Austin Rief: Building Morning Brew, The Ultimate Guide to Building Newsletter Businesses, Side Hustle Ideas, & More

Episode 398: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) talk to Morning Brew Founder & CEO Austin Rief (@austin_rief) about building, growing and selling a newsletter valued at $75M in 5 years, whether newsletter businesses are still worth doing, how to make them succeed, and a few good side hustle ideas to start now. ----- Links: * Morning Brew * Toptal * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ------ Show Notes: (01:00) - Morning Brew origin story (19:10) - Ad sales (24:10) - Austin's strengths (32:15) - Austin's upbringing (42:55) - What did you do with your new found wealth? (45:55) - Ideas brainstorm (01:13:14) - Future plans ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  All right. So we have Austin here, Austin Reeve, founder of Morning Brew. I know how big you guys are. I don't know what the public numbers are. So I'll let you kind of say like, how big is the company now?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, 70, 75 million of revenue this year, double-digit profit margin, 250 people or so.

• 0:25Shaan Puri?

  And it's kind of a crazy story. You guys started this, you guys were at college, right? You're, you're at, is it Michigan where you guys went to school?

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so we're at the University of Michigan. I applied to Duke, didn't get in though, unfortunately. And so went to Michigan. Yeah, I went to a small private high school.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  No, Michigan worked out well. It was a little cold, a little bit colder than Duke, but I, I mean, my goal was to go to the biggest school I could get into, other than Ivy or Duke. So I got into Michigan, had no idea what I wanted to do. And everyone went to finance in Michigan. So I was like, oh, I gotta, I gotta follow the herd. I was a sheep following the herd straight into the world of corporate finance or investment banking. And then stumbled upon this guy, Alex Lieberman, who was, like, I wouldn't even call it a newsletter. It was a PDF attached to an email. He actually took a, he made a Word document. He would PDF it and put it to an email. And that was the first newsletter.

• 1:22Shaan Puri?

  So he was, he was already doing it. Was it called Morning Brew?

• 1:25Speaker 01

  No, it was called Market Corner. It was way more market space, way more finance oriented.

• 1:29Sam Parr?

  Was he in college as well? Or is he, had he graduated?

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So he was two years older than I was. And that's a big part of our success, to be honest. If I was his age, we probably would have went out and raised venture capital. So, you know, 2015, you have BuzzFeed raising money, Vice raising money. And the only reason we didn't follow that path was because I was in college and no one was going to fund a sophomore in college. And so Alex went to work at Morgan Stanley for 14 months. I spent a summer in investment banking and was like, holy shit, this is miserable. Get me out of here. And so I was like, all right, well, I got this Morning Brew thing. I might as well do it for a couple of years. And what's the worst thing that happens? I come back here and that was the, that was the start of going full-time.

• 2:09Sam Parr?

  What did your nice Jewish parents think about you not becoming a banker and instead working on a newsletter?

• 2:16Speaker 01

  So my parents were actually okay with it, except I told them after my junior year, I said, I have one more year of college. What if I just don't go back? What if I don't finish? And the idea of them spending $150,000 on three years of college and not finishing my senior year drove them nuts. So the deal we made is if I graduate and they were cool with me doing Morning Brew for a year or two after.

• 2:41Sam Parr?

  And then fast forward, you guys, so it was funny. Right when we were in the process of selling, you announced that you had sold like months or two months before us. And so you guys sold a portion of the business, I think the majority of the business for something like a $70 million valuation in that ballpark, right?

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, right around there. I think we were actually, we were doing M&A at the same time. We were even talking to some similar partners.

• 3:07Sam Parr?

  I think we were. And the reason why, like Sean and I wanted to have you on, because we want to talk about newsletters, which every, all three of us have a newsletter business. But you and I have an interesting background. We're like, on paper, we kind of hated each other. Like, the whole time-

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Not kind of, I hated you. Dude, I hated you.

• 3:24Sam Parr?

  So I didn't entirely hate you. I just, it was, it was like, I, it was like, just sports, opposing sports teams, where I was like, I have a lot of respect for this person. I don't know anything about their character, but I'm gonna make up the story in my head to like motivate me. And the reason why I wanted to do that was because we, so I launched, we technically launched The Hustle in April, April 2016. Were you before us or after us?

• 3:49Speaker 01

  We were 2015 when we launched the first newsletter, but it wasn't, it was a very small thing then.

• 3:53Sam Parr?

  So we were going like back and forth. It was like, the skim was like the thing. And then it was you and I, Morning Brew and The Hustle. And you guys were this like New York kind of buttoned up crew. I was like a little bit of a crazier person. It was tech, San Francisco. But it was like, everyone kept comparing us. And I remember like wanting to like crush you guys. And then after we both sold, Alex called me and you and I became buddies. And I was like, oh no, I actually love these guys. And now at this point, you and I are great friends and I have a ton of respect. But yeah, like I wanted to crush you. I didn't, I didn't really hate you. What did you feel?

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Look, I think it's always good for a business to have an enemy. I think in the early days, our enemy was the skim. Very quickly, though, we were like, you know what? They're not our enemy. We realized, I think we both realized pretty quickly that you can't raise $25 million for a newsletter and have a good exit. And so I think it was you and us. And so I turned you into the enemy. And I was so immature at the time, right? It was my first thing out of college. I knew nothing. So I was like, here's this guy. He's so abrasive. He's so aggressive. Like, what the fuck? And like, I was so, I wasn't principled. I didn't have real values at the time. And so I just saw you who are super valued, right? You have strong principles, very strong principles, which some people love, tons of people I'm sure don't like. And I was like, this guy is just so abrasive. And I've learned to love that about you.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  But at the time, it just, it rubbed me the wrong way. And I was like, we're gonna make this guy your enemy and we're gonna crush this guy.

• 5:17Sam Parr?

  Dude, I used to get mad because everything that I was bad at, you were good at. And everything that I was good at, I thought you guys were bad at. And I'm like, shit, they're just stealing all my ideas for my ads that I'm running. Or they're stealing all my content ideas. And then I would see how you guys operate and I'd be like, no, we gotta have all these salespeople, just like the, like.

• 5:35Shaan Puri?

  I remember I was at your office and I, and you were talking about Morning Brew and you were like, I thought you would just hate them and be like, they suck. Because I feel like that's how we used to just talk about most people at most startups. It was just like, oh, my God, they suck. And especially one that's doing what you're doing, then it's like, oh, I already want you to suck. So I'm gonna say that. And instead, you were like, God, why is this email look better than ours? And you would just like, show it to the whole team. And you're like, look at this. Why does this look so much better than our email? Look at what they do at the top. Like, God, there's something like, you're just like, they're so much better at that. You know, like the formatting or the cleanliness or like the brand that they are doing at the, I remember at the top of the email.

• 6:17Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, wow, he just respects the actual like craft so much that he can't even hate him fully. He's like, ah, they're doing good at these three things.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Sam, I'll give you a story I think I've ever told you, which is, you know, there was a time where I thought our copy was much better than yours, our editorial. And then there was a time where I thought you guys passed us, right? And Alex, in particular, was maniacal about this. He would print out Morning Brew and The Hustle every single morning.

• 6:46Sam Parr?

  God, that's so funny.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  And we would just go line by line. We'd sit down line by line and we'd be like, that line's better. No, our line's better. No, that, and we'd go line by line. Some of the early Morning Brew employees, they really hated you. Because when you wrote a story that we wrote, and when yours was better, and Alex thought yours was better, people, I mean, people were pissed. There was like a revolt in the Morning Brew office one morning. Because people were like, no, ours is better. And I think ultimately it wasn't better or worse, right? It was just catered towards different people. But, I mean, yeah, we printed out your newsletter every day and read through it, through it for, I don't know, six months, nine months? Like, we were just so focused. Like, I've never been as hyper-focused as I was in 2018 on us writing the best newsletter, growing the best newsletter, and selling it. Like, I woke up every day, write, grow, sell, write, grow, sell. Like, we wrote it in the wall.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  And at 11:00 a.m. every single day, we had the Great Wall of Opens. And we'd track our open rate and write it down on the wall. And we had that for probably two years running, every day. What was our open rate?

• 7:41Sam Parr?

  And your strategy was to, our, our strategies were, they diverged and they were different. So, we were gonna launch, we were gonna stay in this space and verticalize and launch subscriptions, services, and all this other stuff. You guys launched multiple different newsletters, which meant, from my eyes, you grew your revenue quicker. I personally hate that business, because I don't like advertising that much. But you grew your revenue way faster than us. Um, well, I think you did. Like, we, if we were one year behind you, I think we were tracking one year behind. So, the year we sold, I think we could have done 18 or 20 million in revenue, which is around, you were, I think, the same year. So, we were like, tracking perfectly, which is really interesting. But you went this horizontal route, where you launched multiple newsletters. Which route do you like, looking back?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Look, I mean, it's tough to say we took the route, the wrong route. But I also think it's what we had to do, right? We didn't have the choice you had because our content was more general business, right? You wrote with an edge, with a tone. You were targeting entrepreneurs or maybe like account executives who want to become entrepreneurs. And so you had way more opportunity to launch a trends or to launch a HustleCon. For us, we thought, you know, a general Morning Brew subscription wasn't going to work. A general Morning Brew event wasn't going to work. The, the tone wasn't specific enough. The, the target customer wasn't specific enough. But we fell in love with this B2B business, which I know both of you gotten a little bit of Twitter shit. When you, when you spoke about the B2B world and, you know, industry dive. But we, I fell in love with that business.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  And I'm like, wow, if you can get in front of retail professionals and HR professionals, and we have them in our newsletter. And it was the craziest business where we'd launch a newsletter and then we'd break even before we even hired the writers. Because we pre-sell, you know, advertiser, like, let's call it like a B2B SaaS company into one of these newsletters. And so I don't think there's better or worse. I think your, our opportunity was easier to get to 100 million of revenue. Yours was easier to get to, let's call it like a billion dollar company, right? Because you could have subscription, multi-revenue stream much easier. It just was going to take another, you know, eight to 10 years.

