#53 - Nicotine Gum, Dating Apps For The Elderly & Tax on Vested Shares

Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) talk ideas, news, trends and businesses. Sign up for our Run The World conference: https://organizer.runtheworld.today/invitation/313. We've partnered once again with the online business broker Quiet Light Brokerage, they want to give you guys a FREE 25-point checklist to see how sellable your online business is. To receive this free guide, visit quietlightbrokerage.com/myfirstmillion. oin our private FB group if you haven't already: www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. It's free to join yet provides so much value through meeting other hyperactive business people and having discussions around the type of stuff discussed in the podcast. Topics for today: Bernie Sanders proposed tax on vested shares (2:17), Biggest regrets in structuring companies (9:08), Internet conferences like Run The World (14:25), Book clubs (19:12), Copy masters and publishing giants like Agora (26:34), Online services for older people (32:13), Which single digit unicorn will become the next $100B behemoth? (37:53), Turnkey bathroom renovations (47:38) and Sam's angel investment in Nicotine Gum is working (49:10) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:10Shaan Puri?

  What up?

• 0:11Sam Parr?

  What's going on? Did we ask people to subscribe and unsubscribe? Did that work?

• 0:16Shaan Puri?

  I don't think it worked. We got a bunch of videos of people doing it. Thank you for doing it. In my opinion, that experiment doesn't like, it doesn't move the needle too much. I don't know if that technique is a big technique.

• 0:27Sam Parr?

  Let's answer.

• 0:28Shaan Puri?

  The podcast keeps growing organically, but we didn't see a spike because we asked people to do it.

• 0:32Sam Parr?

  Let's answer all their questions. Do you want to answer them today or?

• 0:36Shaan Puri?

  I think next Thursday because I didn't have them. I don't.

• 0:38Sam Parr?

  I got a lot of them.

• 0:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 0:39Sam Parr?

  The problem, and I apologize to people who send me things on Instagram. I don't check that ever.

• 0:43Shaan Puri?

  Oh, yeah. I didn't.

• 0:44Sam Parr?

  You know, there's two inboxes on Instagram.

• 0:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Facebook always does that with their shit.

• 0:47Sam Parr?

  So I didn't know that that was even a thing. And I had all these nice people sending me reviews and stuff.

• 0:51Shaan Puri?

  You find it like a year later.

• 0:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and I didn't even know that. So apologies.

• 0:55Shaan Puri?

  I listened back to one of the episodes, which is the most uber uncomfortable thing you can do.

• 1:00Sam Parr?

  I've not listened to one ever.

• 1:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and I don't blame you. I listened back and you know, you were saying you're very self-conscious now because we do the video and that's how I am about the audio. Because I listen to it and I'm like, what the fuck is wrong with me? Why am I talking this fast? Why am I breathing like that?

• 1:17Sam Parr?

  I think, no, I think you have got, you've got, actually have a great voice. I think you have good cadence. And someone at one of the meetups asked me, he goes, do you guys cut out silence? And I was like.

• 1:26Shaan Puri?

  On the audio, we do.

• 1:27Sam Parr?

  You do?

• 1:27Shaan Puri?

  Sean does that, yeah.

• 1:28Sam Parr?

  Oh, I thought we didn't. And he was like, you guys are talking so fast.

• 1:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so he cuts out ums, ahs, or big repetitions. Like if I say the same thing two different ways for no reason. And then I think he cuts a little bit of the gap between us when he doesn't like it. He's like a perfectionist. I told him not to do it because it takes him like six hours to do every time. He's like, it makes a difference. And I was like, I don't know if this shit makes a difference.

• 1:50Sam Parr?

  I got compliments from it.

• 1:51Shaan Puri?

  Okay, all right. Well, he's gonna justify it now.

• 1:54Sam Parr?

  That's crazy. I just thought we were talking fast. No, people like the.

• 1:57Shaan Puri?

  We do talk fast, but it's the in-between where he speeds it up and then he cuts out any like extraneous bullshit.

• 2:03Sam Parr?

  People like it. You know, I also got tons of compliments from Stu a few episodes back. People liked him.

• 2:08Shaan Puri?

  People like Stu.

• 2:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 2:10Shaan Puri?

  High approval rating.

• 2:11Sam Parr?

  People like.

• 2:12Shaan Puri?

  He doesn't have to drop out of the presidential race like everybody else. Alright, what do we got today?

• 2:15Sam Parr?

  Uh, speaking of presidential, did you want to talk about Bernie? Is that your first thing up here?

• 2:20Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I have a thing up there, but I didn't research enough, but I'll talk about it just quickly. So, a bunch of people on Twitter were freaking out because Bernie's proposing this tax on vested shares that you haven't actually cashed in yet.

• 2:32Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 2:32Shaan Puri?

  And tech people were like, oh, okay, there goes the startup scene. Like, well, you know, if you're gonna tax people on vested shares that they haven't actually received the prop- like, this company's not liquid. And so, but there are some nuances, like it's written here. It's taxed on non-qualified stock options of at least 100,000, you know, if you have over 100,000 in stock, uh, stock options that are vested and your employee is making at least 130K. So it's not everybody, and it's not all types of things. So it's not RSUs, it's ISOs, I believe.

• 3:02Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I'm not an expert in this stuff at all, and I'm not an expert in politics. I know what I believe, but I don't know the technical details.

• 3:08Shaan Puri?

  Well, let's agree to talk out of our ass for two minutes.

• 3:10Sam Parr?

  I'm not gonna talk about that, actually, but here's what I am gonna talk about, is starting a company and how it worked with us. And this will, a lot, because I do know that a lot of people think like, oh, the rich are doing this, they don't understand things. So, when we started The Hustle, I saved up $25,000 to start it. With that $25,000, I made 60 grand in profit in six weeks, which is pretty good. And the first year in business was roughly $380,000 in revenue, and most of it was profit because I paid myself, uh, we were in, I think we were in LLC, I withdrew $2,000 a month in.

• 3:45Shaan Puri?

  Salary.

• 3:45Sam Parr?

  Salary. Um, and that's how I paid my bills. My rent was cheap, very cheap, hundreds of, hundreds of dollars a month. Um, and I lived off $1,200.

• 3:55Shaan Puri?

  Beyond that.

• 3:56Sam Parr?

  Beyond that. It was very, I lived very, very, very frugally. Um, and then, we decided to raise a little bit of money. I raised, I think, $300,000 from people at a three and a half million dollar valuation.

• 4:07Shaan Puri?

  And you had to change from being an LLC at this point, right?

• 4:10Sam Parr?

  Yep, changed to become, uh, an S corp, I think. It was an S corp?

• 4:13Shaan Puri?

  Probably a C corp.

• 4:14Sam Parr?

  I don't remember. I, see, this is, I'm not an expert in this.

• 4:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. You wanna be a C corp if you're gonna take investment. That's just like, if, you don't have to study all the differences between them, but if you're gonna take, like, traditional investment, they're gonna want you to be a C corp.

• 4:26Sam Parr?

  So we converted. It cost five grand to do that. At this point, we probably had half a million dollars in the. $300,000 in the bank account. I don't remember. Between 300 and 500,000 by the end of our first year. And we raised money at a three and a half million dollar valuation. And then, once we started doing stock options and stuff like that, we signed up to Carta and they gave us a, what's it called, a 409A?

• 4:51Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 4:52Sam Parr?

  Where we got.

• 4:53Shaan Puri?

  So that 409A just values your company at some number. You guys had revenue, so they probably took some standard multiple of revenue.

• 5:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so they valued us.

• 5:00Shaan Puri?

  And you want it to be low at this stage.

• 5:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so they valued us in the millions of dollars of range. I don't remember. It could have been three and a half, it could have been six. I don't remember the number. Whenever these types of businesses are, that's what they value.

• 5:12Shaan Puri?

  And you want it to be low because that's what your share price is. That's what your stock options are going to be if you're an employee. You want to get in at the sort of low valuation, so when it sells at a high valuation, you get this sort of increase in value. But if they, if the 409A comes back high, then you're not going to get as much of a lift on your share price.

• 5:32Sam Parr?

  And so, at this point, our 409A is many tens of millions. Which is nice. It's cool. We have a valuable business. But when we started, it was single-digit millions, which was still a lot. I was 24 at the time. I said I started with $25,000 and I was taking $2,000 a month. I was not saving any money.

• 5:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 5:51Sam Parr?

  Okay. I'm not complaining because it worked out, but, so, on paper, I was a millionaire, multiple millionaire. If I had to pay, I think, I forget what this, I don't want to act like I know what I'm talking about. Let's say if I had to pay 20% in taxes on that multiple millions of dollars.

