#121 - So You Made $100m...Now What?

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@theSamPar) are back on the today without a guest. On today’s episode you’ll hear: Sam and Shaan debate the merits and opportunities with Hopin and other digital event apps (7:25) How to make trade shows better with a lesson from Alibaba (14:10), Shaan explores a few different companies that are doing financial services for creators (31:00), Shaan and Sam riff on a hypothetical chrome extension to see what influencers are buying (34:25), how to “diverge and converge” for better brainstorming and design thinking (42:35), the guys try to come with answers for the existential question, if you already had all the money you’re working for, what would you do? (51:35). Big thank you to Azoras for sponsoring this episode! Follow them on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/azoras. Joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. 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.

• 0:20Sam Parr?

  Okay, we're live. Before we get into this, do me a favor, everyone. Google My First Million iTunes, leave a review, and then me and Sean will read the reviews tomorrow, and tell us what you want us to talk about. So you guys can give us some ideas. I've been reading the reviews a lot.

• 0:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you just tweeted out a great review. You want to talk about that?

• 0:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so someone tried to insult Sean and I, and they said, "I don't have it up."

• 0:44Shaan Puri?

  I got it right here. Two-star review from Gliding Over. It says, "These two hosts are an amazing example." That's the bold part, because it bolds like the headline. And I was like, "Ah, this is great. What can go wrong?" So it says, "These two hosts are an amazing example of how someone can be totally mediocre, below average in everything, and still achieve unreasonable success if they are free of self-doubt and shameless enough."

• 1:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so this review person clearly tried to insult us as being confident when we shouldn't be confident.

• 1:15Shaan Puri?

  And I gotta say, pretty well-done insult, too, right? A little, you know, a little no-look insult, a little no-look pass.

• 1:21Sam Parr?

  I thought it was great, and I tweeted it out as like a smug way to be like, you know, "F you, we don't care." And it's been retweeted and clicked on like five or, I don't know how many, 500 times maybe, and people thought I was like serious, and it was like an inspirational, like, "Just do it," which that's not what I was going for.

• 1:40Shaan Puri?

  You tweeted out, you go, "Yeah, 100%. This guy's review of my podcast just summarized a lot of what I believe. You can suck at so many things and still crush it if you're confident. I don't get why this is a two-star review." That's okay, though. Thank you, listener. And I think people were like, you know, like, kind of like defending slash like, yeah, like, sort of like, taking it as an inspirational moment, although you were just trying to be a smart ass, which is great.

• 2:03Sam Parr?

  Yes, it was a smart-ass comment. That's okay. I read our reviews constantly, and that's like been the easiest way to understand what we should make each week.

• 2:13Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:15Sam Parr?

  By the way, do you want to recap anything that we did in the last 10 days? I feel like we've had a pretty strong or interesting 10 days.

• 2:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, fucking guest game strong, man. We had the president of Shopify. We had CEO of Lambda School. We had Josh Elman, who's like, kind of like a growth god in Silicon Valley. Do we have anyone else?

• 2:33Sam Parr?

  The Trump tax lady.

• 2:34Shaan Puri?

  We had the Trump, we had tax girl come on. Who else do we have? We had one more, I think. I'm forgetting somebody, but yeah, we went hard on guests, which is always like, you know, fun, but, but bad at the same time. Like, I love having different people on, then at the same time, I feel like it doesn't have that same tempo that we usually get with the ideas just kind of riffing.

• 2:54Sam Parr?

  Cause we're, we're self-sufficient, um, which is important when we have these guests, we're definitely reliant on their gold. But a few head highlights were, um, what's the Lambda School guy's name?

• 3:06Shaan Puri?

  Austin. Yeah.

• 3:07Sam Parr?

  Great dude, really like him. He's a smart ass online, but he's a great guy, uh, in person.

• 3:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Highlights were. One of the like things you remember from that, I know one where you were like, what are the odds that this fails? And like, you know, they've raised their series C, they've raised like hundreds of million, 150 million bucks or more. And he was like, probably like 50%, which I think was an honest and probably surprising answer for a lot of people of like, look, there's still a 50% chance. It's just flops, this, this, this fizzles are more, more likely not fizzle, like crash and burn. But you know, some probability of success.

• 3:45Sam Parr?

  In this podcast, I said, you know, with this business, like if it doesn't do well, it's just going to make like pretty good revenue and pretty good profit forever.

• 3:53Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 3:53Sam Parr?

  If it does well, it's going to maybe going to be huge.

• 3:55Shaan Puri?

  With your business, you mean?

• 3:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Yeah. I was like, what about you? What, what, what's like the low end, high end, mid end outcome? And he goes, well, it's probably like, it's maybe going to be massive or it's going to just completely bankrupt. And I was like, oh, okay. Awesome. At least you know the game you're in.

• 4:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I like that.

• 4:14Sam Parr?

  So I also liked how he told me about the ACT and SAT business. I actually did research on this. There's a there's a company launched by this young woman who used to work at GLG, that consulting thing. And I forget the name of it, but they've raised a lot of money and they're trying to build a new standardized test. So I think that's bold and I love that. So that was my highlight.

• 4:35Sam Parr?

  Let me look it up.

• 4:36Shaan Puri?

  Okay. While you do that, the other thing I liked from his was the Mormon mission. Like, I don't know if we spent way too much time talking about that, but that was the most interesting part to me. Where, you know, A, I'm just like, that's not my world, you know, he's, you know, I've never, I've never considered doing a mission like that. I didn't know what what actually it entails. I knew people go on it, but I didn't know like, so how does this shit work? And he was like, he made it sound like it's fucking like Harry Potter, where it's like, you know, an owl comes in with a piece of paper. And now you get, you read the piece of paper. It's like, you're going to the Ukraine. And then you go to Ukraine and you need to first learn to speak Russian and then convince, you know, some number of people, you know, that Jesus is it. And I was like, whoa, that's, that's an insane thing that like is just normal in your culture and your life.

• 5:21Shaan Puri?

  And, and also what an insane amount of like discipline and resilience and like, what a formative thing to do. Where you're like, okay, I have to sell one of the hardest things. I have to live alone. I have to learn a new language. I have to do this 12 hours a day. Like, that's not easy. And I thought that was like really interesting as a like bootcamp for, you know, future business.

• 5:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I liked how he was talking about that. I just found him to be a very, almost like a common man, like an everyday man. But at the same time, very stoic, pretty brave. He was definitely an inspirational character. And that company is called Embellish. And without doing too much research, it almost is like they're using video games to like come up with like a test to see how smart you are, something like that. I oversimplified it, but raised a lot of money.

• 6:08Shaan Puri?

  Probably don't make your standardized test service sound like the word embellish, but okay.

• 6:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And then we had Josh.

• 6:18Shaan Puri?

  The application fees thing. Yeah. How, you know, some colleges bringing in 10 million bucks a year just on application fees.

• 6:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And he was like, there is no solution or something like that.

• 6:29Sam Parr?

  I also liked Josh Elman. Josh Elman has done a bunch of interesting things, but he's worked with a lot of Titans. And I found that to be incredibly fascinating of him working with those types of people. And I felt like a douchebag because I was like, all right, Josh, enough about you. Tell me about all the people you worked with.

• 6:42Shaan Puri?

  Hey, thanks for coming on. We'd love to talk to you about the great men you've been surrounded by and hear what they're like.

• 6:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 6:50Shaan Puri?

  Everybody loves that, right?

• 6:51Sam Parr?

  It was so interesting.

• 6:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And he's a good sport about it. He didn't mind. The attention wasn't on him, which I think is like, kind of what you need to be to be like, all right, I'm going to have a big impact, but not be the CEO and founders. Like you kind of have to be low ego in order to do that role and have that career. And then, you know, he didn't take it personally when we were like, hey, tell us about the hero founder. Like, we want to know what they're like, too.

• 7:15Sam Parr?

  I thought that was great. He was insightful. We have a few topics, one that you just put on, but I want to talk about. Tell them. Okay. So it's a, go ahead.

• 7:25Shaan Puri?

