3 Patterns for Great Business Ideas with Jack Abraham, Founder, Managing Partner & CEO at Atomic

Jack Abraham (@jackabraham), Founder, Managing Partner & CEO at Atomic, sits down with MFM hosts Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@theSamParr) to talk frameworks for great business ideas, how one hour can have more impact than everything else you’ve done in your career, the Jenga law of time management, and much more. --------- * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel * Want to found a company with Jack? Check out Atomic VC Future Founders * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter --------- Show Notes: * (1:06) How Shaan originally met Jack * (3:20) The secret to startup studio success * (5:22) Why Jack has banned brainstorming sessions * (23:30) Top lessons learned from the greatest VCs in Silicon Valley * (28:22) The Jenga Law of time management * (33:30) Crazy ideas Jack decided not to pursue * (41:32) Patterns behind great business ideas * (53:56) The value of focusing on one thing vs having your hands in a lot of things * (59:40) Jack’s views on the future of crypto

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  That there could be an hour that comes in your life that is worth more than the cumulative sum of everything else you've spent, all of the time, all of the effort, all of the energy that you've spent doing everything else.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  This is like a hit podcast, like we're growing, we're doing good. And yet Sean, your microphone is the most like hood rat thing I've seen. What is that? Is it like balanced in there?

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. So there's like, you know, there's some way that this is supposed to sit and then there's the way it actually sits. And, uh, you know, don't mess with success. It's our good luck charm.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  So, um, Jack, we're recording now. I think you, um, someone, I don't know how much you looked into it, but someone sent your team a little update on, or a little description on what we do. And it looks like you sent an agenda. This looks awesome. So I have a feeling you know what's up a little bit. Is that right?

• 0:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I listened to a few of your guys' podcasts. I think it's great, great content. Sean and I kind of go way back. Um, we used to know each other back in San Francisco in the early days when tech was getting going there and

• 1:04Speaker 00

  When tech was in San Francisco.

• 1:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah, when tech was in San Francisco and excited to be on. Thanks for having me.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  How did you, uh, how'd you guys know each other?

• 1:11Shaan Puri?

  I was gonna ask you this. Um, I didn't know how much you remembered. I remember pretty vividly. Uh, I was, at this time, I was running Monkey Inferno, which was an idea lab or a sort of a startup studio. And, uh, Jack, I don't know how we got connected, but Jack came by the office and I remember sitting in this conference room and he was thinking about launching his own, uh, you know, it's sort of like personal incubator, idea factory, whatever you want to call these things. What do you call it, Jack? By the way, you call it a startup studio?

• 1:37Sam Parr?

  We call it a startup studio, just given that the industry seems to have gone with that.

• 1:41Shaan Puri?

  And I remember before the meeting, I like kind of Googled, I was like, okay, who's this guy? And then I saw, oh, wow, this guy's like done all this stuff. He had, he built Milo, he sold it to eBay. And this was like, you know, not his first rodeo. And, um, and in the meeting, I just remember you had like really good questions. You had like, because a lot of people like this idea of a startup studio. It sounds really fun. You get to sit around all day, just think of ideas and build them. And like, if something hits, you know, hooray. And, uh, but you had actually like done a lot of thought, uh, you put a lot of thought into it. And so you asked a bunch of questions and I remember thinking,

• 2:22Shaan Puri?

  Hey, I've been doing this for a few years. I could share a bunch of insights. I remember everything that I had told you. I was like, hey, here's a common trap. Avoid it. Go this way. You were like, yeah, that's why we're doing it this way. You had already, you were sort of two, two steps ahead. I remember and I was, I remember walking away being like, okay, I think this is one of the few startup studios that might actually work. And I think it has done so. I think it's one of the few startup studios that has actually worked. You guys had Hims come out of it, which is like a breakout success, public company. And, um, and what are the, some of the other ones that have come out of atomic that are big? I know there was the, there's some that have sort of spiked and I'm not sure where they're at now. They didn't kind of go

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:57Shaan Puri?

  Full, like, like

• 2:58Speaker 00

  We've, we've, uh, we've created a ton of different companies. Um, Bungalow has been doing incredibly well. We just announced a huge raise for that company, Homebound, which is kind of revolutionizing construction and how that's done with a marketplace dynamic replicant, which is using AI to transform call centers, gradient, which is kind of cloud software for screens for B to B applications. So we kind of touch all sorts of industries. We have now actually a few dozen companies that we've started. Uh, so we operate across everything and a lot of our companies are doing really well. We're, we actually try to keep a lot of our companies stealth because people have started to try to copy them. And by the time we announce them, they've usually raised pretty significant funding.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  So a lot of them are, are under wraps, but we tend to do a lot in healthcare and telemedicine. We do a lot in prop tech. We do a lot in fintech, education, AI, and then marketplaces.

• 3:53Shaan Puri?

  And what is the like idea process? Cause you're right. You do stay in stealth for a while. I think I feel, it feels like when you come out to market, you've already like the company's already got a bunch of traction. You announce a big raise at that point. But what that means is that people are willing to copy you. Like if Jack's doing it as an idea, it's probably a good market and a good idea. Let's just, that's, if we just use that and we copy that, we're already skipping a bunch of potential points of failure. And, um, you know, I think everybody thinks they're a good idea person. You actually seem to be a good idea person. So where does that, what, what's the process? What's the process for ideas? Um, you know, how are you coming up with so like a high number of good, of good quality ideas that

• 4:32Sam Parr?

  I heard you have, you have 600, you have a list of 600 in an Evernote doc, just an Evernote doc, right?

• 4:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, 600.

• 4:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So you have a lot.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Lot of ideas. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. Multi-part question. Um,

• 4:50Speaker 00

  So I think the first part of this is where do kind of good ideas come from? And I have a view on this, which is a little contrarian. And actually, I think where startup studios and incubators can fall apart, which is a lot of times if you're incubating companies, a temptation is to brainstorm on ideas. So think about things, get into a room, whiteboard, come up with solutions, and you're kind of coming up with these contrived solutions to problems that may or may not exist. And that's kind of a problem, you know? Versus what we do at Atomic is we don't have brainstorming sessions. So we've been in business for over a decade. We've never had a brainstorming session on ideas, which is kind of crazy, right? So what we do is we observe problems in the world.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  It could be problems that we have personally, problems on our team, problems in our portfolio that our companies have that create enterprise companies. And in that case, we observe the problems, we see a pattern, we actually build the product to solve it. We deploy it across our portfolio, we have built in customers, we we dog food it. We make sure that it works within our portfolio. And then, once we know it works, then we release it to the world. But it's really a problem first kind of mentality. And then solving the problem that I think makes us stand out and a little bit different from other people that have attempted this. And I, in terms of the 600 ideas and where they've come from, it turns out our view of the world is like, it's actually fundamentally very broken.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  There's just a lot of stuff in the world that could be improved. And that doesn't mean that everything's like broken, broken, right? Like, it just means that there's, there is an opportunity in many, many facets of light and many parts of the economy to up level things. And this could be in just like everyday parts of life. This could be in going to the doctor's office. This could be in commuting to work. This could be in, you know, interacting with a company or running a sales team or, you know, something like that. You just observe all of these things and think, wow. That doesn't seem, you know, that seems a little bit broken. There, there's probably a better way. And then I just got in the habit of writing those down.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  And now that list has grown to over 600 and that's a seed that we use to start companies out of at Atomic.

• 7:07Sam Parr?

  And I have a whole bunch of questions that like I, I was telling you, I watched a lot of your interviews. So I, I understand a little bit about your process and I want to ask you about that. But before you did this, so you're 30, are you 34 now?

