, you know, saving you money. And so that was the first person. So I was gonna basically talk to her and be like, hey, should you do this? Like, do you want to do this?

• 38:45Shaan Puri?

  Do you want to like leave? Start your own firm. I'm sure you're scared of all that, but guess what? You would just do the thing you're really good at, which is doing people's, you know, like tax strategy and accounting. And I will get you all the clients. That was, you know, the core premise. But of course, I went down, I said, I created a free crypto newsletter, because I just figured it'd be more fun.

• 39:04Sam Parr?

  Dude, I think these are great ideas, by the way. I think you made the right decision, but these are actually, this is crazy interesting. I wish you would have told me that you're

• 39:11Shaan Puri?

  Can I tell you about a fucking genius idea that came out of that? So have you, I don't know if you've ever like on boarded, well, like you've probably done some onboarding with some, some software that you're trying to use or some company you're trying to use. So for example, with this, with this bookkeeping company, right? The one I hired, I eventually hired for my e-commerce thing. They sent me this like super long checklist. It was like, all right, great. Excited to work with you. Do these 54 things and then we'll get started. Like that will be the start of your journey. That will get you to the starting line. It's like, go to Shopify, give us access. To do that, you need to go to view accounts, permissions, add us there, add us as a bookkeeper, blah, blah, blah. Now go to QuickBooks, do the same thing. Now go to Stripe, do the same thing. Now go to Bank of America, do the same thing. Like, and there was just all these fucking steps. It's like, then send us this, then

• 39:54Shaan Puri?

  send us this. And it just felt, and it was all done in Excel, right? So I discovered this startup that basically takes that process and just wraps beautiful user experience around it. And I saw it and I was like, this is so smart. I invested in instantaneously, didn't have a meeting with the founder. I was like, I totally buy it. In fact, any word you say is only going to make me less bullish on this idea because I am already convinced this is one of the best ideas I've ever seen. So it's called Doc. So it's doc.us. I don't know if you guys have checked this out. And Julian, Julian Shapiro sent this to me after I was like, seeing this problem. And then coincidentally, he sent me the same idea. So here's how it works. So basically, it just creates like, kind of like a Notion space.

• 40:39Shaan Puri?

  So the company who's trying to onboard you, they just create this thing that's like, it's like this is just a beautiful experience. So it's like, hey, Sean, so glad to have you on board. First three things we need you to do are these three. Click the checkbox when you're done with them. So I'll know that you did it. If you have any questions, just put it in the comment thing here, or click this to watch our tutorial from our library that we have about how to do it. And so it just turns that like, back and forth email, or like Excel spreadsheet, like, janky thing into like,

• 41:08Shaan Puri?

  Like workflow for a client and a service to like onboard each other. And I was like, dude, that's a problem that like, I don't know, like, I don't know, 2 million businesses a year have with every one of their clients. This is gonna work. I think this is gonna work. What do you guys think of this idea?

• 41:24Greg Isenberg?

  Well, I love it. I just, I just got a mortgage after my landlord stiffened me. And, you know, I go on to Chase's website and I don't know if you've done this, but you go on Chase's website, you go to the mortgage and there's like, a thousand things to do, plus you're like transported back to 1996 because you're in this like weird thing. There's like JavaScript breaking everywhere. There's like, you like forgot about flash and like flash is somehow in there.

• 41:54Greg Isenberg?

  My, my, my banker calls me and it's like, you didn't finish this one thing. And I was like, what?

• 42:00Shaan Puri?

  She's like, I added it to your client portal. It's like, dude, I don't get a notification. I don't go check that. I hate that place. I fucking hate that place.

• 42:08Greg Isenberg?

  So, yes, yes, this is one of those no brainer ideas. I hope that they, they actually embed, like create an SDK. They do? Okay.

• 42:18Shaan Puri?

  I, I, I think that, I don't know if they already do or they're going to, but that was like a big part of, yeah, I was like, this can live inside of your app or whatever. So you, you know, you, you could just kind of like onboard people right there inside their experience.

• 42:31Sam Parr?

  This landing page is beautiful. This is a beautiful website.

• 42:36Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. So it is absolutely beautiful, but I have a question for you, for you guys. Cause it relates actually to this and also Jim Shark and even the lawyer stuff, which is, you know, sometimes when we're creating businesses, you can do one of two things. You can either like create something brand new, which is like this.

• 42:58Greg Isenberg?

  Or create like a new gem, like a new way of, you know, doing something, or you could like help existing people, you know, do some marketing, make some money that way. Do you guys, you know, and the Silicon Valley way is, is very much like, go raise a bunch of money, invent something new. And it's really frowned upon to do, you know, the marketing piece of it and sort of positioning on top of it. What are your thoughts? And, you know, do you think about that a lot? You know, cause I've been thinking about it a lot.

• 43:28Shaan Puri?

  Say it again. Give us two examples.

• 43:30Greg Isenberg?

  I'll give you an example.

• 43:30Shaan Puri?

  Give us two examples.

• 43:34Greg Isenberg?

