If I Had To Make $1 Billion... Here’s The Business I Would Start

Episode 528: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) answer the question they get most often: “If you had to pick one idea that to make a million dollars this year, what would it be?” No more small boy spreadsheets, build your business on the free HubSpot CRM: https://mfmpod.link/hrd — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (3:00) Idea 1 - The "Me Also" strategy (12:00) Idea 2 - Niche community that solves for X (16:00) Idea 3 - QSBS advisory firm (24:00) Idea 4 - Pizza robots (44:00) Idea 5 - Buying a university — Links: • Quiet Light - https://quietlight.com/ • Exit Five - https://www.exitfive.com/ • Figure - http://figure.ai/ • Renovate Robotics - https://www.renovaterobotics.com/ • Anduril - https://anduril.com/ • DealStream - https://dealstream.com/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Free 2024 Goal-Setting Session - https://planfor2024.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com/ 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. — Other 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.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  All right. Someone asked me an incredible question today. They said, if you had to pick one idea that could make you a million dollars this year, and it can't be just a newsletter or a blog or an agency, which are usually our go-tos, what would it be? What would you do? One specific idea that you would do? And then he also said, and I want to hear one specific idea that you would do to try to make a billion dollars. That's a good question, and me and Sam are going to answer that right now on this episode of My Field of Duty. All right. What's up? We're doing our Q and A, and we got one question that we really love.

• 0:39Sam Parr?

  But is the question, Sean, is it a billion dollar in net worth or a company that's worth a billion dollars?

• 0:44Shaan Puri?

  I'm going to say it's a company that's worth a billion dollars. And you own a big chunk of it.

• 0:50Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 0:51Shaan Puri?

  And what's a billion here or there? Okay, look, the company is worth 1 billion, you're worth 1 billion, it's all a billion.

• 0:56Sam Parr?

  It changes dramatically. So I know a guy who sold a company for 900 million dollars, 990 million dollars. You know how much he made after the sale? 3 million dollars. That's how much he made. He had, he had four co-founders, or maybe five, and he raised a ton of money and they sold it, and he made 3 million dollars. That's insane, right? And I don't, I think that's an extreme case, but I think there's many cases where you create a billion dollar business and you actually walk away with like 8% of the company, which is still a ton of money, but it's, that's a wild experience.

• 1:27Shaan Puri?

  It's like a small ton.

• 1:28Sam Parr?

  It's a small ton.

• 1:30Shaan Puri?

  Not as big of a ton as people think you get when you're, when you make a company that big.

• 1:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's just, the numbers change things a little bit, but let's just get right into it. The million dollar one. What do you have?

• 1:41Shaan Puri?

  The million dollar one. All right. So you go first for this one.

• 1:44Sam Parr?

  So a million dollars in, is it net worth? Like, and what do we say, three or four years to do it?

• 1:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you got a couple of years to do it. You're gonna make a million dollars in profit.

• 1:56Sam Parr?

  So to make a million, so I think that there, if you want to make a certain amount of money quickly, you have to ask yourself, is it going to come through annual cash flow? Or is it going to come through selling something like selling a business? So for example, if you have a business that's earning, let's say $300,000 a year, you, in year one, you do 50,000, year two, you do 200,000, year three, you do 300,000. That's not going to add up to a million dollars. However, you could sell that business for maybe $900,000 or maybe a million dollars. So collectively, you can come up with a million bucks. I think the easiest thing to do would probably be to sell the business. If you want to make that amount of money in a certain amount of time in like three years. What I would do, so first, do you know Quiet Light Brokerage?

• 2:39Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 2:40Sam Parr?

  So if I want to make a million dollars in, let's say, three years, I'm probably not going to invent anything new. I'm just going to copy what works and I'm going to try, maybe not even do it better. I mean, there's four, almost 400 million people in America. Like, I can kind of just figure out someone that already is doing something and copy it, but put it slightly different.

• 3:00Shaan Puri?

  Ladies and gentlemen, we're not going to be better, faster, or cheaper. We are simply going to be also in the business of doing.

• 3:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:10Shaan Puri?

  Strategy.

• 3:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah, the me too strategy. Is that what this is? Like, be also.

• 3:14Shaan Puri?

  That's a different thing. We don't want me to. We don't want me to.

• 3:16Sam Parr?

  We don't want me to. Sorry. The me also strategy. That's what we'll call it. The me also strategy. So I would probably go to Quiet Light Brokerage. So Quiet Light Brokerage, I've had a couple of friends sell and buy businesses through this. I've had one friend sell a business via Quiet Light Brokerage for 10 million. I had another buddy buy a company for 300,000. That ended up making 18 million a year in revenue. And I know those guys at Quiet Light Brokerage and I've talked to them. And basically Quiet Light Brokerage is a website where you buy and sell businesses. It's a brokerage, meaning it's not exactly automated. But what you can do is you can see anonymous descriptions of companies that are for sale. You can see what the earnings are. You can see what the revenue is. You can enter in your email and they'll send you all the financials to the business.

• 4:00Shaan Puri?

  All you gotta do is say, I'm interested in this business. And then they send you a packet of information about that business, including the name, who the owner is, where it's incorporated, how they got their first customers, how, where they get their customer mix today, what are the areas for growth? They do this fantastic little interview with the person, which is, if you're buying the business, very useful. But also, if you're executing the me also strategy, it is brilliant. And in fact, we have a friend who did this. We have a friend who was looking at one of these websites, saw a business for sale for, I think, like $120,000 or $150,000. One of the smallest business for sale, maybe on Flipkart somewhere or something like that. And he was like, well, I don't have $150,000, but I do have a lot of time to pick your brain.

• 4:45Shaan Puri?

  And so he picked the brains of a bunch of people. And then they were like, cool, you want to buy it? He's like, no, but you could, you know, you convinced me how easy this is. So see ya. And went and recreated that and sold it for many millions more. And literally did that. And I think, once I heard that, I realized, oh, there are easier ways and harder ways to make $10 million. And the easier way is you go look at businesses that are already successful and you reverse engineer which one you could, you could create and copy.

• 5:15Sam Parr?

  And by the way, I don't think, I think they make you sign an NDA or something like that. So I think you could get sued if you just rip it off entirely. But I think, but, and that's not exactly what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting be inspired by and do something exactly like it, but slightly different. Sorry. What are they?

• 5:29Shaan Puri?

  Well, let's just look at it right now. So for example, I'm scrolling, you go to Quiet Light or whatever. You could use any of these brokerage sites. We both like Quiet Light because it's a little curated. So it's, it's less filled with junk, even though honestly, a lot of these businesses on here are absolute junk. So let me show you one of these junk businesses. So you go down to the kind of like first sale for $2 million. $2 million bucks is a nice number, right? You could be even a little bit worse in this business and, and still make a million bucks. You can, if you've sold it for $2 million after taxes, you have a million dollars. All right. So here it is. It's a FBA business fulfilled by Amazon. It's a money counting machine.

• 6:06Sam Parr?

  Does that mean that they're literally selling a money counting machine?

• 6:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like, like any business that can be called a minute money printing machine, a money counting machine. In this case, they literally, so this says, launched in 2020, so three years ago. It says this business sells money counting machines and counterfeit bill detectors to local businesses, government agencies, restaurants, financial services, banks, event management companies and nonprofits.

• 6:26Sam Parr?

  Is it one like this, like this money counting machine that I have sitting right here on my desk?

• 6:30Shaan Puri?

  Have that right now?

• 6:32Sam Parr?

  So I have for those not

• 6:34Shaan Puri?

  Give it a run. Give it a run.

• 6:36Sam Parr?