• 6:09Shaan Puri?

  You wouldn't have had the money.

• 6:10Sam Parr?

  I literally wouldn't have had any money to do it.

• 6:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:12Sam Parr?

  Even if I wanted to withdraw money from our business account, I would have had to lay people off, or.

• 6:17Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:18Sam Parr?

  I, like, so when people say, certain people are hoarding money or something like that, a lot of times, it's not true. And I have a lot of founder friends that have businesses that are on paper worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 6:32Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:32Sam Parr?

  And they have tens of thousands of dollars saved. That's it.

• 6:34Shaan Puri?

  In the bank account, yeah.

• 6:35Sam Parr?

  So

• 6:36Shaan Puri?

  They're not liquid.

• 6:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think people need to.

• 6:38Shaan Puri?

  And this also happens if you're an employee, you leave a company, you usually have what they call an exercise window, which might be 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. I think that I think the normal is 90 days. So that gives you three months to come up with the money to buy your options, or you lose them.

• 6:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 6:55Shaan Puri?

  And a lot of people don't have that money because like, you know, they they leave one company, it's a startup, and now their shares are worth 80 grand or 180 grand, and they need to go, they want to go do a different job. And now they need to come up with 80 or 180 grand to buy out their options. That's not still a guarantee that that money's coming back. And often people don't have that money sitting in the bank, so they'll forfeit their options, which is a true bummer. Some companies are being cool about it, Pinterest, a couple others, I don't remember, maybe Stripe. They increased their exercise window to seven years or six years.

• 7:24Sam Parr?

  That's crazy.

• 7:25Shaan Puri?

  So they're like, look, we know this practice is a little bit crazy. It's hard to come up with that cash, and you worked here, you earned your shares, so we're not going to try to take those back. You have the longer window because we might be private for longer, which is kind of a cool trend.

• 7:38Sam Parr?

  So my W.

• 7:38Shaan Puri?

  Companies should do that.

• 7:39Sam Parr?

  My W two income, so at this point, I make money in eight or 10 different ways. I got loads of things that just, it just has added up over time, and that's great. And I still pay myself a salary. I pay myself not that much. I'm not the highest paid person here.

• 7:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 7:55Sam Parr?

  And I, but my W two salary, we're going to be four years old. I've been working on this as a project since 2014. We're going to be four years old officially in April. I, oh, next month, I, my W two salary in year one, I think was $24,000. Year two, maybe 36, and then year three, then I started going higher.

• 8:17Shaan Puri?

  Right, because the business was established at that point.

• 8:19Sam Parr?

  But my W two income historically has been low.

• 8:22Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:23Sam Parr?

  Quite low. And so when I saw this and I saw people getting mad at rich people, I'm like, I bet people thought I was rich, but I wasn't. You know what I mean?

• 8:34Shaan Puri?

  And you wouldn't have qualified for this because it says you have to be making at least 130K, but like.

• 8:39Sam Parr?

  But if I had to pay 30% tax on my stock now, it would be.

• 8:44Shaan Puri?

  Painful.

• 8:45Sam Parr?

  Fucking hard.

• 8:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you'd be in a really tough spot. So, you know, Bernie, I like Bernie, but this is a little bit crazy. This will really screw up the way the startup's ecosystem works, but it can also adapt.

• 8:56Sam Parr?

  I'm not even going to take a stand if I think it's crazy or not. I just am giving a perspective of. My business and I bet and I think I I now I think I have a lot more cash than even most people who have companies that are huge.

• 9:08Shaan Puri?

  What's your biggest regret in the way you set up or organized or structured the company?

• 9:11Sam Parr?

  I wish I wouldn't have raised money and I would have just owned it all.

• 9:14Shaan Puri?

  And why is that?

• 9:15Sam Parr?

  Cause I would be greedier and richer.

• 9:18Shaan Puri?

  You didn't end up needing that capital.

• 9:20Sam Parr?

  It's hard to say because it worked. It worked. If I wanted to start fresh again, I would have been able to do it. I can start now.

• 9:29Shaan Puri?

  What about advice? A lot of people think, oh, this person's so successful, right? You raised money from a bunch of cool, smart, successful people, either in media or not in media.

• 9:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So that was helpful.

• 9:39Shaan Puri?

  Was that truly like, so did you get your sort of values worth on the advice component?

• 9:43Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 9:44Shaan Puri?

  I don't, I'm not sure that that typically plays out that way, but I think you did.

• 9:47Sam Parr?

  Fuck, yeah, it worked. Okay. So look, our network is so fucking powerful. Me and you, our network is so powerful. I have, I think 35 investors ranging from Tim Ferriss, the founders of Nerd Wallet, which is, who knows what that's worth, billions of dollars. Um, the founder of the Chive, founders of Bleacher Report, um, who else? Just look it up. A lot of people and I text them. I just text them. I'll say.

• 10:14Shaan Puri?

  You get a lot out of them and I'll tell you two things that you do that gets a lot. First, your investor updates, which you send, you used to send more frequently.

• 10:20Sam Parr?

  Now I send them quarterly, but before I, for.

• 10:22Shaan Puri?

  Monthly, right?

• 10:23Sam Parr?

  Thirty-six months, I send them every single month.

• 10:25Shaan Puri?

  Every single month and the, it was so well organized. It was basically like, um, hey, here's all the key metrics. You don't beat around the bush. It's like, this is how much cash we got in the bank. This is how much we made this month. This is how much the email list grew. This is how much our open rate was. Boom. That's number one. Number two, and what was your second sort of section?

• 10:41Sam Parr?

  The way that I set up, I was like, oh, numbers. I go, just here's the numbers. There's no interpretation.

• 10:45Shaan Puri?

  Why?

• 10:46Sam Parr?

  All right, let's get into it. Numbers. Boom. Okay. Then I go, uh, and then I do things that are going well. Things are not going well. I need your help.

• 10:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 10:53Sam Parr?

  Yes or no?

• 10:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it was great. And you sent that to, so you did the work to keep them engaged and stay top of mind. Do not underestimate this if you're doing your business. If there's people who are willing to help you out, you gotta find a way to stay top of mind. And part of it is you share frequent updates. And there's a very good sign if you're an investor, if you're one of your companies, stop sending their updates for a bit. That company is about to die, or they're on their way to dying, and they go into a shell. And Paul Graham has this great post, which is just like,

• 11:23Shaan Puri?

  as an investor, when you see that, you know, it's time to go check in. And as a founder, ironically, that's when you need the help the most.

• 11:29Sam Parr?

  Yep.

• 11:29Shaan Puri?

  So don't go quiet when you need the help the most. That's when you need to be talking and asking. And maybe you actually won't die if you could keep that going.

• 11:37Sam Parr?

  What other mistakes have we made?

• 11:40Shaan Puri?

  So I always regretted the, I think that the normal way that people give out equity is a little too founder greedy. So I wish I had given more equity to my team.

• 11:52Shaan Puri?

  And so like, you know, basically, I wish I had just negotiated it better between, what do I get? What do the investors get? And what does my team get? I think it was imbalanced. I think some of what the investors got, the team should have got, some of what I had, the team should have got. Because really, like, the people who are there as person four, five, six, really, they're taking just as much risk as you are in a way. Like, they were there when it wasn't obvious that this is gonna work. And so for the all-stars, I wish I had given more. And next time, my next company, I'll do just that. I will make sure the core four, core five people, I'll make sure it's not like, like typically in a company.

• 12:25Sam Parr?

  How big would the pool be?

• 12:26Shaan Puri?

  So I don't know exactly what the pool will be, but let's say, let's go, what's typical? So typical company, two co-founders, you start 50/50. You're gonna raise some money, they might end up taking 25 to 30% of the company, depending on how it goes. Let's call it 25%. And so, you know, as the founders, you've diluted down, you're at, I don't know, my math's bad, but let's say, you're both at, what is that? Thirty something, thirty-five percent each now. And, um, and so you, you know, that's where you're at. And then your team, the option pool, they typically say is like ten to fifteen percent is your sort of option pool.

• 13:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 13:01Shaan Puri?

  So the first few employees might have like, you know, the key person might get like one to three percent. And then everybody else is below that, is below one percent essentially. And I just think that's like a pretty hard skew. So I would try to get multiple people in the sort of one to, one to four percent range. Uh, I would try to have like my core, my core team all be in the over one percent range for sure. And whether that means I take the haircut or investors take the haircut, that's what I would do if it's a tech company.