• 9:45Sam Parr?

  That's great. I'm happy I'm learning that now after I sold it.

• 9:49Shaan Puri?

  I'm happy I got to see it because I just got to copy both of your playbooks and do that, do it for the milk road. Like all three of us were able to win with the same playbook. Mine was the easiest path of all because I could just text you guys and be like, hey, I'm thinking about doing your thing. But for crypto, what do you think? It was like, yeah, I think it's going to work. Let's do it.

• 10:07Sam Parr?

  And did the playbook work perfectly, Sean, you think?

• 10:10Shaan Puri?

  It has so far, right? We basically, less than a year, we built the number one, like the biggest daily crypto email. It's profitable. It's, you know, seven figures. It's, I don't know, like it worked as well as one could expect. Bootstrapped it, you know, in our spare time. Like that's like as good as I could have expected that to go.

• 10:30Sam Parr?

  Dude, that's why these businesses are awesome is people don't realize that's why I always hate when people say if you're gonna start it over again, what would you do? I'm like, do the same thing. Like it works. It consistently works. I know Austin, you're way more like pessimistic. You got, you're like, I'm pretty paranoid. You're way more paranoid. And I know you say like, oh, it can't work again. And I'm like, no, man, I think it, I think it can.

• 10:50Shaan Puri?

  Austin, you have like a framework around, you have like a lot of opinions around email newsletters. Give us that and put it in the context of Milk Road. Like when I told you I was gonna do that, or you saw I was gonna do that, what'd you think? And did that fit your framework for what you thought might work? Or was that a maybe an outlier? What was it?

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it perfectly fits the framework. So I'm pessimistic on relaunching the next morning brew, a general business, four million person email. But basically I split up newsletters into three categories. One are the editorial newsletters, right? You have your sub stackers, your, your packing McCormick's full newsletter, maybe 2,000 words, maybe 10,000. If you're some of these writers, that's like category one, right? Category two is what we did aggregation, right? And Sam and I kind of went more general, general business went for scale. And then after that, you kind of have like the, let's call it morning brew for X, right? Where you, you still have that aggregation of summaries, but you're more niche, right? And maybe the TAM is smaller, but you think because of your tone and because of the way you cover it,

• 11:50Speaker 01

  you can have a larger percent of that TAM reading your product, which Sean, I think is what you're doing. And the third is more of like your classic, hey, I'm gonna give you five links, your five bullet Friday or things like that. I think the biggest opportunity is Sean, what you did, which is morning brew for X. You find a growing industry and you just ride that tail wave and you just own that and build a brand, something really distinct in one of these, you know, niches.

• 12:14Shaan Puri?

  If X is finance or X is something that's more B to B or like, you know, a professional, you know, something that's a job title, then X works better than if X is, you know, fly fishing or, or, or, you know, basketball or something like that.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think if you're gonna go consumer route, right? Target consumers, it's gotta be high dollar. It's gotta be, you know, the newsletter for Ferrari owners or the newsletter for Rolex owners, right? Something where people spend, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on this. B2B is great as well. That's the other place I would go. And so you were kind of like, I call it maybe pro-sumery, right? It was the best of both worlds. You get hit on both worlds. You got the consumer oriented readers and then also the people who work in the crypto industry.

• 12:57Sam Parr?

  Did you agree with our? I know that I, and we actually did, or I'll say it myself. I did sound like a douchebag when I was talking about industry drive. I didn't mean to like phrase it that the way that I did. But when we were talking about industry drive, you know, they're a $600 million

• 13:12Sam Parr?

  company that mostly is a newsletter business. And our criticism towards the B2B industry was like, the content's pretty whack. Do you agree with that? That assessment? Like, do you still think there's a lot of opportunity to build really big B2B media companies?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just think you have to do it the way Sean did it, right? Which is go the complete opposite route, right? So they're, they're pretty dry. They have a standardized process. They go in every single vertical. Look, I think their business model is simple, but it's not easy. I don't think what they did was easy at all, but I think it's very simple. The playbook is very well defined. There's no crazy tech. They're not, you know, building some AI machine learning thing. It's they create great content, they resonate, they sell ads into it. But the way to compete, I think, is to treat B2B like consumer, right? To treat them like people, like, you know, the milk road does.

• 13:58Sam Parr?

  Why is it not? You're saying it's simple but not easy. Why is it not? What do you mean it's not easy?

• 14:02Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I think to scale across all those verticals, right? To your point, ad businesses are pretty tough, right? And so you take on a lot of costs and you can't, you can't mess up, right? Because if you, you go wrong in verticals, you have a bunch of writers and salespeople. And, and the thing about media businesses, even when they're profitable, the difference between 20% profit margins and losing 20% is way, is way like it's easier to flip that because of all your fixed costs. It's not SaaS. You don't have locked in, you know, you're a B2B SaaS company. You have locked in 100 or 110% of your revenue the next year because of renewals. Every day with ads, it's another grind. You gotta go sell more ads. And so it, it, it's not easy. You know, ad business is an absolute grind.

• 14:46Shaan Puri?

  We found this guy. I'm going to give a shout out here. His name's, I don't know. I think you pronounce it Volter. And he's from the Netherlands and he, I think he's at school right now. I don't know what happened, but I did a video. I thought, okay, maybe, maybe we'll start doing YouTube content. I did this video when Luna collapsed and I did this video like, oh, I lost a bunch of money on Luna. And I did this video. I thought it was gonna be like, funny. I was like, ah, micro viral, whatever. We came out late. We came out like three weeks after the news. So that was kind of stupid. So it didn't, didn't go super viral, but one good thing came of it, which was this kid, this kid on Twitter was like, hey, your thumbnail sucks for, for your YouTube thing. Like it should be like this or like this or like this. He did this thread and I was like, yo, you're great.

• 15:30Shaan Puri?

  I don't know if I'm going to do any more YouTube videos, but like you want to just come in our Slack. Cause I just, well, I like what you just did. That was like helpful and it was quick. And like, you know, he's like, sure. Yeah. That'd be amazing. I love the milk road. And so he joins our Slack.

• 15:44Shaan Puri?

  First we're like, what are we gonna do with this guy? Like, what the fuck is this guy? Like imagine like a two person meeting and I just invite this third guy from the Netherlands to a meeting. You'd be like, uh, like this guy gonna talk? What's, why is he here? And for two months, no one knew why he was there. But then something amazing happened. We were like, ah, we need to sell ads like for the next month or whatever. And it was like, nobody wanted to do it. It was just like, uh, do we have to? Like it's just gonna be a pain in the ass. It just sucks to sell ads. Like, oh, we should hire a sales guy. It's like, uh, even hiring a sales guy is kind of a shitty task.

• 16:19Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Let's procrastinate a little bit. And, uh, along the way, this guy had been wanting, or this guy had been always just messaging us ideas like, I think he's like, I don't know. He's like in the Slack. So he's like, try to be productive. So he would just non-stop message ideas of things we could do. And it got to the point where Ben was just sort of like, dude, this guy is like, you know, incessant, like he won't stop messaging. And it's like, you know, it's at first it's a good, but like, nobody can handle this volume of ideas. Like, this is crazy. And then he's like, he's like, you gotta do something about this. And I was like, okay, I'll, I don't know, I'll talk to him or I'll kick him out of Slack. And I was like, hey, what if we just point the machine gun like outwards instead of like, right now, the machine gun's shooting us with

• 17:03Shaan Puri?

  ideas. What if we just made him like, sell the ads? And he just bothered the hell out of everybody else. And so that's what we did. And this guy is the single-handedly crushing Milk Road ad sales through the crypto bear market. Like, we are fully sold out for months on end.

• 17:20Sam Parr?

  Just one guy?

• 17:21Shaan Puri?

  This one kid who's not even 20 years old, just absolutely pillaging the market. And the advertisers will privately DM me and be like, yo, I shared this guy's name with our sales team. Because I was like, this is how you sell. Like, this guy is relentless. And I was like, wow, that was a, that was just like an incredible, I don't know, like incredible thing. He is so impressive.

• 17:45Sam Parr?

  Dude, let's talk about that real quick. Ad sales. Ad sales suck, Austin. They suck. And what I learned getting into the hustle, I, I, did you sell, I sold our first ads. I think I got us, I sold like the first maybe hundred thousand dollars worth of ads. And then in order to scale, we had to hire a sales team. And they would show me like the conversations that they are gonna have. I'm like, there's, this conversation will never work. Like, you're using all this jargon and you're wearing like, these like button up plaid shirts and like these brown leather shoes. Like, you guys look like dweebs. Like, this is never gonna work. And it worked perfectly.

• 18:16Shaan Puri?

  Like, nobody wants to go skateboarding with you right now.

• 18:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Shaan Puri?

  You are not ready if they want to skate.

• 18:25Sam Parr?

  I was like, dude, you look like, you look like your name's Todd or Kyle. Like, this is not gonna work. And uh,

• 18:31Shaan Puri?