  Well, I don't have it. I don't have it plugged in, but so I have, I literally have a money counting machine here with counterfeit money on it. When I sold my company, Jack Smith, my best friend, he bought me this as like a congratulations. It's a hundred dollars. I've never used it, but I just like, keep it there. And when I have friends that do something interesting, like they sell a company, they close a big deal, I send it to them and I say, uh, this is either gonna be a huge like, uh, paperweight, or you're actually gonna use it. Good luck. And it's a nice gift. I, I think this costs $200.

• 7:08Shaan Puri?

  That's actually great. We should do that for the, for any fan. If you're going through the process of you're gonna sell your business, uh, just email us and we'll send you the counter as the good luck, as our good luck charm from us to you.

• 7:20Sam Parr?

  Whenever, when I have like my cleaning lady here, I'm like, just so you know, this is fake money. Don't even think about it.

• 7:27Shaan Puri?

  Watch this.

• 7:29Sam Parr?

  I was like, it's fake. All this, it's a hundred grand in cash that costs $5.

• 7:34Shaan Puri?

  That's a great trust test. You should, uh, just leave it out and see like, you know what? Not only did you steal fake money, but you're out of a job too.

• 7:42Sam Parr?

  Well, that's actually a test I do when I have like new like vendors at my house is sometimes I'll leave like a few hundred dollars there and I know exactly how much is there and I'll see like, what's gonna happen?

• 7:50Shaan Puri?

  Candy bar and see what happens.

• 7:53Sam Parr?

  So someone's selling literally a money counting machine?

• 7:55Shaan Puri?

  Money counting machine, 1.8 million in revenue, $625,000 of net income, net profit. So they're selling it, uh, here. And then if you go and you, you, it's a husband and wife duo. They says they spent, this is a classic on Quiet Light. This is like the, I don't know what Tinder profiles say nowadays. I don't know what the kids are doing, but I know that every business for sale, the owner spends like 10 hours a week on this.

• 8:19Shaan Puri?

  They just don't have enough time and energy to devote to growing the business that anybody who steps in could do. Uh, all right. So anyways, I would look at businesses like this and, uh, seems like what you're saying is you would probably look at what, like not one, but like maybe 20 to 30 of these, just to get a good idea, get enough data points?

• 8:35Sam Parr?

  And I would find out which fits my interest. So for example, uh, Sean, click where they have membership. So they have a membership category. They've got media, which I know about media. So I would do that one, but membership is interesting. I think the reason memberships are interesting. Is I think you could have a really, really, really niche community where you solve a very specific problem. And I'll give you two examples. So for like, one could be, so if you are, if you have a job, you maybe work, you know, and so you work in whatever industry and you know something, but you have this problem called the knowledge complex where you think, well, everyone knows this, therefore it's not that interesting to teach. And I think that's actually crazy. I think for like, two examples are automations for HVAC owners. Another one is outbound sales for like

• 9:18Sam Parr?

  chiropractors or for architects. And I think what you can do with things like this is you can charge pretty high amounts. You could charge $500 a month where you get access to content that you update on a regular basis. And then you have a community where all the other participants can share tactics and ideas that they're using to overcome the, the problem that they've all signed up for. Another example is a community where you have a database with all the right people who you need to contact at a certain, within a certain niche in order to get a sale done. So for example, let's say you're an agency, it could be like, here's all of the buyers of media at these companies that you update regularly. And then you could have a community where people are discussing tactics

• 10:01Sam Parr?

  and strategies in order to accomplish that task. And I think when you look at like, the, the, the problem, or you're like, you're thinking about what the customer's going through and they're going to buy this, which is, well, if I spend $3,000 a year on this, if I only get one sale, this is worth it for me. And I got a positive ROI. And I think that sale is significantly easier than selling to consumers where you're having to do a lot of guesswork. With this, if you do $3,000 a year in order to get to a million dollar sale, you'd have to look at what those multiples are. But I think the multiples on the membership sites are like five times profit. So you get to a million, you need $250,000 in profit to get to $250,000 in profit on a $3,000 a year service. It could be just you and a part-time employee or one full-time employee. I don't know what that math is, but you don't need that many customers in order to hit that

• 10:45Sam Parr?

  target. And so I would do that over a consumer product because I can just talk to my customers and they could tell me exactly what they want. And I'm basically providing a service that they're requesting on a regular basis in order to keep them retained.

• 10:56Shaan Puri?

  Here's a specific example of that. Exit 5, I think is the name of it. Exit 5 is like a community of B2B marketers. And I don't know what they pay per year. It's a little bit less than what you just said, but I think they could be charging more like $2,500 or $3,000. But the big idea here is go get 100 people paying you three grand a year. And you can even make it exclusive, be like, this is a community for only 150 of the top B2B marketers in the world. We're going to invite you in and then you're going to share ideas. Plus, we have this database of whatever, whether it's ad creative networks. We have this database of vendors that are buyers with their contact info. And we all openly share here. It's a sort of give to get model.

• 11:40Shaan Puri?

  And yeah, that thing is probably worth two, three million bucks right now that this guy's made. And 500 to 1,000 members.

• 11:48Sam Parr?

  And the reason if you're starting from scratch is you don't need that particularly big of an audience. You don't need to, you'd cold email people, you would also build an audience. But in order to get to a, let's say you have an audience of 5,000 people, which is very attainable to get, particularly if you give it a year. You only need about 100 to 200 people to buy what you're selling in order to hit that target. And so your podcast doesn't need to be huge, your Twitter handle, your cold email outbound strategy doesn't need to be huge. And so that's probably what I would do to get to a million dollars. What do you think about that?

• 12:17Shaan Puri?

  Well, you have, you basically said two ideas, right? That was a two for one special. You had go to Quiet Light or a business brokerage and find a business that you can either reverse engineer or legitimately. So you know, reverse engineer, we kind of say, and that's, I would say a little bit generously, let's call it scrappy. The scrappy way to do things. You don't have any money. You, you know, you need to get, you know, rather than just try to come up with an idea from scratch. When you're kind of a beginner, the better way is to go learn what businesses actually work, how they work, why they work. Go look at 30 to 50. That's like a real world MBA that you picked up. And then find one of those that you think you could mimic and put your own twist on, right? That's, that's idea one you had.

• 13:00Shaan Puri?

  By the way, with that comes also, you could just buy the business. So for a lot of these, even a $2 million business, you can go get an SBA loan. A lot of these will say that they're SBA loan eligible. So let's say that you're in the United States, you can go get SBA loan, put down 10 to 15%. So if you can go get 200 grand, you could buy a $2 million business that's doing 600, 600K of profit per year. And so you could actually go buy that business and just try to grow it because actually getting a business from $0 in revenue to 2 million in revenue, or 1.8 million revenue is pretty hard relative to taking a business that's at 1.8 and getting it to 3.1 million, for example. Like, you know, adding an extra million of revenue to a business that's already working is actually much easier than going from zero to one.

• 13:44Sam Parr?

  For sure.

• 13:44Shaan Puri?

  I think you've got both options on the table there.

• 13:46Sam Parr?

  It's just more risk.

• 13:48Shaan Puri?

  Well, yeah, there's, there's a little bit more risk because you're personally liable for the, for the, for the loan there. So, you know, you have to buy a good business. You have to, you have to be able to know what a good business is. And that's where maybe some mentors could help. The other business, the other idea you said was basically a membership service, a membership side, a membership community for some niche, right? That's kind of like a separate idea.

• 14:08Sam Parr?

  It, it has to solve a specific problem. So a lot of these, like, you'll see a lot out there that are memberships for launching a business. That's not specific, that's not nearly specific enough. It's got to be geared towards employees and, and like, there's a clear beginning, middle and end, and there's an outcome. And there's a clear ROI as opposed to like accountability or whatever it is. You know what I mean?