• 7:21Speaker 00

  I'm 35 now.

• 7:22Sam Parr?

  You're 35. So before you were doing Atomic, your first big win was Milo. You sold that for like 75 million at 24, right?

• 7:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:31Sam Parr?

  Stayed there at eBay for two years.

• 7:34Shaan Puri?

  Sam, do you know who his dad is?

• 7:35Sam Parr?

  I do. Comscore.

• 7:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So, so I didn't know that till I was doing research because we had, I just thought, oh, it's kind of like a whiz kid and.

• 7:42Sam Parr?

  I love Comscore.

• 7:43Shaan Puri?

  Behind every whiz kid is some unique childhood, I think, where you get exposed to something. So, so Jack, so your dad started Comscore, is that right? Was CEO, I don't know if he's still CEO and you were working there like at age 12 or something crazy. Is that right?

• 7:57Speaker 00

  Thanks. Yeah. Um, yeah, I had a, an interesting childhood where I got exposed to entrepreneurship at a young age. My dad was an immigrant. He came to the US literally without a dollar to his name.

• 8:09Sam Parr?

  From where?

• 8:11Speaker 00

  He was born in Lebanon and then he actually went to college in France studying science and engineering and math. He came to the US to go as PhD in math at MIT and he literally didn't have a dollar to his name. So he slept on a concrete basement floor at MIT in a sleeping bag. I was born while he was there in Boston. And then, you know, he took math and he applied it to business. He actually invented all of these really cool new forms of marketing, which at the time were revolutionary. He ended up winning these international marketing awards for them. Ended up getting promoted in the company that he joined and eventually became president of it. And then decided to become an entrepreneur. Can you imagine the world dream? I mean, he was basically born at the bottom of the third world.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  He rose to the top of the first world, started a company, sold it. And then when I was 12 or 13, he said, Jack, I'm going to start a company. That's going to measure everything everyone does on the internet and make sense of it. Do you want to join it? And I joined it as the third person, as a software engineer, and I learned how to write code.

• 9:09Sam Parr?

  Did he give you equity?

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Uh, well, so he was like, do you want cash or equity? I said, equity. I don't want cash.

• 9:17Sam Parr?

  Nice.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  Give me equity. So I took the equity and it ended up working out. Also, child labor laws meant he couldn't pay me cash. So I had to get the equity.

• 9:26Sam Parr?

  And at its peak, it was worth it. Like he took it public. It was worth like six billion or something like that, like many billions.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it ended up being worth billions at, at its peak. Um, he basically, yeah, he grew it on his own, took it public. It did really well. And then, you know, two or three years after it went public, he decided, I don't want to be a public company CEO. And he got off of that, started doing investing and being on boards. But I got to see that grow just from like an idea in my parents' sitting room to, you know, thousand plus person company to public company. And I just got hooked. So I started, starting companies at age 15 and I've just been hooked. It's just been in my DNA ever since. Technology has been in my DNA.

• 10:09Sam Parr?

  How old were you when you went, when it went public?

• 10:12Speaker 00

  Hmm, that's a good question. I was in college, so I probably was like 19 or 20 or something like that.

• 10:20Sam Parr?

  So he gave you shares when you were 13. When you were 20, what did they end up becoming worth? Were you like the richest 20 year old there is?

• 10:28Shaan Puri?

  The podcast is called My First Million. You might've been the youngest, the youngest person to make your first million, uh, if, if that math adds up.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  You know, my dad was a, is a very fair person and that would have been nepotism to give me an unfair amount of shares.

• 10:43Sam Parr?

  Number three.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  He gave me what I deserved, which I was a 12 or 13 year old that didn't know how to code. So I got basically paid the equivalent of like close to minimum wage in shares, which is kind of what I deserved. Uh, but it ended up being worth a lot of money and it was great. And yeah, it was a good taste of equity.

• 11:01Sam Parr?

  And you start Milo, i- i- it's a quiet, was it acquired for 75 billion?

• 11:05Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:06Sam Parr?

  Right? So you're 24.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  24, correct.

• 11:08Sam Parr?

  Just massive success. Milo ends up becoming a pretty big deal, like a, a main part of eBay. You work on a, a bunch of, of big parts at eBay. You become this kind of big shot, like you kind of climb the ladder.

• 11:21Shaan Puri?

  This, cause in the last two years, but basically me, so I got acquired, uh, we got acquired by Twitch. So like, you know, go from a, a little startup to, okay, it's a 2000 person company. Sam just got acquired, but his company just got acquired by HubSpot. I don't know how many, how many employees does HubSpot have?

• 11:37Sam Parr?

  Probably 3,000, I think.

• 11:39Shaan Puri?

  3,000 employees. And so, and I know, I would say like the default path for entrepreneurs, and I know because I talked to a bunch of them during the acquisition process of like, all right, what's the next year of my life going to look like? You know, what's your advice to me? And I got a whole range of, of sort of opinions, but I would say the common, the default path was sort of like, look, somebody who's like you, true entrepreneur at heart, it's going to be hard for you to be in a big company for a long time. You could choose to either like, just not play the game. You're kind of like coast and just do your own thing. Maybe do, build a couple of interesting products while you're there and then bounce whenever you're ready. Or you like, try to play the game. You try to climb the ladder a bit and, and actually like, figure out what, what this looks like. There's a different game than the startup game. You're not zero to one. You're sort

• 12:22Shaan Puri?

  of in the one to N phase of things. And you know, it's all about, so sort of about management of a large organization. And I think most entrepreneurs go the first route that I just mentioned, but it seems like you actually kicked ass at eBay. Like, I remember reading some article where you were basically like.

• 12:38Sam Parr?

  Like the VP or something.

• 12:39Shaan Puri?

  You were the, the MVP, really. You were like the, the guy who's helping turn this thing around. I think it was like, part of a bigger story of, hey, eBay's turning itself around. But you seem to have done extremely well. Talk about that. Is that something where you, what was your approach when you got acquired?

• 12:55Sam Parr?

  And is that true?

• 12:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah. How much of that story is true?

• 13:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting. First of all, it's definitely true. It wasn't told when I was at eBay, partially because I don't like that much attention and I don't claim credit for a lot of things while I was there. I was just catching up with like, a reporter that I liked. And I told him this story and he was like, this is amazing. Why hasn't anyone written about this? And it ended up getting written up. And eventually the story got told, but. Um, yeah, I'm a pretty impact motivated person overall, and I had just heard all these stories about founder friends that had sold their companies and they they sell to the acquire and they languish and they actually kind of become depressed.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  They're just kind of like they lose their mojo. They're just like, what am I doing? What's my life becoming? They almost become like robotic. And I was just like, you know what? Life's short. Like, I'm, let me figure out how to use this experience for the good of the company of me. I'm proud of what I built. I want to see it succeed. Let's figure out how to do that. And I went and, you know, there's some funny stories about things that we did while we were at eBay to try to maintain our culture. We, at one point, I rallied the troops. We had this house. They tried to put us in cubicles. I had the whole company rise up and go and rip down the cubicles and throw it on the front lawn and we almost got in trouble and kicked back campus and all sorts of crazy stuff. But I basically took the approach of like, look, what's the worst thing that can happen? They can fire me.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  If I get fired, I don't really care. So I might as well just go for it and try to do great things while I'm here.

