#43 - Getting your team to take big risks, Turning office workers into remote, Quiet founders making big money

Sam and Shaan are back talking news, trends, interesting products and businesses. The way to make a million is by surrounding yourself around other people who want it. Join our Facebook group where we share ideas and help each other out: www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. Sam and his team happy about Twitter earnings (01:20), Long term stock exchange (03:11), NYSE bid to buy Ebay & direct listings (05:39), Commercial laundry businesses (07:39), Jessica Simpson's billion dollar clothing line & other influencer IP businesses (14:06), Secretive founders making the big money (17:12), Company universities (20:10), What would you do once you have all the money in the world (23:51), Remote Year (28:32), Shaan gives Sam a gift...(33:45), How to get your team to take bigger risks (36:35) and their book recommendations (45:20). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:04Shaan Puri?

  In this episode, we talked about a framework to get your team to think big.

• 0:08Sam Parr?

  We talked about a $200 million a year commercial laundry business.

• 0:12Shaan Puri?

  Jessica Simpson, how she's making a billion dollars still off her fame.

• 0:15Sam Parr?

  And a billionaire in Texas who you probably haven't heard of, but you should.

• 0:19Shaan Puri?

  Don't forget about Jambi's special, special, special package I gave Sam, a special gift.

• 0:24Sam Parr?

  Which is just underwear with pockets.

• 0:26Shaan Puri?

  I gave Sam some underwear.

• 0:33Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I'm Sean, this is Sam.

• 0:35Sam Parr?

  Episode two of our experiment.

• 0:39Shaan Puri?

  Of the experiment, yes. And new studio, we're looking fly. Now the video is good. Like, it's good to have video because now we're sitting in a legit studio. I got a bookcase behind me, I look smart.

• 0:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's still...

• 0:51Shaan Puri?

  I've read none of these books.

• 0:52Sam Parr?

  It's a work in progress. Uh oh, that one's gonna fall. Did you, um, see the videos that we posted yesterday?

• 0:58Shaan Puri?

  I did. Yeah, cool. Good stuff.

• 1:00Sam Parr?

  Good framework.

• 1:00Shaan Puri?

  Good stuff.

• 1:01Sam Parr?

  We'll have to continue making it interesting, or improve, I actually think.

• 1:05Shaan Puri?

  I rode my bike here today because I was like, if we're gonna be on video, I can't be fat. So I'm gonna start riding my bike, start eating clean. This podcast's gonna change my life.

• 1:14Sam Parr?

  Okay, so let's get into this. A couple things popped up this morning that I wanted to ask you about. We, last, maybe last year, maybe six months ago, we had like 10 high schoolers in our office. And we were there, I forget what they were doing, we were showing them around, I forget. But they started talking about Twitter, and I was like, you guys use Twitter? And all of them were like, yeah, it's booming. It's like, it's where it's at. And so, a few of us at the office started buying Twitter stock.

• 1:38Shaan Puri?

  Sophisticated strategy.

• 1:40Sam Parr?

  Today it popped, I think it's up 10%.

• 1:42Shaan Puri?

  More, it was up 17% this morning.

• 1:44Sam Parr?

  17%, yeah. So, big fan of that.

• 1:46Shaan Puri?

  Big fan of that. Great job Twitter.

• 1:47Sam Parr?

  And I've noticed I have been, I've spent... Hours a day on it.

• 1:51Shaan Puri?

  So I was, I had a funny conversation yesterday about Twitter. So I was, I was at work and I was talking about, I was like, you know, our, our company's not public. And I was like, um, in some ways that's great because you don't have to worry about the quarterly earnings and all that pressure. On the other hand, there's no sort of stock price to look at every day. You know, you could do great work and the shares of the company don't necessarily get more valuable because it's already got acquired. And, um, somebody was telling me a story. They were at one of these companies, let's call it maybe Facebook, maybe Twitter, maybe Snapchat. And, um, and they were like, yeah, you know what sucked is, uh, you know, 10 days before the earnings call, the CFO, you know, messages of product manager is like, hey, we need to lift monthly active users by like eight million.

• 2:35Shaan Puri?

  So, um, send out an email blast, like send out a notification, notification being like, hey, you know, something, come look. And, um, and I was like, yeah, that would suck. But, but that's how funny.

• 2:48Sam Parr?

  Did it work?

• 2:49Shaan Puri?

  Well, the, the problem is it, it works temporarily because now you're hooked on that. Now you're inflating a number. It's not inflated, it's not fraud, right? It's just trying to juice the number right before their earnings. So you get your stock price, you know, stays stable or goes up. But now you gotta do that every quarter. Any quarter you don't do it, you're deflating and that's a problem. So they were saying it wasn't fun to work in that environment.

• 3:11Sam Parr?

  And I don't, it doesn't matter if you hate or like Trump, but he proposed something interesting a while ago where he said, let's get rid of quarterly earnings report and do six or 12 months. And that is an awesome idea.

• 3:23Shaan Puri?

  That is an awesome, have you heard of the long-term stock exchange?

• 3:25Sam Parr?

  No.

• 3:26Shaan Puri?

  You haven't heard of this? Oh, this is crazy. So Eric Ries, who's, who wrote The Lean Startup.

• 3:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 3:32Shaan Puri?

  Might be in this bookshelf, I can't sell.

• 3:33Sam Parr?

  I have heard about it.

• 3:34Shaan Puri?

  You don't have it up here. Okay. So Eric Ries, uh, for those who don't know, he, he wrote the book, The Lean Startup, which is a great book. And, um, you know, he was thinking about his next project and he decided, you know, what's most screwed up about companies is this quarterly earnings treadmill that you get on. And it just incentivizes short-term behavior. So he's like, if we want to change the way companies work, they're playing the game as it's laid out. They're playing by the rules of the game. They're incentivized to do short-term. Things. He's like, but what if there was a stock exchange you could list on where you were incentivized to do long-term things? So they have some rules around it where it's like you have to hold the stock for over a year. So there's no short-term trading, gets rid of the day traders, the quantitative trading.

• 4:16Shaan Puri?

  They haven't launched yet, but they've been at this for four plus years, I think, because it's not easy to roll out a new stock exchange. But I love this idea. This is an idea where I'm like, yeah, that's what thinking big looks like. And innovating in a space where there's no innovation and I love it.

• 4:30Sam Parr?

  That's great. I, that interests me. Someone sent it to me that the, his page was like, you guys, the hustle should sign up for this. It's kind of interesting and I'm into it. I think.

• 4:40Shaan Puri?

  We should have him come here, talk about it. He's, he lives around here. He's dope. And also I met this guy who ran, I think he, he was like CEO of whatever of the New York Stock Exchange. So he came to our office once and we were hanging out and I was like, so you're the CEO of a stock exchange? Like, wait, stock exchange is a business? He's like, oh yeah, for sure. We're a business. And so basically there's, and I'm kind of a rookie on this still, but like in the 10-minute conversation we had, he was like, you know, there's NASDAQ. And then there's NYSE. They compete for listings. So they want companies to list on one versus the other. And their business model is pretty interesting. They lose money in the US, but they have the brand of being the New York Stock Exchange. And then they power the stock exchanges of like 50 other countries.

• 5:25Shaan Puri?

  So, you know, the Swedish Stock Exchange, they use the infrastructure of, let's say, the New York Stock Exchange. I don't know if that's the exact country, but pretty interesting. So it's basically a stock exchange as a service, which is a very lucrative business to be in.

• 5:38Sam Parr?

  Did you see the New York Stock Exchange is rumored to be bidding to buy eBay?

• 5:44Shaan Puri?

  What?

• 5:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We reported.

• 5:47Shaan Puri?

  That's amazing.

• 5:47Sam Parr?

  Yesterday, I think, or two days ago. Yeah, it's weird, right?

• 5:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that is weird.

• 5:51Sam Parr?