• 14:30Shaan Puri?

  Right, right, right. Nothing soft and fluffy. All right, so those are good. I think those are really good. In fact, I think the first one you said is, I think, the right answer. That's what I would, in reality, that's what I would go do, but to make it fun, I'm going to come up with some other ideas. So.

• 14:45Sam Parr?

  Is that what you had?

• 14:47Shaan Puri?

  That's what I would, it's like, if it was my cousin and my cousin's like, yo, how do I do this? I'd be like, all right, look, this is what we're doing. You need to do this. Worst case scenario, you're going to go learn what a bunch, a bunch, a bunch of blueprints for successful businesses, and maybe you don't pull the trigger on any of them, but still was a good use of your time. And best case scenario, you find one of these that you say, I could do that. And either you buy it or you're going to like remix it and create your own version of that. So that is, I think, the right answer. The second right answer would be an e-commerce company because it's not hard to build an e-commerce brand either on, on Amazon or on Shopify that can sell for a million dollars, but kind of, again, a boring answer. So I'm going to give you a more fun answer. So here is, uh, here's one idea.

• 15:30Shaan Puri?

  The four most beautiful letters in the English language are Q S B S. All right. So what's the Q S B S idea? You're going to create a Q S B S advisory firm. Well, what is that? That's super niche. Technically, this might be considered an agency, but, but I think we'll allow it because it's so specific and niche here and off the beaten path. So here's what you're going to do. Now, when any company starts, a tech company starts, that's going to be Q S B S eligible. That Q S B S eligibility is worth a lot.

• 15:59Sam Parr?

  You have to say what Q S B S is.

• 16:00Shaan Puri?

  Oh, sorry. Q S B S is a tax treatment for qualified small business stock. What that means is that if you're a business that fits like these five criteria, which most tech companies fit, then when you sell, if you've held the stock for five years, or even if it's a little bit less than that, you can still kind of roll it over. Your first $10 million of your gain are going to be tax free.

• 16:25Sam Parr?

  Not only most tech companies, most new C corps that hold for five years, well, it would, would fall under.

• 16:31Shaan Puri?

  There are some exceptions, like you can't do it if you're a doctor or lawyer or real estate. Like there are things that are excluded, but again, that's kind of the point here is Q S B S advisory. We're going to help you figure out, are you eligible or not? And we're going to provide a letter that says, we attest to the, you know, the belief that this is going to be qualified small business stock. Now, why is this easy to do? Why is my strategy this? Well, if I'm trying to make money, it's kind of like you described with the membership. I need to create 10 times more than I'm taking, right? This is a general rule of life. That's probably a good rule of life. Create more value than you're trying to take. And that's what I'd be trying to do here. So I was looking for something where with a small amount of work, I could create a lot of value for my customer.

• 17:15Shaan Puri?

  Well, all right, that sounds generic, but like in this case, if my stock is going to be Q S B S eligible, that might save me $10 million down the road. And that's a pretty big, huge benefit. So would I pay $5,000 or $10,000 for, um, you know, in legal fees in order to, in advisory fees in order to, protect my possible $10 million gain? I would, and I think a lot of people do. And so what, what I would do here is I would build an advisory firm that says, we are Q S B S experts. We know the ins and outs of QSBS were respected. I would hire maybe lawyers or accountants that have done this before.

• 17:56Shaan Puri?

  And I would say, hey, on a as needed basis, I'm gonna, when I get a customer, I will pay you, whatever, $300 an hour, $500 an hour for your time to do an assessment and write a letter that basically assesses the eligibility you think for QSBS. Now, QSBS is not like a black and white thing. It's not like a, QSBS is basically when you, when you get the sale, you declare, you say, this falls under QSBS. But if you ever got audited, you'd have to be able to protect, you know, defend that. Why did you say it was QSBS eligible? And so what companies and individuals do is they will go to, go get a letter that basically says, we as experts have looked at this business and we believe that this is going to be QSBS. This is qualified small business stock.

• 18:40Sam Parr?

  You know, like the 409, what's it called? The 409?

• 18:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 18:43Sam Parr?

  409, so when, in order to do a bunch of stuff with your business, you, a lot of times, tech companies have to get valued every year.

• 18:51Shaan Puri?

  Basically, every year, every year you should get valued. And then that also is necessary when you want to issue new stock or whatever for employees or for investors. You typically set a benchmark, 409.

• 19:02Sam Parr?

  But there's a lot of companies that do this as a service where you spend five or $10, five to $10,000 and you don't actually give them that much information. You give them your financials and then they ask you to submit like 10 publicly traded competitors. And then they just like, say, all right, we think that your valuation is blank. And you, you spend five to $10,000, I think, for that. You're basically-

• 19:22Shaan Puri?

  And you want it to be low usually. So usually what you're trying to do is get a low 409A so that everybody's options are priced low. And so it's like, you're not, not even like you're trying to justify a high valuation. You're actually trying to justify a low valuation in most cases.

• 19:35Sam Parr?

  And it's kind of crony capitalism a little bit. Like they'll be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll make it low or we'll, we'll be fair. And then they wink at you and they like set it really low. But yeah, basically you're, you're, what you're suggesting is doing the same thing for QSBS, which is-

• 19:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, 409A is an equally valid idea. But what I would do is I would, I would create this firm. What I like about the QSBS thing is it's a little bit higher ticket. So typically these people will charge, let's say- Ten to fifteen thousand dollars for the initial attestation letter. I don't know if I'm saying that word right. But then on top of that, you could even charge kind of like an ongoing fee because there are all these like foot faults. So it's not just like a, there is some genuine help. So for example, oh, you're going to sell secondary. There's things you might do wrong when you sell secondary that could disqualify you. There's disqualifying events. And so, you know, you can't bill for revenue in specific ways. If it's categorized as X, it might take you out of QSB eligibility. And so it's just an insurance policy. It's a cover your ass. It's a legal thing.

• 20:34Shaan Puri?

  It's something people don't want to do themselves. It's too high risk to do yourself. And you literally can't do it yourself because you can't write the letter for yourself. And so you don't have to have it, but it is a nice to have. And what I would do is I would go scare the living shit out of every tech company that I find on Crunchbase. And I would say, don't you want this $10 million exclusion for you? It's per person, by the way, it's not per company. So it's per tax return. So let's say there's a company with, that's going to be, going to be big. Every single one of those executives is going to want their stock to be QSB eligible. And so I would go to them and I would scare the living shit out of them that they might get this wrong. And I would tell them, don't worry, we can cover this for you. And here's how we'll cover it for you. Pay us whatever.

• 21:17Shaan Puri?

  Either the lump sum upfront or a monthly recurring fee or an annual recurring fee, fifteen hundred, fifteen hundred dollars a year, two thousand dollars a year. And we will kind of make sure we're your advisory on that so that, you know, you're covered at the end of the day.

• 21:30Sam Parr?

  That's a pretty brilliant idea, actually.

• 21:31Shaan Puri?

  You know, if you just think about it, right? How do you get to, let's say, we talked about to sell a company for over a million dollars. Let's just round up and say you've got to have $300,000 of, of annual net profits. So how do you get to 300,000 of annual net profits? If you're charging, you know, roughly $10,000 a year, you only need 30 customers a year. 30 customers a year?

• 21:57Shaan Puri?