  He's like, my name is Todd.

• 18:31Sam Parr?

  It fucking works. Yeah, yeah.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, Sam, you're, you're not cut out. Your personality's not cut out for the, the, the media buying world.

• 18:40Sam Parr?

  Did you do it?

• 18:41Speaker 01

  You're a, well, no, so yeah, in the early days, we bought, right? But we, we, we sold all direct response ads, right? It was Casper mattress. It was away luggage. It was, you know, hey, buy, buy your placement here, you're gonna get. 300 clicks and 3% of them convert and you're gonna make a thousand dollars and we'll charge you 800. As we've grown though, I think this is another difference between us. We were in New York City and it opened up this whole world that I had no idea about, which was the world of media buying and these big ad agencies and they have huge budgets, right? We're not talking about 100 grand from Casper. We're talking about $5 million from the biggest brands in the entire world. And it really is a black box of people who aren't in it. And I think it's one of those things where it's a black box intentionally so people can't get in, right? Finance is the same thing. Every year, there's a new

• 19:26Speaker 01

  term within the ad industry or finance just to keep people on the outside.

• 19:30Sam Parr?

  Dude, it's crazy. It's crazy. And it's like not based in logic or fact. It's based on relationships and like, it's so weird. It's like, oh wait, I have to realize that this person, this lady I'm trying to get to buy ads, she just has to spend this $20 million this quarter and she just wants to find somewhere to place it where she won't get fired. That was such a weird feeling.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the idea of like media budgets, right? Hey, if they don't use it, they lose it. And so you're incentivized to spend money. It's interesting. And it's something that we learned, again, by hiring people in New York, which I think was a big difference between us and you. You had a lower cost, more like inside sales team, a really efficient one, right? You took that route. We didn't take that route. We went for these big brand dollars. And I think both routes work. It depends what you're looking to sell. We just took the route of say, hey, we're gonna dive right in this black box and we're gonna learn all about it. We're gonna get a million dollars. I mean, one of our first advertisers, Discover, gave us a million bucks. I was in college, I'm a senior in college, living in my frat house, right? Like beer cans everywhere. I get an email from the CMO of Discover, like, here's an RFP. I'm like, what in the fuck

• 20:34Speaker 01

  is an RFP? Like, what are you talking about? No clue. I open it up and it's like, hey, give us media plans for like half a million to a million bucks, right? For a million dollars, she could have owned the company seven times over. The company was not worth 100 grand. And here's this woman asking for a million dollar RFP. And we learned it, but it really is a relationship-driven game.

• 20:55Sam Parr?

  But how did you justify that? Like, how do you, like, if AMX says, we're gonna spend $5 million this year, be real, do you actually think that's gonna help them, like, sell more shit?

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I do, right? We do a lot of brand lift studies and things like that, right? It's different, right? It's not, we're not, no one's trying to, you know, like Lexus, for example, or car company.

• 21:18Sam Parr?

  How many brand lift studies did you do? We used to do that, but I'd be like, what the fuck is a brand lift study? Like, are you kidding me, Todd? What the hell is a brand lift study? I don't know what the hell this is. Or we would do all this other stuff, like an RFP. Like, we had been doing it for like six months, and I was like, hey, guys, like, at this point, I'm a little bit too afraid to ask, but what the hell is an RFP?

• 21:41Sam Parr?

  I don't know what this stuff means. I didn't know what any of this stuff. It's so challenging if you don't work in the industry. And then they like, they talk about agencies, and I'm like, wait, what the hell is an agency? Why don't we just go straight to the brand? Like, this stuff from a small business owner's perspective, all of this stuff is crazy, inefficient, and stupid. Now that I've been at a big company, HubSpot, I understand. I'm like, okay, I get, like, these guys are having to, like, give out a billion dollars of marketing. Like, now I understand a lot more. But when you're just a 10% company, you're like, do you guys realize this market study shit doesn't work? Like, this brand study, that's bullshit, right? Like, you're gonna give me $20,000 to write this article? It took me like 20 minutes to do it. Like, so it doesn't make sense when you're small.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, you know, people are, people are buying the audience. They're buying the, their relationship with, with you. They're not buying, you know, purchases or things like that. And so, you know, I think at scale, when you get to 4 million subscribers, if you can change the perception of half a million or a million people, and have, make them, because of a marketing campaign, have a, you know, 10% of people have a higher perception of, of credit card X's programs, like, that is really valuable when your Visa or your Mastercard or your American Express, and you spend a billion dollars? Like, that's so much money. How do you deploy a billion dollars of marketing spend? You go through agencies, and that's how it all happens.

• 22:58Sam Parr?

  Sean and I are really good, I think, at starting stuff. We've got pretty good vision, where we can spin things up and get them to like a million in revenue pretty quickly. The thing that I was always envious of you, because it's my, it's a fairly big shortcoming, I think I have, is you are just so good at, I don't know exactly how to explain it. You've got this, like, almost private equity-like ability. To like, look at numbers and be like, oh, the margin here is shitty. And I'm like, I've never used that word margin in my life. But you'll like, talk about like, the margin here and like, well, if you just change that by like 10%, probably by doing this, your outcome is going to be like this, this and this. Like, you just have this really good operational ability. You're also really good at saying like, well, if you just improve this, this and this, and only focus on that, then in six months, I think your outcome will be this.

• 23:42Sam Parr?

  You're really good at that. And you were really good at that at a very young age. How did you figure out how to do that? How did you learn how to do that and have that insight and have that ability? And also have that faith in like, well, if you just do this, this and this, the outcome might be this, this and this in eight months.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so I got an undergraduate business degree and I always used to shit on undergraduate business degrees. I'm like, what a complete waste of time. Like, those four years were so dumb. But as I look back, it really did give me a pretty good overview of what it takes to to run a business, not actually the day to day of running a business, but like, what is accounting? I took like seven accounting classes, or I don't know, maybe five. Those were actually really valuable to be able to really dive deep into a P and L to real and my summer spent in investment banking to to understand what's the financial model? What drives the model? Those things that, within the context of finance, like, yeah, yeah, they're okay. When the context of running a business was super helpful to understand what levers you need to pull.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  But the other, the flip side is, I looked at you three years ago and I, before we knew each other, maybe even two years ago, and I was like, both of you, I was like, I hate these guys because they're so good at going zero to one. They're so good at coming up with ideas. Like, I'm the opposite, right? I'm not an ideas guy. I can't come up with ideas, but I do think

• 24:55Shaan Puri?

  It is certainly cooler and sexier to do what we do, you know, there's no doubt about that.

• 25:01Shaan Puri?

  It is definitely

• 25:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but like, dude, what would you, I mean, you know, we all, we need to like partner because zero to one is cool. But then like one to 100 million years is pretty fucking cool, too.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, how about you guys take things, you get them off the ground, you take them to three employees and a million dollars of revenue. And I'll take them from one to 100. And we can just pair up and just every couple

• 25:20Shaan Puri?

  I asked him about his margin and he thought I said margarine. He brought me some butter.

• 25:28Sam Parr?

  Dude, like, I didn't understand a lot of that stuff.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  For all we know, the hustle was either a billion dollar company or worthless. Sam just has no idea.

• 25:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah, well, I like, I remember when we were negotiating to sell and like, there was just all these things that people were giving me advice on. And I'm like, man, I just didn't even think about that. Like, it's just, and I actually know a lot of people that are really successful. Like, we're talking billion dollar successful, and they know so little about operations. And there's a lot of people like that, like, who are just, they're good at hiring, like, Richard Branson, I think he famously said, he's like, dude, I didn't know what a P and L was until we hit like hundreds of millions of revenue. Like, I didn't know how to read it.

• 26:07Shaan Puri?

  Sam Bankman-Fried said the same thing, which is super cool.

• 26:11Shaan Puri?

  Awesome. What I like that you said on the operations side, like what Sam's saying is, like, when you were talking earlier, you were like, you know, right, gross, sell. We wrote that on the wall. We woke up every day and said, right, gross, sell. We had the great

• 26:25Sam Parr?

  That's what I'm saying. He's so good at that.

• 26:26Shaan Puri?

  Those are the things that like, I used to do such like similar, like, we literally had the wall, but not with Milk Road, actually. But this is like, kind of my earlier startups. And at Monkey Inferno, I remember, Sam, you probably remember this, when people used to come in, like, we would always have like, all this shit on the walls and like, these sayings and these posters.

• 26:44Sam Parr?

  Like, indoctrination things.

• 26:46Shaan Puri?