  I don't know how that's possible, but I think it's very strange.

• 5:54Shaan Puri?

  It very, very strange. Anyway, so you were saying something about stock. Well, I don't know, I don't know what you're saying. So why did I even tell the story about the long-term stock exchange?

• 6:02Sam Parr?

  Quarterly earnings.

• 6:05Shaan Puri?

  Oh, Trump's good idea. Trump's one good idea.

• 6:06Sam Parr?

  I think it was his idea. I don't care whose idea it is. I think it's a great idea. Because I read or earnings reports all the time. I mean, it's like a. A huge undertaking.

• 6:16Shaan Puri?

  Right. And what a lot of companies are now doing is a direct listing. You know what that is?

• 6:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Spotify did it. Slack.

• 6:21Shaan Puri?

  Slack, yeah.

• 6:22Sam Parr?

  Airbnb is rumored to be doing it. And I believe what it is, is you, so the way that a lot of IPOs work is a bank will underwrite it, which means they basically buy the early version or the early offerings, the early shares, and that sets the price. And with the direct listing, one of the components is it goes live right away.

• 6:40Shaan Puri?

  So it's, what a direct listing is, is it's the liquidity of being public without raising capital. So if you go public in an IPO, it's your initial public offering, you're selling shares in order to raise money. So it's good if your company needs to raise a billion dollars, that's a great way to do it, because it's bigger than most private investors can do. So that's why people usually do an IPO. But if you're Slack and you don't need money, or you're Spotify and you don't need to raise capital, you just want to get liquid, and you just want to be traded. A direct listing is the way to get the liquidity without the raising capital. And what it does is it's way faster, way less onerous, and, and, you know, simpler to do overall. And so that's why some companies are not doing this. And Bill Gurley is a huge advocate of it.

• 7:20Sam Parr?

  You can save 30 or 40 million dollars in fees to banks.

• 7:23Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:23Sam Parr?

  Doing it.

• 7:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, for sure. Not a problem I personally have, but, you know, interesting nonetheless.

• 7:29Sam Parr?

  There's a good clip. What are direct listings? Okay, what do you want to go to now?

• 7:34Shaan Puri?

  Uh, whatever you want. Gay weddings. Tell me about gay weddings.

• 7:37Sam Parr?

  No, let's, let's wait that a minute.

• 7:38Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 7:39Sam Parr?

  So The Hustle, we covered this thing this morning about a commercial laundry business, and it caught my eye.

• 7:44Shaan Puri?

  I read this. So this was, it's not surprising, because it's like, yeah, of course this exists, but I just didn't know the numbers. And that's what, actually, one thing I really like about The Hustle is it's not always fantastic new ideas I've never heard of, but it's like, we lifted, you know, we looked under the hood of this thing you all know about. I like that. So talk about this.

• 8:01Sam Parr?

  I didn't know about, okay, so here's, I'll round off you numbers off. It's called, I believe it's called Star Laundry.

• 8:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 8:06Sam Parr?

  Um, so they charge 30 to 45 cents per pound. I'm reading the notes now. It's guess, the people guess that they're around 120 million dollars in sales. The way it works is, what they do is they make deals with hotels.

• 8:21Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 8:21Sam Parr?

  Or.

• 8:22Shaan Puri?

  Commercial laundry.

• 8:23Sam Parr?

  Mostly hotels. And what What they do is they'll go to the hotel and pick up to like, let's say, the Westin or something like that. They'll collect eight hundred pounds of linens.

• 8:31Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:32Sam Parr?

  Or uniforms, linens and uniforms. They bring it there. They've got these massive machines that hold a hundred thirty pounds of laundry. And they put them in, they fold them. They probably do it with like tablecloths as well. You iron them, do whatever you have to do. And then you send them back and it was started by a kid who's, or he didn't start it. He's twenty eight years old, twenty eight years old. His father started it, died. The kid took, dropped out of school and took it over. Um, he's rumored to be selling, but I was incredibly interested in it. And I looked up some of the bigger guys in the space. There's one company, uh, I think it's called, is it, what's that say up there? How do you say that?

• 9:03Shaan Puri?

  Cintas.

• 9:04Sam Parr?

  Is that what it says? Cintas. Okay. So they were at four billion dollars in sales and they do a bunch of stuff like renting the uniforms to people.

• 9:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 9:11Sam Parr?

  And laundering them. Four billion dollars in sales, like a thirty five billion dollar market cap.

• 9:15Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 9:16Sam Parr?

  Interesting.

• 9:16Shaan Puri?

  So I got a half baked idea here. So I, I read this and I was like, oh, cool. I know a new thing. But my brain doesn't stop there. It's like, how do I capitalize on this new thing I just learned? And so I was thinking, you know, my, so my family does Airbnb, right? And they, you know, they, they do, you know, a bunch, a bunch of Airbnb nights a year. And it's great, great income for them. They're retired, so it's, it's easy. But the problem is the like turnover each time. And so there's some companies that are out there that are like sort of cleaning services that will come clean your Airbnb. But what I think would be interesting is if you did the sort of Airbnb, um, this commercial laundry service. So basically you would give the Airbnb the sheets.

• 9:56Shaan Puri?

  So instead of saying, hey, use, because what, what my mom did, she uses her own stuff, which is kind of weird because all these strangers are sleeping on it. Or she would go out and buy new sheets, but instead she would probably pay like just monthly to have somebody who delivers fresh sheets. And then picks it back up like they do those like, you know, water bottles that you leave out front.

• 10:14Sam Parr?

  I don't know if that would be good. And here's why. Um, so these guys are doing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pounds of laundry a day. Maybe thou- maybe thousands of pounds of laundry a day. So there's Washio. And that's my midwestern accent. I say warshio and then rents.

• 10:28Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 10:29Sam Parr?

  Rents bought warshio.

• 10:31Shaan Puri?

  And those are just for people, people's laundry.

• 10:33Sam Parr?

  For people. I've used them. I pay fifty dollars each time I use it. It's very expensive, but they're not good businesses, I don't think. Warshio went out of business and was or was acquired for next to nothing by.

• 10:43Shaan Puri?

  So I think I think it I think this would be better because with you if you do an Airbnb, two things change, right? First is I'm making money every time I rent my Airbnb. So factoring in the cost of either cleaning or laundry is like, well, I'm making money, but I'll pay a certain amount of my, you know, revenue, my costs. So it's thought of as a bit of a business. The second thing is, you know, you get higher volume. So like, you know, when these things turn over, it's like, I need fresh sheets on. It's a two day stay and then I do it all again. And that's faster. It's a faster turnaround and it's more like business. It's more like a B to B business than a B to C business where you do your laundry every two weeks and you're price sensitive on fifty bucks, you know?

• 11:21Sam Parr?

  My bet is the unit economics and that would be horrible, would be horseshit because with hotels, you know, like with a fair bit of certainty that there's like turnover of four hundred rooms.

• 11:31Shaan Puri?

  You get the volume. Yes.

• 11:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah, every night. That's gonna happen.

• 11:33Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 11:33Sam Parr?

  With Airbnb, it's not a lot of people Airbnb part time or when they're.

• 11:37Shaan Puri?

  Well, it's just distributed, right? So your pickup point is not one point. You're gonna get, you know, there's more Airbnb rooms in San Francisco than hotel rooms. And so you you would actually get more volume if you're serving all these customers, if they wanted the service. But the problem would be operationally, you'd have to be sort of a roaming pickup versus what these guys do, which is one sale, one pickup point. So I don't know if it's as good, but that's my half baked idea off of this this learning.

• 12:03Sam Parr?

  So the the two folks in the space, Sentas and is it called Unifirst? Unifirst, two billion dollars in sales. So they do, they they clean it.

• 12:11Shaan Puri?

  And these guys are national or is this?

• 12:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 12:13Shaan Puri?

  Cause Star Laundry looked like it was just in New York.

