#200 - When to Go All In, Teenage Side Hustles, & the Crypto Exchange That Could Have Been

In this episode Shaan (@ShaanVP) and Sam (@theSamParr) share when it makes sense to swing for the fences and go all in on an idea. The guys also talk about performance vs brand advertising, the sick house Shaan is staying in, and end the episode with a segment on teenage side hustles. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (:49) Performance vs. brand advertising * (7:43) The $15 million dollar house * (16:01) The 8 figure crypto media biz * (21:56) The power of the Bitcoin community * (25:56) The crypto exchange that could have been * (31:34) When to go all in on something * (38:04) Making millions without an audience * (45:24) How to up your intensity * (48:49) Teenage side hustles

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  I think this is a good strategy. You say no to most everything. Then when you see the thing that you're like, this is it. You go 100% all in on it.

• 0:20Sam Parr?

  All right, we're live. You, you didn't know enough about Red Ventures to bring that up?

• 0:24Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I talked to somebody who sold their company to Red Ventures and they were telling me about it and it was like, oh, I just made a note. I was like, fascinating. Got to go research more. So I put it on here just to be like, I'm going to go research more. And then you added, I know a lot in all caps. So you already know a lot, which is great.

• 0:40Sam Parr?

  Maybe we, we could talk about it later. Also, another thing that I actually forgot to add this. I was watching the UFC fight. And do you remember about four weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago, we discussed this business of giving away like cars? And you have to, um, I saw an ad at the bottom of the UFC fight. And I think that like one way that I find ideas is anyone who's doing brand advertising. So there's two types of, well, I guess there's many types of advertising, but there's the first type is performance, which is, you click on something and I could, I could see 100% when you purchase and I could see everything about that. And I could like attribute it's attribution market, marketing, performance, marketing is what it's called. The second is brand marketing. So like billboards or what's another example? I don't, I don't even know.

• 1:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Just TV commercials, right? You do a commercial. You don't know necessarily and they try to measure it, but in reality, Budweiser, when they run a commercial at the Superbowl, it's because they're trying to build awareness. They want Budweiser to be top of mind. Maybe they want to talk about their zero calorie beer. They're just trying to build awareness and they're not directly hoping that you watch that. Open up your phone, buy Budweiser right that moment. That's not the way that that, that marketing is designed.

• 1:46Sam Parr?

  They hope that you eventually walk into the store and it influences you. This is what GEICO does. And often, early stage companies, particularly tech companies who are like savvy with internet marketing, start with performance. And then when they exhaust that, then they go, all right, now like we need to like just, we just need more people in the world to know about this product. And so what I love doing is I like looking at who's doing brand advertising because not always, but often that means that they're like crushing it.

• 2:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's like buying art. If you're buying art, you're rich. If you're buying brand ads, your company's rich.

• 2:19Sam Parr?

  Yes, that's a great example. And I saw UFC, they have this ad for Watch Gang. And I think Watch Gang may be sponsored in an embedded episode, but then also like before one of the fights, it said, this episode is brought to you by Watch Gang. Get in a Rolex every month. And I was like, what is going on with that? What is that? I've never heard of Watch Gang. And I know a little bit of watch watchers, or at least I'm a fan. And so I don't want to, even though I am kind of bringing it up, but I don't want to get into it too much. But they were doing, I went to watchgang.com and they were doing a contest for a Rolex.

• 2:53Shaan Puri?

  Giving away Rolex. Yeah. This, so my coworker at Twitch, when I was there, he, he came up to me. He shows me his watch. I'm like, hey, man, nice watch. He's like, I got this in this, this watch club that I'm in. So tell me more. And he tells me about Watch Gang. And he's like, yeah, I found this website. I had no idea if it's a scam or not. He's like, it's crazy. This watch is like a $250 watch and I'm paying 30 bucks a month. Like, I don't really understand. Every month they send me another watch. I was like, I was like, okay, it sounds fishy. Like, he's like, yeah, exactly. So I didn't even know if anything would come. But like, look at this. It's here. And, and so then I went and played with it. And it's like one of the like, super optimized websites. It's like, you, you open up the website, bam, let me get your email for this thing.

• 3:37Shaan Puri?

  Oh, you don't want the email? Spin the wheel and win some more. Oh, you spun the wheel. Okay, you have 30 seconds to finish your checkout or else you're gonna like, your family will be taken ransom. And so it's like, this like, and if you go to it, it's just like one hero image. And then it's like, you know, the tagline basically is, you know, get new watches sent right to your door. Do you keep them? You sure do. Are the watches good? No, sir. They're amazing. Right? So it's like, well-written copy, huge hero image. I'm like, this site prints money. And so I just made a mental note about Watch Gang at that moment. And it's like a mystery box. Like, you don't know which watch you're gonna get. You might get one of the like,

• 4:11Sam Parr?

  Is that how it works?

• 4:11Shaan Puri?

  Thousands of dollars watches, or you might get the like $100 watch, but you're always getting a watch of good value. And the weird thing is, who needs this many watches? I don't know. Nobody needs 12 watches a year as far as I'm concerned. But maybe I'm just not the demo.

• 4:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So when I see this stuff, like, if you're in the internet long enough, which, you know, it's not that you don't need to do it that much. In order to see that, when you see something like this, you're like, something is going on to where. It's maybe a scam and full of it, but also like if you told me this made $200 million, I would be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally buy it.

• 4:43Shaan Puri?

  It's an arbitrage play. So it's the same way that like,

• 4:48Shaan Puri?

  you know, most of the D to C brands, they're not like truly making the best products, but they're like, look, if we're really good at Facebook marketing, or if we're really good at affiliate marketing, or really good at whatever influencer marketing, then we could build like movement watches. They built $100 million plus luxury watch brand in two years. They made it sound like an old school brand. They, you know, they, they partner with all these influencers. They use this, it's a marketing company, not a watch company, really. And so that's what this is for sure. This is a marketing company, not a watch company. They could swap this out and do this with golf clubs. They could do this with shoes. They could do this with whatever. You could, you could take this watch gang website and you could do it with sneakers right now. And I think you would do pretty well. I think there's something where there must be something where they're getting the watches,

• 5:32Shaan Puri?

  you know, super discounted somehow, like these might be like out of style watches or refurbished or some, I don't know what they're doing, but there has to be some way that they're able to give you this watch and still make money in the, something, what, I don't know if it's 30 bucks still, or I don't know how much this.

• 5:46Sam Parr?

  I don't know. I, I saw the ad and whenever I see people advertising on the UFC, I think they're like, there's a lot of new brands, like Manscaped advertises there and I had heard of Manscaped. And then they advertise in the UFC. I'm like, oh, they, they must be monsters.

• 5:58Shaan Puri?

  Well, you have to be okay with your logo getting covered in blood. And I think most brands just don't want that. And then the brands that were okay with that got this big upside of a huge amount of eyeballs for a very low, uh, very low ad cost. And so early on, you know, it looked like NASCAR. Every fighter would come out and they'd have like 50 logos of like, from their mom and pop, like barber shop in their local town to like, you know, some random insurance company or, you know, energy drink or whatever. And they've been trying to get it more and more mainstream. Although they just announced a $175 million deal with crypto.com or mycrypto.com.

• 6:34Sam Parr?

  Is crypto.com scammy or legit? I don't know anything about it.

• 6:37Shaan Puri?

  Well, they offer 8% return, 8% cash back. So that's how you know it's, uh, it's probably not totally, it's not that it's a scam. It's again, it's like. These sort of hand wavy types of things. It's like,

• 6:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 6:50Shaan Puri?

  You get our crypto card. It's a metal card. It's awesome. And then when you spend, you earn 8% in crypto bucks. So wait, what's a crypto buck? That's our own currency we created. It's like, oh, God. It's like, you gotta hold 5,000 crypto bucks, and then you earn the 8%. It's like, dude, do I want to go buy $5,000 of your crypto buck in order to earn the 8% here? I don't know. I don't think so.