  The indoctrination. And I always felt like, whenever I would meet founders, one of the highest predictors of success was, do they even know what the main thing is? And it sounds like a stupid question, but for a lot of founders, they didn't really understand what the main thing was for their business. They didn't know their business's version of right, gross, sell. Okay. And even if they understood like that, that's kind of generic. Okay, what are you gonna do with that? They didn't understand to translate that into the Great Wall of Opens is the number we're gonna write down every day. We're gonna look at it. And if it's bad, we're gonna do something about it. And if it's good, we're gonna like, double down on that. And that's what daily work is, is around this one number. And so, it was like, I remember, we had these founders in the office, and they would be like, I'd be

• 27:30Shaan Puri?

  like, all right, what's the, you know, how many new customers you guys get today? Or like, what's the revenue? And they have to like, oh, yeah, let me check. And they would like, at first, they didn't have a dashboard. They're like, going into the database. Like, bro, you haven't built an easy way to know this number? And then, then finally, they built that. And then they always had to check. And I was like, how do you not know? Why am I asking this question? Like, it's 3pm. One of y'all two should have asked this question by 3pm, like, every day. This is crazy. And they just didn't do it. And I was like, these guys are gonna fail because they don't know how to keep the main thing, the main thing. Is that something that you see or like did consciously? Like where'd you get that? Because that wasn't obvious to me right out of college, but it sounds like you got it right, right away.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  I can't find this client info.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that I mean, for us, I mean, it's almost an insult, right? We were, we people like, why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that? Why didn't you go into video? We were too dumb to do that. Like we had no, we're like, video? How the hell do you make a video? We can barely get our newsletter out. I mean, there were days where we, we finished the newsletter like 2am, we'd be coding the thing ourselves. And so I think it was partially, you know, a little bit of foresight, but also partially a forcing function. You know, we just looked at, we're like, if we do these things, we will get here. And we looked at the math and we're like, everyone's telling us we're crazy. But if we grow subs $50,000 every or 50,000 subscribers every single month, and our costs don't change, we're going to go from 50,000 monthly revenue to 75, to 100, to 125. And by end of this year, we're going to be at a million subs,

• 29:12Speaker 01

  doing a million dollars of revenue a month. And I tell that to investors and people, they'd be like, that doesn't make any sense. I'm like, I don't know what to tell you. Like, I'm just looking at the Excel. And people couldn't, I mean, we spoke to investors and they were like, what do you mean, your business only has $100,000 of costs? I'm like, it's people, it's growth marketing, and it's an ESP. That's it. That's all we spend money on.

• 29:33Sam Parr?

  What was that last line? I don't even know what that last line is.

• 29:35Shaan Puri?

  Email.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  It's like, email service provider. We use sale through.

• 29:38Sam Parr?

  Oh, ESP. Okay. I think I said, I was like, SP. I was like, what the hell is SP? All right.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  But it, but it's, it's one of those things where like, it was just when you boil it down to numbers and run it in an Excel model. It's like, it's so simple. And people, these investors were like, well, like, you're not accounting for this and that. I'm like, it's all bullshit. Like, none of that means anything. I'm just trying to make money. Like, I'm just trying

• 29:56Shaan Puri?

  They also did some scrappy stuff. I remember like, didn't you get your first, I don't know, a few thousand emails just by like, standing in a classroom?

• 30:05Speaker 01

  We, I think we may have, we may have broken a couple laws to get our first couple thousand.

• 30:09Shaan Puri?

  People would walk out, you'd have a piece of paper and be like, hey, just write your email.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  We wouldn't let him walk out. So we go in the beginning of a lecture, these Econ 101 lectures, like a thousand people. And I hated public, I still do, but I hated public speaking. And I was like, look, if I'm going to this lecture hall and I'm talking from a thousand people, I better get every damn email. And so what I would do is I'd speak in front of these people, and I'd walk around.

• 30:34Shaan Puri?

  Like the teacher would let you speak, or you would just stand up?

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, the teacher would let us speak because there's this thing called Michigan time. So you actually had 10 minutes in between each class. So if the class started at 10, it actually started at 10:10. And so at 10:05, I get up there, I pitch them on Morning Brew, and then I'd basically print out an Excel document, and I'd walk around. I would just stand in front of people and just stare them in the eyes until they gave me their email. And I'd sit in the back of the class and type every email in. And I'd be like, shit, Alex, that an A or a C or an E? He'd be like, who cares? Put them all in. And we'd have like six permutations of every single email. And that's how we got to like 10,000 or 15,000 at Michigan. And then we're like, do you have a friend at Penn State? I have a friend at Penn State. Let's do this at Penn State. Let's do it at Miami. Let's

• 31:19Speaker 01

  do it at NYU. And next thing you know, we have like 50,000 people across the country, college students, reading Morning Brew.

• 31:25Sam Parr?

  Are your parents wealthy? Did you grow up wealthy?

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Uh, I'd say middle class, upper middle class. But what's interesting, so I grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore. And like, I didn't know, I thought I knew wealth. And then I moved to, I went to Michigan, and I met people from LA and New York. And I moved to New York, and I saw people from New York. And I never saw that kind of wealth. And to me, that was inspiring. That was exciting. Because I came from, again, I was like a very well off, I had everything I needed. But, you know, I know people, I met people at school who were flying private planes. I know what a private plane was.

• 31:58Shaan Puri?

  You got rich pretty young, right? Like, when did you guys sell? You're pretty young right now. I think you guys sold at, what, 26 or something?

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think 25.

• 32:06Sam Parr?

  Well, the reason, but hold on real quick. The reason I asked was because like you've got this like this immigrant hustle and before I knew you, I stereotyped you as this like, ah, everything's been given to this rich kid like and, and, and hearing this story, I'm like, oh no, these guys were like just as gritty as I was for sure, sometimes more.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Alex has his own story about, you know, his family and, and his dad passed away. And so he was, I mean, I learned so much from Alex about hunger. Like Alex, again, he broke things down the same way I did. Alex would be like, hey, you know, I'd be like, Alex, we need a hundred advertisers this year. I'd be like, I don't know how we're gonna do it. We have zero. He goes, I know exactly how we'll do it. I'm gonna go on LinkedIn and I'm not gonna sleep until I message a thousand companies. And we'll get a 10% reply rate. I'll be like, you're gonna message a thousand companies? He's like, well, isn't that what you need to do to get to 100 advertisers? I'd be like, yeah, but that sounds crazy. He goes, well, let's start working. And we just like, you know, sit there, drink beer and we work and just, you know, crank out cold DMs, the head of, I mean, I must know the head of growth at every New York City

• 33:08Speaker 01

  direct to consumer company because Alex incessantly emailed them. And we would like, we would laugh at the response, like we would get excited when someone responded to be like, hey, Alex, this is your ninth email. Like you gotta stop following up. Like number eight was good, but nine, you, you passed it. So yeah, I think we both had that hustle.

• 33:25Sam Parr?

  What did it feel like, to back, to back to what Sean was saying, you're 25 and you, I don't know how much you made, but let's just say eight figures. What's that feel like when you're 25?

• 33:37Sam Parr?

  Fucking dope?

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so first off, it was, it was, it's very cool. It's great.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  So, so it's, so it's interesting, right? Um, I, I got the wire, the sum of money. I was, it was during COVID, so I get this, like, listen to this juxtaposition. On one hand, I just made a boatload of money, more money than, you know, I thought I'd ever make, right? On the other hand, I'm living in my childhood bedroom, sitting next to my parents as the wire hits my account. And everyone's like, what are you gonna do now? I was like, I don't know, my mom's cooking like meatloaf.

• 34:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, tell your mom, mom, make me breakfast.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was the most anti-clamatic thing ever. It was unbelievably anti-clamatic.

• 34:23Sam Parr?

  You should have just moved into the master bedroom.

• 34:28Shaan Puri?

  Move over, mom and dad. This shit's mine.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  No, but I, I, I think, look, I, I think, uh, getting a quick win early in, or a win early in life is so important, right? Just having that swagger, that confidence, that brand allows me to do so much that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. But getting to any room, I can get in touch with anyone, right?

• 34:52Shaan Puri?

  What other opportunities do you think you get?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  I mean, again, like, get into any room, right? So meetings, uh, investing.

• 35:00Shaan Puri?

  What are, what are some cool rooms you got into?

• 35:03Speaker 01

  I mean, again, like, it's the same things that I think you guys are, you, you guys also have wins, right? I don't think anything is, is that.

• 35:09Shaan Puri?

  Well, I don't like to leave my house. And then Sam's only interested in like, people that are like, this guy's the best ax thrower in, you know, the country. And he's like, super pumped about it. I'm like, I don't think you needed to like, you know, pull your, your, you know, rich guy card to get in touch with him. But I feel like you, I don't know, like, have you met Leo DiCaprio? I feel like you might have just bumped into Leo DiCaprio somewhere. That, I feel like that's more your vibe in New York.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Well, so, so I, I, I bumped into Justin Bieber in the Bahamas, um, which was pretty cool. Um, but no, I mean, like, the, the weekend we had with, with, uh, uh, what's his name? Mr. Beast and, and, uh, Hussam was cool. I spent a weekend with Kid Rock on his ranch.

• 35:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, tell me about that.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  That was pretty sick.

• 35:49Shaan Puri?

  What was that like?

• 35:51Speaker 01

  I mean, he's a, a unique, unique character. Again, this is all according to him. So I mean, I've fact checked this, but I'll assume he's telling the truth. He told me he's the only person to play at both President Obama and President Trump's inaugurations. He played at both. And he knows both super well. He's close to both. And he has this, this, he lives in this huge ranch outside of Nashville, right? I went there. It was, uh, my friend, his name's Shane. Uh, he works in tech. He's good friends with Kid Rock. Kid Rock, obviously, music guy. And Shane put together 10 people in tech, Kid Rock, 10 people in music. We go to his ranch. And I mean, you get there and it's like out of a movie, right? You walk in and Kid Rock's back is to me, he's got a cigar sticking out of his mouth. He's got a shotgun and he's

• 36:36Speaker 01

  just shooting clay pigeons. And the whole weekend was out of a movie, right? His studio, unbelievable. We pulled all nighter together, just telling stories about Eminem. I mean, he's a, it's really, really cool.

• 36:48Sam Parr?