  You know, my last company, the founder of 24 Hour Fitness invested in my company. And he told me that before the 1980s, there weren't membership based gyms. Like, it was a new thing. And he invented the first one and it became 24 Hour Fitness. I think they sold for three or four billion dollars. It was a major success. And then there's a lot of people who copied membership based gyms. That's an idea of going zero to one, creating an absolutely new product. Whereas what he could have done was created a gym shark of that era or whatever and consulted.

• 44:13Shaan Puri?

  Gym launch.

• 44:13Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, exact gym launch, sorry. And consulted to, you know, add additional revenue to existing, you know, trainers, et cetera. So the question is, you know, how often are you thinking about creating something brand new versus, you know, just kind of a money making, additional marketing layer on top of?

• 44:41Shaan Puri?

  Sam, what do you think about that?

• 44:43Sam Parr?

  I don't think I think of anything that I think of, I don't think any of it's brand new. I think zero, close to zero, I think about that. Do you agree, Sean?

• 44:55Shaan Puri?

  No, I think there's sometimes new things, but it's extremely rare.

• 45:02Sam Parr?

  Extremely rare.

• 45:03Shaan Puri?

  Extremely, extremely rare.

• 45:04Sam Parr?

  But I would even argue that most anything that's new, you could probably actually say, oh, well, it's just like a different version of blank.

• 45:10Shaan Puri?

  You could trace back, right? So like, let's take Airbnb, for example. Airbnb was clearly like, kind of like this breakthrough product, became this huge success. And it's like the category killer, the category leader for sharing economy, whatever. And now it's like bigger than hotels, like than all hotels, whatever. So it started off as this fringe thing. But there was like couch surfing before that. And like, that was like a product that did a very similar thing. You know, and VRBO, and there was this other stuff that's like around it. So I think you're right that it's very hard to do something completely original. But let me frame it slightly differently, which is, it seems like what Greg is almost saying is like.

• 45:48Shaan Puri?

  Do you want to go for, try to have either a new behavior or an existing behavior? Or another way of looking at it would be, do you want to create a product? Or do you want to have a service company? Right? Like it's kind of, to me, that in those examples is like 24 hour fitness was like a new product. You needed customers to go buy versus servicing, you know, trainers and whatever, whoever else. That was, that's like a service business that's going to have great cash flow and doesn't require you to have this like winning brand and new product and new customers from scratch. Is that, is that kind of, is it more about the services versus product? Is that the?

• 46:25Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think, you know, Sean and Sam, like, you know, having spent time in SF, I feel like when I got to SF, I was all about new behaviors.

• 46:38Greg Isenberg?

  That was really important to me. And Sean, I know that was true for you too, because like Blab, you're always pushing, you know, the envelope with like, you know, and Bebo is like new, you know, is it user interfaces and like new friend finding and new, just like new ways of doing things. Versus now that we're in our 30s, it feels like we're doing less. And this is just an observation and correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like we're doing less of like the new behavior type stuff. And more of like, hey, let's just like iterate on this thing and like focus it on this niche and, and do that.

• 47:12Sam Parr?

  There's this guy named Roger Dickey. I don't know him. I think Sean knows him, right?

• 47:17Shaan Puri?

  I never met him. I think Greg actually knows him.

• 47:19Sam Parr?

  Oh, right. So I don't entirely know his full background, but he used to do like a bunch of high tech stuff. He, I know that he had the, what's the startup that helps you code stuff? It's like a new age, new agency. What's it called? Those with a G? Gixter?

• 47:35Shaan Puri?

  Gixter.

• 47:36Sam Parr?

  Okay. And before Gixter, Greg, what was he doing? He was doing something like very traditional Silicon Valley, right?

• 47:41Greg Isenberg?

  I just know him from Twitter, but yes, he was doing, he was the co-founder and CEO of Gixter, which was, which was huge. But he did it through a really interesting way. I think he did it through Search Lab. Do you guys know what a Search Lab is?

• 47:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 47:56Sam Parr?

  And but I think before that, like, he maybe was at Zynga or something like like a like

• 48:01Shaan Puri?

  He played, he made like a mafia game or something like that.

• 48:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like something No, he made Mafia Wars, right? That's what it was. Yeah. He made Mafia Wars. Which at which at the time was cutting edge. Now, his latest business, I think it's called Revolution. Is it called Revolution? Made.

• 48:15Shaan Puri?

  Made, made.

• 48:16Sam Parr?

  Made, and they are renovating bathrooms. And as a recent homeowner who needs a new bathroom, I went to the website and I was like, this is sick. I love this. I've id. And it looks from the outside like the company is just crushing it. I saw another guy, the guy who started Casper, his name's Luke, one of the four founders, his name's Luke. I think he has a new business that's also renovating bathrooms or maybe kitchens. And I thought it was interesting that these guys, Casper, not exactly like cutting edge, but kinda like kinda new behavior, buying a mattress online. Roger Dickey, you know, the definitely new behaviors. They're going to like these like older businesses and they're definitely using technology. But at the end of the day, they're not like re, they're not inventing anything new.

• 48:59Sam Parr?

  They're just inventing maybe a more efficient process. And in my opinion, those things are far more interesting. And it's kind of intriguing to me that they're, these guys are doing that as opposed to some new cutting edge thing.

• 49:14Shaan Puri?