• 7:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they let a lot of stuff like that and advertise with them. But I want to bring up a couple of topics. You have a few ideas, but you talked about this house thing. So I want to ask you about that.

• 7:23Shaan Puri?

  So I'm on vacation.

• 7:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Shaan Puri?

  First time since COVID, we went to Vegas and I'm staying in a house, staying with somebody and their house is unbelievable, dude.

• 7:35Sam Parr?

  Like a family member?

• 7:37Shaan Puri?

  This is somebody I'm related to. Yes. So this is, this is a house that's, I think it's worth like probably $15 million. And $15 million in San Francisco will give you a fat house. $50 million in Vegas will give you what I'm in. I'm in a resort. I'm in a personal resort. Like I was walking in and I was like trying to not trip into the koi ponds along the way just to the door. Door opens up. There's a fricking, you know, from the hotel, that little, what the bellman has that carts to take your shit to your room?

• 8:06Sam Parr?

  They have one.

• 8:06Shaan Puri?

  They have one of those because the room is so far away from the door because they're just so big of a house. And so I use that. I get to my room. My room is like, you know, everything's magical, dude. We were eating dinner and then all of a sudden, like a convertible, the roof retracted from over our heads. The walls disappeared. They went away. And then we all went swimming in this pool that surrounds the dining room while looking out at downtown Vegas. It's unbelievable. And the reason I say this is because

• 8:33Shaan Puri?

  I thought I knew how much money I wanted. I thought I knew what I wanted. And now that I've stayed in this house, I'd like some more money, please. That's, that's my brutally honest.

• 8:42Sam Parr?

  How much?

• 8:42Shaan Puri?

  Feeling, my raw emotion that I have 24 hours into this house is. Oh, fuck this. Okay, I can be happy without this. But why can't I do this too? This is, this is pretty nice. I've never seen.

• 8:53Sam Parr?

  How much do you think you'd need to have, to have a $15 million house? What do you think your, your, like investable asset, like relatively liquid net worth needs to be like 60, 70?

• 9:02Shaan Puri?

  I think 100 to be safe, 70 if you're 60, 70 if you're like 50, 60, I guess. If you're, if you're just kind of like playing it, you're, you're comfortable with it being riskier, I guess. Or like if that 50, 60 that you have is not totally at risk, you could say, oh, okay. You know, I've, I've got that cashed out. I'm going to put it in safe investments and 15 million I'll put into my house.

• 9:23Shaan Puri?

  This house was previously owned by somebody who was like kind of what their grandfather started like Caesars or one of the casinos, two of the casinos downtown. And so it's like a billionaire family and then they sold the house to these guys. And then they, and then actually the funny thing is they sold the house.

• 9:39Shaan Puri?

  And then they regretted it as soon as they sold it to them. The day later they were like, hey, you know, the broker calls, broker says, my client really regrets selling that house.

• 9:48Sam Parr?

  Oh, no.

• 9:49Shaan Puri?

  And it was one person living here. So it was like this, it's this enormous, like, you know, 30 car garage bowling alley type of thing. I don't know if there is, I haven't even explored the whole house yet. I've only seen like one fourth of the house so far, but she called back, I'll give you a million dollars extra in cash just to have the house back one day later and they turned it down.

• 10:09Sam Parr?

  Dude, I think that's cool. I, I love visiting that. In my head, I think I actually don't want that. Maybe, maybe it's because if you're wealthy enough to buy that, then you just have people who could take care of it. But when I think of owning something that expensive and that nice, I'm like, oh my gosh, I need to take care of it. Yeah. That sounds like a lot of work.

• 10:28Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I think that's true for most things. I feel differently about a house for two reasons. One is I think a house like this makes sense when you have what they have, like tons of kids, basically. So you have, you have like a full family, right? They got four kids and it's like, this is your family's compound. It's like, this is your home base, your kids, like you kind of, you wouldn't really do this. I don't think if you're a bachelor, if you're a bachelor, you want to be, you know, penthouse in Manhattan or something cool like that. But this is different. This is like, it's a suburban home, right? But it's like a family compound. So I think that's the first thing. The second thing is. A yacht or like cars, those are like low use, high maintenance. Whereas a house is like tremendously high use and actually quite low maintenance for, for most homes.

• 11:13Shaan Puri?

  Because for, you know, they have a cleaning staff, they have like people that can come take care of stuff. And yeah, there's bills. I'm not saying there's no bills. I guess what I'm saying is it's not like a car where you're worried about it getting scratched. When it goes out, when you go park it anywhere or you drive it anywhere. And most of the time it's just sitting idle, unused in a garage with a tarp on top. In this case for a house, you're constantly in it, you're constantly using it, especially if you have a big family. So I would say house is the one area where I would splurge. Almost every other material possession, like fancy clothes, cars, it just doesn't make sense to me.

• 11:42Sam Parr?

  When I hear about people like this, I always, the same question pops up in my head, which is how much do they spend per month? So if you had to guess this person's total family expenses, including the house, what would you guess? I imagine you get a mortgage on a, you get a mortgage on a $15 million house.

• 11:58Shaan Puri?

  Like Randy Moss said, straight cash, baby. They had, they had to, in order to get the house, they had to like go in.

• 12:03Sam Parr?

  Oh my gosh. So you don't have a mortgage on the house. Normally a mortgage, I mean, I think.

• 12:06Shaan Puri?

  So what they do is they could finance it afterwards. So they buy it in cash and then they'll go and they'll refinance it. Basically get, get, they'll cash out, you know, they'll leave 30% down and then they'll take the other 70% and they'll pay, you know, some percentage. But for this, you can't even get a traditional mortgage for this.

• 12:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you get like a rich person's loan.

• 12:23Shaan Puri?

  So they got like a, a hard money loan, basically if they wanted to cash it out or.

• 12:27Sam Parr?

  Okay. So including that, let's not include that.

• 12:30Shaan Puri?

  That's hard to include. Yeah.

• 12:31Sam Parr?

  Cause that's even hard to calculate. I don't even know what that, I mean, that could be like a hundred grand a month. I don't know what it'd be. That's a lot.

• 12:37Shaan Puri?

  But if you just had life expenses.

• 12:38Sam Parr?

  Life expenses, not including the house, which is a, a, a ton.

• 12:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I would not be surprised if it was between a hundred and $200,000 a month. That'd be my.

• 12:48Sam Parr?

  No way.

• 12:49Shaan Puri?

  I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't be surprised.

• 12:51Sam Parr?

  That's so much money to spend.

• 12:52Shaan Puri?

  It could be a little less, it could be 70. It's definitely not less than 50 is my guess. I'll ask it today. I'll find out when we're for the next.

• 12:58Sam Parr?

  That's always, that's a good question. Um, just like, what's your burn?

• 13:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. What's your exactly? What's your burn?

• 13:03Sam Parr?

  That's a good question. So let me tell you really quick. And, uh, so this house, this, there's a lot next to my house that, you know, that little crappy shack that was next to my house?

• 13:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 13:13Sam Parr?

  It's for sale. I think I'm going to buy it and I'm going to build a house there and try to sell it or rent it out. And I'm excited to do this and I'll, and I'll talk about this on this podcast. I'm excited to do it because I've never done a project like this. I've never done like a physical business, really. I've only done, uh, you know. Digital stuff and I think it's gonna be exciting. You think it's a stupid idea or a smart idea?

• 13:35Shaan Puri?

  No, I think it's a smart idea cuz it's gonna like kind of change the way you look at the world a little bit and it's right next to you. If this was like even two miles away, I'd be like, nah dude, it's just a headache. When it's literally right next to you, that takes a lot of the like overhead of managing a project or even thinking about a project or researching whether this is a good or bad buy. It's like, okay, what's the worst case scenario? You're gonna have a house next to the house you have. You already like this neighborhood. You already like being there. Your friends are all there. You're gonna be able to like Airbnb this with low maintenance because it's right next door. You know, you'll never have to worry about it. And your friends can come crash there when it's not rented out. Or you can like expand to it. If you build your dream house, right? You can build your dream house right next to you, which is a fun, fun project to do for you and Sarah.