  I've taken shits bigger than that. Come on. If you can't get to a million dollars this way, you can't get to it anyway, right? I think what holds a lot of people back would be there's not going to be a bunch of these. So this is not like you can't spring up 10,000 of these like, you know, social media marketing agencies, there can be a million of those. You have to have some expertise or partner with people who have expertise. So they said, you know, some of the, some of the, the mechanics of how to do it. But man, there's niches and riches and like, that's not that hard to do to get to.

• 22:22Sam Parr?

  And there's so many upsells to that, which is like the key to selling a company is they say, all right, well, how does this grow? And you say, well, do these companies also need a 409, 409A? Do they also need these other legal services? Do they, of course they do. That's how you do it and you, and you sell the dream a little bit of what the expansion revenue comes from.

• 22:42Shaan Puri?

  And the key here is you don't need to be a law firm. So there's all kinds of rules around who can own a law firm. You don't actually have to be a law firm to do this because it's not legal work. It's advisory and it's like some blend of like legal accounting and just advisory. And so I think because of that, you don't need to be a law firm if you do this. And by the way, I've worked with somebody who does this. If everybody actually needs this letter, feel free to email me. I'll, I'll, I'll route you to the guide. You can, you can actually use this because.

• 23:08Sam Parr?

  What are you going to be like the mob and take a cut from making an introduction? You should.

• 23:12Shaan Puri?

  I gotta get my be quite too. All right.

• 23:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 23:17Sam Parr?

  That's actually better than my idea, by the way, because I actually think this is simpler because it's already a service others are providing and you're just basically connecting.

• 23:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Yeah. So I would look for things like that. I had like five other ideas that would fit this, but okay, for this exercise, we're doing one. Now let's move on to the main event, the billion dollar idea.

• 23:36Sam Parr?

  By the way, do I get a thrill of the show before we get to the billion dollar idea?

• 23:40Shaan Puri?

  Oh, hold on. What time is it? It is time for the thrill of the show. Sam, you're up. Your first time providing the thrill of the show. For those who don't know, this is where we shamelessly show one of our companies, but we have to do it in a thrilling way, meaning we got to provide some value, some entertainment, some insight. We got to provide something, a little something. We got to have attributes if we're going to do this. Here we go. Thrill of the show.

• 24:01Sam Parr?

  I'm going to try and keep this one short because this might be a short episode, but basically I remember in 2006. Seventeen, I went to Nerd Wallet, nerdwallet.com. I went to their office. Tim Chen was the CEO and founder. He invested in the hustle. And I remember being like, Tim, I'm freaking out, man. My expenses went up because of payroll from thirty thousand to eighty thousand dollars a month. And at the time, they had just rented Twitter's old office and they were, you know, they probably had a payroll of three million dollars a month, or maybe even five million dollars a month. And I remember he looked at me funny and he was like trying to be empathetic and he was nice and he, and he kind of like, was nice by saying, oh, wow. Wow. Yeah, I understand. And I was like, Tim, I'm so stressed out about this.

• 24:40Sam Parr?

  And what he said to me was basically, look, you kind of have to detach yourself and your payroll needs to just, you just, it's just a number on an Excel sheet. And you just have to like, figure out, do I deploy this much money here and what's my outcome going to be and what's my profit going to be? And that didn't sit well with me until about 12 months ago. So I launched this company called Hampton. Joinhampton.com. It's like a community for founders who are doing at least a million in revenue, but the average member is like 25 million a year. And I remember like that freaking me out forever. We had a team retreat last week and I went out there and right now we've got 16 full-time employees, or 15, including me. And then we've also employed, I think, 50 facilitators now. So in like 18 months, we've created,

• 25:26Sam Parr?

  what's that, 70 or 65 jobs, something like that? And I am so not stressed about it this year. This is the only time I've not been stressed about payroll and providing people. Because the way that we've looked at it is exactly how Tim has explained, where it's just like, what's my input? What's my output? And this idea of being like a capital allocator, I've never had that where it's like been as clear cut as, well, I hired this person, I get this much out after three months. It's completely changed how I've,

• 25:57Sam Parr?

  how I've run this company and it's made me so much more relaxed. And I don't know what made that shift other than his conversation. But you know, I'm talking about, have you ever like been through this?

• 26:05Shaan Puri?

  Well, we both used to be kind of like, oh, if you're an entrepreneur, you're a product maker. And like, we'd be sitting there writing, you know, you're writing the hustle and you know, I'm sitting there in, in designing things and working with agents, just trying to make a product. But there is an up level of that, which is, And as once you build the product and the product has part which Hampton does has product market fit. People like it, they use it, they're in it. Now you're a capital allocator. Basically, you're taking, you're, you're just deciding where resources go. So I need to be able to like, you can't be tight on money because money is your job. You have to deploy that in a way that's going to get more output than the input. And sometimes you'll miss, you're not going to be a hundred percent. But knowing that that's the job makes it easier.

• 26:46Shaan Puri?

  And it sounds like having the right conversation at the right time from somebody who's a peer of yours was the key.

• 26:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and that's by the way, what the whole, one of the whole things about Hampton is that you have peers with other entrepreneurs that are of similar sized company. That you have. And anyway, that like learning, I remember having our team offsite at previous companies and I'm like, how like this person just had a baby. Basically, I just had a baby. How am I going to create enough revenue in order to like provide for this kid? Cause that's how it feels at first. Or you're like, no, you didn't.

• 27:22Shaan Puri?

  I did, remember?

• 27:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 27:23Shaan Puri?

  I'm the one who did that.

• 27:25Sam Parr?

  Hey Jess, when's our baby shower?

• 27:30Sam Parr?

  Just this year, it's been, or you'll be like, this person costs $250,000. There's no way that's a fair salary. And it's like, well, that's not.

• 27:37Shaan Puri?

  It's a house where I'm from. Are you a house?

• 27:41Sam Parr?

  Can I live in you?

• 27:42Shaan Puri?

  You have three beds and a bath? If not, I'm not paying you $250,000.

• 27:47Sam Parr?

  So that's been my biggest takeaway this year with running Hampton. So anyway, if you're particularly if you're listening to this and you do at least 50 million in revenue, we're building groups for that. Joinhampton.com. All right, let's do the billion dollar one. You want me to go first? Can I go first?

• 28:01Shaan Puri?

  Okay, go.

• 28:02Sam Parr?

  All right, I'm going to steal one of your lines. So Sean, what if I told you I had an idea?

• 28:08Sam Parr?

  This is your line.

• 28:09Shaan Puri?

  I'm leaning in.

• 28:10Sam Parr?

  What if I told you I had an idea that Elon Musk himself would be bigger than Tesla? Would that interest you?

• 28:17Shaan Puri?

  I'd be fairly interested.

• 28:20Sam Parr?

  Do you know who, I think his name is Kai Fu Li? Do you know who that investor is? He's the.

• 28:24Shaan Puri?

  No, it sounds awesome though.

• 28:26Sam Parr?

  He's a famous Chinese investor, basically, one of the early guys at Apple, early at Google. He wrote a great book about why China is amazing in terms of like why they're going to beat America. And he was saying that this thing is going to replace 40% of jobs inside the next 12 years. Would that interest you?

• 28:45Shaan Puri?

  I would love to replace 40% of jobs in the next 12 years. I think about that often.

• 28:49Sam Parr?

  Now, if you're thinking I'm talking about AI, you're wrong. Here's it, here, here's what it is. It's humanoids. Humanoids, that's what, that's the technical term. Basically, imagine Robocop or imagine machines. And I think that those whole, uh, business of humanoids, which is robots to automate a lot of processes. But a lot of people think like just blue collar jobs, but that's not entirely true. It's like every type of job. So Elon Musk said that, um, the Tesla has, is working on humanoids. I think it's called Optimus is what it's called. And he went on to say that, uh, like at a recent investor call, he was like, not a lot of you people are talking about Optimus, our robots, but I think that's crazy because this is actually going to be bigger than our car business, bigger than self-driving, bigger than solar. It's going to be bigger than everything.