• 13:30Sam Parr?

  I think that's

• 13:30Shaan Puri?

  This is very different if you're not a high-growth tech company.

• 13:32Sam Parr?

  Would you start it in San Francisco again, though?

• 13:35Shaan Puri?

  I'd start it wherever I live. And so if I'm, if I wanted to live here, yeah, I'd start it here. If I wanted to live somewhere else, I'd start it somewhere else. Now you can start it definitely anywhere. So it's just about your preferences.

• 13:46Sam Parr?

  I, if I was gonna start again, another thing that I would do is I would go and get a job somewhere and just make, like when I started, I hadn't, I didn't, I was always self-employed mostly. I wish I would have worked somewhere maybe for a little while.

• 14:00Shaan Puri?

  Before you did it, or you mean as a, do something as a side hustle?

• 14:03Sam Parr?

  Before.

• 14:04Shaan Puri?

  Oh, you just get the experience?

• 14:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think it would have been nice and to save money.

• 14:08Shaan Puri?

  That's interesting. I wouldn't have thought you'd say that.

• 14:09Sam Parr?

  I think it would be helpful, um, to, to understand how things

• 14:14Shaan Puri?

  I think if you did it for three months, you'd be like, okay, I'm done.

• 14:17Sam Parr?

  It would have been

• 14:17Shaan Puri?

  I got it.

• 14:19Sam Parr?

  Money away.

• 14:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's fair, but hey, it all worked out.

• 14:21Sam Parr?

  You want to talk about some stuff?

• 14:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's talk about some ideas. Okay, um, okay, let's take a quick break and let me ask you a quick question. When did Noah build the ark? After the rain? After the flood? No, before the rain. So as an entrepreneur, Quiet Light Brokerage wants to remind you to prepare before you want to sell your business. You don't just sell it right when you want to, you plan your exit for six figures, seven figures or eight figures. Quiet Light Brokerage is a group of trusted advisors that can help you not just survive the tides, but exit on your own terms for the price you want, at the time you want, to the buyer that you want. You know, as you chart your way towards an exit, you gotta first start by understanding the value of your business.

• 15:03Shaan Puri?

  If you want to see a 25-point checklist to see how well your business scores across the four pillars that they have seen drive value when they, uh, for all the sales that they've seen in their portfolio. You can find that checklist at quietlightbrokerage.com/MyFirstMillion. That's quietlightbrokerage.com/MyFirstMillion. Check out the free assessment, see how your business scores. If you want, you can get a free consultation for your business as well, but no pressure, no gimmicks, no sales pitches. You know, Quiet Light is an entrepreneur-led organization. The founders have built and sold businesses, bought businesses before themselves. They're not just, you know, sort of quick fly-by-the-night brokers. And they advise you to use the best data to help business owners like you reach your financial goals.

• 15:48Shaan Puri?

  So grab the free guide. It's over at quietlightbrokerage.com/MyFirstMillion. Support the pod, go check them out. Run the world, I'll start there.

• 15:56Sam Parr?

  I saw it, cool, perfect timing.

• 15:58Shaan Puri?

  Perfect timing. So these guys have been working on this, obviously, before this, two, I think, female founders. And what this is, is it's a digital conference. So especially with coronavirus and you've had major, major conferences shutting down. So Facebook's F8 conference, done.

• 16:14Sam Parr?

  Sales law canceled.

• 16:15Shaan Puri?

  I believe GDC is done. You know, like-

• 16:18Sam Parr?

  I predict South by Southwest, but this episode will air in a couple of days. I bet you they're gonna cancel.

• 16:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so tons of these conferences are closing. And I've always, this is a great experiment because I've always wondered, why aren't there more digital conferences? Now, we built a product called Blab that was sort of like this. People used it this way, a bunch of podcasters threw a conference on our platform. And I just thought, hey, this is cool because you could be remote, you could be anywhere in the world, you can attend this thing. And what does a conference have? It has speakers. Cool. You can stream that online, no problem. It has like exhibitors. Cool, you could do that online if you want to do. And it has the networking, and that's a little bit harder to do online, but you could do that as well.

• 16:53Sam Parr?

  It's missing the biggest component, though.

• 16:55Shaan Puri?

  Which is what?

• 16:55Sam Parr?

  Serendipity.

• 16:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you have to engineer that serendipity into the product.

• 16:59Sam Parr?

  That's the biggest part.

• 17:00Shaan Puri?

  So these guys claim that they sort of have recreated all of that. I don't know, I haven't used it yet. But the cool thing is, we're now gonna find out. Because with all these conferences canceling, Run the World is taking advantage. And they're going to all the conferences as they're saying, hey, hosted on our platform, we make this really easy for you. They have a cool model where basically it's no money in, they just take 25% of the ticket sales.

• 17:21Sam Parr?

  Who, whose computer is up here?

• 17:24Sam Parr?

  Can you Google Run the World?

• 17:25Shaan Puri?

  Pull it up. And so they've raised a bunch of money from Andreessen Horowitz this week.

• 17:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, a lot of money.

• 17:30Shaan Puri?

  They announced it and um, it's funny, Henry just Googled Run the World and the Beyonce song came up, which is hilarious.

• 17:37Sam Parr?

  My friend had a company called Little Things, which is the...

• 17:41Shaan Puri?

  Is that another song?

• 17:42Sam Parr?

  It's what's the boy band with Harry Styles?

• 17:44Shaan Puri?

  Oh, it's a, what are they called? Five? Something like that.

• 17:49Sam Parr?

  You could talk, Alan.

• 17:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Run the World Today. Runtheworldtoday is the URL. So, live events worldwide. Anyways, I think this is cool and we're gonna find out if this is like, they've been dealt the best hand for their product right now, and we'll see if they can pull this off.

• 18:05Sam Parr?

  That's interesting. Do you think that the...

• 18:07Shaan Puri?

  Like, I think we should do one of these for the listeners. Like, just like you did the New York meetup, I think we should just try, just to take this for a test drive. I think we should just do an impromptu one, and hang out with people, get, let everyone meet each other.

• 18:18Sam Parr?

  I'm down. I uh, okay, if we had to make predictions if this is gonna work, I would say the safe bet.

• 18:25Shaan Puri?

  The safe bet's always no.

• 18:27Sam Parr?

  The safe bet's always no. Okay, but if you had a hundred million dollars, would you invest two million into this business?

• 18:32Shaan Puri?

  I don't know who these people are, and I haven't played with the products. That's the caveat. Let's say I met the people and I played with the product and I felt like they did the thing you said, which is, it wasn't just a live stream of content, or a chatroom, like there was some way to engineer the serendipity of a network, of the networking in a conference, or the discovery of new products, right? Like, so if I felt like they did something different besides just a teleconference, like, live stream, then I would buy it. But I gotta feel the magic.

• 18:57Sam Parr?

  That's a stock photo. So, there's a, Henry's pulling up a photo right now of a mug that says Hustle. We use that photo. That's from Splash That. He was like, yeah, he thought that they stole it.

• 19:09Shaan Puri?

  Henry was writing up a cease and desist, like, during the podcast. That's great.

• 19:12Sam Parr?

  Okay, Run the World, uh, internet conferences, uh, hmm.

• 19:17Shaan Puri?

  You're in or out?

• 19:18Sam Parr?

  I am going to say...

• 19:22Sam Parr?

  51% in.

• 19:24Shaan Puri?

  Okay, alright, we'll take it. So here's what we'll do. By the time this airs, I'm gonna have set up the Run the World Conference. The link to it is gonna be in the show notes. And we'll figure it out. So go in the show notes right now, if you're listening to this.

• 19:36Sam Parr?

  Well, let's uh.

• 19:36Shaan Puri?

  And get a ticket to attend our conference and we'll try this out. And then we'll let everyone decide, is this cool? Or is this like, one of those ideas that sounds good in theory? But it misses the magic and never works.

• 19:46Sam Parr?

  Uh, Henry, go to godaddy.com real quick. Pick a URL. And we'll send them to that URL as well.

• 19:53Shaan Puri?

  Uh.

• 19:54Sam Parr?

  Cause I hate going to the show notes.

• 19:56Shaan Puri?

  Okay, uh, either way, uh, we could just put it on our MyFirstMillionPodcast.com.

• 20:01Sam Parr?

  MyFirstMillion.com?

• 20:02Shaan Puri?

  MyFirstMillionPodcast.com.

• 20:04Sam Parr?

  Okay, MyFirstMillionPodcast.com. It will be a conference.

• 20:07Shaan Puri?