• 14:33Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  And what's, what's a great thing that I can do? Well, there's a bunch of products that eBay can build. I like building products. I'm an entrepreneur. I haven't tried building multiple products at once. What if I use this time at eBay? To try to put together multiple teams under me and try my hand at building multiple products at once? And see if I'm any good at that versus just working on one product. And I convinced the CEO to let me do that and give me a shot at it. And the majority of what we built was hitting and like a lot of it was driving press cycles and the stock price, the biggest thing I did. I convinced the CEO to do on a Friday. That night, I convinced six people to cancel their next two weeks, fly with me to Sydney, Australia, rent an Airbnb, turn it into a hacker house.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  And we built the entire thing in two weeks. There's actually a story written about this online. And it ended up becoming the feed and the homepage of eBay and a hundred thirty million people were using it nine months later. Um, that's like the primary discovery mechanism on the site.

• 15:31Sam Parr?

  And, and, and after that, you started a couple of things before Atomic, I think, right? And those things, they're, I feel like when I was researching your story, they're kind of like footnotes, like they're not like major parts. And yet I researched them. They were really successful. Uh, like a couple of software companies, right?

• 15:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've started a bunch of software companies that are still successful. They're kind of part of Atomic is kind of how we consider them. Everything's kind of been folded into one umbrella at one point or another. The other thing that I would say that is a lesson that we learned, and Sean, I don't know if you remember when we talked about startup studios about this, but one trap you can have with startup studios is when you have hundreds of ideas. And when I left eBay, I had 250 potential ideas for my next company.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  Is the temptation is to try them all. And the thing that we did at Atomic is we only did one the first year, two the second, three, the third, four, the fourth, we really paced ourselves. And I think, you know, now we're at the point where we can do 10 or 12 a year. But that was kind of part of that pacing process.

• 16:42Shaan Puri?

  I remember three of those traps. I want to say them because I'm sure there's somebody out here listening who would be curious. I remember one was exactly what you said, which was focus. So the theme is basically startup studios are great. They have a bunch of advantages. But you don't want to lose the natural advantages that startups have. And so startups have desperation and focus. This is two of the core ingredients of a startup. And I said, you know, shiny object syndrome is a trap. When you have an idea lab, you could do exactly what you said. You could just go into a whiteboard, brainstorm it. That's kind of your job. And then you take one of those ideas that sounds semi plausible and Paul Graham, I think calls these sitcom startup ideas. It's like

• 17:22Shaan Puri?

  you come up with a kind of a manufactured story for a sitcom like, oh, guy and a girl fall in love in college and then, you know, their jobs take them across the country and they break up, right? Like you come up with these manufactured ideas. And then the second thing is because you have multiple ideas going at once, when you're doing, at the beginning, when you're doing one, it starts to hit some rough patches or plateaus or just things get challenging, like every idea does. Well, that shiny object over there is unproven. That one might be easier. Let's just go. And you either intentionally or unintentionally start to shift your focus away from the hard thing that you should really be pushing through and start just focusing on other shiny objects. The second one was desperation. You had said something smart. You go.

• 18:04Shaan Puri?

  We're going to fund the team, I think you said for nine months, you go, then their job is to raise the Series A in nine months. And I was like, that's great, because if otherwise, in an ideal ad, these things can just languish forever. You could just keep them, it's sort of this feeling that, you know, if not this month, the next month, no problem. And you're like, the people working on this are only going to work on this one project, their project needs to raise money, or, sorry, guys, it's a bust. And like, of course, you would probably recycle the best talent into the next idea. But I liked that having a sort of a deadline and a do or die moment of like, you either proved your shit, or you didn't. That was the second, second one I remember. And the third was, you're like, we're going to focus on B to B initially, and not consumer stuff, because we know a bunch of pain points that we've had as entrepreneurs, or our companies

• 18:47Shaan Puri?

  have. And so we can kind of scratch our own itch, and not try to make the next hit social network.

• 18:52Sam Parr?

  And frankly, it's probably so much easier.

• 18:56Shaan Puri?

  Although Hims was a consumer company, so you know, you know, but maybe, who knows, I don't want to pry, but maybe you're scratching your own itch there, too.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  Well, you know, it, it, no, well, no, that was a bunch of, that was a bunch of, that was a hair loss company. I still have my hair, as you can see, it's a hair loss.

• 19:12Sam Parr?

  He was, he was about to, Jack was about to skip that one over, and then he was like, I gotta address that.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  You know, that a VC told me, who I really respect, that the way you make your money in the venture business, is B to B, those are your singles and doubles, typically, and consumer can be your home runs. That can be your lightning in the bottle. And you should plan your portfolio accordingly.

• 19:40Sam Parr?

  Who said that?

• 19:44Speaker 00

  That's a good question. I think it was one of the managing partners from General Catalyst, if I remember correctly. And they're great. We do some work with them. They're pretty fantastic. And, you know, since then, B two B has actually been able to become home runs.

• 20:01Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  Additionally, right? Like the valuations on some of these B two B companies is absolutely astronomical. But the great thing about doing B two B is you can talk to the customer and you can trust what they say. And that is not necessarily true for consumer. Consumers, you can talk to them and you almost have to read between the lines with what they say. You can't trust what they say. You can trust what they do. You have to kind of run them through the product. You have to look at the data and see what they do. But what they do is actually usually different than what they say. And what works is not always what they say is going to work. Part of that is consumers don't know in their mind what they need. They don't know. It's hard. They can't dream it up.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  So it's a very different practice, creating consumer companies from B two B companies. But to address your other point, Sean, of the nine months and, you know, having companies raise on their own. That is like a purposeful element that we designed Atomic in, which is we tried to design Atomic to be uncomfortable at the atomic level. So companies are pushed out and people are pushed out of Atomic. And there's not this effect where people just stay in the incubator forever because it's dangerous to do that. And that is.

• 21:15Sam Parr?

  Is it nine months and $300,000? Is that right? Or $250,000 or something?

• 21:20Speaker 00

  So we have multiple stages of investment. The first check that we'll write to kind of get something going and do some initial research and homework is around a quarter million dollars, but it could range from 100,000 to 400,000. And then if that goes well, we can write a check that's usually $2 million. But again, it could be one to four million dollars. And then from there, we can actually write a check that could be three to eight million dollars. That sometimes we do with other VCs, sometimes we do on our own. Kind of depends on the circumstances, depends on the needs of the company and what we need to get to the next set of milestones. But that's kind of how it works now. That's been evolving over our funds.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  And our first fund, it was smaller, so we obviously only did like the early rounds, which is what Sean is describing. And then as it's gotten bigger, we were able to get the companies further, which is why we can keep themself longer. And now when they come out, they usually have raised these really big rounds.

• 22:18Sam Parr?

  Did you, when you, when you were starting this, how much of your own money did you put up to do this? And were you like, all right, you know, I made this much money. I'm willing to lose a million dollars over the next two years to see if I can make this work?

• 22:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a good question. So my general philosophy with things is you shouldn't sell what you wouldn't also buy. So I wanted to prove to myself that this would work before raising outside capital. So the first year or so of Atomic, I did it with my own capital, which was roughly on the order of what you described. And then once I was convinced, okay, I think this is working. I think we can pull this off. I think this model is going to work. Then we raised our first fund. And our first fund was, you know, roughly, the first, first part of the first fund was roughly a $10 million vehicle. That was primarily individuals. And we had some great founders of venture capital firms involved like Marc Andreessen

• 23:13Speaker 00

  and Iden Sanket and Peter Thiel and people like that that helped us a lot in the early days. And that helped us prove out the model from there. And since then, we've raised much, much larger funds.

• 23:25Shaan Puri?