• 14:16Shaan Puri?

  And then maybe you leave your house, you go to that house if you like build it for, it takes a year to build or whatever. So I think it's a great idea. And it's not like, it's not about, it's not a financial idea, in my opinion. It's a, it's a life idea. It's a, it's a fun thing to do that will probably break even or be profitable when you do it.

• 14:32Sam Parr?

  What I'm learning about finances is that, you know, you and I talk about investing in different stuff. You can just, just your, your average Joe has access to this as well. So this isn't like, it, there's this. If you just park it into a general fund, like a general index fund, life is so easy and you get almost amazing returns like compared to everything else. Do you know what I mean? Like it's so easy and you don't have to think.

• 14:57Shaan Puri?

  Well, you need a big base, right? That's the problem for most people. Yes, that, that vehicle is available for most people, but let's say you're getting seven percent a year. You put a hundred thousand dollars in. Okay, cool. You made seven thousand dollars pre-tax, right? Now you have a hundred seven thousand. You need to let that shit compound for like fifteen, twenty years. And like Charlie Munger once said, when they asked him, what, hey, your guys' playbook seems pretty simple. Why don't more people do it? He said, no one wants to get rich slow. I think that's the problem is that nobody wants to take a small base and let it compound for twenty years or very few people do. And that's, that's the issue there.

• 15:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it is. It's boring, but it works. And then I want to bring up one quick topic. I met three interesting people this week. So I think people like hearing this. I enjoyed hearing this about this $15 million house. All right, I met this guy named Jason. Have you ever heard of this company called Blockworks?

• 15:47Shaan Puri?

  Blockworks? No, is this like a construction company?

• 15:49Sam Parr?

  No, it's right up your alley. It's a media. It's basically like the hustle, like Morning Brew, like Axios, but for crypto.

• 15:56Shaan Puri?

  Oh, okay.

• 15:57Sam Parr?

  I think it's blockworks.io, maybe?

• 16:00Shaan Puri?

  Co, maybe?

• 16:01Sam Parr?

  Oh, is it co? So Blockworks, this guy bootstrapped it. He's only 27 years old. I went to his house last night in New York, in Brooklyn. Awesome business, probably will do eight-figure, or yeah, maybe 10, north of 10 million in revenue this year, completely bootstrapped. Started it because he used to monetize. So he was like 23 years old and he cold emailed Pomp and said, listen to this podcast I'm working on. Come to this event. Just like, he was just like constantly emailing him. Pomp, who's this big Bitcoin guy, but who was less of a big Bitcoin guy years ago, said, all right, you've been emailing me too much, whatever. You're persistent. I'm thinking about launching this podcast. I need help launching it and monetizing it. Do you want to help?

• 16:43Sam Parr?

  This kid, he was a kid at the time, said yes, and then eventually launches a crypto media company called Blockworks. He launches it three or four years ago. It's only an LLC, so he completely owns it. It's not like they didn't raise any money. Really fascinating business, very simple, and he just picked the right category, and now they're doing conferences. It's a slick looking website, right?

• 17:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you go to it. It looks like Bloomberg or something, you know, it looks like a proper, you know, it just looks like a template of a good news site in general. And so how big is like the subscriber base to this, right? So like, is this done through email or is it done through direct site visits?

• 17:16Sam Parr?

  They make a lot of money through email, and then they have podcasts.

• 17:19Shaan Puri?

  So there's

• 17:20Sam Parr?

  And then they have conferences and so they have a conference that he

• 17:24Shaan Puri?

  For what it's worth, showing them close to half a million visits a month?

• 17:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so it's not, it's probably, that's like, if you look at our traffic, the hustle.co, maybe we were two times that. And I know that we had 800,000 to a million a month.

• 17:37Shaan Puri?

  Right. And, and we had talked about coin market cap recently, which was probably the bigger player in this space. So coin market cap sold to Binance, I think. And how much they sell for was like hundreds of millions, right?

• 17:52Sam Parr?

  Hundreds of millions. If it didn't sell for that, it's worth that.

• 17:55Shaan Puri?

  And the shocking thing was that coin market cap had like a larger monthly traffic volume than I think the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, I think it was. Which just shows you like the level of interest. Like when we talked, we joked about this, we was like, oh, like, how do we make this podcast grow? And I was like pivot to crypto. There's just like this insane appetite for crypto content because people get in, they think they're going to get rich. And every day there's a news cycle of like, the world, the world is, you know, we're going to the moon or the world is crashing and like, what's going on? And so crypto was a phenomenal place to go. So I like Blockworks. I want to share one thing, but did you have something else on Blockworks you want to share? I have a topic related to Blockworks.

• 18:33Sam Parr?

  No, it's just an interesting business. I just thought it was interesting. It's just not

• 18:36Shaan Puri?

  How big is the team?

• 18:38Sam Parr?

  Look at their about page. It looks like they have 20 people on board. I don't know who's full time and who's not full time, but and then if you click their podcast, they have like 12 podcasts. It's like a type of company where you, it is sexy in that like it's a media company for crypto. I mean, that's definitely sexy. But the guy is, he's 27, but he runs it just like a small business where he just, he just slowly adds and adds and adds. And I think it's really fascinating. I think there, I think if I had a bet and I don't have, I just got to know him and I don't, we didn't even talk about this. If I had a bet, I would imagine you're going to see this company sell for in the 40 to 50 million dollar range in the next 18 months. And I just wanted to bring it up now to call it out about like, see it before it actually happens.

• 19:18Shaan Puri?

  Right. How, take the over on that. I think it's going to sell for more. If the numbers are saying or what it is, just looking at it, I think. Traditional media is got an appetite.

• 19:27Sam Parr?

  Companies don't sell for that much. If it's only, I don't know what the revenue is exactly, but it's in the range of 10 million. If it only, if they only do, let's say, 9 million in revenue, that's probably only worth $25 million.

• 19:37Shaan Puri?

  But you're not putting the crypto premium, right? So that, so companies sell based on their story. And I think the story here is going to be that, hey, look, this is where, this is where financial news is going. Financial news being probably the biggest, kind of most valuable segment of the news. Not biggest in terms of popularity, but most valuable per, per user, right? So the Wall Street Journal, you know, it's a very valuable publication because every one of their users is interesting and interested in investing somewhere between thousands or millions of dollars. And so I think if you're crypto, if you're the crypto Bloomberg or the crypto Wall Street Journal, like we saw that coin market cap sold for several hundreds of millions, not necessarily because their revenue was that much higher, but because a big exchange wanted to grow and exchanges are worth, like Coinbase is worth 80, 80 to 100 billion dollars.

• 20:22Shaan Puri?

  So Binance, similar, like these company, the exchanges are so big, they were like, great, we need a media arm, right? This trend we've been talking about, HubSpot, oh, we want a media arm, Robinhood, we want a media arm. And so they've been buying up media companies in order to own their own media arm, which is basically cheap user acquisition for them. And so whether it's them or it's a traditional media company that will buy, I don't know. But I do think that a crypto news site is going to get whatever, whatever a normal media site would sell for, I'd put a two and a half X on it for, for crypto right now because.

• 20:51Sam Parr?

  Could be. I, I wouldn't doubt it. And, and what I told him is what I would tell the audience as well, which is, sell to a tech company, don't sell to a media company. If you want to create a media company, build it in hopes of selling to a tech.

• 21:02Shaan Puri?

  Sam's like, make a list of enterprise SaaS companies, then sell to them and take an all stock deal. All right. Now, now you have set yourself up.

• 21:11Sam Parr?

  No, I'm, I'm just saying, like, do you think that a media company is going to three X in market cap value like pretty quickly? Or do you think that Coinbase will?

• 21:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you would much rather go there, right?

• 21:20Sam Parr?

  But yeah, I would rather own $50 million of Coinbase stock than I would have cat of. New York Times stock.

• 21:27Shaan Puri?