• 12:16Sam Parr?

  It was just in New York, New Jersey.

• 12:17Shaan Puri?

  Right. And they said it was pretty cutthroat. They're like, you know, somebody will come out and say, we'll do it for twenty two cents a pound.

• 12:23Sam Parr?

  Super cutthroat because it's really, it's it's probably, it's because it's unglamorous. I have a feeling it's mostly immigrants. So they probably hustle really hard. Your competition's like. Strong.

• 12:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 12:33Sam Parr?

  Um, and so what I like to do is whenever I hear about these companies, I'll, I'll, and I want to learn about the business. The first thing I do is I go to Reddit. I'll type in the name, uh, like sent us and Reddit, or I'll look at their glass door. And I, I like to look at the highest reviews and lowest reviews and I have a feeling I know how these work. I have, I, I'm almost positive the secret sauce for these guys are hiring just shitloads of salespeople and running through them like crazy.

• 12:57Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 12:57Sam Parr?

  So what they do is in Reddit, they'd be like, what's it like to work here? And they would say, you can make a lot of money. It's a grind and the turnover is incredibly high. And so there's all these subreddits dedicated to salesmanship and sales jobs. And these were all ranked, or a lot of people were talking about these. So they just hire like, I imagine 20,000 remote salespeople. And they go door to door and that's how they get it done. And they're selling, so they like get into the laundry business, then they rent you uniforms and then they sell you bathroom supplies and just sell all types of stuff to these small businesses.

• 13:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 13:26Sam Parr?

  And they just probably just go door to door to door. Just, it's a, it's a, you're on the ground.

• 13:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. In your story, the guy said, we have no salespeople, but I don't know if that's real or not.

• 13:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, maybe they, maybe they.

• 13:38Shaan Puri?

  That was his claim. Yeah.

• 13:39Sam Parr?

  I don't know, but maybe, or maybe they're not expanding quickly. I'm not sure.

• 13:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 13:42Sam Parr?

  With these big guys, uh, they had, it looked like the company did four billion in sales, had, uh, 30,000 employees.

• 13:50Shaan Puri?

  Okay. They have some salespeople.

• 13:51Sam Parr?

  Right. And it was one of the top posts on, when I was browsing on Reddit was, like it consistently said, what's it like to be a salesperson?

• 13:58Shaan Puri?

  Right. All right. What else we got?

• 14:01Sam Parr?

  You want to go to, um, we could just briefly talk about this. I was researching stuff for this. You know, Jessica Simpson, you obviously know.

• 14:08Shaan Puri?

  I know her. Yeah.

• 14:10Sam Parr?

  She has a clothing line. Do you know that does a billion dollars a year?

• 14:13Shaan Puri?

  You know, I saw this like two weeks ago and I was like, what? I don't even think she's famous anymore. And what is, I don't know anything about it. She started a while ago or is this new?

• 14:22Sam Parr?

  Uh, I'll explain how I think this works. Okay. So there's a company called, I think it's called sequential brands. They owned or used to own Martha Stewart's line of stuff. They do this with Jessica Simpson. They do it with, uh, Heelys, I believe. You don't remember them?

• 14:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 14:35Sam Parr?

  Stupid things. And then they do it with um Joe's Jeans and a few others. They either buy like kinda forgotten about brands. I think they own DWS, the shoe store as well. So it was like low end, lowish and medium to lowish and stuff. And they just have uh, they work with Dillard's, Macy's, all these like, you know, shit stores that only like

• 14:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 14:53Sam Parr?

  where I'm from, the Midwestern mom go to like um, and they just partner with celebrities like Martha Stewart and Jessica Simpson and just make a ton of shit for them. I mean, it's quite simple.

• 15:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:01Sam Parr?

  Um, but I didn't realize how many people still bought Jessica Simpson's stuff.

• 15:06Shaan Puri?

  That's crazy.

• 15:06Sam Parr?

  It's all moms, I believe. Like people who liked her in the

• 15:10Shaan Puri?

  Are they buying, you know, we obviously, we have no clue. Are they buying this for Jessica Simpson? Oh, Jessica Simpson wears this. This is Jessica Simpson's stuff? Or is it just like, you know, she started this thing, it got into retail and now it just sits on a shelf and people buy like? I find it hard to imagine that Jessica Simpson still has this kinda pull with people. If you said J Lo, I'd be like, yeah, I don't know if it's just because I just watched the Super Bowl or what?

• 15:32Sam Parr?

  Like, like, kinda looks like every woman in the Midwest. Just like a white chick with like, you know, blonde haired lady like, I have got so many family members that look just like that.

• 15:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:43Sam Parr?

  I understand why people would buy that crap.

• 15:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and I'm sure people are doing this with like YouTubers and Instagrammers now, right?

• 15:49Sam Parr?

  I got more on that. Okay, so first of all, this happened, you know, Paris Hilton still sells like crazy amounts of perfume. It's one of the best selling perfumes of all time, still to this day.

• 15:58Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:58Sam Parr?

  Uh, okay, so there's this thing, so I went and so we have this database on Trends, trends.co, sign up. And um, where we looked at the IP address of everyone who's using Shopify and saw the top selling stores. And one of them was called, I think it was called Color Pop.

• 16:12Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 16:13Sam Parr?

  Okay, I did research on that.

• 16:14Shaan Puri?

  Makeup brand.

• 16:15Sam Parr?

  It's owned by, what's that say?

• 16:17Shaan Puri?

  Seed Beauty.

• 16:17Sam Parr?

  What's it say?

• 16:18Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I know it. Seed Beauty.

• 16:19Sam Parr?

  Seed, okay, it's owned by Seed Beauty, a brother and sister uh, uh, partnership that started it. They own Color Pop, which sells makeup, and they're the ones who uh, basically do that Kylie

• 16:30Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 16:31Sam Parr?

  cosmetic thing. So they're doing the exact same thing.

• 16:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 16:34Sam Parr?

  And it seems interesting.

• 16:35Shaan Puri?

  They have a huge operation. There's a, I think I've said this before on the pod once, but they have a YouTube video where uh, it's like, welcome to Seed Beauty or welcome to Color Pop. Like, here's a tour. It's like a recruiting video. But when you watch it, you're like, holy shit, this is a huge operation. What is this company?

• 16:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 16:50Shaan Puri?

  And that's when you go look into it.

• 16:51Sam Parr?

  Where they have like a huge factory.

• 16:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's in LA, exactly.

• 16:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and it's new-ish. It's only five or six or seven years old.

• 16:59Shaan Puri?

  Right, and the brother and sister are very mysterious about themselves and the company. They don't talk much about it, which only makes me want to know more about the whole thing.

• 17:07Sam Parr?

  Here's what I've learned. If it's mysterious and they don't talk about it.

• 17:09Shaan Puri?

  It's huge.

• 17:09Sam Parr?

  It's huge.

• 17:10Shaan Puri?

  It's huge.

• 17:12Sam Parr?

  I know so many people and I'm like, this is huge. Why don't you talk about it? They're like, we don't want anyone to know.

• 17:17Shaan Puri?

  Everybody, if somebody's out there promoting, it's less big than you think, and then they say it is. Even this, even this podcast right now. If I was 10 times more successful, I would do 10 times less content. That's just the rule of life.

• 17:30Sam Parr?

  Right, yeah, and so you don't hear a lot about these folks, and so that's why I think it's massive. If they don't talk about it, there's a guy in Texas named Joe Lamont. Have you heard of Joe Lamont?

• 17:38Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 17:39Sam Parr?

  Okay, so in the mid 90s, he was 20 years old. He dropped out of Stanford and started Trilogy Software.

• 17:45Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 17:46Sam Parr?