  So, so I'll give you my, my take on your, on your question, Greg, which is in my twenties, it's like, the way I traveled was I'd be like, oh, you know, fuck it, I'll go tomorrow, I'll spin the globe, put my finger down. All right, I'm gonna go backpacking through, you know, Eastern Europe or I'm gonna go to Australia and I'll be, you know, sleeping in a van type of thing. And I wanted the adventure. It was actually the right move to do at that time because it's like, how do you get max adventure, max sort of like discomfort and like out of your comfort zone? You know, max spontaneity, all that stuff. And, um, and then like now, it's like, where's like a sandals resort that I could take my kids and like, you know, I just wanna sit down. I just want a place I can go sit. That's not my house. This is basically the extent of my adventure right now.

• 49:59Shaan Puri?

  And so similarly, like that's my, my business career was the same. It was like, at the beginning is like, yo, I'm gonna build the next social network. I'm gonna build a dating app where you might die or whatever. This is like these crazy ideas. It's like every idea was like trying to be crazier than the last. It's like, you know, and it all appealed to me that way. And now I'm like, cool, I could sell a product that I, you know, import a product from China and sell it through a Facebook ad. I click three buttons. I could just sit in my chair and do that. I don't really need a staff. I don't really, you know, I'll just kind of outsource this and that. I'll just write a newsletter. And I'll just write it in my browser and then that's it.

• 50:38Shaan Puri?

  Like, I don't have to like become the next Mark Zuckerberg. I just need to get to like enough people where I'm making a few million dollars a year and living a sweet lifestyle. Like, that's, that's a win, you know, and that's, and I don't have to manage anybody and I don't have to like stress out about this thing and I don't have to know how to code. I don't have to know any of these things. Oh, yeah, great. And so I basically now I'm in the sort of sandals resort part of my career. And I mean that in the best way possible, which was back then I was like, almost like intrigued by the degree of difficulty. And now I'm completely put off by the degree of difficulty. And instead I just do the thing that sounds like what's going to be easy, simple, fun for me. And, and, you know, I'm just going to go that route.

• 51:18Shaan Puri?

  And so I am much less interested in like inventing the next big thing as I am like crafting a dope lifestyle, doing something I enjoy.

• 51:28Sam Parr?

  Do you think that will change?

• 51:30Shaan Puri?

  Feels like.

• 51:31Sam Parr?

  But do you think that's going to change when your kids get older? So when your kids become eight, nine, 10, maybe eight to like 16, they think that you are the coolest guy ever. Or if they don't think that, maybe it's on the other end of you wanting to think that you're cool and you want to impress them. And I've been thinking a lot about that lately. I'm like, do I think that my attitude will change when my kids become five, six, seven, eight? And I want to impress them. Do I think like instead of just like having a sick lifestyle, I'd be like, oh, man, I want to do something like that they are proud of. Do you think that's going to change?

• 52:05Shaan Puri?

  Not because of that reason. I do think it's gonna change, but not because of that. Like, I don't think your kids think you're cool based on like your business success necessarily. I don't, I don't really think that that's the main, the main way that kids think you're cool. And even if it was, that's not why I would do something. I would just have more free time, right? Like when my kids go to school, that's gonna be like a fucking game changer. It's like, I'm gonna get a third of my day back that I, you know, I don't have today. And so when they go to school, I have a lot more bandwidth. If I wanna do something more intense, I can ratchet up the intensity and the difficulty level if I so choose. At that time, right now, like dude, before I do this podcast, like I'm not, I'm not like,

• 52:46Shaan Puri?

  you know, researching every detail for the 20 minutes before this podcast typically. I'm like reading this book called Goofy's Adventure to my daughter, putting her down for the nap. You know, like that's how I prep for this pod, like 20 minutes before is like, I'm literally reading Disney books, putting my daughter to bed in time to come back out here, right? So it's like, there's a lifestyle I like right now that's doing this. And so I'm optimizing for that. I think in five years, I'm gonna be picking a very different challenge than I'm picking today. Just because it'll be time for another chapter and I'll probably be like, oh, that lifestyle shit's boring. I wanna go do something big or I'm gonna be like, fuck business, business is stupid. I'm gonna go like, try to write a comedy show and I'm gonna like try to sell a show for TV. Like, I don't know, I'm gonna do something else with my life.

• 53:30Shaan Puri?

  Every five years, I wanna kind of reinvent myself in terms of what I'm doing.

• 53:34Greg Isenberg?

  So you've come a long way, Sean. So one of the first times I met you, you invited me to the Bebo launch party. And I invite, I was like, could I bring a plus one? You're like, sure. I bring this friend who is visiting. And we walk into this warehouse or something in San Francisco. I remember we had to like walk upstairs and like, Where was it, Sean?

• 53:59Shaan Puri?

  It was in a, you know, like a car manufacturer, car repair.

• 54:03Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 54:04Shaan Puri?

  Like, like a garage, it's like for car repairs, whatever. I don't know. I forgot how to speak English. But like, basically, Michael had bought one of those, like, got rid of all the car, like, car maintenance stuff and just turned it into like his man cave. And he hadn't filled it up yet with his, his like fancy cars and cool shit yet. So it was just an empty warehouse in the middle of San Francisco, downtown San Francisco. And we threw our launch party there before he filled it up.

• 54:27Greg Isenberg?