• 29:34Sam Parr?

  I don't think you guys realize how big this is going to be. I invested in this company, uh, in a space called Figure, and I talked to Brett Adcock, we had him on here. And he basically has me convinced that this is going to be like the biggest industry mover in the next like 10 or 15 years. And I think that what I would do-

• 29:51Shaan Puri?

  You invested in Figure?

• 29:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah, is that, is that, did I tell you that for the 30th time?

• 29:57Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no, no.

• 29:58Sam Parr?

  I've never told you that?

• 29:59Shaan Puri?

  That's funny, but what valuation?

• 30:02Sam Parr?

  $300 million, I think.

• 30:04Shaan Puri?

  Okay, that's not bad.

• 30:05Sam Parr?

  And I invested-

• 30:06Shaan Puri?

  It's not that bad.

• 30:07Sam Parr?

  Well, I invest, and I invested a lot for me, which I think is around $60,000.

• 30:13Shaan Puri?

  Well, yeah, he's like your hero. So, you know, you actually just paid for some time with your-

• 30:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I paid for access. I paid for him to reply to a text. Uh, but basically, that, that was a lot of money for me. I, I don't normally invest that much, but my reasoning is, is like this could, I could see it going out of business, which is incredibly likely. I could see it selling for $3 billion, or I could see it becoming like a $50 billion company. Um, but it's like any, any angel investment. I think the likelihood of it going out of business is incredibly high. But basically, here's my reasoning.

• 30:45Sam Parr?

  If you are why reasoning why I think this could be a big company, I think this is going to be like one of the biggest things that happens in the next 15 years. I think that the people who are working on this space are typically like hardcore hardware engineering nerds. And I think that I could spend a year going to every meetup, going to Carnegie Mellon, which I think a lot of these folks come from. And I think I could find a handful of people and do a really good job of organizing these people around a company. I think that I could do a good job of cold emailing the Brett Adcox of the world and getting in with them as well as some of the older guys in the space and making them like open up to me and say, what are tangentially like the areas that you're not attacking that are interesting? I think I can get them to explain to me these problems.

• 31:28Sam Parr?

  I think that I think this is so big that there's going to be more of these robots than there are humans. And I also think that when you in order to create a billion dollar company or a company that can net you a billion dollars, that's just you have to go huge. And you I think that the odds are what I'm doing personally in my life, I don't have a goal becoming a billionaire, but I think that could happen is I'm creating companies that sell for a small amount of money and then I'm letting compounding kind of like do the rest. That's going to take me 50 or 80 years. Who knows how long that's going to take me. But if you want to make it in a short amount of time, you pretty much have to raise VC and you have to do it in an industry that's like a tidal wave where you're just trying to catch that wave. If you want to do it in like 10 years rather. And so I think I would go into the humanoid space.

• 32:13Sam Parr?

  What do you think about that?

• 32:14Shaan Puri?

  Well, as you know, I love that idea because I was going to say that idea and you said, no, can I say that idea today? And I said, all right.

• 32:21Sam Parr?

  That's not what I said. I said, I said, I've literally written that down already.

• 32:25Shaan Puri?

  Can I have that? Will you send me that and I'll say it with my lips? And I was like, all right, fine, bro. Well, let me tell you something interesting. All right, let me add to it. So obviously.

• 32:35Shaan Puri?

  Hundred percent agree. I think I actually was specifically thinking like warehouse robots. Like I would even just kind of narrow it down and be like, all right, if I was really going to do this, I would try to figure out what job in a warehouse I can eliminate by using a robot.

• 32:50Sam Parr?

  Which is what, like packing boxes?

• 32:52Shaan Puri?

  Basically, I would look at the minimum wage labor class and I would say, um, nobody wants minimum wage, essentially. The workers don't want to be minimum wage. The employers don't want to pay minimum wage and get like kind of a flaky output. And so I had a friend once that was telling me, he's like, I invest in companies with no product market fit risks. My friend Vishal. And I said, what do you mean? I've never, I just thought every startup has product market fit risk. That's the whole point. You're trying to get to product market fit. He goes, no, I invest with no product market fit risk. I never heard that before. And he goes, I'm just looking for technical risk. Meaning if you could build it, the job is done. And he's like, of course you'll still go sell it, but like it will be so easy at that point. The market will obviously absorb this if it can actually do it.

• 33:36Shaan Puri?

  There are many things like this. So like self-driving, if you can actually make self, safe self-driving cars, cars that do not crash, that are, you know, uh, self-driving. And obviously there's always the edge cases, but there's an infinite market demand for people not to want to be driving and sitting in traffic and having their car parked instead of having it go run around and earn the money by dropping people off. And so his idea, you know, he invested in this pizza robot company. So it was like, basically.

• 34:00Sam Parr?

  Which was awesome. Zoom.

• 34:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Well, there was, there was like a few of them at the time. I don't think any of them worked out. There's always like these waves and it's like, it was too early. The tech wasn't there and all the companies crash and burn, but like the next wave should start right now. And actually that's maybe where I would go with this. So he's like, you know, if you're Domino's, do you want to pay, you know, whatever, I don't know what they pay, $15 an hour for somebody who's going to call in sick, they're going to be checking their phone, they're going to be goofing off, they're going to be eating pepperonis off the pizzas, they're going to, you know, they're going to get in fights with the other people there. And, you know, then they leave and then you have to replace them and then you have to train that new person. Or would you rather buy one machine that prints a perfect pizza every single time, 24/7, never calls in sick, never complains, never asks you for more money, never asks for a raise, never spits in the food, never does, would you rather have that?

• 34:46Shaan Puri?

  It's like, oh, of course. You would always have the robot that makes the perfect pizza. And he's like, making a pizza is incredibly like, it's a, it's a sandboxed thing. It's like, not like a robot that can do anything. It's a. Specific robot that can make a pizza. It can flatten the dough into a perfect circle, apply the cheese, apply the sauce, whatever, bake it for a certain time and then put it in the box and cut it. And like, that's what that needs to do. And I'm gonna, you know, so, so what I would do is I would go and do exactly what you said, like go to MIT, go to Carnegie Mellon and be like, hey, guys, we're building a pizza robot. And what we do, there's whatever, how many pizza chains, you know, how many pizza restaurant locations, how many pizza chains in the US?

• 35:27Sam Parr?

  And by the way, there was a company called Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, I forget, that went out of business and people made fun of them. They're like, in the headlines, they got totally mocked. They raised $500 million. That was cool and that definitely could have worked. I think they screwed it up. They like went, they like made restaurants that you could go to. That, that was not right.

• 35:45Shaan Puri?

  There's 80,000 pizza chain, pizza restaurants in the country, 80,000. And you would start with the chains because the chains actually have the most to gain by doing this, right?

• 35:54Sam Parr?

  And they would help you.

• 35:55Shaan Puri?

  They'll, they'll budget, they'll, they'll sign letters of intent. Like I remember when Boom Supersonic, the airplane company came out at YC and they were like, yeah, we have a hundred million dollar purchase order from like Richard Branson. If we could build this plane, they're gonna buy it. So now the question is, do you think me and this pack of nerds behind me can build this plane? That's the bet. And like, whether you do or don't believe it, that was the bet. And I like that idea. Uh, I'll tell, I'll tell you another thing about the robotics thing before.

• 36:20Sam Parr?

  I like test, I like tech risk a little bit more than like demand risk for sure.