  And in the 90s, it was like Oracle, Microsoft, and Trilogy were like the places to work. He started it in Austin, Texas, and it's one of a handful of reasons why Austin became a little bit of a tech hub. And what he would do is he would make software that was for relatively boring things. So for example, if you're Boeing and you have to build a big jet, you need to figure out how many screws and seats and all the stuff you need when you're building this. He created automation software that helped make that process more efficient. I don't understand how it works entirely because I'm not even close to that industry. But then he did the same with cars and a few other things. And he would hire thousands of employees, all young people, and they had this thing called Trilogy University. And it's what they were famous for. They were hired, they would hire hundreds of people a year, all young people, and they would teach them everything.

• 18:30Sam Parr?

  And people loved working there. And they loved it because he was, he's a little mysterious. He's also a wild man. There are stories of him take, they would fly all the recruits to Vegas and he would say, they were young kids, they didn't have a lot of money, but he would say, here's a thousand grand, bet it all. And he would try to do that to get them used to risk. Well, anyway, he did this for a long time, and if you Google Joe Lamont, and you gotta Google Joe Lamont SEC, and you could find all his old filing because they tried to, I think they went public and he bought it back, but they spun off loads of companies and they grew these things like crazy. Well, anyway, in the later 90s, they hit a little rough spot and he laid off a bunch of people and they kind of like went silent. He's back at it now and

• 19:07Shaan Puri?

  How old is this guy?

• 19:08Sam Parr?

  He's in his 40s. So when he was in his 20s, early 20s, he was on all these lists like the bill. They're like, this guy is Bill Gates.

• 19:15Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 19:15Sam Parr?

  And he was a big deal. He went away and they say he lost a lot of money, but he was still very wealthy. But he kind of is making a resurgence now and he has acquired maybe it could be hundreds of small, not small, but enterprise software companies of 20, 30, 40, 50 million, maybe even higher. And what he does is he outsourced most of the gigs to India for Indian developers. And he just increases the prices of the product and does well. And no one talks about this guy.

• 19:45Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 19:45Sam Parr?

  But his enterprise is has to be in the billions of dollars in revenue. And I have talked about it a little bit and Forbes has talked about it a little bit. But he's a guy who doesn't say shit, but is behind the scenes.

• 19:58Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 19:59Sam Parr?

  Doing wonderful.

• 20:00Shaan Puri?

  Right. Love it.

• 20:01Sam Parr?

  And that is a perfect example of a quiet guy. You've never heard of this?

• 20:04Shaan Puri?

  I've never heard of this guy. I've heard the name Trilogy before, but never Joe Lamont. So you said something in there that I like, which is you talked about they had Trilogy University. And I've seen this popping up now. I've always wondered why people don't do this. So when I moved out to Silicon Valley, I was like, what would I want to do here? What's like the dream gig? And my, my first thought was I want to be, I want to help, I want to go to Google and I want to tell Google, hey, Google, why don't you have a university? You should have Google U. You have one of the best brands in the world. You need all this talent. You literally have a campus you already built. And by the way, universities suck and are very backwards and they're not training people for things that actually you need when you hire them. You have to retrain them anyways. And so why not create Google U and I'll be the dean? That was my initial thought process.

• 20:49Sam Parr?

  How old were you?

• 20:49Shaan Puri?

  23, 24. So I didn't execute on this because I, I knew I didn't have the credibility at that time to do that. But you know, since then I've, I've been very interested in this and kept an eye on this space. So we talked about Lambda School, why I was so interested in them. I still plan to start a school even, but I started looking at there's some different companies that are doing this now. So Shopify has Shopify's dev degree. I don't know if you know about this. So they partnered up with a university and they're like training developers and they basically get first dibs on hire. You know, I don't know if it's like, I don't know if that's like in the contract, but the purpose of being of doing this university is to help their talent pipeline, right? And, um, and then there's several companies now that are starting their own, uh, you know, corporate universities.

• 21:34Shaan Puri?

  McDonald's was one of the first that ever did this. I didn't actually know about this, but they had hamburger U. And they were basically training young managers, uh, and sort of frontline people in a, an actual university setting. And they would get it, you know, they'd get a degree and they would be like, all right, now you're ready for the next thing. So it was like corporate training, but done in the fashion of a university. And there's like a spectrum, right? So on the one end, it's just, I'm training you to do the job that we do. That's, I think more like what hamburger U was like. And then there's, you know, Shopify dev degree, which is more like become a developer and then you can get a job at Shopify or many other places. But I think this is, I think this is going to be a trend that, that picks up, which is companies either creating their own or partnering with failing universities,

• 22:18Shaan Puri?

  rebranding it as their own and, uh, attracting talent there and having sort of a talent pipeline from the grassroots up. Because it's so hard for them to recruit talent, recruit top talent.

• 22:28Sam Parr?

  Well, why has that not happened already?

• 22:31Shaan Puri?

  It is, that's what I'm saying. It is happening now. The sort of, there are a few historical things like trilogy, like McDonald's. There's a few others that I, that I looked up. Uh, and then there's some more recent ones. So Shopify, there's two others that, uh, more recently did this. I think I might be wrong with this, but you know that one like crappy CRM company Zoho or something like this?

• 22:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 22:50Shaan Puri?

  They have their own university and I think they target Indian students, um, from India. And this is like their sort of secret sauce on talent.

• 22:57Sam Parr?

  So the guy who owns that spoke at HustleCon, they've never raised funding.

• 23:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they're a big company. Crappy product, horrible product.

• 23:04Sam Parr?

  It's okay. It sucks compared to Salesforce, but they have some things that are perfectly acceptable for where like a smaller thing.

• 23:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 23:13Sam Parr?

  Um, but he is in Sunnyvale. He spoke at HustleCon and he, he doesn't work anymore. He owns it though. He owns, I think he owns all of it, like 100% of it. Uh, like a $500 million a year thing and they have so many different products. So he has like an RV that he like drives around in and like, in like an airstream that he like lives in and goes to all these events. He spoke at our thing. He's a cool dude. Um, and yeah, he told, he went to school. I forget, what's the school in India? It's like a

• 23:36Shaan Puri?

  I I T.

• 23:37Sam Parr?

  Uh, yeah, what is it?

• 23:38Shaan Puri?

  I I T.

• 23:39Sam Parr?

  And it's like the Harvard of

• 23:41Shaan Puri?

  It's even harder to get into than Harvard.

• 23:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's very prestigious. Yeah. And he was telling me that's that's what they do.

• 23:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, um, that's crazy. Uh, and it does work. You were saying something, uh, he lives, he has an RV. So question for you. Um, I was looking into what does Paul Graham do nowadays? Cause he's like, you know,

• 23:57Sam Parr?

  He tweets a lot.

• 23:58Shaan Puri?

  He, he doesn't run Y C anymore. So I was like, okay, what is he doing with his time? It doesn't seem like he's active, you know, investing or anything. He likes to write. And, uh, I was asking Emmett, uh, from Twitch, cause Emmett went to Y C, you know, they're, they're friends and they, you know, he went through Y C early on.

• 24:11Sam Parr?

  CEO of Twitch.

• 24:12Shaan Puri?

  Of Twitch. Yeah. So they, they were the first Y C batch. And so, uh, he was, he's telling me all kinds of cool Y C stories. And one of the, I, I asked him, I said, what does Paul Graham do nowadays? And he said something like, I don't know if he still does this, but he took a couple of years. He basically moved to like the backwoods, I think in England with his family. And like live a simple life in a cabin with the kids and in nature. And then he spends all day, you know, either writing a new programming language or, uh, writing essays that he publishes online. And like, that's what he wants to do is write a new programming language or essays. And so I asked him, I asked Emmett, I was like, what's your version of that? And he gave me a cool answer. I'm curious, what's your version of that? Like you have all the money now, like you have the money, the money's done. You, if you were to exit the career race, what do you, what do you do with your life?

• 24:56Sam Parr?

  I can answer that. I have done it. I did, I did that for about six months.

• 24:59Shaan Puri?

  What would you do?