  You, you have a couple of things on the agenda that I, I want to know the answer to. And one is what you just said. You, Andreessen backed your, your fund, Chris Dixon, David Sacks, Peter Thiel. And you said, on here, it says some of the, some of the learnings from some of these kind of like pretty amazing people. These are some of the like architects of like, you know, the modern Silicon Valley. I guess, do you have any like fun stories, anecdotes or lessons learned that are, you know, not what's, you know, I guess like just absolute common sense where you just say, we all already know that. But what have you learned from some of these guys that's, that's been, that stood out to you or stuck with you?

• 24:01Sam Parr?

  And add in Josh Kushner on there too, because he interests me as well. He, which he almost has a model like yours.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, he also starts companies. I love Josh. Josh is fantastic. Wow. Well, those are great people.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  The first thing I'd say, and you know, this is just a general thing, it's like, there are some amazing people out in the world. I'm surprised how many people don't approach them and just ask them for advice and mentorship. And that's something that was a major way that I learned throughout my career. And I'm so thankful to have had those people in my life and grateful for everything that I learned from them.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  You know, I'd say maybe going, going through some of them. One of the things that I learned from Marc Andreessen

• 24:55Speaker 00

  was actually a really interesting story about Peter Thiel that led to a really, really big insight that I had that has kind of driven a lot of my decision-making since then. Which is this concept that time exists on this massive power law basis. And, you know, they were having this conversation, apparently Marc was telling me, where Peter was talking to Marc and he was talking about, you know, this big moment where he made this investment in Mark Zuckerberg. And he made this investment in, in Facebook. And, you know, he said, you know, "Listen, Marc, I worked so hard my whole life to be able to get into Stanford. I really worked hard in, in high school and I did this and I did that and all these extracurriculars. I finally got into Stanford.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  I got into Stanford, I crushed it at Stanford, I tried to get, you know, the best grades while I was there. I did really well to get into Stanford Law School. I got into Stanford Law School, I did really well while I was there. I, you know, was really crushing it while I was there because I wanted to get into the best law firm. I got into the best law firm while I was there, you know, I realized it wasn't for me, but that enabled me to start a hedge fund. From there, I met Max Lepchin, I got the opportunity to go run PayPal, I ran that, it went public. You know, ended up being merging with eBay. It led me to start Clearing Capital, this hedge fund, which was kind of a dream that I'd wanted to do for a long time.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  All of this effort, all of this time, all of this energy, everything that I had done up until this point in my life, got me one hour with Mark Zuckerberg.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  And that hour was worth more than the cumulative sum of all of those other hours that I had spent in my life.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  And that is a crazy, mind blowing fact, if you think about that. That there could be an hour that comes in your life that is worth more than the cumulative sum of everything else you've spent, all of the time, all of the effort, all of the energy that you've spent doing everything else. And I think that can be true for everyone. So, looking out for those kind of like power law time moments, or those power hours can be so important. And I believe that they exist, and sometimes they're in plain sight. So, thinking about those critically, how do you put yourself in those positions where you can discover those kinds of opportunities? And how do you almost engineer your calendar so that you can create those opportunities for yourself? I think it's an interesting question.

• 27:26Shaan Puri?

  What's an example of that for you? Do you have an hour? Is there something that stands out to you that's like your version of that hour with Zuck? Or how do you engineer it?

• 27:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a really interesting question. So, this is something, I've never met Jeff Bezos, I'm a huge fan of his. But, one of the things that he does, that I think, that I adopted, that I think is a really, really cool practice, is you take a look at your prior week and how all of your time is spent. And you, you look at your calendar, you look at each block, each half an hour, each hour. And you, you basically, I basically modified a little bit what he does, but you ask the question, for all of these things that I did last week, what are the things where if I hadn't done this thing, nothing would have changed? And you cross it off the list.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  And if things keep getting crossed off that list, you probably shouldn't be doing them. You should probably find a way to get out of those kinds of meetings or replace yourself in those kinds of meetings or hire someone perhaps to, you know, take those kinds of meetings for you. Because they're not as productive and then really circle the things that really, really mattered. You know, there could be within a week, if, if it in a lifetime, you can have an hour that's worth the cumulative sum of the hours, you can certainly have that in a week, right? You can have that in a month, you can have that in a year. So really training your mind toward, you know, what those things are. And circling them and having that pattern recognition can make a lot of sense.

• 29:07Shaan Puri?

  I like that. So that's kind of. I used to have a job that was kind of like a shitty job. It paid really well, but I just didn't like it. And I remember talking to my friend there and I go.

• 29:17Shaan Puri?

  He's like, why, why don't you like it? Like, it's all good. Like, it's an easy job. We're making great money. We're, you know, they, they really respect us, they like us. What's the problem? And I was like, the problem is, I feel like if I didn't come here today, nothing would change. And if I, you know, and then you boil that down. It's like, if I don't do anything this hour, definitely nothing's going to change. And we called it, uh, it's kind of like you said, you, you look at all those blocks and you sort of figure out which blocks matter. And we literally said the same thing and we called it the Jenga law, which was, you know, in a tower of Jenga blocks, if you remove some blocks, the tower's totally fine. And then other blocks are like the key linchpins. And there's some, some point where you remove too many and the whole tower tips over and it falls. And so you, you don't want to remove those anchors, but there are plenty of sort of useless blocks that are in there.

• 29:59Shaan Puri?

  And if you take them out, you make space, then something interesting can happen. And so we started doing that. I started, I first started with an hour. I said, okay, every day from 1pm to 2pm, I do nothing. It wasn't to be lazy, it was to test what happens. And then, of course, nothing happened. Nobody noticed.

• 30:14Sam Parr?

  Your, your office space moment.

• 30:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. And I took half a day off, I was gonna do nothing for the second half of the day, see what happens. Nothing happened. Then I just stopped coming to work for like two weeks, right? And finally, by like the fourth week, it was like, they, you know, they were like, hey, what the heck? Where are you? Uh, we noticed that these things were behind and.

• 30:30Sam Parr?

  What job was this?

• 30:31Shaan Puri?

  It was a job I had in Australia. I went my, after my first company kind of got like aquahired, I was working for this thing. And yeah, it was, it was a fun, it was again, a nice place, but it really taught me that like. One thing that matters to me is that my hours matter. Like, I want my hours to matter. That doesn't mean I want to work super hard, but when I do do something, I want it to matter. And I started doing what you're doing, which is like recognizing that it's not linear. Every hour is not equal. We kind of get trained this way, right? You're going to work Monday through Friday, nine to five. There's this assumption that Monday equals Thursday, that, you know, the first hour of an eight-hour day is the same as the fourth hour, but they're definitely not in productivity or importance.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that's absolutely right.

• 31:16Sam Parr?

  I want to ask you about very specific ideas. So in the Pomp Podcast, basically, you said something I entirely agree with, which is distribute, or I don't know if you said it, or if it, but it was discussed, distribution over ideas. So you look at, you want to know, how do I get early customers and can this actually scale? Some of the ways that you do that is you look at the payback period. So you try to see, you try to get that as low as possible. So if I acquire a customer, how much, how long does it take to get my money back? You said the best-in-class is three months. You also said that the LTV to CAC best-in-class is five, meaning you acquire a customer for a dollar, they're worth $5 to you. And you also said that you have a very, at this point,

• 32:00Sam Parr?

  very strict standards for launching companies. So you said you have 600 ideas, you can launch up to 10 now, and that's many years into this. So what I want to talk about is what ideas didn't cross this threshold, but in your head, you think it could have? Or if the right person does this, it definitely maybe could work? Or maybe it couldn't meet some of those benchmarks, but it's still pretty cool and pretty good? What, can you tell me some ideas that keep you up at night?