  So I'm there with one of my buddies from this small town in Quebec. The guy has never left his town, basically, in his entire life. So he had landed in San Francisco, he's staying with me, he gets into this, you know, car shop or whatever, and it's like dark and there's smoke and there's lights everywhere. And then you walk in and there's all these people and there's lights everywhere. And he like literally whispered to me and he said, is Kanye West coming to this?

• 54:58Shaan Puri?

  Did he say, yeah? Said, yeah.

• 55:02Greg Isenberg?

  And it was like, one of those moments, like, I'm sure a bunch of people have like, watched the social network when it's like Justin Timberlake is like talking to,

• 55:14Greg Isenberg?

  I guess it's Mark Zuckerberg in the club and it's just like, it's intense and

• 55:20Shaan Puri?

  It's like larger than life.

• 55:21Greg Isenberg?

  And you were kind of like, living that lifestyle in San Francisco, not like, I mean, I'm painting you as very playboy and I won't say you're a hundred percent playboy. But in the sense of like, you were living that lifestyle, you were, you were doing that like Zuckerberg thing. And now,

• 55:42Greg Isenberg?

  you're, you know, you're kind of doing the complete opposite. And my question to, to, to actually both of you, but particularly for Sean, is if you could redo it, would you have done more?

• 55:56Greg Isenberg?

  More of these product bets that are, uh, there's, it's really less risk. Like, for example, Milk Road, like, there wasn't that much risk there. Zero risk. Yeah, let's be real, right? So like, I feel like people, like, we're, now that we're in our 30s, we're focusing on different niches, and we're taking things that are working, different communities, and we're just pushing that out there with, you know, low product risk. Would you have done that? Or do you think that you needed to do these crazy bets in your 20s to, to, to be where you are today?

• 56:27Sam Parr?

  I have a very easy answer, but I'll let Sean go first.

• 56:30Shaan Puri?

  No, no, go.

• 56:31Sam Parr?

  No, I want you to go first. I want to hear what you're gonna say.

• 56:34Greg Isenberg?

  Playboy Sean.

• 56:35Shaan Puri?

  Well, as Playboy Sean, by the way, for that, I flew in this painter that I had met, and he did, I don't know if you remember this, he did a live painting where he, he's painting this like abstract thing. He's breakdancing while he's doing it. And this is a guy I had seen at a, at a fair in Greeley, Colorado, many years before that. And I was like, hey, dude, I have like a, like, I have a company that has like a bunch of funding. Like, you wanna just like fly out for this party and do something dope? Do that thing you did at that little town fair? Do it in front of like hundreds of people at this thing. And he's doing it, and then at the end, he spins the canvas, and what looked like this crazy abstract thing was he had painted like a fucking Bob Marley upside down. And it's like, he does this like, whatever, he flips the thing, and then he's like done, and he slaps it with his hand. It's full of paint. And it was like, that was the moment.

• 57:19Shaan Puri?

  And I was just like, that party was dope. That was a dope party, actually, now that I remember it. So, do I regret it? Well, now that I'm thinking about that party, no, I don't regret it. That sounds pretty awesome. And I'm glad I did it, cuz I'm happy with where I am now. Having said that, there were so many things that I did foolishly during that time. And I'm not just talking about like, you know, oh, you know, I wasn't as good at this thing as I am now. It's like, no, like, there was so much opportunity right under my nose, and I was blind to it. And like, one of the biggest like scary things for me now is like, what are those things today that are right in front of me that I'm too stupid to see? Just like I was too stupid to see it seven years ago when I was doing that other thing.

• 58:00Shaan Puri?

  For example, Greg, you were in our early mastermind groups, and the founders of Calm were there, and they were talking about how hard it was, and how they're just, you know, it was just Alex, he was just kind of like, yeah, it's hard to raise money right now, I'm trying. And, and we were just like, dude, it's a cool app, man, you should stick with it. He's like, yeah, I'm gonna just keep going. And like, that's a $2 billion plus company now, and we were helping him, like, Dude, why didn't we cut the check? You were there too. I don't know. You didn't take the kind of check either, did you?

• 58:28Greg Isenberg?

  I remember at the time, like if I'm being honest, like I felt that it was too niche. Like I was like, we were like, Sean, you and I were focusing on like,

• 58:40Shaan Puri?

  We were doing big stuff, stuff that was gonna be big.

• 58:42Greg Isenberg?

  Exactly.

• 58:44Shaan Puri?

  One aqua hire later and he's, he's got the huge company.

• 58:50Shaan Puri?

  There was so many of those. So in our masterminds itself, I think Loom was in there. That's a billion dollar company. And I remember kind of like trying to mentor Sean and being like, bro, like, you know, don't worry, you'll figure it out. Maybe it's not this one, but like when you get to your real game, you're going to be like, good because of this experience. You were friends with him too. Like, did you invest in that? Like,

• 59:09Greg Isenberg?