  It'll redirect to this.

• 20:08Sam Parr?

  Do you wanna charge for it?

• 20:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah. Tickets will be whatever. I don't know. We'll pick a number.

• 20:12Sam Parr?

  Okay, uh, we'll make it cheap. Uh, 20 bucks.

• 20:14Shaan Puri?

  20 bucks.

• 20:15Sam Parr?

  And what it will be is, uh, what will it be?

• 20:18Shaan Puri?

  We'll invite our friends. So we'll invite some of the people that we think are the most interesting. We'll do a talk on, hey, how do we build, you know, we'll do the things you do in a conference, right? So a couple of speakers, a fireside chat, and then networking where people can meet each other.

• 20:31Sam Parr?

  Okay, and we'll limit it to 100 people?

• 20:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 20:34Sam Parr?

  Okay, 100 people, some amount of money, MyFirstMillionPodcast.com. There you go.

• 20:39Shaan Puri?

  We'll try it out. Alright, sweet. What else we got on the, on the agenda?

• 20:42Sam Parr?

  Um, oh, I have one. Scroll down. You wanna talk about some book club stuff?

• 20:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 20:46Sam Parr?

  When I moved to San Francisco, I started a book club called The Anti-MBA. And I did it because I didn't go to an elite Ivy League school, but I was always envious of those people. Because when I moved here, I didn't know a single soul. And I felt, I always like stereotyped people as like tall, beautiful, white teeth, with Patagonias, and they had like lovely networks.

• 21:07Shaan Puri?

  That's what you saw all around you.

• 21:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, just like these like rich, white people who, that's how I like.

• 21:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:13Sam Parr?

  That's how I imagined it. And it kinda was that. Um, and I was always envious of that. So what I did was I created a book club meeting where we would meet every week and we would read one book a month and I would convince an expert on the book.

• 21:24Shaan Puri?

  How'd you convince people to join this? Where'd you throw it up? On your blog or what?

• 21:27Sam Parr?

  I'm just a cold email guy. I just learned how to cold email people. And I, I did it online. So each week we would have 30 people show up. And I probably had an email list of 5,000 people who would.

• 21:37Shaan Puri?

  So this was not in person? This was all online?

• 21:39Sam Parr?

  30 people in person, Sierva.

• 21:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Sam Parr?

  Um, a lot of my best friends I met this way, 30 people. Uh, my friend had an office and he let me use it. And, um. We would just meet up and I would and I would read a week ahead of time and just make notes and lead discussion. And sometimes we would have an expert.

• 21:56Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 21:56Sam Parr?

  And then I would send show notes or meeting notes to the list and people loved it. I made close to no money off of it, or I don't think I made any money off it. I just did it for fun. And it was very success successful. And a lot of people said that we should make it a thing. I think it's a stupid, I thought it was a stupid idea, but book clubs are actually kind of interesting. So there's this business called Book of the Month Club. It was started and I believe it was started in the 1930s. At this point, it's owned by, it was owned by Bertelsmann, which is a large publisher, a multi-billion dollar publisher. And then recently, a private individual bought it for single digit millions of dollars. And in the 40s, 50s and 60s, this was massive. I mean, it was millions of people paid for it.

• 22:40Sam Parr?

  So it was quite a large business, hundreds of millions of dollars, probably in the 60s and 70s. It's gone away once Amazon came around. A guy bought it a couple of years ago and it's quite large still. And what they do is scroll down a little bit.

• 22:53Shaan Puri?

  This is 90 million users? What the hell?

• 22:55Sam Parr?

  No, that's Goodreads.

• 22:56Shaan Puri?

  Oh, that's Goodreads.

• 22:57Sam Parr?

  And so Book of the Month Club now has 100,000 active paying customers.

• 23:02Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 23:02Sam Parr?

  Which means they're in the revenue range of 10 to 15 million a year in recurring revenue. And they, the founder said in an interview, he, his goal is to grow 5X a year.

• 23:14Shaan Puri?

  5X a year? Nice.

• 23:15Sam Parr?

  For the next year, not consistently. I don't know if that's, I think that's bogus, but Book of the Month is kind of an interesting thing. I suspect, I've always thought that it would not work. Now, my opinion has changed. So Goodreads has 100 million users. There's this thing called the Wattpad. Have you heard of Wattpad?

• 23:32Shaan Puri?

  I've heard of it, yeah.

• 23:33Sam Parr?

  Wattpad, a lot of people don't know about it. Wattpad, it's owned by a guy in Canada and they have 400 employees. It's a multiple 100 million dollar a year business, I believe. They, it's a book club for, it's not a book club, it's more so.

• 23:44Shaan Puri?

  You write on it. You, you write original stories on it.

• 23:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but it's, their category is romance, middle, middle America romance novels. So if you're a 40 year old woman, you probably have heard of Wattpad.

• 23:55Shaan Puri?

  You're saying that's the most popular category?

• 23:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but it's pretty much all they do.

• 23:58Shaan Puri?

  Oh, really? Okay.

• 23:59Sam Parr?

  It's basically for women who, it's like, men do video porn. Romance novels is woman porn. I mean, that's basically what it is. And so, huge business. And now, I'm quite bullish now on these book clubs.

• 24:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 24:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah, Reese Witherspoon has a book club. My wife uses it, my sister, so many people. Have you heard of this?

• 24:19Shaan Puri?

  No, I haven't heard of that one.

• 24:20Sam Parr?

  It's called Sunshine, some fucking thing.

• 24:23Shaan Puri?

  Oprah had hers, but hers wasn't a paid membership. But this is really smart. Like, what you're describing, I'm like, oh, this is good. And I think you gotta have, probably not gotta have, but it's advantageous here to have a brand, like a Reese Witherspoon, or whoever, Jennifer Aniston, or Gwyneth Paltrow, or whoever. Or, like, The Hustle could do a book club, you could do a book club. Like, I think that you have to have a bit of cachet to organize people around, to get the energy going, that initial energy you need.

• 24:48Sam Parr?

  So here's one angle. You buy the rights to the book, which is expensive.

• 24:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, why would you do that?

• 24:54Sam Parr?

  Well, because I think the margins in books are quite small. I've talked to Tim Ferriss about this. He told me that he earns, he didn't say that, he didn't tell me this, but he told me, I mean, I think that he does about a million a month in revenue off his podcasts. And he told me that, this is what he did tell me, he has made 10 times more money off the podcast than all of his books combined.

• 25:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:15Sam Parr?

  So I, I don't think people get paid a lot of money for books. So the margins are just...

• 25:18Shaan Puri?

  So it might be a cheap asset, you're saying?

• 25:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think it's quite cheap. So I would want to, my goal would be to buy the rights to the book and make it popular. You know who, have you heard of, there's this company that owns, the company that owns Proactive. It's called, I know what you're talking about, it's the skincare. It's a direct marketing company. They, the guy who owns it, it's a quite large business, he got his start because he bought the rights to Think and Grow Rich.

• 25:46Shaan Puri?

  Oh, really?

• 25:46Sam Parr?

  And he helped make it popular again.

• 25:48Shaan Puri?

  Oh, wow.

• 25:49Sam Parr?

  Through infomercials. So that's what I would do, is I would want to buy the rights to all the books. And there's another company called Mentorbox that does this. And Ty Lopez is one of the owners, so it's incredibly scammy. I mean, like, you sign up for like $20, and then it rolls into like a $400 a month thing. It's like fucking stupid.

• 26:08Sam Parr?

  But book clubs are super interesting to me.

• 26:10Shaan Puri?

  So would you do this, like, if you were gonna do this now, how would you attack it? What would you do? So you buy the rights to which books?

• 26:17Sam Parr?

  If I wanted to bootstrap it, no, you can't.

• 26:18Shaan Puri?

  How would you do it?

• 26:19Sam Parr?

  So what I would do is I would look at Vinyl Me Please. Vinyl Me Please is my friend's business. It's a probably a couple million bucks a month subscription thing. So what you do is you give them $50 a month and they send you a vinyl once a month.

• 26:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:33Sam Parr?

  And so I would do that, but for a particular type of category. So what I would do is I would create a Facebook group and I would say it's $30 or $50 a month. And we're going to read one book a month. I'm going to get one expert to come and talk about the book each week or each month. We're going to do it in a Facebook group and I'm going to send you notes about the whole book.

• 26:49Shaan Puri?

  And what category do you think you'd choose? Would you do the romance novel? Or would you do business? Or would you do self-help?

• 26:56Sam Parr?