  You're talking about hopping.

• 7:26Sam Parr?

  Hopping.

• 7:27Shaan Puri?

  Okay. So I put on this sheet, this is what you guys missed before we started recording. I wrote hopping 2 billion. And Sam's like hopping, the events thing? No, what? And so why was that your reaction first?

• 7:39Sam Parr?

  It's, we're saying it. Well, it's hop hopping, H O P I N.

• 7:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. What am I saying? I said something else?

• 7:47Sam Parr?

  I said it wrong. I think I said it wrong. So what, why did you write 2 billion? What's going on?

• 7:52Shaan Puri?

  They're rumored or reported to be raising at a $2 billion valuation, and this is within 18 months of launch.

• 7:59Sam Parr?

  What? Okay. So David, Dave, the guy who helped start it, I, I think he's a co, he's a co-founder. I don't know if he's like the guy or second. He's the, let's say his co-founder. He wrote for me for trends when we first launched.

• 8:12Shaan Puri?

  Wow. Okay. So it says the CEO is this guy Johnny Burafarat. I don't know how you say that. So who's Dave? Tell me about Dave.

• 8:21Sam Parr?

  What was his last name? Let me, I, I forget his last name. He, he was just a, he wrote, he was a freelancer. He's in the trends group and I met him online because he had this medium. Dave schools, Dave schools. Is he the founder?

• 8:36Shaan Puri?

  He's a head of marketing.

• 8:38Sam Parr?

  And I thought it said co-founder on his LinkedIn. Let me see. Head of marketing.

• 8:48Sam Parr?

  Let's see. Sorry. Oh, it says head of marketing before it said co-founder.

• 8:52Shaan Puri?

  Like I love you and you're great and you're definitely part of like the early team, but like let's come up with a word that like, like, don't, don't do, I've done that before where I oversold what I did before in the past and I'm like, trust me, it's a slippery slope. You don't want to do it because the place where you're trying. No. Okay. So what's interesting about Hoppin is obviously COVID shut down the kind of conference industry globally. So there had to be something, right? Zoom and Zoom or something better than Zoom. That's for conferences. And I saw this because there's this guy, do you know Semel Shaw?

• 9:27Sam Parr?

  Yes, I do. Well, I don't know him, but I know who he is.

• 9:31Shaan Puri?

  I don't know him personally either, but you know, fellow Brown guy in tech and he does this thing every year where he tries to call one breakout company. So I'll just take you through. So like, you know, to be clear, these are companies that are always already doing well, right? So he's not like calling them before they're doing well, but he's basically saying like, of all the companies doing well this year, this is the like the golden goose company. That's really breaking out. So 2012, he picked Stripe. 2013, he picked Snapchat. 2014, he picked Slack. Didn't do 2015, didn't do 2016. 2017, he did Coinbase.

• 10:08Shaan Puri?

  2018, Airtable. 2019 was Superhuman. And for 2020, he picked Hoppin.

• 10:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Good hit rate. I mean, a hundred percent. He's right. Every single time.

• 10:18Shaan Puri?

  And even if you had invested in all of those at that time, at whatever high valuation they were, you still would have been, you still would have done great. Because they've, they just continue to grow like monsters. Maybe not superhuman, but. So it's interesting because the conference industry basically got slammed with COVID. Something had to come about, come out as a solution. A whole bunch of people tried. It looks like this is where the momentum is going is to, is to happen. I didn't know about this. I didn't realize this was getting that big. Like a $2 billion valuation in such a short amount of time is pretty incredible. And I haven't used it yet. Have you?

• 10:53Sam Parr?

  Yes, I tried signing up. I tried making an event for us. When you and I were on that kick, we looked at Run the World and we looked at Hoppin and. Frankly, I couldn't figure it out. Run the world. Sorry, folks. It was not good, but they were early, so it might be a lot better now. Hop Hop in looked a lot cooler, but it when did we do this? It was like right at the beginning of COVID.

• 11:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 11:20Sam Parr?

  And happen really wasn't that good either yet.

• 11:22Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so, so they they seem to have they said they had tens of millions a year in annual recurring revenue. Already, and I think they had like hired 150 people this year or something, something insane going from like 10 people to 180 people. So.

• 11:40Sam Parr?

  Where's this data coming from from their deck?

• 11:42Shaan Puri?

  This? No, this was in like the news when people were talking about.

• 11:47Sam Parr?

  How much revenue do they have?

• 11:48Shaan Puri?

  It said tens of millions in ARR. That's what I saw. I don't know. What that means.

• 11:52Sam Parr?

  So this is what's interesting to me is that. This is like a lesson that I hate. It was hard for me to learn and I bet, I don't know, for sure. It was hard for you to learn. It was expensive for you to learn, which was that. The market is far more important than your product. And it doesn't matter how cute or how cool you want your shit to be.

• 12:13Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 12:13Sam Parr?

  The market will pull it out or it won't.

• 12:15Shaan Puri?

  Another way of putting that is. As a founder, you like to think that you are the the controller. You're making shit happen. You're you're a surfer. And you're catching waves and you're trying to surf that wave and like, yes, you don't want to get eaten up. You got to be good at surfing. You got to. Know how to time the waves and whatnot, but the the size of the wave matters a hell of a lot more than, you know, how good you are as a surfer.

• 12:40Sam Parr?

  And it doesn't mean that you can't make other stuff work, like, for example, like the market for like. Sushi is not like crushing it or growing like crazy, but it's like big enough that you could you could brute force your way and make something badass. Same with Bebo. You could you could have figured out some way to brute force your way and make something mildly successful, but.

• 13:03Sam Parr?

  What the market wants, the market wants. And I remember using Coinbase or no Binance. You know, Binance, it's the. I don't know what it is. What do you call it?

• 13:12Shaan Puri?

  It's a it's a crypto exchange that's based in Asia. It's one of the biggest one. I think it is the biggest one.

• 13:19Sam Parr?

  And at the time, when I used it in 2014, when crypto was all the rage, it was really bad. We were all using it though. And I, and same thing with this Hoppin thing.

• 13:29Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I got this wrong. I said 18 months. It says in less than 11 months end to end. They raised their seed round, a very expensive A round, and now another round valued at $2 billion pre-bunny. And they went from $0 in revenue to tens of millions of dollars in revenue already this year.

• 13:45Sam Parr?

  That's, that's just so crazy. And so this is just proof that like, even if your product is, is kind of shitty, if people truly need it and there's no other option, they're gonna, they're gonna come to you.

• 13:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So here's the, here's like the idea. Okay. How do you use this? There's a whole bunch of other kind of like COVID affected businesses that are out there. And the one that we've talked a little bit about that I've actually been trying to pitch this one team that I advise to like, go after is trade shows. And so trade shows are similar to conferences, but they're different in some key ways.

• 14:17Sam Parr?

  What's happening everyone? Today's sponsor is kind of strange, and I'm going to tell you why. But first, let me tell you what it is. Today's sponsor is Azeris, A-Z-O-R-A-S. That's one word. It's a YouTube channel. So youtube.com/azeris, again, A-Z-O-R-A-S. It's a YouTube channel that teaches you how to master your personal finances and take actions. So if you just check it out, what you'll see is stories from inspirational people on how they got there and the lessons they've learned along the way. Hamilton, the founder, he's going to give a lot of practical advice on building big businesses, creating wealth for yourself. And as a bonus, you're going to see how Hamilton's doing it himself. He has a large mortgage company and it's pretty interesting. So go ahead, check it out. Azeris,

• 14:59Sam Parr?

  A-Z-O-R-A-S. Just Google Azeris YouTube and you'll find it. It's a badass channel. And the reason this is weird is Hamilton Keats, the guy in the video who you're going to see, the founder of this mortgage company, he's a listener and he actually emailed me wanting to just do whatever I asked him to do. And I, turns out I didn't reply, I didn't see the email. So he somehow got in contact with us, asked us to sponsor his channel, channel. I love the hustle. So check it out. Azeris, A-Z-O-R-A-S, YouTube channel. So just Azeris YouTube, you'll find it.