  I missed, I missed, I missed, it was called, uh, what was it called? Opentest.co. And that's what Loom was originally. And it, you know, it felt like, you know, when you're doing your first startup and it just feels so shaky because you're, it's your first time doing all this stuff. Like that's what it felt like. And so it was, you know, and then also the, the narrative at the time was, don't invest in other people's startups. You got, if you, if you want to make it in Silicon Valley, you got to give laser focus. So I, you know, my mistake in my twenties was I came to San Francisco and

• 59:52Greg Isenberg?

  you know, I listened to all these VCs with all their narratives. And I did it. And if I were to redo it, I would frankly, just be doing what I now, which is just doing like what I'm doing now, which is like focused on communities, doing agency services, you know, focusing on niches and, and, and web, you know, yeah, just build and experiment and not have the biggest exits in the world.

• 1:00:16Shaan Puri?

  There was like 10 examples like that. Like I remember Alex McCall came over one day and we were catching up and then he went on to start clear. I remember thinking this guy's fucking amazing. I should invest in this clear bit thing. And I like went over to his office and we like hung out. I was like, we had to meet the guys. I was like, I love the energy of this office, man. Like, if I just couldn't do anything besides feel this office, I would be like, they're building a winner in here. And that's also like, I don't know. I don't know if it's a billion, it's multi hundred million dollar company. And he told me at the end, he goes, oh, by the way, I'm buying up. I was like, what else are you doing? Finally, I started to ask smart questions. I was like, what else are you doing? He's like, oh, I bought up some Stripe shares. This Stripe shares available for like $2 billion. So I'm buying a bunch of Stripe shares. I think it was him. Maybe it's Josh Buckley. He's one of them. And he's like, I'm buying up Stripe shares for $2 billion. Let me know if you want in.

• 1:01:01Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, $2 billion. To me, I was like, well, that's like the most a startup is worth is like a billion is like the top of the mountain. So like, to me, I was like, oh, there's no upside left, you know? I didn't like think from first principles about like, everybody knew Stripe was fucking amazing. It was like the best startup in the whole like, you know, in Silicon Valley. And I had this opportunity to go buy Stripe shares at $2 billion. And I thought how late I was. And I was like, man, I wish I could have got in earlier. And now like, you know, the things I would give for Stripe shares at $2 billion now, like, it's like, that's already like, like 100x, you know, from, from there. And that was proven, right? Forget that. Then there was all the services we were using, like Furcon, who's my CTO, he would be like, oh, this is a cool, cool product. Let's use this in our tech stack.

• 1:01:46Shaan Puri?

  If I had just invested in all the bills we were paying for like software we were using, like PagerDuty and Elastic Search and so, you know, like, one after another, those were all huge winners that were pre-IPO. So first was investing. The second was like project selection. So like you were talking about Greg, I did the same thing. I was playing by the rules of like, I was playing by other people's rules. Meaning like what was considered cool at Silicon Valley was to be like a product guy who was building, who had like cool product taste and was building like, you know, like new markets and like going for the, the big billion dollar prizes. And then I met Sam, who was like, I'm writing this newsletter. It's free. I'm gonna have like newsletter ads in it. And I was like, yeah, but like, are you gonna do a startup someday?

• 1:02:29Shaan Puri?

  That's all I felt about it, right? Then Sam's company sells for more than my company sold for in the end.

• 1:02:35Sam Parr?

  He goes, uh, he goes, look, you're good, but basically like you're showing up to a knife fight with a knife. And I wish you would show up with a magic wand that would just murder the competition. I'm like,

• 1:02:45Shaan Puri?

  Sounded cool, right?

• 1:02:46Sam Parr?

  I was like, uh, that's a great analogy. That's a cool story, but like, uh, I don't know, man. I think the math kinda, I think it might achieve the desired outcome, which I'm trying to do here. Which, uh, when I started, I was just trying to be financially independent by the age of 30. That was the only goal.

• 1:03:04Shaan Puri?

  And so, so like, if I could go back and just whisper three things about like, just strategy, like forget life advice, just strategy advice, I would have said,

• 1:03:13Shaan Puri?

  invest in all the smart people you know, like it'll, it'll work out. If you don't have the money, go convince somebody that you have a bunch of really smart friends and they should give you money to invest in that. That would've been the first thing. The second is invest in all of the expenses on your P and L. So go find all the places you're spending money and go try to invest in all those companies. That will also do fantastically well. You'll make more on that than your own company. Okay. If you really want to do your own company beyond that, fantastic. That's great. You're gonna build up skills and you got a lottery ticket there that might work. I would have just said, like, don't try to be Mark Zuckerberg from the social network. Like, think about what, like, like, basically just open your eyes to the problems and the opportunities that exist today. And so like,

• 1:03:54Shaan Puri?

  you know, whether it was like e-commerce or Shopify apps or like, these sounded small at the time, but they sounded small because that's where they were early. And like, at that time, I needed a VC to like stamp their approval that this was a good market or a good opportunity, which by that time is pretty late, because what's the VC doing? They're looking at what companies are raising huge rounds, which means like, four years ago, those were great opportunities. Three years ago, those were great opportunities. And so I wish I had just kind of been more eyes wide open on like, what projects are available to you and like the things that sound kind of nation funny. Those are actually better signals for you than the thing that the VC is saying is gonna be huge or is already huge, because it's often,

• 1:04:37Shaan Puri?