  He's a, a lot of people don't realize this, but Kid Rock got famous right before CDs went down. And he's one of the best selling artists of all time. And I, it wouldn't surprise me if he's probably worth two or $300 million because he was famous when CDs were 18 and $21. And so like, it's wild.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so now though, I think he's a new source of wealth. So he owns, again, this is what I've been told, he owns the most popular bar in all of Nashville. And whereas most of the other ones, like Luke Bryan has one and a bunch of other country singers, they just license their name to the bar, right? And they make a couple percent. I think Kid Rock's like a 50/50 owner.

• 37:25Sam Parr?

  Probably makes $2 million bucks a month.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  No, I've heard more.

• 37:28Sam Parr?

  Really?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Like it's approaching, I've heard, again, I don't know if this is true, I've heard it's big, big money, you know, high, high, tens of millions.

• 37:36Sam Parr?

  You know,

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Which is crazy.

• 37:38Sam Parr?

  Dude, the, one of the best things about our companies and like the culture that us three have kind of built with our friends, because we kind of like got into this media game a little bit early. And I don't know about you, Austin, but when the hustle was starting, there wasn't that many people who we could look at and be like, well, let's just do what they do, but different. They're like, I remember I told this one media guy who I'll tell you afterwards, he's the founder of a multi-billion dollar media company now. I was like, here's what I'm doing. He goes, bro, this will never make more than $2 million a year in revenue. And this other person who I, who I'm now good friends with was like, dude, what are you talking about this? I'm like, it doesn't matter. It's just a small screen. Who cares? Like if you're an email or on a website, it doesn't matter. The math shows X, Y, and Z. And so we had to hire like 24 year olds who like were promising,

• 38:23Sam Parr?

  but like, and then we had to learn about it as we grew. And but because of that, both Morning Brew, the hustle and the, and the crew that now, Sean, I mean, Sean's great at this as well. We've, we've done a really cool job of like finding smart inexperienced people who now have gone on to do a lot of really cool stuff. And that makes me really, really proud to like, see like this crew that we've all built. And so there's like the hustle crew, the morning brew crew, and then Sean was like the hustle thing. Now he's got his own thing. Have you noticed that? Like we all have this little like, Army of people who have like been through like this like self-created like training camp. It's kind of neat, right?

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. I mean, it's, it's, we, in the early days, we could not get people to work with us who didn't want to be entrepreneurs. And the pitch was simply like, hey, we're starting a business. You'll be in on the ground floor, right? You'll see what it's like. And that's, that's all you get. Like, you know, we didn't have, for the first year and a half, I was so cheap. For the first year and a half of Morning Brew, you didn't get a company computer. You had to bring your own computer to work.

• 39:24Sam Parr?

  Dude, I was famous because on Facebook I would put, hey, I'm buying, I'm buying laptops. Does anyone have a Mac for sale for $500?

• 39:31Speaker 01

  No, dude, we were not dropping any money on company computer. We didn't have healthcare. In the early days, you got nothing. You got, I mean, and we, we, we couldn't afford it because I was so against taking venture capital. I was like, we're going to make every penny count. One more story, Fridays at 3 o'clock, we'd all go pencils down, work would stop because we had a referral program. We'd send out stickers and T-shirts and that whole thing that, you know, I'm sure we've all seen, but

• 39:55Sam Parr?

  You had to pack it.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  We had no, we had no packing. And so we'd sit down, we'd like wheel in the, we were keg into our office and we'd conveyor, you know, we, we do like an assembly line. The first person would, would like open the envelope. The next person would stick the sticker in there. The next person would lick them. The next person would put the, the, the label on. And for like three or four hours from like 3pm till 7pm on Fridays, that's all we did was just pack envelopes of shit.

• 40:19Sam Parr?

  Well, you're, one of your early guys, Tyler Dank, has gone on to start Beehive, which is a really cool company. He, he seemed like a really good entrepreneur. He's pivoting or iterating really quickly. And then I've got a couple of people who have done that. And then, um, like, it's, it's just cool to see like these people who are young and not dumb, but like just young and like inexperienced, go on to like build cool shit. And then like your ex-people are now at other newsletter companies. And then Sean has hired a couple of my ex-people or, and probably it seems like a couple of your ex-people. And it's like this incestuous thing, which at first I would be jealous. I'm like, whoa, what the hell? Why are they working with this person? But now I'm like, oh, this is awesome, man. Like we've created this like tiny little industry of, of newsletter nerds and it's actually quite cool.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I think it's really cool. And I think there's be so much more value created. I think what Tyler's doing at Beehive is amazing. I think what I've been so impressed with him is like the the maturation from the morning brew days of, you know, it's like six of us and he's a little bit of everything to the way he's been able to scale himself and scale that team is amazing. And so it's really and Trung's the same way. Like what Trung's done is incredible. And there's, I mean, there's a ton of examples. And it's really cool to see.

• 41:27Sam Parr?

  Do you regret selling?

• 41:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 41:31Sam Parr?

  That's, that's, you answered that quickly, even though like

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Not even a little bit.

• 41:34Sam Parr?

  So you sold part of the business. What do you think the entire business is going to sell for in the future? Hundreds of millions?

• 41:42Speaker 01

  I think many multiples of what we sold the first half for. But we structured the deal in a way that I thought was great. Right? I mean, the ability to have life changing money. If anyone has the option, like, I always think it's good to take half your chips off the table. Right? And maybe I'm biased, because I did that and it's worked. But I thought it was really important. But I still have enough upside where I'm excited. Right? It's not like a tiny earn out that people sign where it's like 10% of the deal. It can, you know, it can be really, really meaningful. And that drives me. That keeps me excited. It keeps me on the hunt. I love the company. I love the people we work with. I love the executive team. But I would, I, I mean, during COVID or during, I wouldn't have slept at night. And I just, I sleep very well at night, knowing that like I have my, my nest egg.

• 42:25Shaan Puri?

  And so what'd you do with money? Did you think cool with it? Or do you, uh, did you touch it right away? What, that money hits the bank, you're at your parents' house? What, what happened to that money over the next, I don't know how long it's been, like a year or two?

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I haven't, I tell you, in terms of everyone's like, oh, yeah, do like, make a splurge purchase. There was nothing out there that I was that excited about buying. So I ended up buying a car, which is expensive. I didn't buy like a Mercedes. I bought an Acura, right? Nothing crazy. I doubled my, or I, I

• 42:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 42:56Sam Parr?

  Pre-owned Acura?

• 42:59Speaker 01

  It wasn't pre-owned, brand new, 2022, sports boat, sports edition, ATEC, ATEC.

• 43:05Shaan Puri?

  Air conditioning, it has air conditioning. Why? Dude, you really do have that immigrant mentality. But I think we need to get you like a 23 and me test. I feel like there's something going on here. You've got too much immigrant energy. I love it.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  No, but I mean, I I I increased my rent four to five times, right? I live in a great apartment. Um, I went on an amazing vacation last summer. Um, you know, I I actually love, I know you guys know Ramit Sethi or Sethi, I'm not sure I pronounce the last name, but like that idea of like your rich life and your spending on, because I mean, uh, lifestyle creep is real.

• 43:42Shaan Puri?

  Totally.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  That is real. And so like, look, I spend money on the things that I find interesting and that I like. And I love traveling and staying at really nice hotels and spending a ton of money on business class flights and things like that. I like living in a nice apartment, but like I live in New York City. What am I going to do? Drop another 50K on a car that sits in a parking lot 361 days a year. It's a complete waste of money. It's just stupid. And, you know, Morgan Housel actually tweeted this. Um, and I read this too. In Will Smith's book, he has a great quote. He was talking about fame and becoming famous. And the quote was something like, becoming famous is awesome.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  Being famous is cool and losing any fame is horrible. And I feel the same exact way about money. Right? I feel the same way. And so I have no desire to like spend money on things I don't actually care about. I don't want to, I don't want to lose my money because I can, you know, change the A to a, you know, an M or whatever on a Mercedes. So I spend money that I, on things I actually care about so I can make sure I maintain my wealth.

• 44:46Shaan Puri?

  What do you invest in? Or do you just, are you conservative? Are you aggressive? Like, what's the pie chart of like, of the hundred percent? Where did, where did the money go?

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I probably took like 85, 90% of it and put it into very, very boring stuff. Right? S and P 500 or Vanguard, like target date funds, like 2065 or something like that.

• 45:09Shaan Puri?

  You did this yourself or you hired like a wealth person?

• 45:12Speaker 01

  No, I hired a team. It's a good thing I did because if not, I would have went off the rails. Right? Um, and then I put, you know, five, maybe seven percent in crypto. Right? And I put another five percent in venture investing. Right? Uh, but the vast, vast majority is in really boring real estate, S and P 500, uh, and.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Like bonds, right? But like really boring shit.

• 45:35Shaan Puri?

  Nice. Let's talk about some non-newsletter stuff. So you got a bunch of ideas. When we were hanging out at Camp MFM, you were telling me about like this thing you're doing and this thing you're doing. I was like, oh, this guy's like way more dynamic and interested in a whole bunch of different things. What are some ideas that you think would be cool to share?

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'll throw out a bunch of ideas I have, but one general framework I think people should think about is when you're in shitty economic times like we're going into now, I think the the framework you should use is you should look to save companies money or earn individuals' side income, right? Before companies, money didn't matter, right? Capital was abundant. And so companies, they were all about just grow, grow, grow, right? How can you help me grow? It's a 180 now. You know, people were trading their money for others' people's other people's time, right? Now they're trading time for money. And so all, you know, if you can help companies preserve money, you can, I think, build really, really great side hustles. So a few ideas, right?