  Right, right. Another sort of related thing on this. So I was thinking back, I was doing some reflection yesterday, actually. I was thinking about crypto and I don't know if I've told you this story, but basically very early on, my crypto story was like this. We were at lunch at the, I was running an idea lab. So that's a good, good position to be in when new things happen. Running an idea lab. You've got a bunch of engineers and designers. You already have funding and you're ready to take a new idea and just chase to market. So Bitcoin, I think at that time, had its first kind of pop from like the $7 range to like, I don't know what it was, 20 bucks and then 100 bucks. And it was all happening within a period of like one or two months that that first bike happened. And then it came crashing down after 100 back to like 17 or something like that.

• 22:09Shaan Puri?

  Exact numbers are wrong, but ballpark Bitcoin was very cheap back then. And our, our sys admin guy Pete, who's like, kind of like a very early internet guy, like would hang out all day at work. He'd be in the IRC channels, not Slack. And he's talking to other sys admins at other companies and shit like that. And this guy's like, and he was always like a security, like he was always like, ah, these big companies are tracking us. And like, you know, he's the kind of guy that would use DuckDuckGo early on type of thing. And so Pete was like in the right community for something like Bitcoin. And so he starts telling us, he's like, oh, Bitcoin. Bitcoin's amazing, dude. We're mining. He's like mining it on our servers in the office. He's like, yeah, it's great. I love Bitcoin. And we're like, ah, here's Pete, you know,

• 22:49Shaan Puri?

  Pete, who's kind of like a, like a more of like a neckbeard archetype, right? It's like, ah, Pete's, you know, really into some, something again. Great.

• 22:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So what's he worth now?

• 22:57Shaan Puri?

  Well, I didn't take it too seriously, but I think he was more like, a lot of people who were early on, they weren't putting a ton of like cash into it. They were mining it or they were like earning it for doing a job and then spending it because they were like, wanted to be a part of this new economy. By the way, have you ever heard that story about Andreas Antonopoulos? Do you know who that guy is?

• 23:15Sam Parr?

  No. Oh, maybe. Is he the guy who looks like, is he Greek?

• 23:19Shaan Puri?

  He, I think he's Greek, yeah, based on the name, but he's basically, um, he was like the Bitcoin evangelist. So he was just, when Bitcoin came out, he was going and talking everywhere, just talking.

• 23:27Sam Parr?

  I know who he is as a personality.

• 23:29Shaan Puri?

  Bitcoin's amazing. He wrote this Bitcoin book. It's great. And so anyways, he's given like, he's spread the gospel. He's like what you need when you have a new movement. It's like, this guy was out, he was, I don't know much about the Bible, but like, you know, he wasn't Jesus, but he's like, you know, Paul or whoever, you know, taking the gospel and going to spreading it. And so he, um, he'd been doing this for years and he had been earning any money he had. He would only take in Bitcoin and then he would spend it on his rent and he would spend it on his coffee. He wanted to live in crypto and live what he was preaching, that this new financial system with real kind of like hard money, true money, uh, sound money, as they say, is, is the, is the way to go. And so anyways, Bitcoin price keeps going up, up and up. And people are like, oh, Andreas, you must be like a millionaire hundred times over by now.

• 24:11Sam Parr?

  Oh, no.

• 24:12Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, well, no, like I was living off Bitcoin. I was spending it like I was, like I was earning it for talking at some things, but I didn't charge a ton because I just wanted to get the word out. He's like, and then when I had it, I was using it to pay rent and I have a family and like, no, I actually, I actually didn't have a ton. But he wasn't saying it like, you know, pity me. He was just like, you know, contrary to believe, popular belief, here's the case. And so there's this guy on, um, on Twitter, I forget his name. He's like this famous guy who he forked Bitcoin and like has his, he owns bitcoin.com. It's kind of like this, he's not very well liked in the Bitcoin ecosystem, Roger Ven, Roger Ver or something like that is his name. So he starts making fun of Andreas on Twitter. He's like, oh my God, the biggest Bitcoin, like, you know, like, uh,

• 24:54Shaan Puri?

  carnival broker for all these years, didn't even make money when Bitcoin shot up in price to thousands of dollars per coin. Like, like what a joke, uh, like, like nice one, schmuck. He starts making fun of him. And then the Bitcoin community rallied and overnight donated anonymously to his wallet and made, made Andreas a millionaire in Bitcoin overnight. Um, of people, people donating money because they were like, no, I got into it because of this guy. He's getting made fun of because he didn't profit off of this. Like, fuck that. Uh, so I thought that was like a pretty cool moment, like one of the cool parts of crypto, not the like annoying parts. Anyways. Back to my story. I'm in the idea lab and basically my CTO catches the bug too. And he starts saying, he's like, yeah, fiat is trash. I'm like, what is fiat? It's a car? Like, what are you talking about?

• 25:39Shaan Puri?

  And he's like fiat currency. That means currency that, you know, the government makes up and prints like by their, by their fiat, they create this currency. He's like, it's bad. I'm like, well, okay, why? Like the dollar seems fine. And he's like, yeah, it's fine till it's not fine. Look at the history. And he starts telling me about this, this, this. I'm like, yeah, but that's like ancient history. He's like, just yesterday, Japan announced that they're going to double the money supply in the next 10 years. I was like, that can't be good, right? He's like, yeah, that's massive dilution. That's like, if you doubled the shares in this company right now, I would be pissed. And he's like, he's like, so he's like, we should do something. I'm like, okay, Paul would like, run with it. What's the idea? Normally Paul was the guy I would give directions to. He's not the idea guy. He's like, tell me what to build. I'll build it. I can build anything. And in this case, he's like mocking up a website and he's basically like,

• 26:22Shaan Puri?

  crypto doesn't have any of the basic like financial instruments that, uh, that the normal economy has. So all we got to do is just build either an exchange or a like, kind of like a, um, maybe like an ACH protocol or like a place to deposit in a savings account. Like we just need something like that for crypto. So he mocks it up. We start going with it. And, uh, our idea lab was backed by this couple, Michael and Zoe Burch. It's basically an individual couple who's, you know, independently very wealthy. And so he come, Michael comes by for lunch the next day. He's like, hey, the lawyer, like our lawyer Susan told us that you're, uh, you're doing like a Bitcoin project. And I was like, yeah, kind of exciting. Like, and I don't really know it myself. I wasn't the one with conviction. It was like

• 27:02Shaan Puri?

  my team and I was just backing them. And so he's asking me, he's like, isn't that like, like, kind of like for the Silk Road and like, isn't that like kind of scammy? And I was like, no, I think there's merit to it, but I couldn't like make a strong case. He's like, dude, I don't know, man. Like, if we do something wrong here in the financial space, like, look, if we, if we make a social app that fails, whatever, I burned a million dollars of funding. If we do something that's illegal, the SEC comes after us, I could lose everything. So like, let's put the kibosh on our crypto exchange that you guys are trying to like create, like launch tomorrow. And I was like, ah shit. So I go tell the team and blah, blah, blah. And we, long story short, we do nothing. So we don't launch the thing. I don't buy any Bitcoin at that time when Bitcoin's like under a hundred dollars. And we, we move on with our life.

• 27:48Shaan Puri?

  And then like now, years later, I'm just chasing that crypto dream the whole time, buying it at like, you know, $20,000 a coin instead of when it was at 20. And I was thinking back on it, I was like, what was the right move there? And so I'll kind of lay out my thinking here. I think the right move, and I think many people will come into these situations where a new trend happens and you're, you know, you want to chase it, but there may be risks associated with why you should or shouldn't do it. And here's kind of like my revisionist thinking. You tell me, you tell me, actually, I'll pause there. Tell me what you think I should have done in that situation. Did I make the right move or what could I have done differently? Cause I think it's important to kind of learn from our game film as entrepreneurs.

• 28:24Sam Parr?

  Well, so like objectively, you made the wrong move in that you, you didn't, we know what the right move was now. But looking back, knowing what you knew, being who you are, I would say, I wouldn't say you made the right move, but I would say you didn't do anything wrong.

• 28:41Shaan Puri?