• 15:33Shaan Puri?

  There's a lot of people I know who've never been to a trade show and they don't know what the hell it is. They just think it's kind of the same thing as an event or a conference and it's not, right? It's this place where business happens. So you get vendors and then you get like sort of you get wholesalers and retailers, right? You get vendors and you get buyers and people are looking for, okay, you make this product. Cool. I want to sell a product like that in my stores, my distribution. And, um, and so, you know, I've been to a whole bunch of different trade shows and, uh, and just as a simple example, there was a about, I think I've told this on the podcast, about a year ago, I wanted to run a quick e-commerce experiment, a dropshipping experiment, because I'd never done dropshipping. And I wanted to actually try

• 16:15Shaan Puri?

  it, uh, because like part of the, the dropshipping sucks because of like many reasons. One of the good things about it is it's really easy to start. And so I spun up a dropshipping experiment around, uh, I think I told you this, crystals. Did I tell you about this?

• 16:28Sam Parr?

  No, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you did. It sounds horrible.

• 16:30Shaan Puri?

  So basically, there's a whole bunch of people, especially Hollywood celebrities and females like Adele and Gwyneth Paltrow and stuff that like really promote the shit out of crystals.

• 16:39Sam Parr?

  I just watched the UFC, like, uh, you know, first episode for the fight and Jared Cantinier, the guy fighting Robert Whitaker fights with crystals.

• 16:48Shaan Puri?

  If he fights with them, he keeps them on him?

• 16:50Sam Parr?

  Like when he trains, he like sets them down at the mat and like,

• 16:53Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 16:54Sam Parr?

  I don't know, like, do you use energy? I don't know what you do, but he like worships them or whatever.

• 16:57Shaan Puri?

  People who believe in sort of crystal energy, crystal healing, all this stuff. Frankly, I totally didn't believe in it. Uh, but I was like, okay, you know, let me try this experiment. Anyway, so long story short, uh, I'm like, okay, where do I get crystals from? I need a supplier of these. Who, who am I going to buy from to dropship? And, uh, and, and I found that the only way to do this, the best way to do this, like you can go through like kind of Alibaba or stuff like that. But the best way to find a good supplier is to go to the gem gemstone trade show in Tucson, Arizona, that happens twice a year and has like 65,000 attendees who each pay, you know, for their ticket, they pay for their travel, they pay for their hotels, then they go, then they get there and they're basically looking to buy. And so there's this huge amount of like

• 17:38Shaan Puri?

  transaction and commerce that happens at trade shows. And I think somebody could build, hop in for trade shows. And I think I've told you once about the, the experience I saw in the Alibaba app. Did I tell you about this? I had this magical experience. So the biggest trade show is called the Canton Fair. It happens in China. Yes, it's like millions of Millions of people go, it lasts like two months or some crazy shit. It's like hundreds of football fields long. So you like start on one end and you're walking. It's like, oh, we make socks and there's like 2,000 sock manufacturers. And then like you get, you get out of the sock part and it's like, now we do pants. And then you like find a hundred pant suppliers and then it keeps going. And you know, by the end you're at electronics and like dildos and crazy shit.

• 18:19Shaan Puri?

  And so the Canton Fair got shut down this year, obviously because of, you know, the quote unquote China virus. And so they were like, okay, how are we going to do, like, how are we going to do? How are, how are Chinese manufacturers going to still do business? And so Alibaba in their app, and you know, I'm probably one of the only people that has Alibaba on their like homepage of their, their phone. I opened it up one day and it was like trade show happening now and I clicked the button. And it took me on this virtual escalator. And it's like, what floor do you want to get off at electronics, fashion, babies, like, you know, food? And so I hop off at electronics and it loads basically like a TikTok screen. So it's like a live video, full screen of this woman and she's at her booth at the actual fair.

• 19:01Shaan Puri?

  But there's no guests. So they lined up all the vendors and booths, the booths are like 10 feet apart. So they're all socially distant. Each person had a webcam in front of them, like a setup webcam by the, by the, the trade show. And they were doing a live stream with their products and then I could be, their catalog was at the bottom. And I could touch an item on the catalog and like inquire. And then she would, she'd be like, she'd see it on her screen and she'd pick it up and be like, oh yeah, you want this foot massager? Yeah, look, it's Wait, it was a real lady? It was a real person live. Yes, exactly. And so I'm touching her catalog and she's showing me what items that they have and like pointing out the specs. I could ask a question, be like, oh, like, you know, what's the quote, what's the price per unit on this? And she's like, well, I'd love to talk to you, like hit the exchange business card button and then we'll be able to DM each other.

• 19:45Shaan Puri?

  But for now, you know, roughly we have three models, the premium and this and that. And I'm like, what the fuck is going on? I didn't need to fly to China. I didn't need to go to the Canton Fair. I didn't need to like, you know, get an upset stomach from eating food, you know, in China for the next three weeks. This is amazing. And so I was like, this is what like, okay, Alibaba did that for their own suppliers, but like, who's going to give that to the Tucson gemstone trade show? So I think that's a great idea that I've given away for free.

• 20:12Sam Parr?

  You want a history lesson here?

• 20:13Shaan Puri?

  Please.

• 20:14Sam Parr?

  I asked Abra to look this up. This is what I do. You know what Comdex is?

• 20:18Shaan Puri?

  Never heard of it.

• 20:19Sam Parr?

  Okay, so you know who Sheldon Adelson is?

• 20:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he's like a Vegas casino guy, right?

• 20:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so Sheldon Adelson, pretty controversial because he's a very, very, very pro-Israel to the point of like, I think he's one of the biggest funders and he like buys newspapers in order to promote Israel stuff. So a little controversial for that reason, but beyond that, he, what did he start? Was it the, does it say on here? Was it the Bellagio? Whatever the biggest hotel group in Vegas, he started it. He's probably worth 30 or 50 billion dollars.

• 20:52Shaan Puri?

  He started the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, which I think owns like, you know, a bunch of, owns Venetian.

• 21:01Shaan Puri?

  It owns, yeah, a bunch.

• 21:02Sam Parr?

  Sands, which is like one of the largest hotel groups in the world. It's basically casinos and hotels. They have the Sands China, they have like everything, whatever. He's just a big boss. The way that he started that was he started this thing called Comdex, which was a trade show. It stood for, it was like personal computers. He started in the 80s. Eventually, he sold it for a billion dollars to SoftBank and it was renamed CES.

• 21:30Shaan Puri?

  Ah, okay.

• 21:32Sam Parr?

  And I learned about him because I was very curious about him and he, so he started this trade show business and it got to be so big that in the 90s or in the 80s before Vegas was, I mean, it was right when Vegas was kind of taken off. He was like, man, we gotta build our own hotel to house all these people. And so he built like, I think it was the Las Vegas Convention Center and then he built like a hotel. And that is how he got into hotels. It all started with trade shows. And what he said, he goes, people never understood this jump from trade show business to hotel business. But he goes, it's the same thing. In the trade show business, I'm in the real estate business and I'm selling real estate to vendors at X dollars per square foot.

• 22:14Shaan Puri?

  Look at this picture. Doesn't this guy just look like a 33 billionaire?

• 22:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I mean, he's he and he's known for being like super cutthroat. I mean, he's just like a poor, hardworking immigrant who like takes no shit. So good with the bad. Anyway.

• 22:31Shaan Puri?

  He also made the largest single donation to Trump, $5 million.

• 22:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he also bought a Las Vegas newspaper like and they say that he did it just to promote Israel, Israel stuff, which no judgment there. I'm just kind of saying what he did, what he's being accused of.

• 22:49Shaan Puri?

  What he's known for.

• 22:50Sam Parr?

  But pretty interesting guy. And it all started with trade shows. So I'm very bullish on trade shows. I love trade shows. I've written about it on trends, actually, a lot. There are so many companies that are way bigger than you think. There's this one guy who started this business called Money 2020. Have you heard of that?

• 23:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's the isn't it kind of like the fancy? I thought it was like a conference. Maybe I got that wrong.