  Well, just because I have such a network in business that I could just crush it right off the bat. But romance novels, I know this from experience because I've invested in these types of things. Romance novels have the highest liquidity, as in people consume them the most.

• 27:08Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:09Sam Parr?

  So I would.

• 27:10Shaan Puri?

  They're like voracious readers, five times the number of books read.

• 27:12Sam Parr?

  Romance category is probably one of the most, is probably the most popular category on Kindle. I bet you it is. So.

• 27:20Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 27:20Sam Parr?

  Me personally, I would start here. But if I even slightly was interested in romance novels, I would.

• 27:27Shaan Puri?

  And I like what this guy did, buying the rights to the Book of the Month Club. You know, a popular asset that's sort of decayed over the last 30 years. And see if you can revitalize it on the cheap. I think these are interesting businesses.

• 27:38Sam Parr?

  There's so many books that I love that are written in the 60s and 70s. And you try to buy them on Amazon and they're hundreds of dollars because they've just been forgotten and they don't reprint them.

• 27:46Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:47Sam Parr?

  I just tried to buy a book the other day for, that someone mentioned on Twitter and it was $900.

• 27:53Shaan Puri?

  What book?

• 27:54Sam Parr?

  It was, so I just tweeted about Agora, that's the scammy company, which we can talk about if we want. But it was all about copyrighting. It was 900 bucks.

• 28:03Shaan Puri?

  Wow. Okay, yeah, let's talk about Agora.

• 28:06Sam Parr?

  Okay, you want to hear about Agora? Okay.

• 28:08Shaan Puri?

  So Agora is what? It's a B2B paid newsletter company?

• 28:12Sam Parr?

  Uh, yeah.

• 28:13Shaan Puri?

  That has absurd revenue.

• 28:15Sam Parr?

  Go to my Twitter account. Okay, so here's another interesting company. I know this because I'm in this world and it's directly related to us. Yeah, just, yeah, the same par. Yeah, whatever, that's fine. Okay, so Agora.

• 28:29Sam Parr?

  Crazy interesting background. So Agora was started by this guy named Bill Bonner in the 1970s. He was a publisher. He had a magazine about money and investing and things like that. And then he decided to start changing how he did his marketing and he created a newsletter that became quite popular. At this point, you'll see it, it's the most popular one. No, up higher. At this point, they make, it's rumored to be one and a half to $2 billion a year. And the way that they do this, there it is, they own 20 to 40 different newsletter publishers. And what they do is, is they buy a ton of traffic to their funnels,

• 29:11Sam Parr?

  their marketing funnels, and right off the bat, they'll sell you a $50 product.

• 29:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:17Sam Parr?

  And once you buy that $50 product, they now have a large database and email list of qualified buyers who are interested in a particular topic. And they typically lose money on this first purchase. So let's say that they have a book that's 50 bucks, they'll spend up to $200 to acquire you, meaning they'll buy a ton of ads and they'll, they'll lose money on you. But they'll make it up because on the, they call it a backend. On the backend, they sell you a $2,000 paid newsletter. And this company in particular, they even sell supplements and shit. Now, some people think that they, some people love them. And when you own 20 or 40 different brands, you're going to have some legitimately great products.

• 29:53Shaan Puri?

  Right. So what's their best product?

• 29:55Sam Parr?

  Um, money map press.com. Or, yeah, money map press.

• 30:01Shaan Puri?

  So this is for hedge funds, for, for financial traders?

• 30:03Sam Parr?

  No. Um, yes, some financial traders. Their, their typical audience is white men between 50 and 70 who, who, who are conservative and believe in like, the government's going to come and like, take your money. Um, I mean, that goes like, so I sign up some of their funnels. And there was shit like, if you go to brightbar.com, you'll see an ad that says like Nancy Pelosi's coming for your money and things like that. And you sign up.

• 30:28Shaan Puri?

  That takes you through one of the Agora funnels?

• 30:29Sam Parr?

  Uh huh. And it's a $5 book. And then, yeah, and then you'll, you'll go through these funnels. Now, let's just get rid of the whole unethical part because you can learn from everyone. Who cares if it's unethical or ethical? It's fascinating regardless and you can learn from it. What they're experts at is copywriting. And everyone in Silicon Valley, not everyone, but you know, you get the point, is all about design. It's got to look good. It's got to be aesthetic. Their websites are a blank page. With text.

• 30:54Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 30:55Sam Parr?

  Not just text, but like fucking 5,000 words and a buy now button at the very bottom. It's crazy.

• 31:03Shaan Puri?

  That's fascinating. That is fascinating. And I think you're, you know, you know, that Peter Thiel quote where it's like, what's something you believe to be true that few would agree with you on?

• 31:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 31:10Shaan Puri?

  I feel like, you know, you might have many, but one of them would be copyrighting over design any day.

• 31:16Sam Parr?

  Copyrighting over design 100%.

• 31:18Shaan Puri?

  Most people, I remember when I learned the word copyrighting, because I was like, what is, what is even talking, what is copy? Why does everyone keep saying this? And like, I literally was at work and people were like, hey, can you give me some copy? I was like, coffee? What? She just asked me to go get a coffee for her? Like, I had no idea what the fuck she was talking about. And, uh, and then I sort of learned, oh, copy means text that's going to go on the website. And then through you, I realized, hey, wait a minute, the text that's on your website is essentially your salesman and sales gives you the money. I should probably learn how to do this. And then I went deep on it.

• 31:49Sam Parr?

  It's the most important skill you can learn because I've spent years learning it. If you just give me a blank webpage, I will, I will make money till I die.

• 31:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 31:59Sam Parr?

  I will always have a job because I could do that. Now, what I could do is do really unethical shit and scam a lot of people really easily. But if you know how to copyright, do, or you know how to persuade via the written word?

• 32:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I would say persuasion is the most important skill, whether it's through the written word, verbally, um, you know, I don't know if there's some other variation.

• 32:19Sam Parr?

  Copyrighting is just the form in which you learn it. Now, the way that I describe it is if you're a good copywriter, you understand what motivates people. And if you understand what motivates people, you can create products that they'll want.

• 32:30Shaan Puri?

  That will appeal to people.

• 32:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And then if you are, that is, that's the, when you do copyrighting, you just learn what motivates people. And then you just happen to use the written word to

• 32:39Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 32:39Sam Parr?

  Communicate.

• 32:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Uh, when, when you mentioned the Boron letters and then I just went deep on that, that was like my foray into this. So we'll, we'll do a whole section on.

• 32:48Sam Parr?

  Did you read the?

• 32:48Shaan Puri?

  Yes. And then I started like doing all the things in it, uh, because I got obsessed.

• 32:53Sam Parr?

  So the Boron letters, if anyone's curious, Gary Halbert is his name. He's dead now. He died of a heart attack.

• 32:58Shaan Puri?

  It's actually kind of hard to find.

• 32:59Sam Parr?

  It's hard to find.

• 33:00Shaan Puri?

  But there's, there's one link and if you get to it, it's like chapter one, two, three, and it goes to 19 or whatever.

• 33:04Sam Parr?

  It's this copywriter who's one of the best copywriters of all time. And what he would do is he was such a good copywriter that he kind of turned into a crook. And so he would write these sales letters to buy like encyclopedias or, and buy like. Fucking anything, just shit.

• 33:19Shaan Puri?

  So the Boron letters are, the way it starts, it's like he's writing to his son.

• 33:22Sam Parr?

  He's in jail.

• 33:23Shaan Puri?

  He's in jail, writing to his son. And he doesn't start off by being like, here's how you copyright. He's just writing to his son and it's one by one and each one's a teaser. Every sentence teases the next sentence and every letter teases the next letter. And then by the time you get 20 deep, you're like, this guy's a master.

• 33:37Sam Parr?

  It is awesome. So read that. Um, all right. What do you got, Sean?

• 33:40Shaan Puri?

  Um, a couple others. Okay. So here's an idea. So I was, uh, talking to my cousin and, um, so we were talking about like, one of my cousins, he's young, he goes on dates, uses the apps, boom, boom, boom. And then like our aunts and uncles are always like, oh my God, look at him. He's just swiping left and right. He goes on dates. It's like really foreign concept to them. And, uh, so that was one data point. Okay. Just kind of noticed, wow, my aunts and uncles, they really don't get it when it comes to this online dating thing. Data point two, I'm watching the debate and, um, it was, I watched so much shit online that when I watch traditional TV, first of all, it's so slow. And secondly, I start to see the commercials and I'm like, oh, this is what's being advertised to mainstream America. Like,

• 34:22Sam Parr?

  Cars and drugs.