  you know, those companies to start are like, you're in a, you're in an absolute dogfight and it's just like, one winner out of a hundred is gonna emerge versus other things where like, you could basically take. No, no product risks, no market risk. So I had a friend Vishal tell me this once. He goes, I invest in companies with no product market fit risk. I had never heard somebody say that. It didn't even make sense to me. I go, what do you mean? Like every startup is product market fit risk. He goes, no, it's not. Like what? And he goes, he was the one who convinced me to buy Bitcoin initially as well. He was like Bitcoin's going to be the, you know, the biggest thing in the world. He's like, I just put up basically all the money I have into Bitcoin. I was like, what the fuck? This is like back in 2016, 15. Nobody was really saying that back then. So for the product market

• 1:05:18Shaan Puri?

  fist fit thing, he goes, he goes, for example, I just invested in a company that's making a robot that makes pizzas and it makes pizza. It makes a perfect pizza every time 24/7 at a lower cost than a human being can do it. He goes, I don't know if they can, he goes, there's a ton of engineering risk, like they may not be able to technically do it. But if they can do it, there's zero market risk. Every pizza shop will want this over paying an employee to make imperfect pizzas only in certain hours, call in sick and blah, blah, blah, like for a higher cost. And I was like, oh shit, that's true. There are things that have zero market risk. And I was taking like maximum market risk before. So like, that's the other strategy is like, you don't have to take as

• 1:05:59Shaan Puri?

  much market risk. The thing you're doing now, Greg, is like way less market risk. The thing I'm doing with Milk Road had like zero market risk, basically. And there's just like, there's a lot of money, there's life changing money that could be made and a lot of fun that could be had without taking on unnecessary risks.

• 1:06:14Sam Parr?

  What happened to that pizza company?

• 1:06:17Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I think they're still in engineering risk mode. They got like a big contract from Domino's, but then their CEO got in trouble for some things that they hired a new CEO, something, something, something. You know, like, again, these are legit engineering risks. So I'm not like, that doesn't mean they'll all work. But like, what I'm doing with the newsletter is like neither technical risk nor market risk.

• 1:06:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah, operational risk. It's just, are you going to, are you going to be able or wanting to do it for a long time, which is

• 1:06:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:45Sam Parr?

  Pretty good. You know, that's a pretty good thing to try to overcome.

• 1:06:48Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:06:49Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, it's really tough. You know, I remember coming to San Francisco and, and hearing all these narratives and these VCs telling me this, and also entrepreneurs sort of repeating a lot of this stuff. And I will say it, it's tough to go against what these stamps of approvals say to do, you know? Like, you have to tell yourself every day, like, and I have to do that, too. Like, when I started a services business, all my, most of my Silicon Valley friends were like, "A services business? Like, an agency? That's what you're gonna do?" You know, like, and you just kind of have to push forward and really just remember that,

• 1:07:31Greg Isenberg?

  you know, just because, you know, certain people on Twitter say a certain thing, or Sequoia or Andreessen say a certain thing, doesn't mean you can't have a great, like, I would say you can have a better lifestyle not being Mark Zuckerberg than being Mark Zuckerberg.

• 1:07:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah, exactly. The Pope Catholic, bro. A brown bear shits in the woods.

• 1:07:52Greg Isenberg?

  Right?

• 1:07:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Shaan Puri?

  What was that? A brown bear shits in the woods?

• 1:07:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00Greg Isenberg?

  That's a Sam Parr special. That's a Sam Parr special.

• 1:08:04Shaan Puri?

  Is that the number seven Sam Parr special that I just ordered? Because I think I got it.

• 1:08:09Sam Parr?

  Does a brown bear shit in the woods? Yeah.

• 1:08:11Greg Isenberg?

  That's why people listen to this podcast, though, for a couple of Sam's Parr, Sam Parr specials.

• 1:08:17Sam Parr?

  Did you just, what did you say? Did I, did I just order a Sam Parr special number seven? Because I think I just got it. That's good. By the way, there, I made a joke recently where Sean, you go, "Yeah, so there's these short traders." And I said, "Oh, yeah, how tall is he?" And you just, like, totally skipped by it. And the people, the comments on YouTube are like, "I think the joke was funny, but it was definitely funny that Sean just ignored him."

• 1:08:46Shaan Puri?

  No, people were like, dude, how did you not acknowledge that absolute gem on time, on target? You were, you were quick with that one.

• 1:08:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it got no love and the commenters pointed it out.

• 1:09:00Greg Isenberg?

  You're the new Chris Rock, man. You're the new Chris Rock. You're a better version of Chris Rock.

• 1:09:04Sam Parr?

  Thank God this is digital. He's gonna bitch slap me right in the face. Dude, I can't believe that happened. I'm gonna like riot for this. I'm gonna go see, I can't wait to see Will Smith apologize.

• 1:09:16Shaan Puri?

  Oh yeah, he's for sure gonna come out with something. By the way, the form on his slap, if you look at the photo, full extension, cross body. I mean, like, do you, I've never slapped anyone. If I tried to slap someone once, I'm not gonna have perfect form. That guy has to have slapped before because you don't just wake up with perfect form on a slap like that. Like the, just look at the extension and tell me that's not, that's not his 12,000 slap.

• 1:09:40Sam Parr?

  Smith is a habitual slapper, man. This guy has slapped before. We gotta, we gotta stop this guy before he gets out of control. He's definitely slapped before.