• 36:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Me, me too. Um, even though that's not at all how I've, you know, thought about it before, but if I was gonna go try to build a billion dollar company, I would go try to build one with only tech risk and not demand risk. Um, so there's, I'm gonna tell you a little, little story here. So shout out to this guy, Abe. You probably don't know Abe, but his boss, Kevin Ryan, came on the pod. So Kevin Ryan comes on the pod. He's fascinating, but like, he had this aura of, I'm a badass who does badass things, but I'm kind of busy. And so, uh,

• 37:02Shaan Puri?

  Of course, Ben applied Ben's law. So the Ben's law, for those who don't know, is you don't try to contact Sean, you contact Ben. Ben is the faster, more approachable, smarter, better, better human being to approach and get the insight on and then get in touch with me than trying to go to me directly. And so Ben applied Ben's law. Ben goes and he finds Kevin Ryan's Ben. And so he finds the number two that's, you know, like there. And so he finds this guy Abe, Abe Murray. And I was, I'm subscribed to Abe's newsletter and he just had a good one, which he goes,

• 37:33Shaan Puri?

  he goes, why the consensus view of robotics is wrong? And he goes, I think that most people think, you know, the future of robots is this humanoid. And maybe a humanoid that walks and has arms and legs is the, is the eventual solution. But that might be too far out right now. And actually, we should look at the most successful robot in the world today. What is it? The dishwasher. It's installed in everybody's home already. It's a robot dishwasher. It replaced that job of having to wash dishes for, you know, the majority of homes. And he goes, it doesn't have arms and legs. It doesn't look like a human. It is a purpose-built robot that solves one specific need. And they have some company called Renovate Robotics.

• 38:14Shaan Puri?

  And the picture is basically it's a robot that sits on a roof that does roofing jobs. So it'll go and it'll replace a roof, basically. It just goes up and down your roof, uh, you know, or like, not replace, but like, you know, lay down the roof or whatever, like, you know, install a roof on a, on a home. And he's like, if this works, it's going to be, he's like, we just did the first robotically installed roof. If this works, you again, you have lower cost, higher quality, more like consistency, uh, more availability, you know, for, for roofing companies. And so I like this idea of these purpose-built, specific robots, the equivalent of dishwashers and pizza making robots and roofing robots. If I was going to do the billion dollar idea, that's what I would do.

• 38:58Sam Parr?

  But I'll give you a new one. Their homepage is, labor is the biggest challenge for roofers. Our robots make roofers twice as productive and improve safety by reducing work at height. Easy. That's an easy sale. Another, and I'll wrap this up. Another reason why robots are interesting is you are only working within the laws of physics. And the laws of physics, I find, I find those to be a bit. Easier to work in compared to say, creating the next Louis Vuitton. Like to creating a brand or consumer product, I actually think it's more complicated than just saying, well, I like, because that's an infinite number of options. Within hardware, it's just like, it's just like so much simpler and straightforward versus generating

• 39:41Sam Parr?

  demand or creating a brand that people love, or creating a social product that people love, which is so much more rare and more challenging.

• 39:47Shaan Puri?

  Have you heard Elon Musk quote, "The only real laws are physics, everything else is a recommendation."

• 39:54Sam Parr?

  No, but that's brilliant.

• 39:56Shaan Puri?

  All right, so that's a great idea. I think these personal robots.

• 40:01Sam Parr?

  That's a great idea I came up with, says you.

• 40:04Shaan Puri?

  Well, I was saying that's these, these, this robot idea, I think is the right idea. By the way, here's a way to like, create more luck like this. Our buddy Furcon has this space in San Francisco called Founder's Inc., F dot Inc. And what he did, I was like, so what's the plan? He's like, I'm just gonna recruit like, the smartest hackers I can find and just be like, hey, here's a free office, here, I'm gonna help you out and I'm gonna invest in you before you even know what the hell you're doing. And I'm gonna help you get these off the ground. I was like, well, that's great, but how are you gonna get the best hackers? He goes, I'm gonna give them toys. So what do you mean toys? He goes, I took the first floor of the entire office, there's no desks, it's just a hardware robotics lab. He's like, so I'm buying like, 3D printers, drones, laser cutting equipment, robotic arms,

• 40:50Shaan Puri?

  stuff that the average hacker can't buy, you know, the average, you know, 22-year-old engineer can't go buy this, you know, $15,000 thing or $30,000 thing. But Furcon could buy it and he's like, I'm just gonna make it available for free and come in here and work on it. And so now he's got, in that lab, there's a guy who's got a brain device that you put on your head and it like, makes you more focused. There's a guy who's, there's a company called Orangewood Labs that basically, they have this robotic arm that can. Do whatever you program it to do. So when I went in there, they were like, watch, we're gonna make it, you know, make a margarita. Watch this. We can make this. And the application they're doing is painting, or like, I don't know, powder coating or something like that.

• 41:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, powder coating.

• 41:31Shaan Puri?

  You ever done powder coating? And I was like, no.

• 41:33Sam Parr?

  It's really dangerous, too.

• 41:34Shaan Puri?

  I was like, no, stop asking me questions. And they're like, well.

• 41:36Sam Parr?

  I think everything is powder coating.

• 41:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's basically like how you, you know, all you do it on floors, you do it on any metals or whatever, like for a car or something like that. So they were like, yeah, this thing can powder coat basically better and faster, like automatically. And so we could do jobs at like, you know, one fifth of the price of a human being, because we just give them the robot, the robot just goes and does it, and then it comes home, and that's it. And so I was like, oh, interesting. But there's a lot of people building stuff like this. And one way to increase serendipity is to like, go to these kind of hardware labs, or go find out where they hang out, and just go talk to people, see what they're, what they're building.

• 42:09Sam Parr?

  And a lot of these people who do this. They're not, they're not, a lot of them don't care about business. A lot of them are unorganized. It's like the, the typical, like, scientist who wears, like, who forgets to put one sock on, and only wears like one sock, or like, their shoes on, on the wrong foot. It's like, they're just like these brilliant people who don't necessarily care about stuff. And I think if you can be the organizer, you can win. What do you have?

• 42:31Shaan Puri?

  All right. So my path to a billion. Do you want the dark idea? Or you want the light idea? Do you want the, the good idea or the evil idea? Which one do you want?

• 42:42Sam Parr?

  I don't know. That's, I want to go dark, I think, but.

• 42:46Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I can give you both, but I'll do the dark one fast. So here's the, here's the big pitch for the dark idea.

• 42:53Shaan Puri?

  Anduril for some other country.

• 42:58Shaan Puri?

  You could figure the rest out from there. What Palmer Lucky has done with Anduril for the US Defense Department? Do it for Israel. Do it for, do it for another country. Go find a country that wants, you know, advanced weapons technology, and be like, cool, I'm gonna recruit the brightest minds, and we're gonna give us like, you know, a 50 million to 150 million dollar contract, and we'll get started here.

• 43:20Sam Parr?

  Dude, Palmer's on a tear lately.

• 43:21Shaan Puri?

  And I would literally go look at the roadmap for Anduril, and be like, oh, they built this, like,

• 43:26Shaan Puri?

  missile that can fly itself, you know, and lives in this like vending machine. I don't know if you saw that video of like.

• 43:31Sam Parr?

  Yes, it's amazing, man. He's on a tear.

• 43:34Shaan Puri?

  I'd be like, cool. Do you pick from the Android menu? We're going to figure out how to build those and you guys will own the IP. That's what I would do if I really had to, you know, if I was, if I wanted to go into more of the gray or dark areas where it's, you know, there's a bit of war and destruction involved. But here's the light idea. Here's another idea.

• 43:54Shaan Puri?