• 34:23Shaan Puri?

  Very fascinating. So like Noom was on there, which is like the diet, like nutrition plan thing. They do really, really well in OOM. Um, we should break them down later.

• 34:32Sam Parr?

  They advertise with that.

• 34:32Shaan Puri?

  But the other one was some, uh, it was this gray haired woman comes on the, on the screen and she's like, oh, online dating, where do I start? And then it gets like, well, open up your browser, type WWW dot and then the URL. It's like, and then start clicking around. Like that was literally, that was the ad was like, how do I even get started? It's like, here's how you get started online dating. I don't remember the name.

• 34:54Sam Parr?

  Oh, come on.

• 34:54Shaan Puri?

  It wasn't like a match or, you know, I had never heard of it before. So I started thinking and I was like, um, you know, there's so many people that are sort of in my sort of, uh, extended family and whatnot that are divorced and they're alone. And so I was thinking about them and I was like, you know, it'd be great if they found someone, but the reality is they don't do a lot of online dating because it's so scary and foreign and it's not the online part that's scary. It's the expectation that you then need to go meet somebody. And so like, let's take my uncle, for example, my uncle's, I don't know, 65 years old. He is divorced. He gets lonely. His kids are all grown up. Everyone left the house and, um, You know, he doesn't wanna actually like, it'd be great if he met somebody who was awesome and they could just like be companions for the rest of their life.

• 35:36Shaan Puri?

  But he's sort of like, dude, I don't wanna get out there. Like, last time I went on a date was 40 years ago. Like, uh, I think I'm just out of the game. It's easier to be lonely than it is to put yourself out there. So, anyways, long preamble for the idea. The idea is a service that's for older people. Let's make it just 50 and up as a, as a rule. And it's called Just Talking. And the expectation is you're gonna go out here with other people who are like you, are sort of single, might be alone, looking for companionship. But it's just talking. You can't meet. It's not their real names. It's nothing. It's just somebody you could log onto the computer and just talk to, either through audio or text. And you could talk to them continuously, or you could switch and pick somebody else and talk to them. But it's just companionship as a service. For, and it, it's not dating. You're not gonna start going out with this person. You're not trying to get remarried.

• 36:22Sam Parr?

  You're just getting the reps in.

• 36:22Shaan Puri?

  You just don't wanna be lonely at home anymore. And honestly, you can have a virtual relationship, uh, you know, through this. And it's because I was also watching Love is Blind.

• 36:29Sam Parr?

  So good.

• 36:30Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, dude, somebody should make an app that's just this now, uh, off the back of the show.

• 36:34Sam Parr?

  Good idea.

• 36:35Shaan Puri?

  And so anyways, these are sort of some ideas. What do you think?

• 36:37Sam Parr?

  Learn about it by, I love it, I love it. Winner, that's a winner. Um, what I would do is I would go and do research on the sex hotlines that used to exist that probably don't exist anymore.

• 36:47Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:47Sam Parr?

  And I would wanna learn how they work. I bet they crushed.

• 36:50Shaan Puri?

  So I'll shout out some like tangentially related, so sex hotline related, but obviously.

• 36:53Sam Parr?

  Master P used to own one that, that killed it.

• 36:56Shaan Puri?

  Then there's one, uh, a startup out here in San Francisco called Papa. Have you heard of this?

• 36:59Sam Parr?

  Papa?

• 37:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 37:00Sam Parr?

  No.

• 37:00Shaan Puri?

  Papa is, uh, grandkids as a service. So it's just young people, uh, that you, that will just come over to your grandparents' house and just do stuff for them. Um, and like, talk to them, but like also do their laundry and like take out that trash. I don't know if they're doing well or not. They just launched, they raised a bunch of money. And, um, because there's this huge aging population of the baby boomers. And so there's this wealth of opportunities that are for these, this, the largest generation of people ever in America is now getting old. And, uh, I, I forgot, this woman was calling it the, um, The gray new world and you know for gray hair and so she's like you know the gray new world opens up all these possibilities so one is Papa which is grandkids of as a service. One is honor because.

• 37:43Sam Parr?

  I know honor.

• 37:44Shaan Puri?

  There's a huge shortage of caretakers for for the elderly and so honor is a on demand caretaker platform that you know is.

• 37:52Sam Parr?

  But you're getting off track here. Are you going with caring for old people or helping people get laid?

• 37:56Shaan Puri?

  I'm talking about just talking. That's my idea, but I was just tangentially saying there's some other businesses that are trying to help this.

• 38:02Sam Parr?

  How about Relationship Hero?

• 38:04Shaan Puri?

  What do they do?

• 38:04Sam Parr?

  Never heard of that?

• 38:05Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 38:06Sam Parr?

  Jack invested in it and he says it's going well. It's called Relationship Hero, relationshiphero.com and they teach you how to do online dating.

• 38:12Shaan Puri?

  Okay, just coaching for online dating.

• 38:14Sam Parr?

  Go, can you go to?

• 38:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, pull that up.

• 38:15Sam Parr?

  That's how it started as it might be a little bit different.

• 38:17Shaan Puri?

  For you, yeah, this would be for younger people though. It'd be for whoever.

• 38:22Sam Parr?

  I think it could be.

• 38:24Shaan Puri?

  I think if you did just talking and you ran a bunch of Facebook ads, you could get a lot of people to pay to be a part of a community of people. Where they can have these online relationships.

• 38:34Sam Parr?

  I love it.

• 38:34Shaan Puri?

  Expectation is you do not go offline.

• 38:37Sam Parr?

  I think it's great. You know why I think it's great is because the way the way that you're positioning it is as a marketplace. Those are notoriously hard to make, but once you have them, they're great.

• 38:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 38:47Sam Parr?

  The reason why I like this is you can kind of fake it at first.

• 38:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 38:50Sam Parr?

  So you can just hire people.

• 38:51Shaan Puri?

  You can have some operators.

• 38:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 38:52Shaan Puri?

  That are that are providing that.

• 38:54Sam Parr?

  I think it's a great idea.

• 38:55Shaan Puri?

  You could seed the marketplace with the operators.

• 38:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think it's awesome. We talked about OnlyFans.

• 39:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 39:00Sam Parr?

  Um, that's trending today on Twitter.

• 39:02Shaan Puri?

  Is it?

• 39:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, worldwide.

• 39:03Shaan Puri?

  Because of what? Some shit must have gone down.

• 39:06Sam Parr?

  I didn't get the joke. I clicked on it and tried to understand it and I didn't.

• 39:08Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:09Sam Parr?

  I didn't get it.

• 39:10Shaan Puri?

  One out of three Twitter trends.

• 39:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Shaan Puri?

  Don't fucking get.

• 39:13Sam Parr?

  It was a top OnlyFans, which we talked about. OnlyFans is a great business, but I love just talking. I think it, I think that's a great idea.

• 39:20Shaan Puri?

  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

• 39:22Sam Parr?

  No, I think that's that's a winner.

• 39:23Shaan Puri?

  All right, I have a question for you now. So before last week, I think maybe it was when I was with Stu, but I. I shared this anecdote or this this sort of advice, which was if you're offered a seat on a rocket ship. Um, you know, don't ask which seat, just sit down and buckle up. And this is just career advice, which is if you're not going to start your own company.

• 39:42Sam Parr?

  You got flack for it.

• 39:43Shaan Puri?

  Did I?

• 39:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 39:44Shaan Puri?

  Oh, I thought people loved it. What do you mean?

• 39:45Sam Parr?

  Well.

• 39:46Shaan Puri?

  What was the criticism?

• 39:47Sam Parr?

  Nice sized audience. Not everyone's gonna be happy.

• 39:49Shaan Puri?

  But what was, what was the criticism based on? It wasn't even controversial.

• 39:52Sam Parr?

  Just stuff like, um, titles. It was just comments like people saying titles are important. How much you get paid is more important, things like that.

• 40:01Shaan Puri?

  That's crazy. Disagree. Hard disagree. Um, okay. So anyways, the question was, sort of that led to a different question, which is what are the rocket ships of today? And so somebody, by the way, took that idea and made a rocket ship newsletter for jobs.

• 40:13Sam Parr?

  Andrew Johnson.

• 40:13Shaan Puri?