• 1:09:49Greg Isenberg?

  I wonder, as he was walking up the catwalk, there was like five seconds there. So I wonder what he was thinking. Like, was he like, you know what, am I gonna punch him? Am I gonna slap him? Like, I wonder what was going through his mind.

• 1:10:01Sam Parr?

  I think he's off his rocker a little right now.

• 1:10:04Shaan Puri?

  I've done that before to my sister where like, I knew I was mad and I started to charge. She's five years older than me. So I was like, you know, a kid at the time. And I knew I was mad and I had, I had to, I have to do something, but I had no plan. And so I had like three steps to improvise the plan. I remember this and she'll, she always tells the story. We were in the kitchen and I was pissed because she made fun of me. And I'm five, six years old and I was walking and I, I'm in the kitchen. I just grab a butter knife and I go, Nisha, this is the end. And like, she was like, the end of what? I was like, and like, nobody knows what happened after that. We both just blacked out. She thought it was hilarious that I had, you know, said like a movie line, like a loser.

• 1:10:45Shaan Puri?

  And I was holding this butter knife. I don't know what I was gonna try to do, but it wasn't gonna work. She's, she could overpower me pretty handily at that time.

• 1:10:52Greg Isenberg?

  The Sean Poirier special.

• 1:10:55Sam Parr?

  All right. That's the episode.

• 1:10:56Shaan Puri?

  By the way, Greg, you said something. Don't edit it. I want to leave with Greg got my wheels turning. Even while we're joking, my wheels are still turning about what you just said about the narrative. Here's my challenge, each of us. What's one narrative that you think actually you should be going counter to that narrative? Like, there's a narrative that we hear as entrepreneurs, as people in kind of tech. And like, what do you think is the like, actually, I don't know. Maybe it's this other thing instead. So if anyone has one, do it. But otherwise, I'll give you one.

• 1:11:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 1:11:31Shaan Puri?

  So mine would be, I'll give you two. There's the inside crypto. There's a narrative that's basically like, oh, there's all this innovation happening. This, it's like the next protocol, the next token, the next whatever. I'm pretty sure that if you just buy three or four things, like if you buy Bitcoin, ETH, I put Luna in there now. Just buy those three. And you just chill. Either all of crypto is gonna work and those will work amazingly. Or crypto is not gonna work. And no matter what you did, like if those fail, if those don't go up dramatically in value, crypto just didn't work and none of the shit will work. And so I think actually a basically

• 1:12:15Shaan Puri?

  like, for a while, the best strategy was Bitcoin and chill. And now it's ETH and chill. I basically think it's still the same. I think it's like, buying two or three tokens and not even needing to know anything more, just chilling on those is probably the best investment of the next like 10 to 15 years. It's gonna outperform everything during that time. So I think like, going deeper down the rabbit hole and like, learning more is actually gonna fuck up your returns versus just buying the main ones and just holding for like 10 years and not thinking about it. That's one. And then the other is I think that angel investing doesn't make much sense anymore. And I say this as somebody who angel invests. Like the valuations are so high that like, if I think about like that same money going into like

• 1:12:58Shaan Puri?

  one of these sort of boring cash flow businesses is so much better for your life. So if you're like an individual angel investor and you have, let's say a hundred thousand dollars, you know, or $300,000 that you want to go put into like a basket of 20 startups. It's like, are you sure you shouldn't just buy like, like get an SBA loan and go buy like some random website that's already producing profit and that'll pay itself off in two years or less? And, uh, and now you own this cash flowing asset. Like, I'm pretty sure that's just gonna do better.

• 1:13:28Sam Parr?

  Dude, I agree.

• 1:13:30Shaan Puri?

  Than a basket of angel investments.

• 1:13:31Sam Parr?

  The, the, the, our friends who have all crushed it on angel investing, you know, they, it means they made their investments five or eight years ago and it was different. It is, it's outlandish at the moment. So I agree with that. I think for mine that, I think that it's actually, I think that, I think that you only have a few swings in your career and a lot of people are like, oh, you should be patient and you've got a lot of time to do certain stuff. I actually think you should try, you should dedicate your twenties to getting your first significant win because after that, life gets a lot harder. You get a lot less energy, you're a lot smarter, which is actually bad. You actually, it's kind of good to be kind of ignorant.

• 1:14:15Sam Parr?

  And not enough people, I think oftentimes people go the other route where they go, well, just go join something for a little while and learn. In my opinion, F that, your twenties, dedicate it to getting a win and getting, even if it's relatively small and do it as fast as possible because after that, life is a lot easier.

• 1:14:34Greg Isenberg?

  I'll give my.

• 1:14:36Sam Parr?

  What, Sean?

• 1:14:37Shaan Puri?

  I was gonna say, give the Moyes quote about getting rich quick.

• 1:14:40Sam Parr?

  He goes, why does everyone hate on getting rich quick? Get rich quick schemes are the best. I want to get rich quick. I don't want to get rich slow.

• 1:14:51Greg Isenberg?

  I got I got two real quick. So I got off the phone with a friend of mine who works at Facebook. He told me this morning, he told me that he works roughly 90, 90 to 120 minutes per day on average. I thought you were gonna say 90 to 120 hours a week. He

• 1:15:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's the best when you measure your work in minutes.