• 32:33Shaan Puri?

  Honorable mentions.

• 32:33Sam Parr?

  Honorable mention.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  Good question.

• 32:40Sam Parr?

  That was a good question, by the way.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  Let me, let me think through that. I mean, there, there have been plenty, plenty, plenty over the years to think through. I'm just trying to think through some worth calling out.

• 32:52Shaan Puri?

  Take out, take out your Evernote and just scroll.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  I know, I know.

• 32:56Sam Parr?

  Click share and then add Sam at sampar.com.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. Okay, well, I'll give you some examples. So, one example is, um, all right, so talk about problem solution. So, we got this, we got this new office in, in Letterman and the Presidio, for those of you who don't know, in San Francisco. It's kind of like a national park. There's like a lot of trees around and we got this new office and I was just a mess in this office. I was sneezing, I was feeling awful, like every day, and I just had these horrible allergies and I couldn't get rid of these allergies and I like, it took me three or four months to get an appointment at an allergist.

• 33:35Sam Parr?

  Was it like mold or something?

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Well, I had no idea. I was like, what could this be? Like, obviously, there's something new about this environment. So, I went to this allergist, I got tested, and of all the possible things I could be allergic to, it was the one tree that was growing outside the window of my new office that I could not move, that was like protected by the city. Anyway, so I, I had to deal with it. In the process, you know, what are your options in terms of getting treated for allergies? Well, you can get allergy shots, which are painful, you have to go every week, they have to be scheduled, they're expensive, like, they take a lot of, we're talking about time power law. I don't want to be driving around the city, getting these allergy, allergy shots every week. Or you can do something called sublingual immunotherapy. So, basically,

• 34:19Speaker 00

  like, there's two ways to get these allergens in increasing quantities into your immune system, so that you, you get used to them. One is through an injection, another is by putting them under your tongue. Both ways, they get into your bloodstream. So I I said, well, I want to do the thing under your tongue. You can do it at home. It's a drop a day in the morning. That seems a lot easier. So I did that and I got it and it completely cured me of my allergies. And I was like, this is amazing. Why doesn't everybody have this? Look, look at all these kids. They're going there, getting these allergy shots. You go and you look and structurally, it's really messed up because the allergists get paid for giving these allergy shots. That's why there are so many allergy shots. You go to the allergist, they bill your insurance.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  So every visit you do, they get paid versus every sublingual drop you do at home, they're not getting paid. So that's actually, you know, normally the perfect setup, right? For like creating a company. It's like, okay, let's disrupt. There's this misaligned incentive. Let's go, go ahead and disrupt this. Lot of people suffering, huge pain point. People really, really hate their allergies. So we went, you know, we found a compounded pharmacy. We found like supply chain is actually pretty difficult to like source and get right and treat all these allergies and figure out how to do via telemedicine. And we went and we we tested it and just the economics just don't work and it's just.

• 35:45Speaker 00

  I think they should work. I think it's dramatically better than getting shots at the allergist. I feel like I don't understand why this isn't the way everyone gets cured of their allergies. We attempted to make the world better by giving everyone this way of getting cured of their allergies. But we just weren't able to figure it out. And then we tried selling it through doctors and, you know, the allergists, of course, don't want their revenue stream to be disrupted of getting the allergy shots. So that's not going to work. So eventually we said, you know what? We got a lot of other problems to solve and opportunity cost is really high.

• 36:19Sam Parr?

  What, what about it? Didn't it work? The, the medicines were too expensive?

• 36:24Speaker 00

  Just the unit economics. Yeah, we couldn't, we couldn't get the unit economics to work.

• 36:28Sam Parr?

  Do you know, do you remember how much, like some, what some of the numbers were?

• 36:31Speaker 00

  Well, let's see. We were trying really, we, we tried a bunch of different price points in terms of like the monthly price for these sublingual drops, ranging from like seventy-nine a month all the way up to like two fifty a month. Those, these are our tests, you know, we're testing the pricing. That obviously gets you a gross margin depending on that price. And then, you know, there's a CAC to acquire the customer. And the problem in this case was just the CAC was really, really high. I don't know if it's, you know, a new thing. Customers don't know about it. They need to be educated. Maybe they're skeptical, um, hard to sell over the internet. I'm not sure, but the, you know, we're really good at producing low CACs. We're really good at scaling things.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  We just couldn't figure out how to get the CAC low on this. We did a lot of different iterations. Um, and you know, the other way that can work is if the churn is really low and you just get payments for a long time. This should be, it takes about a year to three years to fully cure. Um, but it just didn't work out. The math didn't work out. And, you know, that's the kind of thing. The world should be that way. It should be that way. And like, you can be an entrepreneur and believe that. And I still believe that, but you'll be knocking your head against a brick wall forever and get nowhere. And there are other problems like that, that you can solve, that can become huge. And it's just better in our view to work on this. So that's why I've adopted this philosophy.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Um, which is exactly what you said, which is distribution's more important than ideas. And we only want to work on ideas that can achieve mass distribution because our view is life is short. And, you know, up for us and our co-founders, we want to, you know, prize our time. And we only want to work on things that can reach a lot of customers, whether they're consumers or businesses. We want it to matter. Um, so we, we try to validate that as much as possible upfront.

• 38:29Sam Parr?

  What are some other ones that you've done that maybe could have worked, um, but just missed the mark?

• 38:34Shaan Puri?

  You, you have a different, like, different bullet here that you can do if you, if it's hard to think of that, which is patterns for great company ideas. And it says three ideas to talk about. So I'm curious about those.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm gonna throw out another one. That was like a crazier idea that we we looked into. That I'm just gonna put out there as a crazy idea. Maybe someone on this podcast will do it. I still think it's a good idea. But there are some problems with it, so I'll disclose it. So, you know, there's all this technology, computer vision, etc. That's been developed for autonomous vehicles. So cars, self-driving cars. So cars, they drive around. There's a lot of issues, right? Like you've got stop signs, you've got stoplights, you've got, gotta be able to identify colors.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  There's people coming, there's bikes, there's all this stuff in the environment that you, you know, there's, it's 2D, but it's also 3D. You go up, you go down, there's weather, there's all of this stuff. So we were trying to think, what are some interesting, you know, ways that this technology could potentially be applied? And, you know, a crazy idea that I had that I had us look into was what if you created autonomous fishing vessels? That went out into the ocean and just fished 24/7? Even through inclement weather and they have like crazy sonar and like computer vision underwater? And they could find the fish and they just, you know, automatically did all of that.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  And, you know, we looked into it and, you know, it's, it's still such interesting technology. I hope someone does build it. But that, there's some structural issues with it around fishing quotas and the industry, industry capture of that industry that we could get into another time. That kind of make it a little bit difficult, but that's another idea.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  But anyway, yeah, I'm happy to, we can discuss that more. I'm happy to progress into the patterns behind.

• 40:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, go to, go to, go to the patterns. I'd be curious to what those are.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  Cool. Sounds good.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, so some patterns that I think are kind of tried and true. That are really interesting to, to think about.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  One pattern is if you take things that rich people have access to or rich companies have access to, and you figure out how to democratize them. So you make them more accessible, distributable, cheaper, and accessible to everyone. That is a winning formula for creating a really good company. And part of the reason for that, from a philosophical perspective, this is actually something I learned from Marc Andreessen. He has this belief that human desire is infinite, which is an interesting concept. And if you believe that, then people with a lot of resources and companies with a lot of resources are willing to spend on

• 41:40Speaker 00

  the outer limit of human desire. So they're poking around, they're figuring out all of these things of what's the next thing on the human desire bubble that could be discovered. And they might discover something. And if something there really takes hold, that you can then take and give to everyone, everyone might want that. And it might be ready for everyone.