• 25:00Sam Parr?

  Uh, for seven weeks, I drove my motorcycle all over the country. So I did do that. It was awesome. It got boring.

• 25:06Shaan Puri?

  Did you have a plan or it's like a walkabout? You just went wherever you're

• 25:09Sam Parr?

  I, I was like, I, I was like, I'm gonna, I have a budget of like, I didn't spend a lot, maybe five grand. And I was like, I'm just gonna see what I can do. So I stayed, I couch surfed. I like literally couch surfing.com, Airbnb's motels in Kansas in the middle of the country are like $25.

• 25:22Shaan Puri?

  That's dope.

• 25:23Sam Parr?

  I stayed all over the place. I camped just for about seven, eight weeks. I'd post on my Facebook where I'm gonna go. I met girls. I used Tinder like crazy. I was single.

• 25:29Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:30Sam Parr?

  Um, I just

• 25:31Shaan Puri?

  So that's what that when did you do that? You were 20?

• 25:34Sam Parr?

  That was about four year, four or five years ago. And if I had to do it again, I would do that for a little while. And then me and Sarah, my wife, we would, I would rent an airstream which and, and, and drive all over the country. And then I would probably visit 10 different countries, but that dude, that shit gets boring after a while.

• 25:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So

• 25:49Sam Parr?

  I've done it.

• 25:50Shaan Puri?

  So it's, it's some, it's the question is, what would you do beyond the sabbatical, right? Cause there's the what you would do for three months. That's like travel, hang out, party, whatever. But then that gets boring and hollow and you sort of feel, you don't feel great. So what I, what I thought was interesting was I think the cabin in the backwoods, working on his own project is writing his own language and his essays. That seemed like his sustainable peace place, you know, like he could just keep doing that. Um, and so I don't know what that is for me, but I think it's an interesting question. Uh, Emmett's was, I don't know, we had to bring him on and ask him again. It was something like he would, um, go to his hometown, I think in Washington, like Seattle, and he would, I don't remember. I think he was like so stumped and he was just like, nobody's ever asked me, this might be the best question anyone's ever asked me.

• 26:33Shaan Puri?

  And that's why I remembered, uh, like, like, oh, this is a good question. Let me ask more people.

• 26:37Sam Parr?

  So I, um, a year ago or some time ago, we got offered to sell the company. We almost took it and I decided, no, let's keep going. This is cool, but I was tired though. I took Jason Lemkin taught me this. He was like, just take two weeks off. And so I was like, no, I'll do it. Let's do five weeks. I was like, why not? I'll do five weeks. I gave myself a bonus. I was like, all right, I got

• 26:59Shaan Puri?

  Money and time.

• 26:59Sam Parr?

  Money and time. And after about two or three weeks, I started coming back to the office.

• 27:05Sam Parr?

  I got bored.

• 27:05Shaan Puri?

  And were you like recharged or you were just bored?

• 27:08Sam Parr?

  I was recharged and bored. I mean, like, I was like, I gotta do something. I gotta go, let's go. It's like, it gets very boring.

• 27:14Shaan Puri?

  For sure.

• 27:15Sam Parr?

  Um, what would you do?

• 27:17Shaan Puri?

  Um, so I think, I think I talked about this last time, maybe that, um, my, uh, my ideal life is basically taking like two-year plunges into trying to do something creative and, and like that is interesting to me. So like, I would do two year, if it was right now, I would basically spend a ton of time with my kids. And then I would try to do, uh, stand-up comedy for two years. Cause I think that's one of the hardest things that's Somebody can do. I just want to go try it. And then I would do another two years where I would try to write a book, or I would try to make a movie, or I would try to build a company, or you know, I would just do these two to three year chapters, just doing a creative pursuit. I would move the hell out of San Francisco. Um, if I could, I would take my, you know, if I had all the money, I'd basically tell my family, look, we're going to move to this San Diego or wherever it is.

• 28:02Shaan Puri?

  And, um, and I would do that. And then twice, twice a year, I would live in a different place for one month. So I started doing this where I lived in, uh, last night, last one was Buenos Aires. We went down to Argentina and we lived like a local for a month. And it was way better than any vacation because we were just living there. We weren't like tour, it wasn't tourism. Um, and it was just a month and then come back and it was a lightweight commitment. I didn't have to like give up my life and like go start a new life. It was just like a month and I even worked when I was there. I was like, cool. I'll work four hours a day. No problem.

• 28:32Sam Parr?

  Have you heard of remote year?

• 28:34Shaan Puri?

  No, what is this?

• 28:35Sam Parr?

  It's like study abroad, but for remote workers and they hook it up. So you, they set.

• 28:39Shaan Puri?

  That is genius. Oh my God.

• 28:41Sam Parr?

  Genius.

• 28:42Shaan Puri?

  Well, did you do study abroad?

• 28:44Sam Parr?

  It was awesome. I did.

• 28:45Shaan Puri?

  Study abroad is amazing. If you just do study abroad, but now you're seven years into your career, that's, that's amazing. That's all I need to know.

• 28:51Sam Parr?

  EF tours, that's what I did. I think EF education first. I don't know what it stands for. Uh, EF tours, huge company, billions of dollars in revenue. Started by a guy, an older guy. Now he's old now, but it was like a bootstrap thing.

• 29:02Shaan Puri?

  This is study abroad.

• 29:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah. But I was curious about study abroad. I think it's an interesting thing and, uh, a guy named, I think he's Austrian. And, uh, they sponsor a tour. Uh, the reason why I looked into it was they sponsored a tour de France cycling team, like the best team. And that's, I think you get a return on that for some people, but it's, I think it's a thing of passion and a money.

• 29:20Shaan Puri?

  You only do that if you have a lot of money.

• 29:22Sam Parr?

  Right. And so I was like EF tours. That's a study abroad.

• 29:25Shaan Puri?

  Sponsoring the tour de France is like thing number 180 on the how to market our company list.

• 29:30Sam Parr?

  Well, no, some people do it. What like postal service, uh, sponsored Lance Armstrong for eight years. Now had the fraud thing not happened, it would have been.

• 29:37Shaan Puri?

  It would have been great.

• 29:38Sam Parr?

  It like helped the postal service.

• 29:40Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:40Sam Parr?

  No, it could be good, but you do have to have a lot of money upfront. And anyway, EF tours did it and it's a huge.

• 29:46Shaan Puri?

  So tell me about remote year. What do you know?

• 29:47Sam Parr?

  Um, well, they contacted us, wanted to work together. And so I was looking into it and you just pay it. It's simple. You just pay a fee and they hook it up where you can go live different places.

• 29:56Shaan Puri?

  So when they, when you said they wanted to work with us, they wanted to work with the company?

• 30:00Sam Parr?

  Me, the hustle.

• 30:01Shaan Puri?

  To do to like what?

• 30:02Sam Parr?

  Advertising.

• 30:03Shaan Puri?

  Advertising, okay.

• 30:03Sam Parr?

  Someone just said.

• 30:04Shaan Puri?

  But I, if, how does it work? I'm an employee. I want to work remotely.

• 30:07Sam Parr?

  Pull it up.

• 30:08Shaan Puri?

  I want to do a stu-, I want to do a study abroad.

• 30:10Sam Parr?

  Dot co or dot com. I forget what it is. But there's other services like this where they own destinations, like multiple hostels and they're set up for workers, uh, not for partying. And you can spend like three months in a location. Uh, there's, there's.

• 30:24Shaan Puri?

  I feel like Bali is turned into that.

• 30:25Sam Parr?

  I fucking hate Bali. We have Steph, one of our, uh, writers, our analyst, lives there and she loves it. I think it's whack, but.

• 30:33Shaan Puri?

  What's whack about Bali? You're the only person on the, on this island of Bali is whack.

• 30:38Sam Parr?

  It's, it's just like a po-, it's just.

• 30:40Shaan Puri?