  Right, okay, so fair enough. So let's say, uh, door one is do nothing, always, right? So do nothing. That's where, that's the door we ended up taking. Door two was create and launch this like kind of crypto exchange slash money transitor, whatever, that was like where we were headed. What I think was, I should have looked at, what does door three, four and five look like? So the first thing I should have done is I should have bought the currency, right? Uh, that, that's kind of an obvious one. If you believe in this thing enough to build a startup around it, you should own some of the underlying asset, um, as, as something you own. So that was like the first part. Second was, when I got pushed back from somebody richer, smarter and more experienced than me, and I didn't have the answer, the answer shouldn't have been, okay, no, okay, I'll stop it. It should have been.

• 29:23Shaan Puri?

  Well, let's, let me put together a case for doing this. Give me a week to put together a case of why we might do this. Why this might not be such a bad idea. I agree with your logic. Let me put together a case and let's start with that. And so I could have took a pause breath and I could have said, all right, let me go and actually like, get to conviction myself. And if I have conviction, I'll convince anybody in the world to do that we should do this. But if I don't have conviction, it's just a matter of, I haven't really thought this through enough. And the third option was, or the next option was, what are the other things you could have done? So what are the no risk ways to ride this wave? That's what I think Blockworks did. That's what CoinDesk did. That's what CoinMarketCap did. So there was other things you could have done. You could have created a media company that said, all right, I'm not going to like, try to be a financial exchange and that has some risks. But why don't we spin up a media side?

• 30:08Shaan Puri?

  Well, there's going to be, if this is going to be a thing, people are going to be interested in the content. We could build that and then that gives us options to launch more stuff. So that would have been a smart move. That was zero risk financially, as far as like the, the sort of regulations and SEC goes, but still would have been riding that wave. I didn't think about that because I didn't have all these other business models in my tool belt of like, what else I could do? Another would have been to, instead of just launching like a media company, it could have been an agency. So we have several friends like Andrew from MetaLab, our friend Greg who launched Late Checkout. You can launch agencies that help big companies understand what to do with this thing. And you're going to actually charge a shit ton of money to do this. Consensus is the big one right now. That's the big kind of consultancy for this. I think they do over a hundred million dollars.

• 30:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we talked about them. They're a multi-billion.

• 30:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, right. Just from, just from this, just from consulting with big companies saying, hey, do you know how to spell blockchain? We can, we can spell it for you. And so, so basically there was other business models I could have done. So looking back, I would say that that's one learning I had. And I guess like going forward, that's, I think it's important when these like new waves come out to like dive in on them, learn about them and then think about, all right, should I try to build the big risky thing? Should I try to build a community? Should I try to build a media site? Should I try to build an agency? Like I have 10 options and depending on my level of conviction, I can go in either one of those directions. I could build the audience first. I can build the technology first. I can try to land grab and do something there. We could have created our own currency. There was 10 other ideas that we could have done. But anyways, this is like a.

• 31:40Sam Parr?

  But to continue talking about strategies, it is to continue talking about strategies. My opinion is that you should actually take door number one in most cases.

• 31:49Shaan Puri?

  Do nothing.

• 31:50Sam Parr?

  And yeah, and when you see something that you think is like, this is one life strategy. And I think this is a good strategy. You say no to most everything. Then when you see the thing that you're like, this is it, you go 100% all in on it.

• 32:05Sam Parr?

  And, and so there's a few examples of this. So, and, and when you go all in on it, it's a high risk, but it's high reward type of thing. So examples are you become BuzzFeed and Facebook gets popular. You launch an entire media company on BuzzFeed. Cheddar did this as well. They launched an entire media company off Facebook Live and they sold for $200 million. Now you have loads of examples of it not working for people. More examples of it not working than it does, does work. But when you, when you spot these waves, I actually think that, uh, like the, the, the risk versus reward is far in your favor of doing it. And Bitcoin is one of those where of course we know now, you know, you didn't know then.

• 32:47Shaan Puri?

  What, what are the hallmarks of a wave? All right. What were some recent waves? And then what, how do you know when it's a wave versus just shiny object distraction?

• 32:54Sam Parr?

  I think engagement for sure. So I think it's, it's not, the wave is not how many people are using it, but the few people who are using it, how much are they using it? And so I think that.

• 33:04Shaan Puri?

  Does this feel like a cult? Do these people seem crazy? That's actually very positive signs for waves.

• 33:11Sam Parr?

  Yes, I think that's the, the biggest one is, uh, are people like, how into it are they? So like, I was just talking to a guy that was selling, um, who did a multi-level marketing scheme where, and he didn't know it at the time, but he was, he thought it was multi-level, but it was a pyramid scheme. He was like, well, I'm just like a salesperson for this energy drink.

• 33:29Shaan Puri?

  He was a participant in it.

• 33:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was like, but I loved it and I thought it was okay. He goes, and then it took me forever to realize that it was a pyramid scheme. And then I was like scamming people, so I had to bail. But for a long time I was so into it. And like, when you see like people who are so into something like Amway, like Herbalife, they actually become huge, huge companies. Even if most people don't get it, you'll, you only need a few people that are passionate about it. So it's all about engagement.

• 33:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I would say that. So I would say, what are you going to look for with a wave? Second one is complete behavior change. So like Facebook early on was a good example of this, where all of a sudden people were checking something like 30 times a day. There really weren't websites that you would go check 30 times a day. And Facebook was one. And so similarly, like Fortnite or Twitch, something like that. It's like, wait, you're just streaming a webcam of yourself for eight hours, like playing video games? So yeah, not a lot of people do it, but the people who were doing it were doing this completely weird behavior that made no sense and had no like real parallels to what people were, what that same person was doing before. And so if it's been able to consume this person's life and change their whole like workflow,

• 34:35Shaan Puri?

  then it's going to do that for other people, right? Like, uh, remote work is like that in a small way, but that's, that's another one. A third one is

• 34:44Sam Parr?

  Go ahead.

• 34:45Shaan Puri?

  A third was just a technology wave. So a new device comes out that can do something that the other devices couldn't. I like, oh, this is a phone. It has an accelerometer and a GPS. So now what, what can you create when you have a GPS in your pocket? Well, you could push a button and someone could come find you and pick you up and take you somewhere else using that same GPS. And so like, you know, Rideshare became enabled because this new device was there. Or you have a camera in your pocket at all times. Well, then I guess people are going to take way more photos than they were before. All right. That's when you get Instagram, you get Snapchat. So I think the technology wave is the other one.

• 35:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah, there's a bunch of these and, and, and it's actually fun to talk about. Like, we all know what the waves are, but there, let's talk about some of the waves that we've seen recently that actually turned out not to be waves or likely won't be waves. Clubhouse is one of them. Um, a lot of people dedicated a lot of stuff to them. I could have seen a startup raise money on top of a clubhouse show or something like that.

• 35:38Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 35:39Sam Parr?

  And, but, but, but I don't actually hate people taking that shot. And I think that a lot of people do.

• 35:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 35:44Sam Parr?

  And I think, I think

• 35:45Shaan Puri?

  You have to measure how much do you have to lose? Like, for example, in that scenario I was talking about, I would have launched the crypto thing because I had nothing to lose. Our investor who's like basically a billionaire is like, hey, you know what? I don't mind if you fail on these startups, but like, don't have the SEC come after me. Like, that doesn't seem good. Like, let's not hold like, if this works, we're going to have like a hundred million dollars of user deposits that we're like on the hook for. That sounds bad. I don't, you know, I, it wasn't easy to get this billion dollars. I don't want to lose that. So for him, it was the correct decision to say, let's not risk ruin. When you're You know, and you have nothing. Well, you have nothing to lose. And so feel free to go more all in and take more risks faster. If hey, if clubhouse turns out to be a dud, what'd you lose? Six months of your life? You know, like $2,000. It's okay.

• 36:30Sam Parr?