• 46:40Speaker 01

  I think it's like what's old is new. And then there's a bunch of agencies I think can be really interesting to start right now. One is outsource talent. I knew nothing about the outsourced talent game. I recently became a co-owner in a business. It's a really interesting business called Oceans. They found talent in Sri Lanka, right? Really cool talent in Sri Lanka where they've US graduates come to tech startups, work there, really interesting. And I think there are ways, right? They have a unique advantage going to Sri Lanka, which we don't really have to talk about. But I think there are companies who were hiring a full-time copywriter, let's call it, or a full-time marketer. And they probably only need them for 25, 30 hours a week. 2021, screw it, right? We'll need them at some point. I think now companies are really questioning FTEs, right?

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Do you need a full-time hire? And so you can create these niche marketplaces. And I'm getting investment opportunities to them all the time, and they're just not venture scale. But you bootstrap a marketplace. Let's call it like a content marketing agency or content marketing marketplace for B2B companies, right? These stocks are down 90, 95%. They're trying to drop FTEs, but they still want content, right? We all know how valuable owning audience and content is, and building that marketplace, helping them find people. I think simple services like that are going to come back into vogue and be very, very profitable.

• 47:58Sam Parr?

  What's that company where the founder got in trouble for not converting the the stock, converting the convertible notes, but it was a marketplace for developers and it like bootstrapped its way up practically with top towel. So top towel, they got in trouble because they only raised like 800,000 or a million dollars, but they didn't convert the the note or whatever. So it was controversial, but they basically have bootstrapped it to this point to like north of a hundred million in net revenue. And so these marketplaces are like can be, they can be pretty freaking powerful. It seemed, they seemed hard to get off the ground, but they don't seem that hard if you already working in the in the industry and it's a super niche, a niche topic because people ask me all

• 48:41Sam Parr?

  the time, they go, hey, I want to hire writers. Who should I hire? And I'm like, I don't know, man, it's hard. I don't know who you should hire.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the one I, the one I'm now a co-owner in has gone from zero to seven figures of ARR in like eight months, right? You've had a very specific target customer.

• 48:56Sam Parr?

  That's gross.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Unique talent.

• 48:57Sam Parr?

  Gross or is that just your take?

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Margins are, no, no. Well, now both, right? Both are seven figures of ARR.

• 49:04Sam Parr?

  That's crazy.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:06Sam Parr?

  And then what's his name? Marshall from Marshall Haas, he did shepherd. What's the URL?

• 49:10Shaan Puri?

  It's the same thing, right? Same, same business.

• 49:13Sam Parr?

  And I, it seems like he's scaled that to high seven figures in like less than a year, it seems from the outside.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I think they're a bit different, right? Ours is, I think there's is more like strictly EAs. The one we have is more, you know, you have people in finance, people in operations. What's interesting about Sri Lanka is they have big four accounting firms, right? So you can pose people, not just from local businesses, but from people who've been trained by Ernsting Young and Deloitte. And so it's an interesting, an interesting demographic to go into.

• 49:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I love that one. I think that's a great one. What are, what are some other like, you know, help businesses save money, help, the other one you said is help individuals earn side money. What's a, what's an example of that?

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So here's one I think is interesting, right? So you built Morning Brew for crypto, right? I know a lot of people have spoken about this, but I don't think anyone's really built the brand yet. I think Morning Brew or the hustle for AI is gonna be huge.

• 50:06Sam Parr?

  How's that feel, by the way? I think you're just like calling Sean the Morning Brew of blank.

• 50:11Shaan Puri?

  It's okay. It's okay. We did kick your ass in crypto. I mean, it's okay. It's okay that that happened. We could just let it go though. We could tell, we could take a collective deep breath and just let it go if you, if that would help.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  No, no, again, you guys did a really great job. I thought that was awesome. And I think someone's gonna do the same thing in AI, right? And so the bootstrap version of this is to do what you did, right? The AI newsletter, right down the fairway, have a unique tone, integrate yourself into the audience. The way I think to take it to the next level is the last three months, thousands of entrepreneurs have all started tinkering on little AI side projects, right? And they all have 50, 100 K of ARR. And I've been reaching out to all these founders, like, you know, different little tools, right? These are not real big businesses. They're all side hustles, right? I went home for Thanksgiving. I asked all my friends from home, my family, hey, like, have you guys been playing around with the chat GPT? Have you been playing around? And they're

• 51:09Speaker 01

  like, what in the hell are you talking about? Right? And so clearly, it's the same customer for all of these different things, right? And so I think this is an opportunity for the AI for Morning Brew to start a little tiny capital or a little holding company where you can start to invest and buy these businesses, right? Give an off-ramp to these founders who've built these 50 or 100 or 150 K ARR businesses and start cross promoting them, bundling, marketing them. You write reviews for your little AI tool and then you promote it. And instead of having advertising, which again, Sam has spoken about how it's difficult, you're just promoting all your products. You have this portfolio of 10, 20, 30 little AI tools and maybe each one is half a million or a million of ARR. But all together, you can get pretty big pretty quickly.

• 51:55Shaan Puri?

  That one seems harder to me. I feel like, like, I like the idea, but I'm like, okay, realistically, if I did that, I feel like I would, I like ideas where the idea is so good, my execution can be like a seven out of 10 and I still win.

• 52:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but this is his thing, man. This is his thing. He executes some of these things really well.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  I don't think it'd be that hard. I'm telling you, I've been talking to a bunch of these, like, these founders, these little AI side projects. And I've been, I'm like, what are you doing with it? And they're like, I have no idea.

• 52:27Shaan Puri?

  The reason I think it's hard is not because you can't roll them up, you can't buy them. I think it's hard because it's like the Lindy effect, right? So when something's been around for three months, is that 50 K MRR? And it seems great. Like, you don't know if that thing's gonna be around three months from now, because the next model will come out or the next chat, like, for example, you know, Your stable diffusion comes out, then, then, you know, chat GPT comes out. Well, people were, you know, I've invested in a couple of these, you know, the AI writing tools, they're getting better. And they're pouring millions into marketing to get, to get customers for their, you know, AI writing tool, but everybody's building on the same foundations, the same models. And then they're

• 53:12Shaan Puri?

  trying to say how they're going to be differentiated. And the reality is they could differentiate on, I don't know, customer acquisition. And so I think that like, it is, you know, I think about when I buy something like, you know, the tiny capital model works because he buys stuff that's like, kind of been like around and forgotten and ignored for like a long period of time. Like he buys like a dribble.

• 53:35Shaan Puri?

  You know, it's like, oh, it's been around for years and I could buy it and I can, it's going to be around for years and I can improve it over that time versus buying the things that are really new and quick. I think you have a challenge with the durability of those businesses because what happens as, you know, the AI just keeps improving, you know, either these things become obsolete, or it starts to consolidate into like one app that can do four of these things. And so you don't need one for posting on social media and one for writing emails. It's like, ah, it's the same Chrome extension that's just going to do both. And so I think there's a good chance you can kind of get like, you know, you know, just sort of blown away by, by, by the rate of change that's going on in

• 54:18Shaan Puri?

  the industry. So that's the thing I would be worried about with that. Similar to, I remember telling Andrew Wilkinson about Thrasio and I was like, oh, this is super smart. Like these FBA stores are super cheap and there's, you know, like each one of them is small, but you could go and just like scoop up all these and look at this, they're buying them on this like crazy little multiple. He goes, yeah, it's like picking pennies up in front of a steamroller. And is his first reaction. And I was like, yeah, I could see what you mean. Like if the platform changes, he goes, if anything happens, he's like, you know, these aren't real durable brands. I haven't been around for a while. Maybe it's that Amazon changes the algorithm. Maybe it's that there's, you know, more competition. Maybe it's that the multiples go up. There's, there's four or five different ways where you just get steamrolled. And that's actually what how it played out pretty much in the, in the

• 55:04Shaan Puri?

  Amazon aggregator space was for a while, the getting was good. And then those companies went all in on it. And then they kind of got steamrolled, you know, they're, they're getting steamrolled as we speak.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you bring up a great point about AI, right? And that's why, while I think the technology is great, I've been very skeptical investing in these companies that just really build on top of, you know, OpenAI, because it's like you have a nice wrapper, right? It's nice marketing. It's great. But what do you have long term? What are you actually?

• 55:33Shaan Puri?

  They all do that. Who doesn't do that? Nobody's doing their own AI. Everybody's everybody's building off OpenAI or Stable Diffusion.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  And that's why I'm skeptical of investing in that, right? I think there's so many popping up, right? It's the next crypto wave, right? There's gonna be a huge, huge bubble and, you know, and they're raising, not a crypto crisis, but I'm seeing, hey, two guys left some, you know, Andreessen back company, we're raising five on 25. Like, what do you have? They're like, oh, well, we have a deck, but since we created the deck, we've already changed our mind. It was this, and now it's this. And it's like, guys, come on, you can't, you can't be serious. We've seen this play off.

• 56:04Shaan Puri?

  And they're like, while you say that, they're like, we just got another offer for 35. The price has gone up.

• 56:10Sam Parr?

  You, you know, like, I always, I always felt this way about you. And as I've got to know you, I feel this way even more. The way that you know someone's an interesting founder is when you talk to them and you're like, a little fearful of them, where you're like, I don't want to have to go against this person, because they're going to be very, very challenging to kill. And you totally have that vibe. You've got this like weird mixture of neuroticism, where you're like, no, I have to go, like, I have to win, we're gonna lose, like, everything's over if I don't win this thing. But then you also have this, like, really good work ethic. I remember I asked you the other day, I'm like, hey, at what point at Morning Brew did you quit grinding? And you're like, what? Never. I'm still grinding. And I think that's just a really, that's really fascinating.