  It's overrated.

• 30:41Sam Parr?

  It's just all tourists. It's, it's, it's not like cool Indonesia. I think it's just.

• 30:46Shaan Puri?

  There's places.

• 30:46Sam Parr?

  It's like saying like.

• 30:47Shaan Puri?

  It's Cancun, yeah. There's places an hour away from Bali that are what Bali, what people think Bali is, and that's actually where you should go.

• 30:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, Bali is like Cancun.

• 30:56Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 30:56Sam Parr?

  What's it say? Does it say how it works?

• 30:58Speaker 02

  Remote year curates work and travel programs for professionals to see the world without having to quit their jobs. They give you basically like an itinerary, but like you're with like a group. So it's like a community.

• 31:07Sam Parr?

  How much does it cost? And is it one whole year?

• 31:09Shaan Puri?

  Oh, so, okay. So it's, it's a group of people from different companies that are all going to go on a curated sort of like tour, living in different places, working. I think this is a fantastic idea. I think this is on trend.

• 31:20Sam Parr?

  Wait, did I sound negative about it? I think it's interesting. I don't, I don't know enough to say it's amazing or horrible. It's definitely interesting.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  Four, six or 12 months.

• 31:28Sam Parr?

  Four, six or 12 months. What's the fee?

• 31:31Shaan Puri?

  If, for the purpose of this podcast, when I say amazing, I mean, interesting. Amazing, obviously, as you go deeper in the business, means, I know that people want it. The economics make sense. When I say amazing, I mean, oh, I'm very interested in that. That is an interesting premise.

• 31:44Sam Parr?

  I'm bullish on all types of remote stuff. I think it's great. I'm definitely bullish on that. Um.

• 31:49Shaan Puri?

  Cool. What else we got?

• 31:50Speaker 02

  About thirty five hundred down payment and a monthly.

• 31:52Sam Parr?

  Damn.

• 31:53Shaan Puri?

  Thirty-five hundred down and then two grand a month to do this for a year. So that's twenty-four grand plus the sort of thirty-five hundred application fee.

• 32:00Sam Parr?

  But how many?

• 32:01Shaan Puri?

  A lot of people would do this. A lot of people would do it because there's so many people to sit.

• 32:04Sam Parr?

  Remote, single and likely young.

• 32:07Shaan Puri?

  No, no, you don't have to be remote. You have to actually be not remote, right? So you want to be dying in a cubicle in New York, San Francisco or LA.

• 32:13Sam Parr?

  Remote job already, right?

• 32:14Shaan Puri?

  No, no, I think what it is is either they help you go remote.

• 32:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 32:17Shaan Puri?

  For the year, like you're not remote. You work in HQ. You're done it for eight years. You have enough sort of equity built up with your employer to be like, hey, I'd like to do a remote year with this program. And I'm sure these guys are trying to partner with companies to educate them on like, look, this is good for your company. You'll retain talent in the long run. If you let them have these sabbaticals, these working sabbaticals.

• 32:35Sam Parr?

  That's cool. Google remote year crunch base.

• 32:38Shaan Puri?

  A lot of companies do this sabbatical thing where like.

• 32:40Sam Parr?

  Money they raised.

• 32:40Shaan Puri?

  After four years, um, you get like four months off or six months off to take a sabbatical because they know like that's usually when you just churn out.

• 32:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Uh, Jason told me, um, someone I look up to that it's at the four or fifth, five year mark where you get burnt out. And I did too. And that's when I took my time. I was like, all right.

• 32:58Shaan Puri?

  We sold in year five because.

• 32:59Sam Parr?

  You're just tired.

• 33:00Shaan Puri?

  Very tired. Um, I wasn't even tired, like fatigued. It's like, need a change.

• 33:05Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 33:05Shaan Puri?

  My body started telling me I need to change.

• 33:07Sam Parr?

  What does it say?

• 33:07Speaker 02

  There is seventeen million in.

• 33:09Shaan Puri?

  Damn.

• 33:09Sam Parr?

  Okay, seventeen million. So I guess they're going to go big or they're trying to.

• 33:12Shaan Puri?

  Trying to go big.

• 33:13Sam Parr?

  I met with, um, uh, Scribd. Do you know Scribd?

• 33:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 33:17Sam Parr?

  I met with that guy, uh, Trip, the CEO recently. The other day I went to his office and I was shooting the shit. And he's twelve years in and I was like, he's like, I was like, are you tired? He's like, I have been and I took time off. But it's like, I'm, I'm taking this public. I want to go for a long time.

• 33:29Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 33:30Sam Parr?

  Or I want to take, I want to try and take it public. Um, Scribd is big.

• 33:33Shaan Puri?

  Very big. Because they got into like the books and legal document space and like they figured out how to like.

• 33:40Sam Parr?

  North of nine million in subscription revenue. Sorry, uh, nine figures.

• 33:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 33:43Sam Parr?

  Over a hundred million in subscription revenue.

• 33:45Shaan Puri?

  That's good. All right. What else we got? Anything else good? Uh, I have a gift for you. Hold on.

• 33:52Sam Parr?

  Cool tights. Thank you.

• 33:56Sam Parr?

  Alright. Oh, hell yeah. Okay, Jambi's. Okay, Sean sent me this where he wanted to invest in them. I thought it was a horrible idea. Let's see if it's good. They do a good job. They got all the, um...

• 34:09Shaan Puri?

  D to C hallmarks.

• 34:09Sam Parr?

  They got the D to C hallmark, lowercase letters, this same font and these pastel colors.

• 34:14Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 34:15Sam Parr?

  It's Jambi's times. Boxers with pockets. It sounds crazy, but feels so good. As soft as luxury briefs, as breathable as the Arius boxers and functional as your favorite.

• 34:25Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so let me tell you. Jambi's is basically, it's for when you go home and you're wearing jeans right now. Nobody wants to wear that when you go home. You, do you not take off your pants right when you get home?

• 34:36Sam Parr?

  When I get home, every morning, there's like, my pants are at the front door. Very clearly, I stepped out of them.

• 34:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. You walk through the door and you step out of your pants and you leave it on the floor because you're bad. So these are Jambi's. So basically, it's boxers, so that you can wear them around.

• 34:52Sam Parr?

  Oh my god.

• 34:52Shaan Puri?

  They have no hole in the front, so there's no flashing, you know, danger. And they have pockets, so you can put your phone in it. Simplest innovation I've ever seen.

• 35:01Sam Parr?

  But do these?

• 35:01Shaan Puri?

  No hole and pockets.

• 35:02Sam Parr?

  Do these, uh, run up when you put your pants on? They seem thick.

• 35:06Shaan Puri?

  Uh, so you wear them, you don't wear them with your pants.

• 35:09Sam Parr?

  Uh.

• 35:10Shaan Puri?

  You wear them instead of pants and instead of underwear. You just wear these.

• 35:13Sam Parr?

  Alright.

• 35:14Shaan Puri?

  So, most people wear like, they had a slide in their pitch take that I liked, which was like, everything people wear at home is not meant to be worn at home. It's like basketball shorts.

• 35:23Sam Parr?

  Yoga pants.

• 35:24Shaan Puri?

  Yoga pants. You know, it's like, you know, all the, like, so people are wearing the wrong thing, so they're like, we're gonna make the thing that you should actually wear when you want to just lounge around at home.

• 35:34Sam Parr?

  Alright, I'm gonna wear them. I'll report back.

• 35:36Shaan Puri?

  So I was all about it, and my wife is making fun of me because she's like, what the hell is this? Why? Why? Because I was, I was checking the front door every day to be like, are my Jambi's here?

• 35:44Sam Parr?

  Are you serious?

• 35:44Shaan Puri?

  Are my Jambi's here? I was so excited, I don't know why. And so, I got them and she's like, okay, I wore them and she's like, these are just boxers. And I was like, but the pockets and no hole up front. And then, we had some friends come over and she was like, no, leave your Jambi's on. You love your Jambi's, leave your Jambi's on. And I had to like...