  So since we're talking about reflection and stuff, let me tell you a quick story. So I'm gonna send you this guy's LinkedIn. I met this guy this week. So I like just last week, we were off. I was off. So I just went and hung out with people. My friend Joe introduced me to this guy named Val. I don't even know how to say his last name. But Val, I went out to lunch with this guy named Val. So this guy's story is basically, he came from a Soviet Union country. I forget. He came from Soviet Union. I forget what it's called now, the area that he was from. Uzbekistan is what it's from. He's a like a Jewish immigrant from Uzbekistan. He, at the age of 18, listen to this, he started a cellphone ringtone business. He was the only employee and it did 10 million in revenue in year three.

• 37:13Sam Parr?

  He was started when he was 18. So this was when he was like 21, 10 million. So 10 million in profit, he said, he goes, basically.

• 37:19Shaan Puri?

  Ringtone to Americans?

• 37:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah. He goes, I was the only employee.

• 37:22Shaan Puri?

  Oh, a kid from, I don't even know what you said, Uzbekistan.

• 37:26Sam Parr?

  Uzbekistan, I believe.

• 37:27Shaan Puri?

  Selling $10 million worth of ringtones to stupid Americans. Isn't that beautiful? I love that.

• 37:32Sam Parr?

  And that amazing. I believe it's called, you can scroll down. It's called Tone Media. I believe that's what it is on his LinkedIn, something like that, or Tone Fuse. I don't, I don't even know which one it is. You get so many of them. And the reason why this guy interests me is, so I'm gonna tell you everything that he has done since, but it's all been bootstrapped. No outside funding and all in different industries. So the first one, and he probably has more, but these are the ones he told me about. So a phone business, the ringtone business, he's, he's like the revenue. And he goes, by the way, revenue and profits are pretty much the same thing because I was the only employee. He was like, it went like 2 million, 4 million, like 10, and then I sold it. His second thing was called Mobile Fuse, which is a ad tech company.

• 38:13Sam Parr?

  It's, that's boring. That's not that exciting, but it's a big business, something like, I imagine, he didn't tell me, but I imagine like 50, 60 million in revenue, pretty big. Then while he was getting that started, he noticed that peer to peer lending was popular. So things like, you know, SoFi?

• 38:27Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 38:28Sam Parr?

  Stuff like that. So he created a company called Prime Meridian Capital. I've never even heard of it, but I think their URL might be Poise Lending. Basically, at this point, they've given out billions of peer-to-peer loans. So totally different from ad marketing or ad tech. Then from there, he started a thing called, I don't even know how to pronounce this, Giacallo, but he was telling me all about this. But basically, a company like Zales, have you, you know Zales?

• 38:54Shaan Puri?

  The diamond company.

• 38:55Sam Parr?

  Or do you know K Jewelers, Jared, Ernest Jones, Peoples, there's a bunch of them. So it's all owned by this company called Signet. Signet is a multi-billion dollar diamond business. And what they do is they own all of these brands. And he was telling me, he was like, I was thinking about what makes that company special. And he was like, basically, they have those headquarters where they just look at which diamonds are most popular, which, which brands and which cuts are selling the best. And how can we tell all of our brands what we think are going to be the next big thing? How can we help you optimize that brand by selling a little bit more efficiently? How can we buy in bulk? Things like that. So it was basically, it was just a normal mom and pop store, but we just multiplied it by however many. And so we just created these, these, this trends bit, and then this

• 39:37Sam Parr?

  economies at scale, you know, buying in bulk stuff. Not particularly special, but, but just executed really well. And so he goes, well, you know, I'm going to build software. So I'm going to help all the mom and pop jewelers do that same thing. And so he went and started this new company. And if you look at his LinkedIn and go to the website, you can see it looks like really janky, really simple. But they, what they do is a mom and pop brand can sign up and they'll, the, the, the, the name of the company, I think it's called, I don't even know how to pronounce it. It's a horrible name. How do you say that?

• 40:07Shaan Puri?

  Giacallo.

• 40:08Sam Parr?

  Giacallo. It's, it's really bad. So Giacallo will help you get bulk discounts, but then will help you spend your marketing. So it's almost a little bit like a part agency, part buying in bulk, part CRM, where you could like, look at sales and like, help predict which is going to be the most popular in order in bulk. And I believe this company is going to be doing around 80 or so million in revenue.

• 40:32Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 40:33Sam Parr?

  And so this freaking guy, we'll have to, like, he's, he, he, his English as a, as a second language, and he's real quiet, and he's real understated, very low key. And he was just telling me all about this. And I had a few learnings. The first is just, It's crazy, the story.

• 40:48Shaan Puri?

  The first, I haven't done shit in my life. The second, this guy's a fucking beast. Third.

• 40:54Sam Parr?

  Yes, it just, and he didn't, he's not flashy. I mean, he had a nice watch on, but he had normal clothes and he, and he didn't brag about himself. I had a pull, I pulled it out of him. And he, um, the, the, a few things. What we tell ourselves about why we can't do something, it's bullshit. It's mostly bullshit. I mean, some people are more talented than others, but you could just get so much done just by, just by working really hard. So what we tell ourselves about why we can't do blank, that's nonsense. Second, there's this, I don't know, like some people call it like the, I think it's called the red pill. I forget what people call it, where they like see the world differently. I've hung out with enough people that just crush it and a lot of people who you don't, never even heard of. And I'm, and it, and oftentimes I'll like, when I'm looking at this house, I'm like, oh, should I buy this lot? I gotta sink this money into it, it's gonna fail.

• 41:38Sam Parr?

  But there's so many, there, there's a few people in this world and I know, I know a lot of these people who just be like, yeah, of course, just let's do it. And they're just so confident. I actually think you have a little bit of that in you. They're just so confident and they default to optimism, optimism. And it works so well. It's like this, this ability, i- i- in this case, it's money, but it could be anything. It, it could be, um, you know, well, we're just gonna fly there and we're just gonna figure it out. But this like default to, yeah, of course it's gonna work. A few people have that and that attitude gets you so far. Uh, and, and I, I've been able to experience that just by being around some of these people. But it, it's just a really fascinating person.

• 42:16Shaan Puri?

  Wow, I love this, uh, I love that little story. I love this guy. This is, this is really cool. And, uh, yeah, I'm impressed. I love meeting these kind of like under the radar, you know, self-made kind of like business badasses that have hopped from industry to industry. It's like, there, there's zero luck involved when you're gonna do that, right? There's luck is, luck is a like kind of a scaler. It's like a multiple of like, the thing was successful, whether ringtones were gonna be worth 10 million or 20 million or 50 million or 1 million. It was hard to say, but if you're the type of person that's gonna make the ringtone business, the mobile ad business, the jewelry, like independent business, the whatever, uh, the peer-to-peer lending company.

• 42:56Shaan Puri?

  You have, you know, the track record speaks for itself. You know what you're doing as far as like identifying an opportunity and then chasing it properly.

• 43:02Sam Parr?

  And I just Googled this guy. It looks like he has a Twitter, but like no followers and he has 200 followers on Instagram. And he posts pictures of his vacation with his family, like nothing sexy. I mean, yeah, he's got actually some fancy cars that's sexy. But I guess this whole point of like, you get caught in this bubble of you have to build an audience. No, you don't.

• 43:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, no, you don't.

• 43:22Sam Parr?

  You don't, you don't. You can, and maybe that could be fun for you. You don't. You could do something that no one has ever heard of you. You could just cold call and you could get done, likely whatever you want to get done. And another thing that I've learned is just intensity. So this idea of, well, you have this ringtone business. That's kind of silly. It's like, yeah, maybe, but I bet you, I mean, it could make $10 million a year, which is like crazy rich. And just like stepping it up.

• 43:49Shaan Puri?