• 42:01Shaan Puri?

  Like what? Like Uber was a classic example of this, right? People had private drivers. Now everybody can push a button, have a private driver pick them up.

• 42:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. Private driver with Uber, private chef with DoorDash, private shopper with Instacart. Those are all, you know, really good examples. You could even argue, you know, second home Airbnb. It's kind of like having access to a second home, much in a much cheaper way.

• 42:30Shaan Puri?

  And so what's a, what's an idea in that space? So what are some other things that you've seen that either very wealthy people or very wealthy companies have that the rest of us don't? What are some other, what are some other examples in there that, that, you know, haven't looked into it, but might be, might be interesting?

• 42:45Speaker 00

  Well, I think that there seems to be some kind of a renaissance happening in fintech, partially because. The wealthy seem to have access to financial planning, financial resources around planning, access to the markets. You know, there's this whole 99% versus the 1% and people have kind of figured that out. And I think that's why you're seeing this boom of new companies. If you can give the 99% what the 1% has access to and the ability to generate wealth, I think that that's actually really interesting. I think there are a lot of interesting startup ideas that are being formed there. We're starting one or two that we think can help empower people in that area, for example. So that would be, you know, one example of, of an area that-

• 43:30Sam Parr?

  Are you gonna do anything in the wealth advisor space?

• 43:36Speaker 00

  We are kind of tangentially doing things there. I think that there's probably a lot more to do there. You know, wealth advisory is a compounded issue where even the wealthy, when they have access to wealth advisory, it's not great.

• 43:53Sam Parr?

  It's not great. Have you heard of, have you heard of Adpar, Sean?

• 43:57Speaker 00

  No.

• 43:58Sam Parr?

  So I, I bet you have, Jack, right?

• 44:01Speaker 00

  Adipar, yeah.

• 44:01Sam Parr?

  Adipar, sorry. And so Adipar was started by Joe Lonsdale, I think, right? I only know like, you know, the Wikipedia version, but basically it's a, it's kind of like mint.com, but for really wealthy people. I actually, but like billionaire wealthy people. I actually don't know what features necessarily it has that, uh, something a little bit, what, what, Jack, what's it have that's more robust, do you know?

• 44:25Speaker 00

  It basically has tracking of like everything, every fund, everywhere in the world, every wealth manager, all of your assets. But they tend to work more with wealth managers instead of individuals. But Joe and that company has an, like a big vision for where that can go. And you might be able to work with it as an individual now, but that's kind of along the lines-

• 44:46Sam Parr?

  So-

• 44:47Speaker 00

  That could disrupt that.

• 44:48Sam Parr?

  So I work with some of these folks and they send me like the jankiest stuff ever. And their login, so like Morgan Stanley, the login to like, look at your investments, it's horrible. And I was like, you guys, this is just absolutely awful. Like I'm just using spreadsheets on my own. This is really bad. You know, I've heard of this Atapart thing and they're like, well, you know, you can't use that unless you're worth $500 million or like a billion dollars. It's really, really expensive. Like it's crazy high. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Just like give me a mint.com login or something and you guys like become the admin and just like, let's share this. You could just tell me because this is dog shit. And so I think that um, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in that space.

• 45:28Sam Parr?

  But to go back to your point about distribution, I think selling to those people are really can be quite challenging because they're very old school and they're very conservative. But uh, that I was bringing this up to ask you if that's a space that has been interesting to you lately because you, I know you're being a little cryptic because you like to be stealth. But until you you go live, but so I was trying to, I'm trying to get something out of you.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's a really interesting space. I would encourage people to look into it. I think that there is a lot that can be done there. I think there's dissatisfaction amongst everyone, basically in that space. It's pretty universal. Lot of room for improvement.

• 46:05Shaan Puri?

  Of course, that's that's one pattern for great ideas. So what are the, what are the wealthy companies that people have that can be democratized? And uh, and other, if if a few people have that desire and they pushed out to that limit, other people would want it if you can make it accessible, cheaper and more available to them. That's a, that's an amazing one. I think there's tons of great ideas there. Uh, what's another, what's another framework or sort of pattern you've seen for great ideas?

• 46:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. So one that I think is is pretty interesting, that's also I would put in like the tried and true bucket. Is if you take something that people consistently do and they have to do and they feel like they have to do it. But it takes a lot of steps and or time and you dramatically simplify it. And you make it a lot faster to accomplish the same thing that they feel like they have to do. So some good examples of this would be, for example, booking online travel. You know, it used to be so hard to do. You'd have to go to so many different sites. The Kayak founders had the vision of let's just pull it all into kayak.com.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  You go to one site, you see it all in one place that they made it really easy.

• 47:18Shaan Puri?

  I think you've said this once, which was anytime there's somebody has 14 tabs open to do this, to do one task. That's a business opportunity. Is that right?

• 47:26Speaker 00

  That's a business opportunity. Yeah. I mean, you just watch for that. If you ever see that, people are doing a lot of research. There are yeah, tons of tabs open. It's really arduous. That's an opportunity. Another example of that, that we, we kind of found with him's and hers and other telemedicine companies that we, we've started is going to the doctor's office. You know, people need to go to the doctor's office. Think of that process. You're calling the doctor's office, you're scheduling an appointment, you're whipping out your calendar, you're putting it on your calendar. You're going to the waiting room, you're sitting there, you're getting prescribed something, you're going to Walgreens, you're waiting in line for half an hour, going around the store, going home, you know, this is big process.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  And as a result, the next generation kind of doesn't even really engage with the healthcare system. You know, close to nine out of 10 of them don't even know who their doctor is and or they haven't even gone. So, you know, telemedicine takes that process and makes it a five minute process where you can do it on your phone and go through and get treated for whatever condition that you have. I think another interesting example of that is selling your house. People need to sell their house, right? And it's a really hard, long, arduous process fraught with a lot of anxiety and things like that. Open Door came along and said, hey, come to this website. Tell us what your house is and we'll make you an offer to buy it. And you can sell it right now.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  And you know, not everyone has to do that and not everyone does do that, but enough people do it that it created a really, really big company that's doing really well. So those are some, some interesting.

• 49:03Shaan Puri?

  And you guys are doing that now with Open Store, right? Uh, which I gotta say is it is a truly great idea. I remember when I first heard it, I texted my friend and I said, uh, I, I didn't even say how great this idea is. I just only said, why are we not doing this? Uh, because I was like, this is that good of an idea. Selling your company, selling your ecommerce store in this case. Takes so much effort, so much work and the data is all there, right? Like I'm assuming, I don't actually know how it works. I'm assuming it's sort of like ClearBank or whatever, where you can plug into their Shopify, you can plug into their Facebook ad account, you can plug into their bank or whatever. And, and with those, you know, three sources of data, you can get a basically like a health score and a value of, of this, of this,

• 49:44Shaan Puri?

  uh, of this shop and make them an offer and they don't have to go, most of them don't even know, like at least with a house, it's painful, but you kind of know what you're supposed to do to do it. Yeah. Nine out of 10 friends I talked to who have an ecommerce store don't even know what you would do if you wanted to sell. They don't even know what, whose door do I knock on? What do I need to have ready? And, and so therefore I just, I'm just not going to do it. And, and it's like the open door thing where not everybody's going to do this, but sure, if open door captures, I'm, I don't know what they modeled out, but you know, 1%, 3%, 5% of all house sales, like multi-billion dollar company. Same thing for, for open source. So I'm super, super bullish to the point where I was like, why, what am I doing with my life that I'm not doing this idea? This makes total sense.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  Oh man. Well, thanks for saying that.