• 36:00Sam Parr?

  You left them on?

• 36:01Shaan Puri?

  I left them on with friends over and I was very uncomfortable. I was like, I wouldn't do this, really.

• 36:05Sam Parr?

  Really?

• 36:05Shaan Puri?

  But they were like, okay, you're just wearing boxers. And I was like, no, no, no, these are Jambi's. And then we had a debate and it was all good.

• 36:11Sam Parr?

  Well, I'll report back.

• 36:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. I need somebody. Right now, I'm the only person I know that likes these things. But if you like them, you'll be too. Otherwise, I'll know I'm the only one.

• 36:21Sam Parr?

  I'll know in a few days, or I'll report back tomorrow. You want to do one more?

• 36:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I have one. I have a framework, so not an idea.

• 36:27Sam Parr?

  You want to scroll down a little?

• 36:28Shaan Puri?

  Framework's a little bit boring, but I think this one's really interesting. So if you run a team or a company and you want them to think big, have you ever been frustrated why people don't think bigger? And like, sort of take bigger swings in the company?

• 36:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and I have a theory as to why that happened.

• 36:45Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so I'll tell you. You tell me your theory, and I'll tell you one of the reasons I think is there.

• 36:50Sam Parr?

  We didn't raise venture capital. And so I think that my hypothesis was one of the reasons why this happened was because I was so frugal early on. And I was like, oh, well, like, we have to, let's save a thousand dollars here, five hundred dollars there, and that created small thinking.

• 37:03Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 37:03Sam Parr?

  And that's one of the reasons.

• 37:04Shaan Puri?

  And look at you now, buying two hundred dollar chairs like it's nothing.

• 37:08Sam Parr?

  Well, our first office rent was five hundred dollars a month.

• 37:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 37:12Sam Parr?

  And then I remember being like, now we spend...

• 37:14Shaan Puri?

  Fun fact, you guys worked out of the Craigslist original office.

• 37:17Sam Parr?

  Maybe I'll save that story for tomorrow. I'll tell a good story about that. We worked out of Craigslist first office. When, like, they moved out and we moved in.

• 37:23Shaan Puri?

  Like, when you walk in, the sign still says Craigslist, Inc., or whatever.

• 37:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'll tell that story tomorrow.

• 37:28Shaan Puri?

  So, okay, but so you're saying because you were frugal early on, but thinking big doesn't take money. Thinking big doesn't take money, right? Most big ideas don't take that much money.

• 37:38Sam Parr?

  Okay, so then what's the answer?

• 37:39Shaan Puri?

  So, here's one of the reasons why, right? So first, you know, it's about the people you get. Some people are dynamic, and they only want to work on big things and take big swings. And so one thing is we hire people who are good at executing, because we need to execute on something that's already figured out. You don't want people just bouncing off the walls with new ideas all the time when you need people who can execute. But what ends up happening is, at a certain point, you need those same people to start thinking big and taking big risks and working on projects that might not work, right? Like, this podcast, for example. If this podcast gets big, it adds a whole nother dimension to your business. But let's say most likely, it's hard to make it big, it might not work. And so you are the one who can spearhead this in your company, or somebody like me, but it's really hard for all the people out there to do.

• 38:21Shaan Puri?

  To spend time on something like this. I'll tell you why. So this is a Jeff Bezos theory that I also heard from Keith Roy. So the thinking is this, when you, what most people do when they run their company is they measure people on their outputs. So let's say you want to grow the newsletter, right? Because the newsletter is your core business. So there's somebody probably in charge of growth or growing the newsletter. And you know, you'll judge them on how much did the newsletter grow? And so because of that, you know, they get tuned to work to be measured by their output. So if somebody wanted to work on this podcast project, they'd be like, okay, this is valuable. If we get to our goal, 100,000 listeners per episode, that's not easy to do. That's a top 15 business podcast, most likely going to fail. So I don't really want to attach my name to that because if I'm going to be measured by the output, I don't want to do things that are most likely to fail.

• 39:06Shaan Puri?

  So like, you know, if you're Elon Musk and you want to go to Mars, it's very hard to get convinced people to do that when it's most likely going to fail. So what happens is people start optimizing. It's like we were talking about the stock market earlier. The incentives in a company are to do things, to do, to do projects that are probably going to work. Because if a project works, you look good. You look good, you get promoted. You get promoted, you make more money. And so the game is incentivized for you to do things that are probably going to work. But the company as a whole needs people to do things that are probably not going to work.

• 39:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 39:36Shaan Puri?

  At a certain portion of the time, higher risk, higher reward projects. But as an individual, tying your name to those projects is a bad career move. So how do you change that? So Jeff Bezos has a different theory, which is like, look, instead of measuring the outputs, which are in general, hard to measure anyways, right? How do you raise revenue? Well, you need to do these 10 other things, right? You want to make, you want more revenue? Maybe you need to get in touch with more sponsors. Maybe you need to increase your close rate from 20% to 30%. There's all these inputs, these levers that create that output.

• 40:04Sam Parr?

  Relatively small ones.

• 40:06Shaan Puri?

  And they're very specific and those are in your control. So as you go from the output, let's say get more revenue to the input, which might be like, make more, you know, reach out to X potential sponsors per month, close at this rate, make sure that we follow up with 100% of hot leads. Like those are inputs in your control. So what he does is when he measures, when he manages somebody, he measures them on their inputs, not the output. So revenue cannot go up, but if you Pick the right levers and then you hit your goals on those levers, those things that were in your control, you can get promoted.

• 40:36Sam Parr?

  What's an example?

• 40:38Shaan Puri?

  Let me, let me use a hypothetical example of

• 40:40Sam Parr?

  Laundry.

• 40:41Shaan Puri?

  Of, well, I think it's, I think the hustle business is actually a good one to use here. So let's say, um, let's say you want to measure the output you want. What's like the key output you want, either revenue or, or audience growth. Okay. So let's do revenue.

• 40:53Sam Parr?

  Make up a number, two, two million a month in revenue.

• 40:55Shaan Puri?

  Two million a month. Okay. So the team wants to hit that goal. We all agree that's the right goal. What are the three biggest levers you need to do in order to achieve that goal?

• 41:04Sam Parr?

  Increase free email subscribers, increase paid email subscribers, or paid trans subscribers, increase, um, number of advertisers.

• 41:12Shaan Puri?

  Cool. So you say number of advertisers, email subscribers and trans subscribers. What you would do then is say, okay, am I in control of those things? Maybe not, right? Maybe, uh, getting the email list to grow actually requires me to do three other things, right? Like, how do you guys get the email list to grow? Maybe it's paid ads, maybe it's giveaways, maybe it's

• 41:32Sam Parr?

  Web traffic.

• 41:33Shaan Puri?

  Web traffic from a blog, right? So it might be what you, what you actually set out as the employee, the way the employee gets measured is number of blog posts they wrote per month, uh, that received a minimum of this much traffic. It might be the number of, you know, emails sent out about trends, uh, or it might be increasing the conversion rate on trends from X percent to Y percent.

• 41:54Sam Parr?

  Do you know a good way to organize that? Okay, ours.

• 41:56Shaan Puri?

  Okay, ours is a good way to organize it, right? But what ends up happening? So, so let's like, so the main point I wanted to make was if you're measuring outputs, it's a very easy thing to do because it's like, dude, all that matters is growth, it's revenue, it's profits.

• 42:07Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 42:08Shaan Puri?

  What you'll realize very soon is that you can't motivate a team to do that because it's too far away from what they control. You gotta measure them by what they control and promote them. If they do the, if they were very thoughtful about picking the right levers, if they executed really well on those, if they were consistent on those things, that's a good employee. You should promote that. Because that way, even if the output was unlikely, right? Like, let's say growing this podcast into a top 10 podcast. But if Henry's motivated by, hey, after every episode, you need to publish five, five of the best clips. Why? Because we are pretty confident that leads to Growth.