  On the stepping up, on the amp it up format, on the intensity idea. So I was working out this morning

• 43:56Shaan Puri?

  with the guy who's house I'm in. And so he was like, hey, like, I don't know if you're up, but like trainer's coming at 8 a.m. If you want to get a workout in. Yeah, fantastic. I'm up. Let's do it. So I go downstairs, home gym, crazy, go inside. Trainer's there. We're doing our thing. And, and I don't particularly work out. I'm not like a super intense workout guy. Like I'm trying to do well, but like my default is like, I feel the way most people feel when they work out. Like I'm getting super tired. I'm like, my muscles are failing. Like they're not, I don't feel like I could do that anymore. You know, like I'm trying, oh, like she's like, all right, how much you want to squat? I'm like, well, I don't really know. And all right, let's start with like a little bit and then like, let's go up from there. I'm not like trying to like prove something every second of the workout.

• 44:39Shaan Puri?

  But he was talking about intensity during the workout. He's a very intense guy. And so he.

• 44:46Shaan Puri?

  At the end, we were doing abs just to finish. And so we're doing like a Russian twist thing or whatever. He's facing the other direction. He's doing the other ab workout and we're just taking turns. I'm doing mine. He's doing his. I'm doing the Russian twist. And he heard me ask the trainer, I go, should I have my legs in the air? She's like, yeah, that makes it a bit harder. And I was like, okay, cool. Let me try it. And so I was just doing it. It was just kind of like an offhand comment. And then when it was his turn to go to that, it was like the second round, second set. He's like, I gotta, I gotta put my legs up now. And she's like, no, no, you don't have to. You can just put it down. He's like, no, if he's gonna do it, then I gotta do it. And he's like, he's like, that's the best part about working out with somebody is that their intensity picks you up. And if you pick the right partner, then you match their intensity and you just get that little extra that you weren't gonna get if you were on your own. He's like, that's the best part. And I think that's what this

• 45:30Shaan Puri?

  podcast is for a lot of people is, we are like their workout buddy for their like, kind of like the brain workout, basically of just thinking about businesses, being excited about things, learning new shit. And so I think that's the benefit we're giving some people through this podcast. But it's also what, what like when you go meet this guy, and you, you know, what's the benefit of meeting this guy? You're not gonna do a deal with him. You're not gonna invest in his company. But literally just having met him and heard his story, all of a sudden, now you, you can, you got red pilled. You're gonna see the world differently just because you know that he exists. And when we tell his story now, hundreds of thousands of other people listening to this are gonna know that he exists. I think that's really cool. And I think it's something you should be intentional about, of getting around other

• 46:14Shaan Puri?

  people so that you have those red pill moments, you get around other people's intensity. So you raise your game.

• 46:19Sam Parr?

  So let me give this guy a shout out. I'll spell his name because I don't even think I said his last name. His name is Val, V A L, last name, Kattayev, K A T A Y E V. I don't know how to, I'm sorry, Val. But anyway, that's, that's his, that's his name. Pretty interesting. Dude, if you click like contact info, all of his companies are there, his emails are on his LinkedIn. Interesting guy. Okay, so we're like 45. Are we gonna go to ideas? Are we gonna, are we gonna, are we gonna, you want to keep it to this like little, I don't know, what do you, what do you want to do with?

• 46:53Shaan Puri?

  So I have one that I think is gonna be a good segment. We can finish on that. Let's finish strong. People are gonna be, by the end of this, people are gonna be hyped up. All right. So somebody.

• 47:01Sam Parr?

  I think, by the way, I think they will. Dan, are they gonna be hyped on this?

• 47:06Shaan Puri?

  Very hyped.

• 47:07Sam Parr?

  Okay, very hyped. Thanks.

• 47:09Shaan Puri?

  I think Dan is trapped somewhere. Dan is trapped inside my computer right now, it sounds like. Alright, so, uh, so I want to finish up with this idea of teenage side hustles. So, somebody emailed me and they said, "Hey, you know, love the pod. My kid is, I think, 12, 13 years old. Like, I want to get him into entrepreneurship. My daughter is like 11, my son is 13. I want them both to learn about business. Do you have any ideas for side hustles or a little like, kind of like mini hustles that a teenager could do?" And so it got me thinking, and so I started going down this. I thought this would be a fun brainstorm for us. I do have some ideas that I wrote down for this, but I basically gave it 15 minutes of thought and I was like,

• 47:54Shaan Puri?

  "Okay, cool. I'll do this on the pod live. What do you think?"

• 47:57Sam Parr?

  Great. You, you gotta kick it off though, because you, you spent more time thinking about it. And then I will, uh, I'll come up with a few while you're talking.

• 48:04Shaan Puri?

  Alright, so here's the teenage side hustles. I break it down into four categories. So, the first one is called "blue collar stuff." Okay, so this is stuff people, teens have been doing for a long time, but with a twist here. So, uh, local, you know, normal blue collar stuff. You go, you mow lawns in the neighborhood, you deliver the paper, you shovel snow, depending on where you're at. Uh, I think that's all cool, so here's how I would step it up. So, I would say, "Hey, here's one thing we could do, right? We're going to provide a service to our neighbors, but let me teach you in business about leverage, right? We don't want to trade our time for money. I don't want to be the one mowing the lawn. I don't want to be the one shoveling snow." So, you could do two things. You could teach them to hire up other kids and basically have the other people in the neighborhood doing the work while you are doing the sales and, uh, you're taking in the money and you're paying out from there.

• 48:50Shaan Puri?

  So, you could teach them labor leverage there. The other way of doing this is you have them, uh, learn two things at once. So, you have door-to-door sales in your neighborhood. But secondly, you teach them about lead gen. So, instead of actually having to do the work, all you need to do is make the sale, um, or, or get the warm lead even. So, I was thinking, you could go in a neighborhood, you could go door-to-door. So, here's my specific idea for, for them. Go, go around your neighborhood. And you're gonna you're gonna knock on the door and you're gonna sell one of two things either pest control. So you're gonna say, hey, we live in the neighborhood, you know, our house and other houses have had issues in the past with pests and infestations. And it's better to catch it early before it becomes like a major problem and you have to gut the whole kitchen because

• 49:33Shaan Puri?

  you got this, you know, mice infestation or rats or cockroaches or whatever. And so would you be, would you want a free inspection? Would you be interested in an inspection to let you know if your house is good condition, bad condition, or needs, needs some work? And then basically, what you do is you call up the local, you know, pest control service and you say, hey, I have 15 houses in my neighborhood that are interested in getting an inspection. And, you know, I think that even if 10% of them or 20% of them convert, that you guys will get some good business out of this. So I'm calling up local service, local service providers and seeing if anybody basically would want to want these leads. And I have all their information for you. I did the first first

• 50:16Shaan Puri?

  contact with them. I have their name, their number, and I have the details about what they're interested, what they're worried about, what they're interested in. And basically, I would sell those leads to local pest control company. And I think you can make good money doing that just around your neighborhood and other neighborhoods. And you would learn that, hey, you know, where is the value capture? The value capture is in getting the customer, not in actually going and looking under the floorboards for cockroaches. Okay, so that's the first first blue collar one. The other version of that-

• 50:40Sam Parr?

  Hold on, listen to this. So I'm just trying to find, there, here it is. Okay, so I know a guy, he spoke at HustleCon, his name's Gabe, Gabriel Una Astaseki, Astaseki.

• 50:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I know this guy.

• 50:51Sam Parr?

  So what he did was, he's a friend of mine, he started this company where basically, they did lead gen. So it was called Cal Finder. So if you Google California home painting, California pest control, you get brought to their website, they just do a better job of displaying information, you submit a lead, they send it to a paint company, and that paint company pays them $5 for that email address. The way it started is he bought a yellow notepad, and he went door to door to find people who would be interested in having their home painted. He collected a list of 100 names in the first day, and then he sold that for $10,000 to a- Variety, different, like, different paint, paint companies. And he did that a couple more times. And then he eventually created a proper company that made $20 million a year in sales.

• 51:36Sam Parr?

  So that's the outcome or potential outcome to that.