• 1:15:15Greg Isenberg?

  He texted me. He texted me today. He said, it was 9:12 a.m. He said, 9:12 a.m. Finish work for the day. 12 minutes. And so

• 1:15:27Shaan Puri?

  You know, put us in a group chat. I want him to text us every day, just the timestamp of when he's done.

• 1:15:31Greg Isenberg?

  That's what that's what I told him to do. I said, you need to create like a Twitter and non account.

• 1:15:36Shaan Puri?

  A Twitter.

• 1:15:36Greg Isenberg?

  That's and so I'm gonna stay tuned.

• 1:15:40Shaan Puri?

  Do that.

• 1:15:41Greg Isenberg?

  But I think that in your 20s, like potentially go work at Facebook, go work at Google, get those high paying jobs. I think that, by the way, I think I think that's a good way to get a win. Get, you know, do that for a few years while you're, you know, do your doing your your learning on the side, like join a DAO, build a community, build a newsletter, do whatever you want to do, it would really speaks to you while you're you're not, you know. Yeah. So you're making money and you're learning. What more could you ask for? And then my and, you know, just because you gave a crypto one, Sean, I think that and I spent a lot of time in NFT land and web three land, too.

• 1:16:24Greg Isenberg?

  I think that NFTs are going to 99% freedom. It's going to be a free freedom and thing. I think the the idea of selling NFTs

• 1:16:36Greg Isenberg?

  will be a very small thing.

• 1:16:39Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so what what happens? Why? Why would I give away something for free? Or what's my incentive? So what happens after it's freedom?

• 1:16:45Greg Isenberg?

  So, yeah, I mean, you know, okay, so the idea, right now, it's like people are selling NFTs and projects for point 05 to point 2, let's say, on average, for some of these, you know, 10,000 PFP projects. I think that that's going to burn out at some point, and I think we're starting to see it burn out a little bit. And I think that, you know, did you see the 100 thieves drop?

• 1:17:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they, what did they do exactly? They did a much smaller amount.

• 1:17:16Greg Isenberg?

  So they basically, first of all, I was in gaming and gamers hate NFTs. So the fact that they did a successful gaming NFT launch, like obviously kudos to them. But basically they won this championship and they were like, okay, in order to get this like collectible, you can go grab it. It's free. We're not saying it's going to be worth anything. And they got 700,000 people to collect this collectible. And it's a trophy and then they make money on if there's value, right? So if it grows in value, they get royalties. And I think that's where you're going to see a lot of is like creators and, and, and big communities basically doing freedom ends.

• 1:17:59Greg Isenberg?

  Even though people seem, you know, people today think that selling NFTs is the future. I don't think so.

• 1:18:06Shaan Puri?

  Right. By the way, I'm going to change mine to just simplify it. Instead of starting a company by a existing business. I think that is the most overlooked, obvious thing for a smart person to do is how do you take your market risk to essentially zero? You buy a business that's already working and profitable and you just say, cool, I'm a better operator than this person. Or I know about a different form of operation than they do. And so I can grow this using Facebook ads, or I can grow this using outsourcing, or I can grow this using, you know, code or whatever it is. So you, you hear almost no narrative, you hear tons of narrative around the genius visionary startup, start a new thing, building a new project, launching a new thing.

• 1:18:48Shaan Puri?

  And like, you hear like one or two examples of people buying businesses. And I think that for most smart people, buying a business is a far better idea than starting.

• 1:18:57Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, but when you're in your twenties, my, my pushback to that is like, when you're in your, let's say, early twenties, like, do you know, like, you're saying that now, but I think like,

• 1:19:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:08Greg Isenberg?

  You do need like that operational experience and that's where my point is. You got to like, it's worthwhile to, to just potentially take a high paying job and then on the side, kind of like experiment and do stuff.

• 1:19:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's true. I'm not really limiting mine to the 20s. I think I'm still making mistakes in my 30s, so I'm assuming other people are too. And I guess it's more like, what narrative do I hear now that's easy to float along with that I'm like, you know what, actually, I don't, I don't actually think this is true. And like, that's the one for me, which is like, for most people who want to be entrepreneurial, they default to starting a business. And I think actually, maybe it should be the opposite. Maybe you should default to taking on an existing business and growing it, and only create a new thing if you like, actually have a new invention in mind, a new idea that really you can't shake in your head, versus like, just starting a new startup.

• 1:20:04Greg Isenberg?

  I like that.

• 1:20:04Shaan Puri?

  Because, because you want to be an entrepreneur, right?

• 1:20:08Shaan Puri?

  All right, I think we lost Sam. We gotta go. All right, Greg, thanks for coming, man. Where should people find you?

• 1:20:12Greg Isenberg?

  Twitter, at Greg Isenberg, or on our pod where it happens.

• 1:20:17Shaan Puri?

  Or in the mountains of Canada.

• 1:20:19Greg Isenberg?

  Or the mountains of Canada.

• 1:20:20Shaan Puri?

  Unless you're the IRS, in which case he's in mind at least 180 days.

• 1:20:23Greg Isenberg?

  At least.

• 1:20:26Shaan Puri?

  All right.

• 1:20:27Greg Isenberg?

  See ya.