• 23:14Sam Parr?

  It's a trade show. Yeah. And it's for people like Stripe and anyone in finance, tech, and he sold it for $250 million, two years after starting it. And then he did it again with Shop Talk. You know Shop Talk?

• 23:29Shaan Puri?

  I've heard of it.

• 23:30Sam Parr?

  And it's a former tech guy. This guy and his partner worked at Google and they were techies. And they go, oh, fuck this. Let's try this trade show thing. And they just like created this template.

• 23:39Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so so walk me through it. So what's the I know you've written about this. So there's a blog post you wrote, I think for trends or maybe somewhere that.

• 23:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah, if you go to for that, but I'm gonna plug it. Go to trends, sign up, get the dollar dollar thing and then type in trade shows.

• 23:50Shaan Puri?

  So so give us the how do they make their money? Is it the attendee like kind of ticket? Is it the vendors booths?

• 23:57Sam Parr?

  So you you do it one of two ways. What you do is you get either the tickets or the vendors to pay profit or to pay your costs and then you make the profit off the other half. And so and so what you'll do is it's all about unit economics. So you say, you know, how many, what would the average sponsorship be? Now, how do I get all of them here? And then how do I get vendor or attendees to make it worth their while? And so, for example, some events, this is not like a conference. You don't always want to do a conference where it's like you. Charge $5,000 to get a TED Talk. You know, TED doesn't make profit, you know, that event. That doesn't do that well. I mean, it makes good revenue, but it doesn't like make that much money. The real money's in the trade shows and the goal is that you have to make it.

• 24:39Sam Parr?

  And so the speakers at your trade show, all those do, all those do is pull in like-minded people. And then all the money is going to be made over the transaction. So you need people to gather in order to transact. If you don't have that, it doesn't make a lot of money. HustleCon was a good conference, but it's not massive because there's no transactions. You have to have that transaction because you have to justify it to the vendor. That if you come, you're going to get more business. Therefore, it's very easy for me to say, it costs five grand a day for you to attend.

• 25:09Shaan Puri?

  Right, right.

• 25:10Sam Parr?

  And so the economics typically are that the, um, that the, um, vendors that you pre-sell pay for the hard goods of the event. And then all your profit comes on the back end with the tickets.

• 25:23Shaan Puri?

  Right. And now let's say you're, uh, you're my friend, uh, James and James is a, uh, James hears this idea. He's like, oh shit, I heard Sean and Sam, uh, talking about trade shows and the hop, hop in $2 billion. Oh, let's smash those together. I'm going to build the trade show, uh, you know, app, that Alibaba thing that sounded cool. How would you go about actually, um, uh, like where would you go from there? You get the idea. Give me your next three moves.

• 25:51Sam Parr?

  I would have to remember one word, liquidity. Liquidity is the word I would obsess with is how do I get liquidity? And what liquidity is defined as is transactions. So lots of vendors, lots of buyers. What do I do to get liquidity without that? It ain't shit. It's worthless.

• 26:08Shaan Puri?

  Well, that's, that's to run a trade show. I'm saying, let's say you want to be the hop in two trade show providers to say, hey, use this for your trade shows. How would you go about that?

• 26:15Sam Parr?

  Well, you have to help me get liquidity. And what liquidity means is eyeballs or attention of the right people on your computer screen. And you have to make it really easy for them to transact. So what would I do? Um, first of all, I wouldn't do this as like a Zoom thing where you, um,

• 26:34Sam Parr?

  Are just sitting there watching people talk. That is not what I would do. I wouldn't just, you know, make a, make a conference online. You'd have to reimagine the experience, sort of like Alibaba did.

• 26:45Sam Parr?

  What would I do? It's really hard. I will say that. I do think it's a multi-billion dollar problem. I don't know. What would you do? Let me think.

• 26:51Shaan Puri?

  I think the first thing I would do is I would be like, okay, uh, who are those guys that did shop talk money 2020? Sounds like they came from tech and they do trade shows. So maybe, maybe I should talk to them. And what I would talk to them about, I'd say, hey, what are you doing for your trade shows in 2020 and 2021? Are you, are you guys still doing it? Or, or like, what do you, what is your current alternative due to like, kind of the COVID situation? And has your business been affected by the fact that people are afraid to travel or not willing to travel? Or your, your venues might get canceled if there's an outbreak or whatever. So I would first try to understand that. So I would try to talk to maybe five trade show organizers. And I would ask them about how their business is doing and what's at risk due to the changes.

• 27:29Sam Parr?

  And by the way, to piggyback off that, I would not talk to the most popular. What I would talk to is the apartment, Southern California, Southern California apartment rent landlords trade show. I would talk to the crystals trade show. I would talk to, um,

• 27:45Shaan Puri?

  Right. Not CES, not money 2020, not, not whoever, right? Like,

• 27:48Sam Parr?

  And in order to find those, you look up the company in forma. And you look up the company.

• 27:58Sam Parr?

  I forget. There's a couple of them. One, if you Google Blackstone trade show acquired, there's a company that Blackstone for trade shows just bought. I would look at all the boring ones.

• 28:06Shaan Puri?

  And so you, you find these boring, maybe start with the small ones. I would start first talking about the problem, see if this is even a real problem, see if they're interested in something like this. See if, see if their business is being affected. If it is, then I would try to figure out, how do I attend a trade show? So I would be like, what's the next trade show I could attend to actually just go observe this? And then the third thing I would do is I would scrape a list of as many trade shows as I can find, and I would cold email them and I would say, hey, I, you know, uh, I, I, I heard about, you know, your trade show looks awesome. But, you know, with COVID, I know that things are quite uncertain. Have you thought about taking your trade show online or doing a digital trade show? You can actually get more people to attend, make more money and, you know, have way less cost and, and, and risk.

• 28:53Shaan Puri?

  Let me know if you'd be interested in doing that. We're, you know, that's what we do as a company. I'd love to talk to you about it or show you how we do it. And I would try to, you know, see what the response is to some cold email to a list of, you know, 100 tradjo organizers. And then I think after I did all that, I would know a lot more. I'd know that this is either a terrible idea for these reasons, or it's a good idea, but it has this big risk or this big obstacle. And that's what I need to focus my energy on overcoming.

• 29:19Sam Parr?

  One thing that all these event people are turning to, and I think it's a great idea, is they're turning their events into online communities. And I think that's the way to go. And I will say that there is a, there is an interesting opportunity there, but the downside is that you're competing with Facebook and they're doing a very good job at that.

• 29:39Sam Parr?

  So it's an interesting problem.

• 29:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I like it. Okay. What else we got?

• 29:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 29:45Sam Parr?

  You want to talk about, okay, so here's, I first, you have this thing called Astro and I, and I kind of, I got a story about that. The founder of Astro was introduced to me via cold email, like in cold intro. And the guy who introduced me, I don't know him and I was kind of rude to him. I was like, do I know you? Did I say this intro was okay? I was in a bad mood, so I hate when people do that. But so that's how I heard of Astro. What's Astro? Do you want to talk about that?

• 30:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I actually, I wrote that a while back, so I don't really know too much about it. But it's basically, it's a debit card to support creators. And so, you know, I don't know what they're, there's a few people that are trying to do this. Basically trying to provide financial services to creators, whether it's like funding, or it's like a Patreon type service, or it's this, which is a debit card for creators. Or like, how does a YouTuber get a, buy a house? Well, the traditional banks don't know how to value their YouTube channel. They can't get a mortgage. So like, maybe we could do mortgages for creators. Like, I think that's a very interesting space, but it's one of those where my spidey sense starts tingling. And it says, I think this sounds like a good idea and maybe a bad idea. And so that's, that's where I'm at. It's not a very informed opinion.

• 30:58Sam Parr?

  I hear you on that and I would agree that that could be the case in some of these examples. But let's play the other side, which is why it is example, it is interesting and I'm going to be a little ignorant here. But I think the way the business model works is that Mastercard gets what 2% per

• 31:14Shaan Puri?