  We're buying a university. Okay. So what are we doing? There are a lot of colleges for sale, more than you would think.

• 44:02Sam Parr?

  Are they on Quiet Light?

• 44:03Shaan Puri?

  They're on Deal Stream. So go to a website called Deal Stream.

• 44:06Sam Parr?

  Come on, that was kind of funny.

• 44:08Shaan Puri?

  Well, they could be. Deal Stream is literally like Quiet Light. It's just different name. It's the same idea. It's a business brokerage. Uh, but if you look colleges for sale, they're, they're there and they're not that expensive. You could buy colleges for like $5 million, $10 million. So to do this, you're going to need a lot of money, but the good news is that universities are worth a lot of money. Like what would you peg the value at? Let's start at the top end. Like, what do you think Stanford or Harvard is worth? Somebody really, if, if mega billionaire genius wanted to buy Stanford or Harvard, what, what would it even cost? Could it?

• 44:40Sam Parr?

  I don't even know. Would it be, would it be like a Harvard, a hundred plus billion dollars?

• 44:46Shaan Puri?

  I mean, the endowment alone, I think is like, what? The endowment alone is almost $100 billion, right?

• 44:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's hard to even, it's

• 44:52Shaan Puri?

  The whole ins and out has got to be 500 billion. It might like, these are companies that are worth, they're, sorry, the universities are essentially properties that are worth, you know, a Facebook. They're crazy, they're crazy.

• 45:04Sam Parr?

  Harvard endowment is, is 53 billion. So yeah, I don't know.

• 45:07Shaan Puri?

  A hundred to 200 billion, 300 billion, something like that?

• 45:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like so big that it's hard to understand.

• 45:13Shaan Puri?

  Hard to even fathom, right? Not for sale. Can't be bought essentially. Same thing with Stanford. Now let's even go to like a Belmont, right? So like, let's just do some quick math here.

• 45:21Sam Parr?

  I went Belmont University.

• 45:22Shaan Puri?

  You went to Belmont. What's the tuition at Belmont?

• 45:24Sam Parr?

  Back then it was 30,000. Let's see what it is now. Belmont University tuition, $38,000.

• 45:31Shaan Puri?

  All right. So $38,000 and how many students go to Belmont?

• 45:35Sam Parr?

  Let's say 5,000.

• 45:37Shaan Puri?

  5,000 per year, per year, or the whole, whole university?

• 45:40Sam Parr?

  You could say, um, let's say 1,800 per year.

• 45:44Shaan Puri?

  All right. So let's go, let's round up to 2,000. So even a small, small private, where, where is Belmont? I don't even know where it is.

• 45:49Sam Parr?

  Nashville, Tennessee. It looks like they have 7,300 students. So 2,000 per class, let's say.

• 45:54Shaan Puri?

  Cool. So $76 million top line. That's not counting endowments, that's not counting grants and research, it's not counting the fact that it's tax-free, that it's has like all these other benefits like we've

• 46:05Sam Parr?

  So you can actually see, see the numbers, by the way, that Belmont's annual revenue is $464 million, their expenses are $350 million, so they make $100 million a year in profit, they only have $200 million in liabilities, and they have $1.5 billion in asset.

• 46:23Shaan Puri?

  And that's for a middle of nowhere university, so that's the game plan, we're building one of those. Now, what are we gonna do? So we're gonna go buy one, what are we buying? We're essentially buying two things. I want the campus, and I want the liquor license. And by liquor license, I mean the accreditation. As long as it's already accredited, I don't want to have to go through that process. Now, why do I want a campus? Because I want the land, I want the buildings, I want the depreciation, I want a physical place because I think it adds to the prestige. We will have a large online component, but whatever. Now, the main goal here is we gotta brand this school. And so, what are we gonna do? We're gonna make it a bit of a luxury product, meaning it's gonna be only for the elite

• 47:07Shaan Puri?

  of the elite. So, yeah, we have to have a lower acceptance rate than Harvard, we have to be known for, we're gonna sponsor competitions for like mathlete type of competitions, hardcore science competitions, we are going to go around the country to high schools and basically be like, we're going after gamers, programmers, and hardcore math kids. And we're gonna sponsor a ton of competitions. Guess what those sponsorships cost? Pizza. The currency is essentially you provide free pizza. There is no competition. When I was doing our esports company that we sold to Twitch, I was like, alright, we want to create the world's biggest high school esports league. And we did, in like, less than a year. Guess what it cost? Like, 450 pizzas is what it cost me to like sponsor these programs. It cost nothing. And so, we're

• 47:52Shaan Puri?

  gonna go and we're gonna first, we're gonna get in front of them. Now, when I, why did I go to Duke University? I went because like in fifth grade, Duke did something called the Nationwide Talent Identification Program. And I'll be damned if my mom didn't want to find out if her kid was talented. And so, we take this test, and we take this test

• 48:09Sam Parr?

  and it's Is that like the Indian version of like a, like one of those model competitions they have at the mall when you're 12?

• 48:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's a beauty page. It's like sports, but for brown people. So

• 48:20Shaan Puri?

  still, my mom puts me in this. I really, I think every kid in my school took it. They just went to the school and they were like, hey, we're trying to identify the most talented, gifted and talented kids.

• 48:28Sam Parr?

  Also, parents, can you put your income on the statement as well?

• 48:34Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 48:36Sam Parr?

  Does that impact your IQ a little bit? And, you know, we gotta get paid.

• 48:40Shaan Puri?

  So I got a score back and a goodie bag. And literally, the goodie bag was a Rubik's Cube. And I don't know what the hell was going on, but whatever that is, I'm gonna go find the marketing coordinator that did this do talented education program. We're stealing that. We're gonna go get them while they're young, fifth, sixth grades. We're gonna be identifying these special, you know, special gifted and talented kids. So making it super prestigious. You already know the name's gonna have some old money shit, right? You know, you know, we're going, I've already done this before with the private school names.

• 49:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's gonna be like Bridgemont, Oakland.

• 49:11Shaan Puri?

  Waldorf.

• 49:15Sam Parr?

  Kennedy Excelsior.

• 49:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. So we're definitely going that way. We're gonna have our own entrance exam. So we don't take the SATs because we're not peasants. And so you're gonna, we're gonna go from city to city, and we're gonna have our own entrance exam. It's gonna be a six-point exam. I don't know what that means, but let's just say that's what it is. Now, what else are we gonna do? You know, these speaker bureaus where you can go pay like $50,000 for Obama to speak?

• 49:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 49:42Shaan Puri?

  We're doing that.

• 49:42Sam Parr?

  More like $2 million for Obama, but yeah.

• 49:44Shaan Puri?

  Okay, well, we got a budget, all right? And the budget's gonna be like, we have like a $6 million speaker budget. So when I'm raising this money for this, I'm gonna basically raise 50 to 75 million dollars, maybe 100 million dollars for this. And a lot of that is front loaded in brand building. And one of the things we're gonna do is about five to six million dollars a year in speaker fees. And so I'm basically gonna pull the Sam Bankman Freed without the fraud. So you know, Sam Bankman Freed took the money and basically was like, how do I just brainwash everybody that FTX is like a thing and it's legitimate? He's like, Tom Brady, Larry David, Steph Curry, this arena.

• 50:19Shaan Puri?