  Um, but beyond that, I was just sort of thinking, just my thought experiment. What companies that today are worth one to five billion? Do I believe will be multi hundred billion? So what's, just as a way of phrasing it simpler, what five billion dollar company today could become a five hundred billion dollar company in the future? I say this because we have friends who bought Facebook secondary stock, uh, back in two thousand and six and two thousand and seven, when Facebook was valued at over a billion dollars. And today Facebook's like, whatever, five hundred billion dollar company. And, um, that, you know, it was clear it wasn't going to zero. It was clear it was a thing. And the question, but you could have invested then and got a phenomenal return. And I have several friends who did. I had a friend, uh, Alex, uh, oh no, sorry, Josh Buckley.

• 40:59Shaan Puri?

  Who's a, who's a good guy, founder and.

• 41:02Sam Parr?

  British guy?

• 41:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he's a British guy. He's, and so he, um, he was telling me, we were just hanging out one day and he's like, yeah, I'm buying secondary stock of Stripe as much as I can get. And I was like, oh, like, what do you mean? Like, I'm not doing that. Why, why are you doing that? I should do that. Uh, and he was like, yeah, I just think Stripe's a great company and there's secondary stock available and I'm just buying it. I'm like, well, what's the valuation? It's already like a two billion dollar company. He's like, yeah, but it's like Stripe's gonna be big. He's like, I think Stripe's gonna be huge. So I'm just buying up secondary. And now, so Stripe's valued now at like twenty billion dollars. Uh, so he took essentially like a no risk bet in my opinion. And 10x'd his money on a private company that was, it was already a unicorn, but wasn't yet on the stock market, wasn't doing like 10% a year. You know, that's a 10x appreciation.

• 41:44Shaan Puri?

  So, long story short, what companies do you think have that potential that are in the single digit billions today or less? That I, that you think could be a Facebook, Google, Amazon of our generation?

• 41:55Sam Parr?

  So a few years ago, I answered this question and I, I thought it was at Lassian and I went in on that and I, and it worked.

• 42:01Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Tell me about that. What do you mean it worked?

• 42:04Shaan Puri?

  Back then it was.

• 42:05Sam Parr?

  Can you just look, look, go ahead, Henry, look, go to Atlassian stock, you're busy today. I, I invested in Atlassian stock. I mean, it's not like I like, yeah, Atla- uh, Atlassian, spelled with an A.

• 42:16Shaan Puri?

  A T.

• 42:17Sam Parr?

  A T. There it is. Yeah. And then go to all time. I bought Atla- Max on the far right. I bought it when it, when it went public. So what did it go up by?

• 42:29Shaan Puri?

  So that's like a 3X already?

• 42:31Sam Parr?

  So I 3X my money. So I bought Atlassian because I read their annual report and I was like, oh, these guys are great.

• 42:36Shaan Puri?

  Right. So their market cap is now 35 billion.

• 42:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So I bought it right when it went out. So that worked out well.

• 42:40Shaan Puri?

  What do you think can get to the over 100 billion? It's very hard to get over 100 billion.

• 42:44Sam Parr?

  How many companies are worth over 100 billion, like 50?

• 42:46Shaan Puri?

  Very few, especially if you think about tech companies. So some of the tech companies that made it, Amazon made it, Google made it, Microsoft made it, Facebook made it. Uber did not quite make it yet, but it's getting there. Tesla made it. Like I think I invested in Tesla when it was at about this number, five, five to eight billion.

• 43:03Sam Parr?

  Oh, really?

• 43:03Shaan Puri?

  And now it's almost 100 billion. And so like that's, that's a big lift of a company that it's out there. It's not a seed sage startup you're taking a bet on.

• 43:12Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 43:13Shaan Puri?

  It's a company that's out there. And the other way to take the bet on it, even if you're not an investor, is to go work at one of these companies, right? So like Airbnb was a good candidate. Uh, now it's value too high to qualify for this. Airbnb is like at, I don't know, 35 billion or something like that.

• 43:27Sam Parr?

  We'll see what happens with this.

• 43:29Shaan Puri?

  But it's not in the single digit billions anymore. But when we, when we moved to San Francisco, we could have done that, right?

• 43:33Sam Parr?

  When I moved to San Francisco, I had a job offer at Airbnb when it was worth a billion.

• 43:37Shaan Puri?

  One billion.

• 43:38Sam Parr?

  Maybe less. I don't know. There was only, no, it was less. It was 2012.

• 43:42Shaan Puri?

  Right. So, so let's just say it was at a billion, which it wasn't, but let's say it was.

• 43:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I would have made $10 million. I don't know.

• 43:49Shaan Puri?

  It's 35X. So even if you had just gotten a, a sort of standard stock package, which was like over four years, you're going to get 200 grand.

• 43:56Sam Parr?

  I would have made five or 10 million dollars.

• 43:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's insane.

• 43:59Sam Parr?

  And I got fired before I even showed up to work.

• 44:02Shaan Puri?

  So some other candidates that I put up here, Flexport, I think is a candidate.

• 44:06Sam Parr?

  Maybe.

• 44:08Shaan Puri?

  Oh, you got some inside intel? That sounded like a juicy maybe.

• 44:12Sam Parr?

  Well, Ryan told me he thinks it's gonna be massive or it's gonna go bankrupt. Which is like how you're gonna be when you're

• 44:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's how you're gonna be.

• 44:18Sam Parr?

  That's how you gotta be.

• 44:19Shaan Puri?

  So some other, some, this was harder than I thought. I also tweeted this out. So the most popular answers I got was Airtable and Carta. And I pretty much disagree with both of those. I don't know. And I asked, so these are smart people replying. And I was like, Carta? Why Carta?

• 44:31Sam Parr?

  We should get Carta to sponsor this podcast, by the way.

• 44:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, why are they not sponsoring?

• 44:34Sam Parr?

  I don't know. You guys need a sponsor. And I'm gonna, I, I don't give a fuck if people sponsor. I'm gonna tell you the truth. Carta, it's the best option out there, but it still needs a lot to improve.

• 44:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 44:44Sam Parr?

  I use it. I give you guys five grand a year. I'm happy that I give you the money. But it can improve.

• 44:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So Airtable, Airtable, it would have to basically replace Excel in the corporate world for it to do this. Otherwise, it will not be a hundred billion dollar company.

• 44:58Sam Parr?

  How about Gusto?

• 45:00Shaan Puri?

  Gusto's a good one. So I think there's a lot that are in the sort of either HR tech, just you need to be in huge spaces.

• 45:04Sam Parr?

  I like Gusto and Rippling.

• 45:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Gusto, Rippling, I think, I mean, a hundred billion is a high bar, but yeah. So other ones that I, that I put up here, so Stripe, but it's past this point. So Coinbase, only if the Bitcoin, if Bitcoin actually becomes, like if Bitcoin actually is the thing, it becomes the global reserve currency, then

• 45:22Sam Parr?

  Well, it doesn't have to be.

• 45:23Shaan Puri?

  The largest Bitcoin sort of company, the largest Bitcoin brand would be, I think.

• 45:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it just has, could it become Bank of America? Could it become Wells Fargo?

• 45:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but I think Bitcoin has to become that relevant for Coinbase to be.

• 45:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I buy, I buy that.

• 45:36Shaan Puri?

  Uh, Open Door is another one, just because residential real estate is so big. So if they actually have a working model, they could become a hundred billion dollar company.

• 45:43Sam Parr?

  I don't buy that.

• 45:44Shaan Puri?

  Because what?

• 45:45Sam Parr?

  Cause Zillow and Trulia aren't that huge.

• 45:48Shaan Puri?

  Uh, they don't do what these guys do, though. Zillow and Trulia, they sell leads to brokers. They're now trying to copy Open Doors. And now they offer what Open Door offers, but Open Door is literally buying and selling the houses. They're flipping houses at scale, which is pretty crazy.

• 46:01Sam Parr?

  What else?

• 46:03Shaan Puri?

  This was tough. I don't know. That's all I had. But I put this on here. I wasn't going to talk about it initially. But I'm like, I want to bring this up. I want people to tell me what I'm wrong about. Well, what what companies I should be considering in this. But I think there's a really important question because for me, I'm going to go try to buy secondary stock in all these companies.

• 46:16Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I don't.

• 46:17Shaan Puri?

  And if you're working, you should go work at one of these companies.

• 46:19Sam Parr?

  A hundred billion is, that's impossible. I won't even, I'm not even going to try to predict that because like only like a few hundred people, a few, a few hundred businesses have ever probably done that. I don't know the number, but that's really hard to say. But if I had to make a prediction, I do think that there will be some new search engines. And I also think that some of the new Chrome replacements could be quite large. So Brave is one of them. What's another one?

• 46:50Shaan Puri?

  Replacing the browser?

• 46:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Anything that are replacing browsers, I think are kind of cool and could potentially be that big. I think there's going to be a lot of browser.