  Right, there's some exchange fee or whatever they call it.

• 31:17Sam Parr?

  So then is the way this business works is that Astro or another credit card partners with Mastercard and goes, hey, Mastercard, you guys take 2%, give us 1%.

• 31:27Shaan Puri?

  Yes, and I'll get you more customers.

• 31:29Sam Parr?

  And we're going to layer. You think that's how it works?

• 31:31Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so I think in general, that is a model that a lot of these guys use. I just went to the website. So I had it a little bit wrong. This is actually more interesting than I thought. So what it is, is, okay, so we could do this, for example, we could issue an Astro card to any of our fans. And what it says is, hey, fans, if you want to support me, just get the Astro card as you go about your daily life. You can assign that some of your value, like of what you're transacting, should get shared with me. And so they're taking some of that margin that they get, the, you know, the sort of these fees and they're sharing it with creators. And so as a fan, no extra cost to you and you get to support your favorite content creators.

• 32:11Sam Parr?

  That's, you know where that idea is stolen from?

• 32:13Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 32:15Sam Parr?

  So Adam, a lot of people do this, but Adam Carolla was famous for doing this was he had this home, this website called adamcarolla.com/Amazon. And what he did was he put his referral link on his, and he goes, now remember, listeners, if you're going to buy anything from Amazon, go to my website, click through, because the way Amazon used to work, it might've been up to five days. So if anyone clicked on your referral link and bought anything within five days, you got, it used to be 7%. And so he always used to, Adam Carolla, for those who are younger, he was like the Joe Rogan before Joe, he was like, it was like Howard Stern, maybe Adam Carolla, then Joe Rogan. I mean, he was like the guy.

• 32:58Sam Parr?

  And he would always say, click through to adamcarolla.com/Amazon, you help support us, you put a little bit of win in our sales, which I stole that line and that's what he used to do. So I think this is a kind of an interesting idea because I used to click through and buy it. But clicking through and buying on Amazon is a lot easier than applying for a debit card.

• 33:16Shaan Puri?

  Right, that's hilarious. So I'm reading an interview about it right now. It says, how did the Amazon relationship come about? Did they approach you? He goes, I wish I knew. I think we approached them. I think our salespeople approached them and basically said, you know, like if we send people here away, can we get a rev share? And that's kind of

• 33:34Sam Parr?

  That's Adam Corolla.

• 33:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's Adam Corolla talking. I want to see, I wanted to see how much revenue he made. I bet he made a shit ton. Like he has a huge audience.

• 33:41Sam Parr?

  He was like the number one podcaster and that's what he would do all the time. And this was, Adam Corolla is actually really innovative. So he started doing paid podcasts three or five years ago, maybe, maybe 10 years ago, actually.

• 33:54Sam Parr?

  And he has his own feed. He had this thing called Mangria, which is the man version of Sangria. He would call it Mangria. And he's cool, man. I love Adam Corolla. He's interesting.

• 34:05Shaan Puri?

  I don't find him funny, but I like a lot of the stuff he did. Like, I don't like listening to him. But yeah, you know what's, okay, here's a, here's a, you know, on the spot idea. Okay. So what if there was a Chrome extension, right? Like Honey, you know, Honey, big, big popular Chrome extension app saves you money. What if there's a Chrome extension that basically was like, once a month, your favorite creator can, can recommend a product. And basically like, like, for example, I just bought like this, let's say I bought this Joby tripod, or I just bought this, you know, writing thing called, I forgot what this thing's called. Remarkable, the Remarkable Tablet. And let's say I loved this thing. I'm trying to remember the last product I really, really loved, but let's just say I really love that product.

• 34:50Shaan Puri?

  I can basically make that my product of the month and I refer it and I basically have a chance to kind of like, put a little video and it's 30 seconds of me showing the product and saying why I love it. And you know, I do get an affiliate kickback on it, but I'm only able to promote one product per month as an influencer there. And so, you know, I'm sort of selecting what I, what I think is the best product that's improved, you know, the quality of my life recently. And, and so anybody who installs the extension, basically they follow, like let's say I promote it, it installs it, it follows me, but then it would also see you and like 10 other people that are like also on the network that I could follow if I want to get their recommendations as well. And we get a, we get a share of, of that.

• 35:31Sam Parr?

  It's interesting. The best example of this that I've seen is this website called, I forget what it's called, but basically they work with all the YouTubers. And I guess a common question amongst the YouTubers is, what shirt are you wearing? Or what camera are you using?

• 35:45Shaan Puri?

  What microphone is that?

• 35:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And so they made this website and all the YouTubers put it in their profile where they like click to see my gear. And they have like a Pinterest page that says like, here's what I use for everything. Here's the clothes I was wearing. And people click through and buy. And it's really cool because like Casey Neistat had a pair of glasses and I was like, damn, are those special edition Ray-Bans? Or did he like, how did he do that? And so I like, well, looked at it. And then, you know, when we were doing this podcast, I was like, what mics are all these people doing? But the problem is, is that with this affiliate model is Amazon just changed their, their structure. And they just on a whim, cut it in half.

• 36:19Shaan Puri?

  Right. Okay. So here's a different, here's a different model of this. Have you ever heard of the company G Fuel?

• 36:24Sam Parr?

  No, but I liked that.

• 36:25Shaan Puri?

  So G Fuel is a, is a energy drink that's, that's marketed towards gamers. And so it's big on Twitch. And I think they were doing, I don't remember the exact number. I met the founder. It was like over 30 million a year in revenue. It might've been 80 million or something like that. It was, it was pretty substantial. I know for sure it was over 30 million. I think it might've been more. And, and he built the whole thing just straight up. So what he did was you go to the top, he went to the top Twitch streamers. I don't know if this is the beginning of how he's got it started, but like he created an energy drink, which is not that hard to do. He branded it as G Fuel, as in gamer fuel, I think it stands for. And then he went to the top streamers. He was like, look, you're going to have your own flavor and your own shaker that this thing

• 37:08Shaan Puri?

  comes in. And so like, you're my influencer and you need to put this in your Twitch bio and whatever. And at that time Twitch streamers were like underpriced arbitrage. They had a lot of fandom, a lot of audience and traditional sponsors didn't know how to work with them. Or they were like just putting up their logo and not like a real product. And so they would send these guys tons of stuff. So they'd be drinking it on stream that you'd see them drinking it. And they basically made Gatorade, but for esports instead of sports. And

• 37:36Shaan Puri?

  So I think you could do the G Fuel model for a bunch of other things. And whether it's like any other product that fits that lifestyle, or it's something like what you're talking about where it's your gear. So I think somebody could make a D to C company that basically creates pre-made kits. So I could get the Casey Neistat, like it's just a box of all the stuff you need to have his setup. And we pre-make, so partner with the influencers and say, hey, you get asked about your gear all the time. Just put this here that says, buy my gear. And you can buy my gear. It's a pre-made box and it comes with a video like instruction about like how to set up the Casey Neistat like setup, or how to set up the Dr. Disrespect setup, or whatever it is.

• 38:18Sam Parr?

  There was a, okay, so.

• 38:20Shaan Puri?

  Not affiliate links, like you gotta go D to C. You gotta own the relationship and you gotta be selling a box that's like hundred or more dollars worth of value, because somebody wants to become a creator.

• 38:30Sam Parr?

  Look up Quarterly Box.

• 38:31Shaan Puri?

  I'm familiar with this one. I thought this was a good idea, but I don't think it took off.

• 38:35Sam Parr?

  Wait, Crash and Burned, I think. It was called Quarterly Box and it was like, smart people would send you a box.

• 38:40Shaan Puri?

  Tim Ferriss had a box and I remember being like, oh, cool. Tim Ferriss has a box. It was, it was when the box trend was getting big. And this was like, what if your influencers could pick five products? And you'd get it every quarter in a box. That was the concept.

• 38:52Sam Parr?

  It's a hard business. It's a hard business.

• 38:54Shaan Puri?

  It is a hard business, but I know so many box companies that do amazing, right? Like one of our listeners, Leland, who does bump boxes. That business crushes. He's great.