• 50:26Shaan Puri?

  Don't worry, I'm not gonna copy you, but.

• 50:27Speaker 00

  Keith and I are having a ton of fun, ton of fun building out that company, um, here in Miami. That's been a blast. Building a, a great team, a huge team. And yeah, it solves this pain point in a market where it's really hard to sell your company. And all you need to do is come to a website. We give you a price and you can sell your company. And it's, it's really interesting. We have an amazing data science team. We're hiring really aggressively. If anyone wants to join, it's, uh, you know, anyone who joins that team, it's such an unbelievable team. I think it's going to create this almost. Miami mafia, so to speak, around here of amazing people. I think it's an exceptional opportunity and scaling really quickly. So that's been a lot of fun. Thanks for saying that.

• 51:11Sam Parr?

  In another pod, you said something like you have this list of ideas, but every once in a while, you'll meet someone who's so amazing that you say to them, well, what's your idea? And how can we, just tell me what your idea is and we'll partner with you. Or, you know, you said something like that. I don't know if it was exactly that. What attributes would a person have to have in order for you to say that to them?

• 51:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we're, we're open, you know, the ideas don't necessarily have to come from us. We're totally open if people want to bring their ideas and co-found companies with us. We just kind of ask that they be baked off in a process and that the data wins. We're just such big believers in this distribution over ideas thing, that as long as we, if we test their idea and the distribution's great, fantastic, let's go, let's do it together. That sounds great. But otherwise, you know, we just ask that we do that kind of testing process that we like to do. But some of the attributes that we look for, you know, we really like people that are just tenacious. They just wake up in the morning, they want to play offense. They have three things they want to get done by the end of

• 52:16Speaker 00

  the day, and they get them done. And they knock down walls. And they're creative, they have a lot of raw intelligence, they inspire other people, they can hire, they're charismatic. You know, it depends on the idea, right? Like, some ideas that are more technically oriented, obviously, you're looking for a slightly different profile versus ideas that are maybe more, you know, sales or product oriented. So we are a little bit founder idea or product fit as well. We do consider that. But yeah, those are some of the attributes that we look for in people. But sometimes you meet someone and there's just a really strong connection. You know, you have these high bandwidth conversations, you're feeling

• 52:58Speaker 00

  great about everything. And we'll just say, you know, we just want to work with you. We're totally agnostic to the idea and come in and join us. Let's look at 10, 12, 15 ideas over the next three to nine months. If we find something we love, great. Let's start a company. If we don't find anything, no harm, no foul. Hopefully, you know, you've met some cool people and we've had fun along the way and, you know, you're on to your next thing and we'd love to be as supportive as we can.

• 53:25Sam Parr?

  I, one of the biggest differences between Sean and I, although we're very similar in a lot of ways, he tends to do many different things and he likes doing many things at one time. I am always teasing him and jokingly criticizing him. I'm like, only do one thing. If you only do one thing, you're gonna be, you're gonna succeed more. And he's like, well, no, but I like this and it's working. And he's right, it is working for him. You have both started one company or, you know, Milo was like your baby or I imagine when you're running that, that was like your only focus. Now your focus is on launching 10 companies a year, although, you know, you hire people to help you make it happen. So I guess your baby's kind of atomic, but do you think that starting multiple companies

• 54:11Sam Parr?

  is gonna be a bigger wealth creator for you than if had you just done kind of one major thing and you only focus on one, let's say a software company or something like that?

• 54:23Speaker 00

  Um, it's an interesting question. So before I answer that, just one comment on that. I have noticed a pattern, which is that the smartest people I've met in the world fall into one of those two camps. They either want to be like singularly focused on one thing, almost to a fault, where they are so focused on it and they just absolutely have to crush it. And that's one archetype of success and it works really well. And some people are super successful that are that way. There are other people, and I put myself more in the camp of like, I just get energy from working on a lot of things with a lot of different people. It's how my brain works. I have to work across a lot of different things. And that's also, you know, part of it is what you enjoy and what makes you happy.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  And that's kind of what I enjoy and what makes me happy. It's inventing, it's the early stages, it's what could come next. So when I thought about doing atomic, it actually wasn't, believe it or not, a wealth building exercise. It was really. You know, one, is it possible to build a company that builds companies? Nobody's really figured out how to do that at scale before. Two, how could you do that? Three, is that the most interesting and impactful problem in the world to work on? I believe that it was at that time. And, you know, would it be fun? And would I get to work with really great people on really great problems? And I thought the answer to those questions was yes. So I decided to do it. It can be very lucrative.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  I do think probably you can do better by just focusing on one. Like if you had one thing that was gonna go to the moon, that you can probably do financially better, just going all in on that thing, at least in the short term. I don't know in the long term, because in the long term, if you build a company that builds companies, what's the value of that? I don't know.

• 56:14Sam Parr?

  It's like asking a genie for unlimited wishes.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Right. So, but it's not really, you know, what drove the decision making or kind of how I think about it.

• 56:23Sam Parr?

  Well, you said it's not been done before. I mean, maybe, I don't know where they were at the time. You know, Rocket Internet, for the listeners, there's this company called Rocket Internet based in Germany, started by these three crazy, crazy brothers. And their whole shtick was basically copy Silicon Valley companies, but do it in Africa, Asia, and other places where that thing didn't exist. Airbnb in Europe, or Amazon in Thailand, or whatever it is. Zappos in Nigeria. And they created a few companies that were fucking huge. And they did it so, but their whole thing was copying to the point of they would have this chief scientist who would basically study, let's say they're copying Pinterest. He would send out an email to the Pinterest of Africa

• 57:07Sam Parr?

  and the Pinterest of Germany and be like, Pinterest changed their button size on the top right from this to this. Do it. Have you ever thought, what do you think about those guys? And have you ever thought of doing that strategy where instead of invention, let's copy?

• 57:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's just not our style. It's a very different style. First of all, I think the kind of talent you can work with that you can motivate to just copy other people's ideas, I think is very different than the kinds of people we're able to attract at Atomic and work on our companies. You know, it's more of a mercenary, probably than a mission-driven approach. We pride ourselves in everything that we've done has been innovative. It's been original. We haven't been copying other people's ideas. It's not in our ethos to do that. So, and the processes and how it operates is very different and the culture is very different fundamentally as a result. So I do think you need to pick one of those two things.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  Would it be easier to build something that just copies other people's ideas? Yeah, it would be easier, but it probably wouldn't work as well because I don't think just copying other people's ideas is as valuable and I don't think that it would work as well anyway. But it's also just far less interesting to me. It seems like the ideas that worked well for them were the ones where there was like a local network effect in the US that hadn't gone to Europe yet and they did it in Europe before the US company could go to Europe. But there were a lot of companies that they copied that they had a hard time because they kind of installed someone who

• 58:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they're just hired guns. They would just hire bankers and say, just spend more money than this other company.

• 58:49Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 58:50Sam Parr?

  And, uh, you know, missionaries often outlast mercenaries and you have to, longevity is one of the key factors you need to, to, to, to win.

• 59:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:01Shaan Puri?

  Let's talk about

• 59:01Speaker 00

  It worked to some extent, but it's just different.

• 59:03Shaan Puri?

  Let's do a couple of minutes real quick on crypto. So, on a scale of one to chugging the Kool-Aid, where are you at with crypto? Just kind of personally investing in it and then what do you think is exciting or, or completely overrated? I don't know what your take is. There's sort of, it's pretty polarizing. So people are usually very into it or, you know, think it's toxic and, and Ponzi schemes. So like where, where do you stand?