• 56:53Shaan Puri?

  Were you, are you weirdly good at, like, some random thing? Did you, like, channel that obsession towards some other thing, like, growing up?

• 57:00Sam Parr?

  We, we, like, we tennis or some bullshit?

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I was obsessed with video games, right? Sports, video games. But nothing, nothing specific, right? I wasn't like Travis Kalanick, like, number two, we tennis in the world. No, it was that. And now I'm like, it's that for cooking, right? I'm, I've thought about like, would I go to culinary school and take night classes? Because now I'm obsessed with cooking. I love to cook.

• 57:25Shaan Puri?

  Did not see that coming.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  You gotta come over for a meal. You gotta come to the, I know you don't leave San Francisco, but when you do, you have to come to New York.

• 57:34Sam Parr?

  So what do you, you said something about remit and like your rich life. What do you think your rich life, how old are you now, 28? What's your rich life gonna be at 35 and 40? Like, what are you working towards?

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think for me, it's all about time, right? Like, to me, wealth is all about having time and spending that time how you want to. Right now, I want to spend that time building this company because I constantly see more growth and more opportunity. And not just like 2X, but 10X. But ultimately, what I want to be able to do at 35 is spend my time, how I want to spend it on any given day, right? And that means a lot of travel. I love traveling. Like, I want to go at some point in the not-too-distant future, hopefully, go on a six-month trip, three months to Europe, three months to Southeast Asia. I never got to do that. A lot of my friends in college, when they graduated, they went to Thailand and wherever else. I drove from Michigan to New York and started working the next day. And so for me, it's a lot of traveling.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  You know, nothing crazy, spend time with family, doing fun stuff, right? Like, being able just to say, hey, like today, I'm gonna, you know, drop 500 bucks and go, you know, do something, you know, $1,000 and go do some fun activity, right? Adventurous activities. But it all comes back to just waking up and say, hey, here's how I want to spend my day and then doing that thing.

• 58:45Sam Parr?

  Are you able to do that now?

• 58:47Speaker 01

  I can, right? But I choose to spend that time on Morning Brew. Like, I am maniacally focused on growing Morning Brew. I think there's a ton of opportunity, but as soon as I don't think that, like, I'll change. I'll say, hey, you know, today, I want to do something else.

• 59:00Sam Parr?

  Do you like having 200-plus employees? It sounds like fucking hell, particularly New York, Manhattan, like, woke employees that like, in the New York media scene, like, everyone's talking about unionizing. Like, when I think about that, I'm like, this sounds miserable.

• 59:14Shaan Puri?

  Blink if it's miserable, because I know you can't say anything. What are you gonna say?

• 59:21Speaker 01

  No, no, I mean, look, I think there's a couple things. One, we have a lot of remote employees, so we do have a really good distribution of employees across the country, which I think does help, right? I think having employees everywhere gives different perspectives, right? Our engineering team lives, you know, in the Midwest, and we have people all across the country, which I think is cool. But... To be honest, as a CEO of a 250 person company, I'm not interacting with that many people on daily basis. But what I love is like, the one of the reasons I stay is because we built this team of people who are reporting to me who are just A plus all-stars, like absolute rock stars. And that's what makes me so happy is when I can just come to work and say, hey, you know, Chief Content Officer, hey, you know, person X, like,

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  what are you doing? Like, tell me more about it. How can I help you? But also, I'm like a vacuum, right? I'll hire someone new, a Chief Content Officer, a COO. I'll be like, I'm gonna learn as much as humanly possible. And my goal is to catch up to you in knowledge as fast as possible. So if you're 38, you're 40, you're 10 years older than me, I want to just vacuum up those 10 years of knowledge you've gained working in these four or five places in the next like two months. And I'm just gonna pester you and sit with you and just learn as much as humanly possible. So I can be better than you and know more than you. And it's like this competitive nature.

• 1:00:41Sam Parr?

  That's exactly what I'm saying about being like someone that you're, you'd be really hard to compete with. You were hard to compete with. That's a really fascinating mindset. It's very intriguing. I saw Sean smirk. That's always a good sign.

• 1:00:55Shaan Puri?

  You were like, yeah, I wouldn't want to compete with you. It's like, oh, you did for like five years.

• 1:00:59Sam Parr?

  I did, yeah. And like, I mean, it was fun. I think that, I think maybe I'm the same way where someone's like, I don't know if I want to compete against you. But, but like, you know, I think it's, it's, it's, it's, you're intriguing. You're interesting. I think you have got a really good mindset. I think you got that good inner game.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think, I can't remember if I said this before, but I think the thing that really, I've changed my thinking about you so much is, I used to think you were like rude. And now we've been working together on like a few side projects. And what I've learned is that your style's not for everyone. But you are what I would call like admirably abrasive, right? And we were on a call, I don't know if I'm supposed to tell the story, but we're on a call, I won't say names. We're on a call and this guy gives us like a three minute pitch. And I just see the look on Sam's face. I go, oh no, this guy's spiel is not good. And the guy goes, Sam, what do you think? And Sam, no smile, straight face goes, I don't know why I'm even on this call. What are you talking about?

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  I just started dying, but.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  But

• 1:02:07Sam Parr?

  I'm not trying to be rude. I'm not trying to be rude.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Exactly. Exactly. And it's not for everyone, right? That style is not for everyone. But I can see how you so quickly grow things with the right people because that type of radical candor, that like, hey, I'm just gonna tell you what I think and we're not gonna have an ego and we're just gonna work together to solve problems is so much better than sitting in the corporate media and being like, oh yeah, no, that was, that was great. And then sending an email later, you should look this guy straight in the eyes and you're like, I don't know why I'm here.

• 1:02:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I mean, and the person who we're speaking with, I think they're great. And I was just like, you're, you're great. This is stupid, though. You, you know, be different and be better than you are right now and achieve your potential. I think you're, I think you're great. That's typically the way that I work with people and I don't like hearing when people say that I'm rude. That kind of hurts my feelings because I'm like, oh shit, I don't want to be like, I don't want to be known as a jerk. I'm a pretty kind guy, I thought. So I hate hearing that, but it is the truth.

• 1:03:06Shaan Puri?

  All right.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Sean, you work with Sam. What's it been like?

• 1:03:09Shaan Puri?

  Do it on your own.

• 1:03:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think Sam's intimidating to work with. You know, I think that I've seen a bunch of people around the podcast that are intimidated, but it's a good thing. It's a standard, like the people who have really high standards for how they want things to go, they're intimidating to work with. Like for me, we come on here, something's messed up, the camera, the audio, whatever. I'm, hey, don't worry, it's gonna be a great show. I'm trying to put that person at ease. I'm like, they probably feel like shit. I know they didn't want this to happen. You know, like, and a lot of these things are, I know, like, that's not you intentionally messing something up. That's like, something is going wrong. Somebody's late. Something out of your control is happening. Whereas Sam gets frustrated, I could see that person start to sweat. And I don't think that's rude.

• 1:03:55Shaan Puri?

  I just think that's like, I think you're focused and I think you, you know, you're just like, you're like a blunt object. It's like, what are you gonna say? Like, this hammer is not very soft? No, it's a fucking hammer. That's why we like it. That's why it has, that's why it gets the best spot in the toolset because it's this like really like heavy blunt object. And that's what you need. And like for the podcast, the podcast would not be successful without Sam. Like that's just, he brings that to the pod. And so I love that. Now with that comes, well, I, you know, sometimes it's not going to be, not everyone's going to get treated with soft gloves. And that's okay. Like, you know, if you know, the guy's intent is good, then you, you don't really worry about it.

• 1:04:37Shaan Puri?

  So I don't know. That's, that's my, uh, I don't know. My, my feedback.

• 1:04:41Sam Parr?

  That's good.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that, that's on brand. And then Sean, let me, I, I know I'm here for you guys to, to ask me questions, but I want to ask you a question. Which is, you know, like you obviously are a great storyteller. You're very good on camera. How much of that you think is, is natural? Like yours born with it?

• 1:05:00Sam Parr?

  Let me answer this. Keep going, keep going, keep going. Let me, let me answer it first part. Keep going.

• 1:05:05Shaan Puri?

  The hammer, enter.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, I was gonna say, how, how much of it you think you're born with? And how much are you, have you studied? Like, are you, and what are you doing to get better at it? Cause I've listened to the podcast for three years and you've just increasingly upped your game and gotten better. And I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty incredible.

• 1:05:22Sam Parr?

  So let me give my perspective and then he should answer. But so from the time I knew Sean, he was always pretty good. He would, we would, we would do these like, the, the podcast stemmed because me, him and Siava and a few other guys would meet weekly or monthly. And like do kind of what we're doing now. And Sean was always good at, at like, I, I would explain something and he'd be like, well, so what you're really saying is this. So here's how you should look at it. And he would like storytell in such a way where I'm like, oh, wow. You've got this like inspirational like thing about you. That's really good. And then, so we always had that. I think that was like a, I think he was born with that. And then we started the pod and he was a little rough where I actually think early on I was better than him at like capturing attention.

• 1:06:05Sam Parr?