• 39:03Sam Parr?

  Bump boxes?

• 39:04Shaan Puri?

  There's another one called Cause Box. But Cause Box fucking crushes.

• 39:07Sam Parr?

  Means it gives you, is bump box pregnant?

• 39:10Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 39:10Sam Parr?

  Like baby bumps? For the mom or the baby?

• 39:15Shaan Puri?

  Both. It's like products that you're gonna need through your pregnancy and beyond. And so like.

• 39:20Sam Parr?

  Okay, so that serves a need, though. So does, that serves a need and a little bit so does the pets one.

• 39:26Shaan Puri?

  Look up Cause Box. Go to, go to, go to Cause, like, like, like for a good cause. Causebox.com. This business does like over 20 million a year in revenue. The metrics are amazing. And it's basically like, we put well-made products in this box. And these are all like, I don't know, like either like ethically sourced, cruelty-free. You're supporting the cause somehow. We donate, you know, a fridge to somebody in Africa every time you buy, whatever. You know, like there's some story like that. This business crushes and this. There's nothing special about it in that that sense. There's no like, yes, there's failures in boxes, but like, there's also successes for sure.

• 40:05Sam Parr?

  What's that company that started as a newsletter and eventually became a monthly box? And they make like $500 million a year?

• 40:12Shaan Puri?

  Started as a?

• 40:13Sam Parr?

  It was a.

• 40:14Speaker 02

  It's not FabFitFun.

• 40:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's it.

• 40:16Sam Parr?

  That's the one. Dude, it started just like my company as a newsletter and now they do like, I don't know.

• 40:22Shaan Puri?

  Where's the hustle box?

• 40:24Speaker 02

  I think it's 200 million. I think it's 200, which is still insane, but.

• 40:27Sam Parr?

  It's insane. I don't know. We need a hustle box. I, you know, I either need to launch a hustle box or a credit card. That's what it sounds like. I'd rather go with the credit card.

• 40:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. But you've been talking about the credit card. Why don't you do the credit card? We talked about that like three years ago.

• 40:41Sam Parr?

  I don't know. I just haven't gotten around to it. I should.

• 40:43Shaan Puri?

  Doing this podcast instead. Fuck it.

• 40:46Sam Parr?

  We, I should launch.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  Call out to any listener who wants to build a credit card.

• 40:50Sam Parr?

  I think we should. I think that credit card is actually kind of interesting. I saw this other credit card.

• 40:54Shaan Puri?

  Y'all could have been Brex if you had the vision, right?

• 40:58Sam Parr?

  No, I think the vision's simple. I think it's more like the chutzpah.

• 41:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 41:01Sam Parr?

  That's the hard part.

• 41:02Shaan Puri?

  If you had, if you had known that that's what, that the market opportunity was really as that big to do the credit card for startups and that if you went balls to the wall, it'd be like a multi-billion dollar company, you would have done it, right? Like, of course, hindsight's funny, funny. Nobody knew that shit ahead of time, but.

• 41:16Sam Parr?

  There's another good one where, and this woman who we interviewed to work here, I was like, all right, impress me like what your ideas and she showed me, she was like, there's this company that's doing a credit card and they work with Mastercard and they, what they do is they tell you the carbon footprint of each purchase. Which, ah, it's, it's important. That's not really important to me, but for a lot of companies, it's important because I think you can get special status if you have a low carbon footprint.

• 41:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and for customers, I think some customers really care about it.

• 41:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Oh, by the way, you should still do Brex. You should still just do that exact same thing. There's a lot of people that don't use them yet and there's other competitors, but like, whatever. You should still do that business.

• 41:58Sam Parr?

  I think it's cool. Is Brex doing well?

• 41:59Shaan Puri?

  I want to buy the hustle and I want to do these businesses on top of the hustle.

• 42:04Sam Parr?

  Here's the problem. It's not a problem, but the hustle, like any company. Well, no, I mean, because we're an audience company. The thing is, is that anything that we launch will at least do mildly okay.

• 42:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 42:15Sam Parr?

  There will, there will be 2,000 people who buy everything we do, no matter what. 10,000 people more likely than not. The problem is, is that you have to prioritize.

• 42:24Shaan Puri?

  Choose wisely.

• 42:25Sam Parr?

  Or, or spin out. Do you know what I mean? It's all about focus. Uh, which is, I mean, you have a lot on your plate. Are you focusing on it?

• 42:33Shaan Puri?

  Am I focusing on one thing? No.

• 42:36Sam Parr?

  And what's better? Not focusing or focusing?

• 42:39Shaan Puri?

  Trick question. Focusing. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Focusing is better. There's, to me, there's this, uh, like, I don't know if you've ever seen, like, in design thinking, there's these like two phases. And, and, you know, those guys from IDEO and, and the people who in design thinking world, they have this like concept of diverge and converge. It's this little diagram of like, first you diverge, you go broad, and then you converge and you like, you settle on, on the solution. And so in a brainstorm, they say, all right, we're diverging right now. And that's the time where like, any idea is a good idea. Don't filter anything. Don't say, well, no, that's bad because of X, Y, Z. Like, we're just trying to get all the ideas out there. And then when we converge, we're trying to actually like filter down and get laser focused on what we're actually gonna do. And so I think that in life, that happens too sometimes where sometimes you dabble and sometimes you diverge and sometimes you spin up a few experiments

• 43:23Shaan Puri?

  and you let things get a little bit messy and you, you, you don't focus. And then you go through periods of laser focus after that, once you realize what you want to do. And like, for me, I went from, I went six years of laser focus straight to a period of experimentation and dabbling where it's like, I'll start a podcast and like, cool, I'll invest in companies and like, I'll try these things. And then I'm gonna like, trim and cut and focus once I like, learn about them.

• 43:46Sam Parr?

  I agree with that. I mean, I agree with that. I think that, I think that acknowledging that you're unfocused because you're trying to figure out what to focus on is totally a great plan. Are you learning that? Are you, what are you going to focus on? What's going to be the thing?

• 44:02Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so my, my rule is like an 80 20 rule. 80% of my time and energy and focus goes on my main business and 20% is going to go on my, my side hustle or my hobby. So for me, my side hustle or hobby is content, content production, whether, whether it's this podcast or my newsletter or whatever else. And then 80% is on the main thing, which today is Twitch, right? That's like my main day job. And so even over, so I like that balance. And so over time, you know, that's what I want to get to. Like, I don't think in the long, long run, Twitch is going to be my 80%. But for now it is, and when that switches, it'll be like my business. Whatever my business is will be my 80% and my 20% will always be content and, and audience stuff.

• 44:43Sam Parr?

  In our last 10 minutes, I'm going to ask you a question that's somewhat related. It's going to not seem related, but it is. But do you think about what you can make that will last like a hundred years? Like, for example, when you were working with Blab, did you think like, let's, we just got to get traction and make it work? Or was it, did you even at all think about longevity?

• 45:06Shaan Puri?

  No, I did not. Longevity in the sense of like, I thought longevity meant like, is this going to be around next year? Do I want to spend two years on this through it? Could this be a five year arc? Definitely not the like 100 year thing. And I think when CEOs say that, like I remember the CEO of Evernote said that, oh, we're trying to build Evernote as, we, we plan this out as a 100 year company. And that shit sounds good and that's cool. I don't think that's actually like that functional, like on a database. It's definitely not at the early stage. Like, it's not that, that great of a question. There's many better questions to ask yourself. And I think for the most part, it's self-serving when people think that way.

• 45:43Sam Parr?

  Let me change, I agree with you to say like Evernote, but, but here's why.

• 45:45Shaan Puri?

  By the way, he's working on some other shit now and like, you know, sure, the company might, might still be around. It's been like outstripped and outflanked by Notion and others.

• 45:53Sam Parr?

  And here's why, here's why he's working on something else is because he raised all this money and that company is no longer his.

• 45:59Shaan Puri?

  Okay, maybe that's why.

• 46:01Sam Parr?