• 46:58Shaan Puri?

  I think if any company nails AR, they will, they will be able to do this. But that's a ways away, I believe.

• 47:04Sam Parr?

  How about a ZUSK? Is that what's called?

• 47:07Shaan Puri?

  ZUSK, the self-driving car company.

• 47:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 47:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So that was the other, I considered all the self-driving car companies because I'm like, if, if one of them becomes a success, a self, a successful self-driving car company, the market leader will be worth over a hundred billion. It's just more likely, I believe is more likely to be Tesla or one of the incumbents rather, they'll buy one of these companies rather than the, that company independently going from where it is today, which is one billion to a hundred billion.

• 47:32Sam Parr?

  How about this? What companies are public now that could grow that much? So I was talking to Mois the other day and we were looking at stamps.com. They're crazy undervalued. And the next day, we were like, let's buy this. The next day, we didn't buy in time. It

• 47:44Shaan Puri?

  Went up 50%.

• 47:45Sam Parr?

  Went up 50%.

• 47:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I love that.

• 47:48Sam Parr?

  It was coincidental.

• 47:49Shaan Puri?

  Just, I saw an interesting stat. Over the last 10 years, if you had just bought the FAANG companies, so Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, in the 10 years, it outperformed all VCs, or sorry, it outperformed even the sort of top

• 48:06Shaan Puri?

  like expected returns of venture capital. So the public market, if you just bought the five most popular tech stocks, you did better. It was a 20, 24% IRR over 10 years.

• 48:15Sam Parr?

  Okay. Well, what, what's public now that could, I don't fucking know. That's a great question.

• 48:22Sam Parr?

  It's, that's hard. You gotta really bet on industries. What do you got?

• 48:25Speaker 02

  What about like whoever becomes the leader in sports gambling? It's gonna be.

• 48:30Shaan Puri?

  Sports betting.

• 48:31Sam Parr?

  Good. That's a good, that's a good.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Whoever is the number one, whatever that is.

• 48:35Shaan Puri?

  And if the legislation keeps opening up.

• 48:36Sam Parr?

  That's a good call. I would do sports betting. I would bet on that industry. That's a great call.

• 48:41Shaan Puri?

  Okay, we ventured off into stock tips, so I want to get back because we don't know shit about the stock market. That's not our, that's not our promise. Uh, let's tell them something else that, that we find interesting. What else you got?

• 48:49Sam Parr?

  You want to do one more?

• 48:51Shaan Puri?

  I'll mention one other cool company that's related to stocks, actually. PublicComps.com. So PublicComps.

• 48:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I saw a guy share this on Twitter.

• 48:57Shaan Puri?

  Uh, he's just breaking down, um, S1s for companies, which like, a lot of people like to do nowadays, but it's just a good, you don't have to do the research. This guy does the research for you and he publishes it. I like it.

• 49:08Sam Parr?

  Let's do, uh, let's do, let's wrap up with maid renovation. You talked about this in one of our very first podcasts.

• 49:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. So one of our very first ones, I was like, hey, I saw this ad. I think this is awesome idea. What it is, if you don't remember, because you're not a diehard, um, the, what it was is it's a turnkey bathroom renovation. So if you want your ba-, so the ad was just a dope looking bathroom. And it was like, if you want this bathroom, it's like five grand. And you don't have to like, because what, what happens today? You have to hire a contractor. You have to come up with the vision board of what you want it to be. You have to choose all these different materials. Then he sources it and then it turns out and then it's like, that's a one-off. So they have like four designs of bathrooms. You just pick which one you want. You want the old Victorian cool looking one? You want the modern one? Or you want the middle of the road one?

• 49:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I always said I wish barbers were like.

• 49:53Shaan Puri?

  And here's the price and you just push the button. Yeah, it's like, actually, some barbers do this. You go up on the haircut.

• 49:57Sam Parr?

  Just give me the number three.

• 49:58Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, I'll take the number three large, you know, you know, no problem. So that's what they're, these guys are doing for bathrooms. I thought that was really smart. So it turns out, this was not just like some random startup. This is Roger Dickey was starting this and he's a, he started Gigster. Um, he's, he's done some cool stuff in Silicon Valley before, so he's, he's not a sort of Joker. And, um, they raised nine million bucks and they came out of stealth. And I was like, I gave myself a little pat on the back.

• 50:22Sam Parr?

  That's a good one. That's a good call. That, that's a pretty good call.

• 50:25Shaan Puri?

  I still think it's a very cool idea and I also think that anybody could compete with them because this will not be winner take all, because you have to be doing local renovations in different cities. Uh, they announced it this week.

• 50:35Sam Parr?

  Good job.

• 50:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 50:36Sam Parr?

  Uh, can I give myself a pat on the back?

• 50:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 50:39Sam Parr?

  Um, one of my first angel investments, uh, Lucy, uh, lucynicotine.com, I think, or I don't even know what the URL is, to be honest. You-

• 50:50Shaan Puri?

  Explain what it is. People don't know.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  I don't, but it's huge. It's like replacing Juul.

• 50:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so I invested in-

• 50:57Shaan Puri?

  All your what?

• 50:58Speaker 02

  All my friends at school.

• 50:59Sam Parr?

  All your friends are buying Lucy?

• 51:00Speaker 02

  People are, yeah.

• 51:01Sam Parr?

  Oh, fuck, yeah. Money in the bank. Okay, so one of my first angel investments, uh, I don't remember when this was, three years ago, the founder of Soylent, Dave, um, who's my friend, Dave Rintown, uh, Runten, he started this thing. And, um, it was basi- it's basically a Nicorette. So it's-

• 51:19Shaan Puri?

  Right, new age Nicorette.

• 51:20Sam Parr?

  Nicotine gum. And, um, he told me about it and I was like, alright, well, Dave, you started Soylent, so you're pretty smart. You scaled that thing up. Yeah, I knew him well, he's a good guy. And it's a-

• 51:33Shaan Puri?

  Big market.

• 51:34Sam Parr?

  It's nicotine. So I'm like, okay, well, I mean, this is-

• 51:36Shaan Puri?

  Retention's gonna be good.

• 51:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm a, I'm a nicotine user. I like the gum. I chew the gum and I like the-

• 51:42Shaan Puri?

  You chew Nicorette?

• 51:43Sam Parr?

  Uh, yeah, I like to, I prefer lozenges, so I'll put them in my mouth.

• 51:47Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 51:47Sam Parr?

  Uh, and, um-

• 51:49Shaan Puri?

  But you don't smoke, so you just do this, just nicotine?

• 51:51Sam Parr?

  I like nicotine. It's, I don't drink and I don't smoke. It's, it's, it's my, that's my vice. And, uh, and it's a monthly subscription.

• 51:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 51:59Sam Parr?

  I was like, yeah, of course you'll fucking knock that one out the park.

• 52:02Shaan Puri?

  Really smart.

• 52:03Sam Parr?

  And they just raised a lot more money. And, uh, so on paper, which is completely useless, on paper's not gonna buy me a house or pay my rent. But the valuation went up significantly, so I got a little-

• 52:13Shaan Puri?

  My corner store guy has it at the front by the register and I said, okay, whatever's at the front by the register, that's what's selling. That's what this guy knows will make him money.

• 52:20Sam Parr?

  Is it really?

• 52:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I sent Dave a picture. I was like, look at this shit.

• 52:24Sam Parr?

  Uh, Henry, all the-

• 52:25Shaan Puri?

  Although the guy, the guy, I asked him, I said, how well does this sell? He's like, it's pretty good. It's not Juul, but it's pretty good.

• 52:30Sam Parr?

  Of course, it's not Juul. Are, are the ki- kids are buying Nic- uh, Lucy?

• 52:34Speaker 02

  It's a thing, yeah.

• 52:35Sam Parr?

  Oh, fuck, yeah. Money in the bank.

• 52:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Pay the taxes on it.

• 52:41Sam Parr?

  Oh, fuck.

• 52:43Sam Parr?

  Money in the bag. I think that's a 5 or 6X so far. I'm proud. That would be a...

• 52:50Shaan Puri?

  That's a good investment. I like that one.

• 52:51Sam Parr?

  That would be a good one. I think we're one of the first folks in on that one.

• 52:57Sam Parr?

  Fucking A. I hope it works. And just for the... Wow, it is awesome.

• 53:04Sam Parr?

  It is totally luck, so I'm not gonna take that much credit. But, awesome. Thank you. Give us a review and share with your friends.

• 53:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, tell your friends. See ya.