• 59:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, good question. I mean, I think crypto is real and it's here to stay. I think the question is, what are the fundamental, like, real innovations in crypto? The things that are going to be around and what are the things that are? There's a lot of manipulation. There's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes people don't know about. On these chat groups and apps and like forums of like pump and dump things. Yeah. Really bad. You know, this is stuff that people like in a normal market would probably go to jail for. Like, seriously, this is happening somewhat regularly in this market. So it's a little concerning to like the average person to know what is and what isn't real.

• 1:00:11Speaker 00

  And that's my big concern with it is, you know, there's a lot of people rushing into it. There's a lot of enthusiasm. It is real, but knowing what is real and what isn't real, I think is is really difficult. So what's real to you? What do you think is real?

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  So to me, you know, I think one indicator to look for is where are developers signing up? This is also true with companies, by the way, whenever there's platforms that are built. And this is true for like enterprise companies or like app stores. Where do the developers go? Where the developers go usually works and is a good place to invest. And I think that's true of crypto as well. So on that thesis, I think Ethereum is a great place to go. Solana seems to have a lot of developer interest. I think there's a lot of other places.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  You know, one that I was kind of early involved in and helped get off the ground was one called Terra and Luna that just launched a new main net that had like 50 to 100 apps just launched that are super interesting. They're very interesting to me because they're solving a different problem than a lot of other people in crypto are solving fundamentally. What does that mean? But sorry, go ahead. Go ahead.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  So a lot of, you know, if you were to kind of knock crypto, if you were like a macroeconomist and you were like, wow, what does the world look like 10 or 20 years from now? If this really catches on, the big critique would be, well, if this is digital gold, imagine what would have happened to the world if everyone just held gold and nobody put money into a bank.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  There'd be no jobs, there'd be no economy, because people put money into the bank, the bank lends out money to companies and to people, that money gets spent, it creates jobs, those people spend the money and it goes through the economy and it just has this domino effect that's really important for the whole like system to work. In crypto, someone puts it in crypto and it stops, and it doesn't keep traveling through the economy, it's not a productive asset. So you basically take a productive asset and you make it unproductive. And I feel like for like decentralized crypto to work and scale in the world, that's gotta be fixed somehow. And the Terra and Luna people are very, very attuned to this problem. So instead of just focusing on purely technical

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  things, like, you know, NFTs, or, you know, new apps they can build, or APIs, or smart contracts, or things like that, they're actually thinking about, you know, how can you lend crypto? How can you borrow against crypto? How can you invest in stocks? You can invest in stocks directly with their stable coins. You can earn 20% interest with Anchor, you can borrow against that, and then there's a way to earn 30% interest. And there's this whole ecosystem of basically ways to make crypto productive in a decentralized way within the crypto ecosystem, that I think is really interesting. And I don't know, they're a really, really good, really smart team. I don't know of

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  too many other people that are working on that. And then the other one that I would call out, that I was an early investor in, is a project that hasn't launched yet, but if there's anyone out there who knows how to mine, I would say mine this cryptocurrency. It's called Ironfish, and it's basically this genius, I can vouch for her, she's a genius. And she basically created what I, what I think is the first true cash on the internet. So the whole idea of crypto was, it's going to be cash on the internet, it's untraceable, I give this to you, nobody knows, just like with cash. In reality, what happens with Bitcoin, we make a transaction and it's public forever.

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  Literally, this this record is going to be public and replicated across the internet forever. And everybody's going to know about it. Now people realize that and it's an issue. So you had, you know, coins like Zcash and Monero that were created, but it turns out those actually can be decrypted and you can figure out where all of that went. So she's the first person that really figured out how to make truly anonymized crypto. And it's called Ironfish. I think it's a really exciting project. I don't think it's tradable on exchanges, but I think it's mineable and it'll probably be tradable at some point. So those are some early ones that I think are exciting, worth um, worth kind of looking into.

• 1:04:43Shaan Puri?

  Love it. And uh, and do you use like DeFi? Are you like an actual participant or user of DeFi?

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  Um, I don't use DeFi too much per se. I'm more, I do actually a little bit, but I'm more of kind of like a set it and forget it. Buy and hold, long-term and patient type of a person. So I'm not actively doing, I, you know, I know there's a lot of stuff out there going on like yield farming and things like that, that I'm not as attuned to. But if I had more time, I'd be interested in learning more about it.

• 1:05:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, kind of. That's what I wanted to leave it with, which was if you weren't doing all the shit you're doing now. And I took away kind of the reputation of the network. So like, you know, you're, you're still you. You're still, you know, sharp, but you're 21, 22, 23 years old. Where do you think you would go work? What would you work on?

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  Hmm. That's an interesting question.

• 1:05:43Speaker 00

  I might consider working on, you know, web three and crypto specifically figuring out how to use crypto to build new networks. That can be built that are totally decentralized.

• 1:05:58Shaan Puri?

  Like social networks or or other types of networks?

• 1:06:01Speaker 00

  Uh, they could be marketplaces. They could be social networks, but I think what the Internet taught us is networks are what's valuable at their core. And I don't think Web three is, I think it's still early. There's like 10 million sort of users out there of this stuff. There's, you know, four and a half billion people on the Internet, so it still has a long ways to grow. If you can build some of these early networks with network effects, you can probably build things that are really valuable. And I know there are some people that are working on it, but there are probably still some really interesting opportunities out there.

• 1:06:38Sam Parr?

  Well, this is, this is, this is awesome, man. I, I mean, I could talk to you for another few hours. I've, I've got so many more questions. Hopefully you can come back and do this again.

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  Of course, would love to. Thanks for having me.

• 1:06:48Sam Parr?

  This, this is badass. Um, I pay attention to everything you guys do on Atomic. I'm always looking at your job page to see like, what do they, who are they hiring for now? What are they going to launch now? And trying to figure out if I could kind of like reverse engineer and see everything and so.

• 1:07:03Shaan Puri?

  And you have good taste, dude. You, uh, you, you invested in or co-incubated a company with my cousin. I don't know if you know that, uh, Rohan.

• 1:07:11Speaker 00

  Oh, which, which one?

• 1:07:11Shaan Puri?

  Rohan Puri. He, uh, he started Stabil Auto. Uh, that's my cousin.

• 1:07:15Speaker 00

  He's great. Rohan's awesome. We love Rohan.

• 1:07:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he's super smart.

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's great.

• 1:07:21Sam Parr?

  Well, thank you for doing this. This is badass. Um, this is awesome.

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  Of course. Thanks for having me.

• 1:07:26Sam Parr?

  We're excited to publish this. We're excited to make this happen. It was awesome talking to you.

• 1:07:30Shaan Puri?

  If people want to get more, where do they follow you, find you, you subscribe to your newsletter, uh, buy your OnlyFans? What do you want them to do?

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  Not on OnlyFans, uh, but you can follow, yes, uh, you can follow me on Twitter. I'm just Jack, at Jack Abraham, or, you know, you can find me on LinkedIn and or, you know, we're just at atomic.vc is our website. You can actually apply on our website for a program we have called the Future Founders Program, where we'd love to co-found companies with people. We love co-founding companies with diverse people of all sorts of backgrounds. We're agnostic to location, can be from anywhere. And we want to start a lot of great companies and it'd be an honor to start, you know, maybe we can start a company with someone listening to this. That would be great.

• 1:08:17Sam Parr?

  Well, this is awesome. Thank you very much. We'll be sharing a bunch of your links. I'm so excited that you came on here.