• 42:41Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 42:41Shaan Puri?

  So he should be able to win even if the podcast doesn't focus on the inputs.

• 42:45Sam Parr?

  What you could do, what you can control as opposed to the outcome.

• 42:47Shaan Puri?

  The second, second phrase I liked from this was it's all about zeros. What does that mean? When you think about a project, you need to have enough projects in your portfolio that either add a zero or are a zero. What does that mean? So you don't want, if let's say, let's say revenue is at, let's call it 10 grand a month. What you want to do is you want to have some projects that we're going to, that are going to add a zero to the end of that. 10 grand becomes 100 grand. And you want to ask yourself, what are our add a zero projects? How many add a zero projects do we have running right now? What often happens at a company is you have zero of those running at any given time. You have no projects that have the potential, even if they worked, to add a zero to the, to the, to the number you have at the top. And what, what happens with those projects is that most of the time they're going to be a zero. They're not going to work at all.

• 43:31Shaan Puri?

  And so I like these, I like having this language to motivate a team. So anyways, that's my framework for leading a team. Make sure you're doing this.

• 43:38Sam Parr?

  I made that up.

• 43:39Shaan Puri?

  Uh, so Bezos is kind of famous for the inputs versus outputs. There's other things like there's a book called The Score Takes Care of Itself.

• 43:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's about, uh, the football guy.

• 43:47Shaan Puri?

  Bill Walsh, yeah.

• 43:49Sam Parr?

  It's like, in order to win this championship, we're going to answer the phones on time.

• 43:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 43:52Sam Parr?

  We're going to answer every phone call.

• 43:53Shaan Puri?

  He took over a really shitty team, the San Francisco 49ers at the time. They were the worst team in the league for several years running. And what most people do is say, okay, how do we win more? And winning is the ultimate output for a, a team, winning the Super Bowl. What he said was winning the Super Bowl, like that, that is so far away. What we need to do is what are our inputs? So the first thing he did was he trained the front desk person on how to answer the phone. And he's like, we're going to nail this. And what's the next thing we need to nail? How we practice. Here's how we get, here's how we stretch. Here's how we warm up. And he's a very detail oriented guy. So like, that was his mantra, but like fundamentally, what he's saying is the same thing. We measure ourselves based on the things we control and the score takes care of itself. If we do the, if we pick the right things, the score will work out.

• 44:34Sam Parr?

  Well, here's one year clip. We got one of those. This, that's a good, that was a good speech and that, uh, will help take care of our score.

• 44:43Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. Uh, cool. Anything else we want to do today?

• 44:46Sam Parr?

  No, we can do these tomorrow.

• 44:47Shaan Puri?

  Okay, cool.

• 44:47Sam Parr?

  That was wonderful. That was good.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  This is a story just like that. John Wooden, like famous UCLA coach.

• 44:52Shaan Puri?

  Tying the shoes, right?

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Same, yeah. How to put on your socks and how to tie your shoes. That's the first day of practice.

• 44:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, uh, there was no, there was no basketball. Everyone walked out to the court and they're like, Coach, where's the ball? He's like, oh, we don't need a ball. First, we learn how to put on our socks and tie our shoes so that we don't get blisters because we're going to be practicing hard. So you need your socks to have no bunches. And everyone's like, what the hell? And this is the guy who won like, you know, 10 championships.

• 45:14Sam Parr?

  He just passed away, I think, recently, right?

• 45:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, a few years ago.

• 45:17Sam Parr?

  I'm gonna, uh,

• 45:18Shaan Puri?

  R.I.P.

• 45:19Sam Parr?

  I also bought, um, uh, I bought Bill Belichick's, one of his books. I have a book club. We're gonna read it.

• 45:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's do a book recove from, from this list here. So what's a good book that's on the shelf?

• 45:28Sam Parr?

  Um, we should add more to it, but let's see.

• 45:30Shaan Puri?

  Oh, also, high output management. This principle is in this book too?

• 45:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I like high output management. I hate reading it, but I like the knowledge.

• 45:37Shaan Puri?

  I hate reading it too. I was given it.

• 45:38Sam Parr?

  Oh, boring.

• 45:39Shaan Puri?

  I only read 25 pages, to be honest, but.

• 45:41Sam Parr?

  It's so boring. Um, Scott Belski's The Messy Middle is wonderful. I'm gonna add more custom stuff. If I had to read one right now, maybe this extreme ownership one, that's pretty solid.

• 45:52Shaan Puri?

  Extreme ownership, Jaco? Where's that?

• 45:54Sam Parr?

  At the very bottom right. And then if you had to read.

• 45:56Shaan Puri?

  Okay, all right. We'll do, we'll do one book recove at the end of each thing. All right.

• 45:58Sam Parr?

  And then, uh, let's, if I only had to do one, I didn't see, is Call Me Ted right there?

• 46:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 46:04Sam Parr?

  The biography of Ted Turner.

• 46:06Shaan Puri?

  All right. This is, this is the book recommendation of the day. Call Me Ted.

• 46:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 46:09Shaan Puri?

  Why is this a good book? I haven't read it.

• 46:10Sam Parr?

  Call Me Ted. It's good because Ted Turner, look how he looks. Ted Turner started CNN, which eventually merged with AOL and Time Warner and all this stuff. It's, it's a huge thing. He started, uh, TBS.

• 46:22Shaan Puri?

  Is he the one who created the concept of 24 hour news?

• 46:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, uh, he, uh, his father, Ed, owned a, a, a billboard company in the South and it did well. I think it was making like 10, 20 million dollars a year with 3, 4 million dollars of profit. Pretty solid. He, his father killed himself. He inherited it. Within a few years, he was like, all right, now let's get into radio. They got into radio. Then he goes, we have to, uh, let's get into local TV. He got into local TV. Then he said, we gotta, we need more programming. Let's buy the Braves. Let's buy the Hawks, the Atlanta Hawks. So he was in the South, did that.

• 46:50Shaan Puri?

  Is this why the Braves were on TBS always in perpetuity?

• 46:53Sam Parr?

  Yep.

• 46:53Shaan Puri?

  Oh, nice.

• 46:54Sam Parr?

  He started, he goes, now my next big project, we're gonna start CNN. It's gonna be a 24 hours, 24 hour news network. And the only time we're gonna go, uh, quit, go off air is when the world ends. So we recorded the, uh, like a goodbye segment is like, the world's about to end. We thank you for tuning in. And, uh,

• 47:11Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 47:12Sam Parr?

  He, uh, he bet it all many, many, many times. He started out on third base. I mean, he started out with wealthy family, but he turned that into a huge thing. Now he's one of the largest landowners in America and he's a huge outsider from the South. Loud mouth, pretty obnoxious, but smart.

• 47:25Shaan Puri?

  Have you met him?

• 47:26Sam Parr?

  No, he's probably gonna die any day now. He's got dementia, he's quite old. But Reese, uh, he, him and his partner are indirectly investors in us. And I, and I always, uh, seek out stories on, on him.

• 47:38Shaan Puri?

  I remember when you started the hustle, you were like, I'm, I'm inspired by this guy. I want to be the modern day Ted Turner type of thing. You were, you were very motivated by him.

• 47:46Sam Parr?

  He's badass. He's, uh, mostly a great person. He wasn't always a great husband, but he screwed up.

• 47:51Shaan Puri?

  He did some great things though.

• 47:52Sam Parr?

  He did a lot of great things. He owned MGM, just baller.

• 47:55Shaan Puri?

  Nice.

• 47:56Sam Parr?

  So read this one.

• 47:56Shaan Puri?

  All right, cool. Good book recommendation.

• 47:58Sam Parr?

  All right. We're out. Thank you.