  Like, for example, what I've been thinking about is how do you create something? And it doesn't have to be the same thing. I just learned about this HR software that was built in 1880 originally as like, you know, they did it just by paperwork.

• 46:16Shaan Puri?

  It was a sewing machine.

• 46:18Sam Parr?

  Right. It just like changed from one thing to the other thing. And I just, there's something I've been, I've been finding incredibly fascinating about just like compounding growth and how do you make something that like, for example, my father-in-law owns a moving company and he bought it from someone. So this moving company has probably existed for 50 years. And we'll see like, you know, with people getting laptops, like they, there's less commercial stuff for them to move. But like, someone always needs to move. And I think like, what can I make that there will be demand for the next 50 to 100 years or, or you know, it's kind of interesting.

• 46:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think, you know, I think that's a good one, which is just like, is this a fad? Is this, or is this like something that will, the, the demand for this will always be around, right? Like Bezos has this thing where he's like, you know, instead of, because people always ask Jeff Bezos, like, you know, where do you see retail going? Where do you see e-commerce going in the next 10 years? He's like, look, we try not to like predict the future as much as we predict what's not going to change. Like customers are not going to want slower, you know, they're, they're never going to stop wanting faster shipping. They're never going to stop wanting the best prices and they're never going to stop wanting ever, you know, ever increasing that variety of choice for what they can, you know, what they can buy. They, they want to have, they want to be able to get, get all this stuff. And so those are the things that are not going to change. So we're going to spend like the next decades, making shipping faster and faster, getting prices lower and lower through economies of scale.

• 47:38Shaan Puri?

  And making sure that we, we sell all the products that people want to buy. And like, I think that's a, that's a, that's a really powerful way of focusing the company is like those three, those three levers, we can pull to infinity and our customers will thank us and have ever. The, he's like, the best thing about customers is they have high standards and they, you know, um, they're never happy. And so, you know, what two-day shipping now, but like when we have two-hour shipping, two days will feel like an eternity. And then they'll want 20-minute shipping and then they'll want two-minute shipping is like where, where we need to get to. So I think that's like a cool way of thinking.

• 48:10Sam Parr?

  It's a good thing to ask because I'm noticing something. So our company, our main thing turned four in May and I'm like, man, like I wish I would have done it this way from the beginning. And I'm like, well, what can I do now? What can I do now? That's the beginning that in four years I'm going to be like, yeah, this was the right way to do it. What about 10 years? And then I'm also doing this other thing where I'm living in the Airbnb's and I'm like, man, I've bought so much furniture and thrown it away over the years. What would happen if I either A just bought close to nothing and B only bought stuff that would last for 50 years? Like, would I be happier and richer? And I think the answer is yes.

• 48:45Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, I like that. You know, okay. So your question triggered a bunch of thoughts in my head. One, one other way of looking at that question is like, I'll tell you the ways I ask questions like that. One I ask right now is, is this a finite or an infinite game? I don't know. Have you ever read that book, Finite and Infinite Games? Truth be told, me neither, but read the first 20 pages and got the concept. Basically, you know, like a finite game is one, like basketball is a finite game. There's a fixed set of rules. There's the, you know, 94 feet court, four quarters, 12 minutes each, five players on each side. And you're trying to, the game ends at a certain amount of time and you're trying to win. That's the point of the

• 49:26Shaan Puri?

  game is to win and achieve the outcome. And then you have like infinite games, like a relationship is more like an infinite game where it's like

• 49:34Sam Parr?

  Or like Monopoly.

• 49:35Shaan Puri?

  Risk. You know, it's a game that you intend to play forever. The rules are ever changing. You play for the sake of playing, not for winning. There's no such thing as winning. And like, I think it's a really powerful concept because you want to play more infinite games for two reasons. One is when you're playing a finite game, you're playing for an outcome. When you're playing an infinite game, you're playing for the sake of play. Like, that's how I think about you and me in the world of business, right? Like, we just, it's played to us. We enjoy doing it. We enjoy talking about it. We enjoy investing in it. We enjoy all factors of this. It's an infinite game that we're just going to keep playing regardless of what outcomes we're getting. And then you think, and then when you play infinite games, you have to be highly adaptable to rule changes and stuff like that. So a similar way of thinking about that is when I do a project now, I think

• 50:20Shaan Puri?

  If money was no object, if I had a hundred million dollars, would I do this? And that's a question I asked this guy who he got acquired by Twitch also their company got acquired for, you know, over a hundred million dollars and he was still at Twitch four years later. And I asked him, I said, why are you still here? You've surely you've vested out by now.

• 50:40Shaan Puri?

  You know, I know you didn't get that whole sum of money, but like, and he was like, oh, I love it here. I love the job, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, I know this guy's job was like very like stressful and like hard, like a lot of work. And limited in power, like he wasn't in charge of the company, like he didn't have full autonomy. He was working on like, you know, backend infrastructure stuff and like kind of compliance and security and, you know, gnarly things. Not like what most people think of as fun. And so I go, I was like, so why are you here? He's telling me, oh, I love it. I'm growing. I love my team. I love the customers. I love the industry, blah, blah, blah. I asked a bit different question. I go, let's say you had a hundred million dollars in your bank account tomorrow, would you show up to work here? And he goes, well, you know, I was like, no, would you like, would you continue to do this job if you had a hundred million dollars?

• 51:25Shaan Puri?

  He goes, well, no, I would probably go build a video game. I was like, oh, okay. So like you're here for the money. Like all those things you said are true, but I just changed one variable, the money. I didn't change any of those other great things you said. And now you don't want to be here anymore. Right? And so like, it's okay to be honest. Like I do a lot of shit for the money. But as I started to think about it, I asked myself, what would I do? If I had all the money and then like, I should just do that thing now, because the money will come anyways, regardless of which path I go down. And I think that's a good question to ask. It's hard to stick to that, but I do think that's the right advice for myself.

• 52:00Sam Parr?

  I ask myself that question all the time and I always get depressed. I'm like, I don't know. I don't know what I would do. Like I like, all right, let's see. Like if you have a hundred million, like I think I would buy a really fancy car and a very small house.

• 52:14Shaan Puri?

  Big car, tiny house. Okay. What else?

• 52:16Sam Parr?

  Well, like, cause like, yeah, if the bigger your house, the more work it is.

• 52:20Shaan Puri?

  Sure.

• 52:21Sam Parr?

  I don't know what else. I don't think.

• 52:22Shaan Puri?

  Forget about what you would buy. What would you do with your time?

• 52:25Sam Parr?

  I don't know. I don't have any hobbies.

• 52:27Shaan Puri?

  What would you do? Like what are some options?

• 52:31Shaan Puri?

  Okay, well, let's abre you. Abre, you have a hundred million dollars in the bank? And you have your free time. How old are you, Abre?

• 52:39Speaker 02

  I'm 27.

• 52:40Shaan Puri?

  27. What do you, what do you do? What comes to mind?

• 52:44Speaker 02

  I don't know. Like, I was thinking about this the other day, too. Like, I have no idea.

• 52:49Sam Parr?

  I think most people don't know the answer to that.

• 52:51Shaan Puri?

  Don't you think we should know this, right? Because, uh, not that we should have a answer, right? Maybe there's no answer, but like, don't you think we should think about it? Because we're, we're working so fucking hard for financial freedom, right? And then we don't know what the hell we would do if we get it, right? It's like that Joker line, like, you know, I'm the, I'm the dog chasing the car. If I caught it, you know, I wouldn't know what to do with it. And isn't that crazy to me? Like, that, that seems wild.

• 53:15Sam Parr?

  It is. I think it's incredibly crazy, but I think it's the truth.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  I think the fun is in the pursuit. Like, there's something in the journey. Like, I, I told Sam, like, if he ever, you know, whatever, sold the hustle or whatever, he would go and start another company. Like, he couldn't, like, not work at, like, at something.

• 53:31Sam Parr?