• 51:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so the downside of this is your kids might start making more than you do a year. But the upside is they'll learn a lot about business. All right, so that's the first one. You could do this with anything. Pool fencing. Hey, I noticed you have a pool, but you don't have a fence. You know, it's against California law to have a fence without a pool when you have kids. You know, would you like us to come out and give you an estimate of how much that would cost to keep it safe? And, you know, so you could do pool fencing, pest control, home painting, whatever. Doesn't matter. So I, so my specific idea would be blue collar lead gen. That's number one. Number two, events. So you've hosted conferences and events. I think that you could, if you're a teenager, I think you could host a neighborhood fair. Here's how this works. You go out, you rent the bouncy house, the slip and slide, all the stuff that like,

• 52:22Shaan Puri?

  for one individual home to do, it's kind of an expensive birthday party. But if you're going to do it and amortize it, it costs around, across the, the cost of the whole neighborhood, it's actually not a bad idea. And so I would create the neighborhood fair. I would charge for entry. I would, I would have a local sponsor, you know, the local bank could sponsor it because who could turn down your kid's smile and saying, hey, I'm hosting the neighborhood fair. Would you be a sponsor for us for $500 or whatever? And, you know, all the proceeds go to us as kids, you know, to fund my own education. And so I would basically rent a bunch of cool stuff, have cotton candy, have all the stuff, charge tickets and neighborhood fair. That's my second idea, events. What do you think of that one?

• 53:00Sam Parr?

  I think that's okay. I would do the first one over the second one. The second one sounds like a pain in the butt.

• 53:05Shaan Puri?

  I'm just giving them options here. I'm giving them options.

• 53:07Sam Parr?

  That's all right. Keep swinging.

• 53:09Shaan Puri?

  Three, the theme of this one is little kids acting like adults. So we've all had the like, kind of fundraiser thing where you, you go door to door and you say, hey, would you like to buy, you know, cookie dough and ice cream and wrapping paper for our, like, school charity? Great. So here's my twist on that. My twist on that is that you call it the, the Bitcoin Junior Club or something, the Bitcoin Kids Club. And basically you go door to door and say, hey, I'm really interested in Bitcoin. Have you heard about Bitcoin? Yeah, I've heard of Bitcoin. Well, hey, the neighborhood, we want to create, you know, two of us, three of us, kids in the neighborhood. We are creating the first kids Bitcoin club. And what we want is for every house to invest somewhere between, you know, about a hundred dollars. And we're going to buy Bitcoin and you're going to own it.

• 53:54Shaan Puri?

  And we're going to take a management fee on top of what we are of, of the, of managing the money. Right. So we're going to create a little investment club. We want to learn about finance and money. This is a great way for us to do it. And for you, you'll be owning Bitcoin and we're going to help you out. We're going to teach you all about it. We're going to give a presentation at the end. And, you know, hey, if your kid wants to be involved in the club, they can too. And so I would create this little, I would create a small little money management fund. And I would try to get houses to give me, you know, a thousand bucks if they can, depending on your neighborhood. This is either impossible or it'll be easy. And I would go to the rich neighborhoods and I would say, that's what we're doing. And for them, they actually get to own an asset. So it's not like they're just giving away the money. They're actually going to get the asset, but you're going to charge, you know, your, well, instead of a normal 2% fee, we're going to call it a 10% fee that you're going to take in exchange for managing money.

• 54:39Shaan Puri?

  And then you're going to send out a newsletter of the report about what's going on in Bitcoin.

• 54:43Sam Parr?

  I think it's awesome. I think that it's just like, yes, this is an easy, yeah. It's just, it's cute enough that it justifies sending your kid to hang out with people.

• 54:51Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. Okay. So those are three ideas. The way I was thinking about this, and this is another piece is like, how do you even brainstorm this? So when I brainstorm, I don't think about what's the idea, right? I'll think about two things. So the first thing I thought of was what do I remember from my childhood? And then what's the 20% twist I could put on this, right? So that's the fundraising idea, but the twist is now it's for Bitcoin, right? Or I used to mow lawns, but the twist is actually I'm going to like sell those leads to a lawn mowing service. That's the first way I think about things. What do I already know that I can just put a 20% twist on to make it fit this situation? The second thing is I don't look for answers when I brainstorm. I look for questions. So here's the questions I wrote down before I brainstormed this. I said, What's cute when a kid does it, but annoying if an adult did it?

• 55:34Sam Parr?

  That's a great question.

• 55:35Shaan Puri?

  I started brainstorming ideas, right? The second one is, what's fun for kids, but boring for adults? Like, you know, my daughter, she loves like cleaning. Like, if I let her clean, she'll clean a folding. She loves to fold. Kids, actually, like, I used to have a lot of fun mowing lawns, but like, as an adult, I hate to go mow my lawn now. And so if I know something that's fun for a kid, boring for an adult, we can have them do it. The next one is, what are kids actually just good at and adults are bad at? So there's just things that kids are just better at. Okay, what are those? And lastly, what amount of money is a win for a kid, but would not be a win for an adult? Because then the kid can do it and they would be happy with it. But no, an adult won't do it because this is not enough money there for the, to fill the void of what they're looking for, the opportunity cost. And so that's how I brainstorm this.

• 56:18Shaan Puri?

  That's just a little peek under the hood about how to think about stuff like this is, don't look for the answer. Look, ask a bunch of questions and then spitball.

• 56:26Sam Parr?

  If I, for my kid, I would probably have them, I would think of what skill should they learn now that they won't have time to learn in the future? So for them, that will have a big impact for them. I think it would be door, I think door to door selling. And I would sell, I would send them to like a, an Amco, or I think it's, or sorry, Cutco? Or some type of like door to door knife, or door to door books? Some type of cutthroat time where it's like, look, you're going to spend three months for two, two different summers in a row. You're going to do this. You're not going to like it at first, but the skill that you learn, you're never going to be able to learn this again like this in your life. And it's going to, it'll change your world if you get good at this.

• 57:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. We're not going to baseball camp. We're going to Cutco camp. You're going to learn how to sell knives door to door this summer. That's what, that's literally what I'm going to do.

• 57:14Sam Parr?

  That, that, I think that would be the right move.

• 57:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Anyway, so those are my teenage side hustles to like, I forgot the person who wrote in. To whoever wrote in, that's my answer. Sorry, I haven't emailed you.

• 57:25Sam Parr?

  Dan, what do you think? Did we, we meandered a little bit?

• 57:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I really liked the end. I used to sell calendars in high school door to door. Got a free gift from.

• 57:36Shaan Puri?

  By the way, another, my brain's still firing on ideas. Here's another one. Digitize the neighborhood's home videos. Everybody I know who's like, kind of like my parents' age, they have a bunch of photos and albums and videos on like little cassette players.

• 57:48Sam Parr?

  That's a great business for kids.

• 57:49Shaan Puri?

  And they're worried that those are all going to go away. And you just say, hey, I'm going to drop this box off in front of every door and I'm just going to put a sticker on it. And I'm going to say, put your, put your photos and videos in here. I'm going to give it back to you, you know, sort of, I'm going to send you, I'll put it in the cloud for you. So you'll have these forever in good quality and you'll never have to worry about these going bad or losing this box or water spilling on it or anything like that. Let's, let's save your memories.

• 58:14Sam Parr?

  I think that's a genius one. That's the, that's incredibly smart because you don't need to be that good at doing it. You just have to have time.

• 58:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. We could basically just go drive it to like Costco or whoever does this, or you could do it yourself.

• 58:25Sam Parr?

  Costco does this?

• 58:27Shaan Puri?

  I don't know if it's Costco, but like some of these, yeah, one of the retailers, they do this. They'll digitize your stuff.

• 58:31Sam Parr?

  That's a great service to offer, offer, because your time's free. Yeah, I would, that's a good one. That's what I would do. I would pick that one. All right. I guess that's the episode. We'll see what people think of that. I thought it was actually quite good. I enjoy hearing stories. Love people. So we'll see if it's good.

• 58:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let us know. Tweet at Sam. He's the Sam Parr on Twitter. Tweet at me. I'm Sean VP. And let us know what you think of the episodes. We take that feedback and that's how we adjust. A little less randomness, a little less life advice, a little more ideas, a little more stories about wealthy people, whatever you guys want. So let us know how, how you want us to shift it.