  And then he started learning about copywriting. I think I was like, he should learn about this copywriting thing. And then he got really good at copywriting and then he got really good at storytelling, like on a more refined basis. And basically what happened was because he was born with this, I think this innate ability as well as he wanted to learn about it. And then he actually studied it. His trajectory and his growth was. Quicker than mine, and I think he actually surpassed it in terms of like storytelling and ability to capture attention. And if you won't listen to like the first couple of episodes, you could clearly see like because of his tone of voice and everything like, all right, this person's intriguing. But then it was like he studied it over a year and you could see that there was a huge change. And I think it was in part of him studying copyrighting. And I do think he

• 1:06:49Sam Parr?

  like actually went and studied like Hassan, Hassan and like all these other comedians. He like figured out, we both like comedians, but I think he studies it and will like tweet or message each other like, hey, let's look at how they like told this joke. It was really interesting. And so he actually studied that and truly learned it. And so I think it was a combination of being born and studying over like two years. That is that accurate?

• 1:07:10Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I think some things you said there were accurate. Sure. My, and nobody knows, right? Like it's a possible question to answer, but like, I'll give it my best shot. My, here's my honest opinion. My honest opinion is I don't actually think I'm that good at it in absolute terms. I just think it's relative to tech, business and like podcasts.

• 1:07:29Sam Parr?

  No, dude, when I've seen you with like professionals and they like comedians and I saw that they were like coming to you for advice. I've seen it.

• 1:07:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that, okay, that happens. But I think the, I don't know, I grew up in Houston and Houston's just got like a very high swag factor. And like they're like, I play basketball in the locker room. There were dudes that like should have been on stage at the Apollo or something like that. Like just the natural charisma of people who were just, you know, that I grew up with were was just really, really high. So I think that actually has a lot to do with it. Would you hang out with people who naturally have a lot of swag and charisma and tell funny jokes or stories are able to, to just quickly jump in and have quick wit? That's just becomes your normal. So I think part of it was that some environment stuff. My sister, for example, is way funnier, way better

• 1:08:20Shaan Puri?

  storyteller than me. And growing up, it was always Sean's the smart, nice one. He's quiet. He's shy. She's the funny one charismatic. If something happened to me, they'd be like, Nisha, tell the story about like, Sean, like let Nisha tell the story. Everyone will love it. So at every family party. It was her doing and, and you know, so imagine that like the person you admire, your, your older sibling is really great at this thing. And you just constantly see your family and friends are like, everybody loves that about them. So to me, it became like an important thing in my life. I was like, not in a negative way, not like a jealousy, but I was just like, it was a thing I valued. I was like, oh, that's a really cool skill. I value that. I had no idea how to do it. And when I was younger, I was just super, super quiet. So I didn't talk that much in my friends group.

• 1:09:05Shaan Puri?

  I was just the, I was the laugh track. I wasn't the guy making the jokes. I was the crowd noise. And, um, but I started to, I got a couple of lucky breaks. My cousin was in town and was like, hey, you know, there's a movie audition going on, like you want to come with me? And I just like, I guess so. I don't know. And so I went with him and I ended up getting cast in the movie. And that like showed me, that exposed me to a different thing. And the guy in the movie who was my brother was Cal Penn, who was the guy from Harold and Kumar and stuff like that. So I got to hang out with him for like weeks at a time. So now I'm around somebody else who's very charismatic, very good storyteller. But he's like a professional actor, right? So he was somebody I admired that I was hanging out with for weeks. He's the only guy I talked to on set because I was intimidated by everybody else.

• 1:09:50Shaan Puri?

  And he was super nice to me. And so we just hung out every day for like, you know, six weeks. So that's a kind of a boot camp in like, just being around somebody who's got that charisma. Okay. Then fast forward, uh, I moved to San Francisco and I'm like, okay. I want to be like, you know, I don't know. In my mind, I was like, a CEO should be the leader. The leader should be inspiring, charismatic, clear. I'm none of those things. So how am I going to do all that? And so I like tried to do things. I took, you know, I went to the SF improv. I took classes there all the time, right? Cause I was like, I don't know, it's fun. I might meet some people, but also I think this, I think improv is just like a crazy skillset to have, like to be able to on your feet,

• 1:10:33Shaan Puri?

  be able to think of something and, you know, make a crowd laugh. That, that to me is a actual superpower and it's the superpower I wanted to have. Same thing with comedians. Like I like that content, but I don't just watch it and let just like drool come out of my mouth. Oh wow, these people are funny. I'm like, I want to be funny. I love how funny they are. And like, what do they do when they tell stories? To, you know, that makes it work. And I'll go re-watch it and I'll sort of break it down sometimes. I'll, I'll try it myself. Uh, like for example, when I did that Luna video, I did it in the style of like those John Oliver or Hasan Minhaj like skits. And mine is like, you know, 10 times worse. And I texted to Hasan and he was like, cool, change these 95 things.

• 1:11:15Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, ah dude, that's a lot to change. I'm just going to ship it like, you know, I don't have time to do all that. But like, now that you've told me this, I now know what I should have done. But it's just those reps, like it's talent helps, but then there's reps and people don't really see the reps. And I would say like that combination of the three things I mentioned, like being around people who are, who are better at it than you and you admire them, that plants a little seed inside you, right? Like Austin, you were talking about that with money, like when you met people with more money, it was inspiring. And you're like, oh, wow. My world opened up. I now have like people I can sort of like, you know, I could try to embody a blueprint that, that maybe they have to something I want. That's how it was with storytelling and sort of like, I don't know charisma or something like that for me.

• 1:12:00Shaan Puri?

  And so that, you know, being around people who you admire, putting yourself in unusual situations that are like kind of intensives, like improv or acting in movies, stuff like that. Most people in business don't have that experience, so they shouldn't be as good at it, right? Like if you've never gone through these intense experiences, then you know, how would you have developed those skills?

• 1:12:20Sam Parr?

  Why are you asking that, Austin? Are you trying to like get better at talking or what?

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want to get better at public speaking. So 2023 goal, I guess I'm going to New York improv.

• 1:12:30Sam Parr?

  Dude, I, I, I think some people are born better, but I think everyone can get at least good. But I do think Sean has this like something that will make him great. And uh, it is, it's very uh,

• 1:12:43Shaan Puri?

  Well, let me just put it this way. Austin, have you ever watched back a video of you speaking publicly in order to take notes on yourself of how you did?

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:12:54Shaan Puri?

  Super uncomfortable feeling, but an obvious thing to do if you wanted to get better.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:58Shaan Puri?

  Right? Like, I just had that moment where I was like, oh, I'm saying I want to get better at this. I've never done any of the obvious things you would do, right? I've never like went and watched myself and said, what the hell am I doing with my hands? And why am I fidgeting so much? And I, oh man, I keep saying, um, at the start of these sentences, I should just say the sentence. But like, I had to go review the game film. Okay. Then the second thing was like, I had to take it seriously. Like, did I just walk up there unprepared and not warm? Or do I warm up? Or do I prepare? Okay, that, that, that added to the game. And then the third one is like, who's the best at this? And I went to a Tony Robbins event and I was like, this guy's like the best public speaker I've ever seen.

• 1:13:36Shaan Puri?

  And even if I don't listen to any of his content, if I just literally listen to the rhythm of his words and the gestures and then the, the hooks and how he's getting everyone's attention. That's a masterclass right there. Like, okay, I'll take that. And so that's how I started stacking up some of these things. And I don't consider myself a good public speaker because I don't do a lot of speeches or anything like that anymore. But um, it's definitely something at a time I try to build up. And it accumulated in an epic wedding speech. I gotta say, the best speech I ever gave was at my wedding, unrehearsed, off the dome. And just like, it was, I don't know, the perfect, the perfect speech. I just retired from the game right there.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  At your own wedding?

• 1:14:14Shaan Puri?

  At my own wedding, yeah.

• 1:14:15Sam Parr?

  Is there a, is there anything else you want to talk about, Austin? It's pretty cool. You should come on more, by the way. We should talk about newsletter shit. Cause you're like the only person, or us three are some of the very few people that like, I actually want to ask newsletter advice from. Um, and like,

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm trying to get out of the, the newsletter guy branding, but just keep on bringing me on to be the newsletter guy.

• 1:14:35Sam Parr?

  But it's, it is so fun. It's, it's a love hate relationship. It's really, they're really fun to do, but also they're painful and whatever.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I think that's it. I think we, we cover most of it.

• 1:14:49Shaan Puri?

  What do you think you're gonna be doing like 10 years from now? You're gonna, you think you'll be running businesses? Are you gonna be just investing?

• 1:14:54Sam Parr?

  Or big businesses or small ones or what?

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  So to me, it's, it's barbell, right? I either wanna, you know, have some passive income and, you know, work 20, 25 hours a week, more casual. Or I'm gonna go all in, but if I go all in, it's gotta be huge, right? The potential has to be multiple billions. I don't think I'm gonna wanna run a business where it's like, it's nice and it's like a double, right? If I win, it's a double. I, I don't want doubles, right? I either wanna home run or I wanna, you know, sit in the dugout and just, you know, be, be part of the peanut gallery. I don't wanna play in that middle game.

• 1:15:28Sam Parr?

  I'm gonna look in the future and I'm gonna tell you, it's probably not gonna be you sitting in the dugout. That is not gonna be, this is, I think maybe you will for a couple of years, but i- i- if I have to make a bet and I would put my money where my mouth is, it's not gonna be that one. That's not what you're gonna do.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  We'll see.

• 1:15:45Sam Parr?

  Well, thanks for coming on, dude. This is awesome.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me. We'll see you again soon.