  I, I, for sure, I'm, I'm starting shit till I die, but it, it would be like, what? Like, for example, there's this guy in Alabama, and he has this thing called the Barber Racetrack and the Barber Museum, and he, uh, he inherited his father's milk dairy business, and then he sold it for like $500 million, and then he opened up a motorcycle museum and a motorcycle racetrack, and it's a profitable venture. But I'm like, I would do that, probably. That's what I would do.

• 53:58Shaan Puri?

  That's cool. Uh, I like that. You know, the guy I worked with, Michael Birch, he basically had this, right? He got all the money that you could ever spend in a lifetime. And then I observed, what did he do? And he basically did, I would say, three things. One is he started an idea lab, because he's like, dude, I'm not gonna stop building new shit. But like, no, I'll do it on my terms, right? I'll never go pitch for money again. I'll just fund roll, the bankroll this myself and own it. Uh, I'll hire great people that I want to hang out with. I'll build a dope office. Like, you saw the office in San Francisco. That office is amazing.

• 54:26Sam Parr?

  It's probably had $5 million furniture in there.

• 54:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. And, uh, uh, you know, I'll have a personal chef who cooks us lunch every day, and I'll work with great people who work on ideas, right? So that was pillar one, was Idea Lab. Pillar two was, he's like-

• 54:39Sam Parr?

  Hold on. Yeah. Did that make a profit? Or no?

• 54:42Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 54:44Sam Parr?

  Okay, so that was a fun thing that whatever.

• 54:46Shaan Puri?

  Yes, it probably it probably is close to, I don't know, it's close to break even, not not bad, but you know, could have, if you just put that money in the market, it would have done way better. Yeah. So so that that was true. But again, he's not trying to make money like the the idea lab would have rarely been able to move the needle for him financially. Obviously, he wanted to be a financial success, but so pillar two was he started the battery, which is basically he bought an old candy factory, a 60,000 square foot candy factory, and turned it into a members' club, basically designed a hotel, like, you know, he he always was fascinated with architecture and spaces and designing spaces, and like designed to kind of a dream, kind of like hangout spot, and then invited a bunch of members. And so then he was just hanging out with cool people all the time. Like, you know, some of them

• 55:29Shaan Puri?

  are like celebrities and whatnot, like, you know, when Beyonce's in town, she stays there, you know, Justin Bieber stays there, Leonardo DiCaprio, I bumped into him at the battery, right? Like, that's cool. But there's also just like other, you know, like, I think a third of the memberships went to like artists and like other people who, you know, weren't kind of rich and famous.

• 55:46Sam Parr?

  Does that make a profit or break even?

• 55:48Shaan Puri?

  That it will never break even because the huge capex, but on like every year, it's it either covers its costs or is profitable. But he put a lot of money into like buying the building, retrofitting it seismic retrofitting and, you know, in California because of earthquakes, and then went way over the top, like, you know, the elevator was a $2 million elevator, like, you know, he went over the top with everything. And so recovering that money, I think, would take a lifetime, but he didn't care. He basically said, I don't care if this ever makes my money back. I'm not doing this for a profit. I don't want it to constantly bleed a lot of money where I start to stress. So if this just breaks even, once we open the doors, I'm cool. And it's done more than that.

• 56:25Sam Parr?

  Who runs it?

• 56:27Shaan Puri?

  He went through, I think, six general managers before finally finding, you know, whoever runs it now. And that was a hard part, but you know.

• 56:34Sam Parr?

  That's a stressful part of the job. Okay, the third thing.

• 56:36Shaan Puri?

  Third thing was philanthropy slash like, I even put his angel investing in that bucket, but philanthropy. So he's probably given. Over $10 million to charities like Charity Water and whatnot. Even over $10 million, just to Charity Water probably. And I always ask him like, you know, what do you like doing nowadays? He's like, well, I still like building stuff like he relearned to code, you know, recently because he just likes to build things. He liked working with us in the idea lab. He's like, but the best thing I've ever done is the work with Charity Water. And he didn't mean that in a fluffy way, like there's no interview. Like I was just hanging out with him, asking him a genuine question. And he goes with them to Africa like multiple times per year, takes his family there and gets to see the impact of their work. And he's like, by far, that's the best thing I've done. And he's friends with the founder.

• 57:18Sam Parr?

  Where's that guy live now? Doesn't he, didn't he move to the Caribbean? I saw his house for sale for like $25 million.

• 57:23Shaan Puri?

  He moved to the British Virgin Islands. Yeah, he bought an island and then in the BVI and lives there.

• 57:29Sam Parr?

  What a weirdo. What a cool sounding dude.

• 57:32Shaan Puri?

  And so that's cool.

• 57:32Sam Parr?

  And is he happy?

• 57:33Shaan Puri?

  What's that?

• 57:34Sam Parr?

  Is he happy?

• 57:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he was a happy dude. He was happy before, he was happy after, like the money was like, you know, you know, it just allowed him to have cooler shirts. He has like some pretty sick shirts and, but, you know, for the most part, he was a happy guy before. And, you know, Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, he kind of did something recently where a few years ago, where he put somebody in charge of Y Combinator and then he like retreated to the woods in, in the UK.

• 57:59Sam Parr?

  England.

• 58:00Shaan Puri?

  And like, just wanted to write. And like, I think he's like, either he was writing a new programming language or he's just writing essays. And he was like, just living in the woods with his family. And like, that was his version of like, you know, I got it all. What do I do to be happy? And so I think for everybody, it's worth asking your question of like, what's your version of the retreating to the woods in the UK? And just being happy.

• 58:20Sam Parr?

  Well, we can end there. I would love to hear other people's version of like the best example of someone.

• 58:27Shaan Puri?

  Living your best life.

• 58:27Sam Parr?

  Doing whatever to make them happy after that. Like it's like, there's a great story where it's like an American visits a resort town. And this Mexican guy takes him out fishing and he brings back three fish. And the guy go, the American businessman who's on vacation goes, man, this is a great thing, you know, you should. How many of these do you do a day? And he goes, I just do one every couple of days. And the guy goes, why? You should do five a day, then you can make this much money and then hire these people. And then the Mexican guy goes, why? And he goes, well, because then you're going to grow to this much money and then this much money. And by year 15, you're going to sell for this much money. And he goes, well, why would you do that? So you could sit around and fish all day. And the guy goes, but I do that.

• 59:09Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 59:09Sam Parr?

  I already do that.

• 59:11Shaan Puri?

  It's like, then you can relax, just fish all day and hang out with your family at night. He's like, that's, that's what I do currently.

• 59:17Sam Parr?

  It's like, I just, all I do, I mean, I just fish and I get you one, I get me one. And that's what we eat on. And anyway, it's a great story. I would love to hear what people's examples of that are, real life examples of that.

• 59:26Shaan Puri?

  Our friend, Sully, who's, you know, 10 times more successful than either of us. And he texted me something the other day because I showed him, I gave him a kind of like a life update. I was like, hey, I'm doing this, this and this, and here's how it's going. And he just goes, wow, like, I'm so happy for you. He goes, he goes, and I kind of was like downplaying it because, you know, I was like, well, you know, it's still a long way to go, kind of comparatively to like what you've done and what you're doing. And he was like, no, dude, you're living your best life. He goes, there's two people who are living their best life, you and Sam Parr. And he goes, and so I don't even know what he meant by that, but.

• 1:00:01Sam Parr?

  He says that to me about you all the time too.

• 1:00:03Shaan Puri?

  Isn't that like, A, it's like a great compliment? And B, you kind of want to live up to it. It's like, fuck, man, what is my best life? And like, yeah, what if I, instead of comparing myself to all these people, like, what if I just, what is me living my best life, you know? And, and that's what everybody is jealous of.

• 1:00:17Sam Parr?

  I never know if he's being patronizing or if he generally is like the happiest person I've met. But he says that shit to me all the time, which is funny because his brother like wants to murder everyone.

• 1:00:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yin and yang.

• 1:00:29Sam Parr?

  So it's an interesting family. Thank you, everyone for listening. Leave us a review, please, we'll read them.

• 1:00:34Shaan Puri?

  All right, see ya.

• 1:00:36Sam Parr?

  All right, bye bye.