  This guy is like a super connector in Hollywood. I'm gonna put 100 million dollars into his fund. And now he's gonna make, he's gonna give me dinner with Bill and Hillary Clinton. And like, that's what he literally did. And although he did a bunch of screwed up things, honestly, it's kind of inspiring the way he just threw his weight around using money to like build a brand. If he had not literally stolen money from customer deposits to do so, that would have just been an incredible approach by an entrepreneur. Like it actually would have been very like lauded of how he did it, the same way that like, you know, Uber is is sort of praised for the way it just like brute force its way into different cities and actually like built a huge global brand. So that's what I would do. So speaker fees, those are going on the website, those are going viral to get those people

• 51:04Shaan Puri?

  to do like kind of speeches to our kids. And we're going to also spend a ton of money on direct marketing. So no university really goes D to C, except for the low end, University of Phoenix type of shit. That's crazy.

• 51:15Sam Parr?

  And by the way, they are amazing at it. They are really good at it.

• 51:19Shaan Puri?

  They built a five billion dollar business doing it.

• 51:21Sam Parr?

  In the world of like direct response, there's like financial newsletters, then there's like Omaha Steaks, who like crushes it and the stamps.com of the world.

• 51:31Shaan Puri?

  And erectile dysfunction.

• 51:33Sam Parr?

  And then like video game people, and then universities. University of Phoenix crushes it. I think, I think them and like Full Sail are in the top like 20 of spenders on Google.

• 51:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, ITT Technical Institute running TV ads and stuff like that, that's what I would do. So I'd basically go through podcasts, I'm going to blanket them. Every, every intellectual podcast that parents listen to, I'm going to blanket it with, with ads for this. And the ads aren't apply, apply now, come here. The ads are going to be about how hard it is to get in, about, it's going to be more native stuff about controversy. Is it right or wrong that the school is so hard to get into that it's only for the gifted and talented, that they're discriminating and only allowing the smart kids in? And I would actually drum up controversy around that in order to, to build the brand. Cause there's no better brand than a brand of something you can't get into.

• 52:26Sam Parr?

  So there's this amazing article that says, lessons you can learn from for-profit universities on cost per click advertising. The University of Phoenix in the last five years has spent $3 billion in marketing. On Google alone, it's estimated that they're spending roughly $5 million a month and they receive roughly 70,000 to 80,000 clicks per month off of Google app. That's insane. That is insane. That's wild.

• 52:52Shaan Puri?

  What else would I do? Okay, so I'm spending a ton of money on ads. I hired the best branding agency in the world. I'm spending money on the speakers fees. Again, I'm spending, spending, spending. Now, how do I make money? Okay, well, obviously you have things like your tuition. But I actually think there's another, another way you could do this. It involves my good old friend NFTs. Okay, so hear me out, hear me out. You're gonna respect this idea when you hear. Have you ever seen when a stadium launches that they sell something called PSLs? Do you know what those are?

• 53:20Sam Parr?

  Is that like season ticket holders for a certain period of time? Or like founding club members?

• 53:25Shaan Puri?

  You would think you're paying twenty five, fifty thousand dollars. Oh, you must be getting tickets. No, no, you got a personal seat license. And the license just allows you to buy the ticket. You can't even buy the ticket without the license. So literally imagine every chair in the stadium. And they basically have their own license. Each one has its own license. You have to buy the license in order to buy the tickets. Once you buy the ticket, now you can, now you can sell it. Now you can sell the license. You can sell whatever, right? They use this to fundraise. So I kind of had this idea about universities, which was. If I wanted to start a university, let's say it was gonna have. You know, five thousand or ten thousand students a year. Well, why wouldn't I sell ten thousand? Why wouldn't I mint a ten thousand NFT package around this?

• 54:06Shaan Puri?

  And again, I built the brand up. I have a real story here, unlike most NFTs. I have a real story. And the story is this. What would it be worth to buy a seat at Harvard? To own one seat in every admissions class in Harvard. You could use it for your own kid. You could gift it out as a scholarship. Or you could sell it to somebody who wants to go to.

• 54:26Sam Parr?

  Well, yeah, because the, the, the value.

• 54:28Shaan Puri?

  Rental property.

• 54:29Sam Parr?

  The value of a good diploma. It should go up every decade. So like a Belmont University, they don't have any street cred. So like my value isn't going up. A Harvard, a Stanford goes up, but then if they have a controversy like Penn State did, it goes down.

• 54:42Shaan Puri?

  Correct. And so I want to have ten thousand admissions licenses essentially. So this is a, a ticket you buy. There's one of one. You own it. You could decide if you use it, if you gift it, or if you rent it out to a student that year. And it's gonna pay you rental income. You're gonna get a piece of the revenue, a piece of the profits from the, from the, uh, from the, from the tuition. Now. I think that you could sell these for probably at least 25,000, if not 50,000 each, right? So like, I think that's a low end for what you could do if you again, tell the story properly. And your boy's a good storyteller. So let's say we get, we end up getting to $50,000 a piece. We sell 10,000 of these.

• 55:22Shaan Puri?

  I just raised $500 million. Okay. So yeah, that's a, that's a pretty big initial set of funding, but I think you could do that to get this off the ground without having to go get rich VCs or billionaires to fund this thing. And so I think what you could do is do maybe 10,000 or $20,000 per, per seat here, sell 10,000 of these. And you know, we're going to price these all in ETH. That's just five ETH. Five ETH that you own, uh, you know, a seat at this prestigious university. And so I don't know if I would do it year one, but maybe year two, I would move to that. Once I've built a little bit of the brand momentum and I would say, uh, you're going to own something that's going to pay you back every single year. So you might've spent 10 grand on it, but you're going to get back, you know, two grand a year, a thousand dollars a year in, in income. Plus you own this prestigious asset that's going to appreciate over time and you can sell your whole seat later.

• 56:08Sam Parr?

  I think you answered the shit out of this question. I, I, I think that's, that's, it's a very compelling argument. I would probably do normal tuition, but I understand that.

• 56:19Shaan Puri?

  You do normal tuition in addition. That's the beauty of these PSLs. You do normal tuition tuition on top of selling this initial seat. It's just that person gets a rev share of the tuition.

• 56:28Sam Parr?

  The biggest thing that's wild here is that you can go onto Deal Stream, which I am, and I'm looking at universities that you can buy. Here's a university for 8.5 million dollars that you can purchase, fully accredited, which I don't know what the value of that is.

• 56:43Sam Parr?

  And you get a campus.

• 56:45Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 56:45Sam Parr?

  Uh, this particular university had peak enrollment in 2017 with 2 million in revenue. This is wild. This is wild.

• 56:52Shaan Puri?

  Right here. Fully accredited university, Southern California. A fully accredited university in SoCal. All right. 25 million. It's accredited, its degree is recognized all around the world. They get, the school can offer F1 visas. So you know, we're getting that international student money. Cause you know, who likes being accepted into a hard to get into program in the United States more than a US citizen? Somebody in China. And so we are going to go ham on international students. We're going to, you know, uh, that's going to be a big part of the marketing. So this says, the, the school has about 900 students enrolled in undergrad MBA and DBA programs. There's one physical campus and one branch campus.

• 57:30Sam Parr?

  So they, I think this particular one has, it says title nine is possible. And I think with title nine, I think that means you get government funding for sports.

• 57:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. You're eligible for, for getting funding, uh, from it. And this is crazy, right? So I would, you know, I would just keep my eyes peeled for about a year. I would go around and you know, one thing that every rich person likes is the idea of like fixing education. And I would just go tell them, this is a school that you would have wanted to go to. Right? It's a school that is, um, you know, based around people who actually build things and make things. It's going to be a school that prioritizes projects. So for lectures, it's a school that is, um, you know, it's, uh, it's competitive and

• 58:11Sam Parr?

  And it's not online.

• 58:12Shaan Puri?

  It's not online and we're trying to, uh, build the next brand. These old brands, like, you know, even the best, you know, the, the Harvards, the Stanfords and whatever. There hasn't, you know, what, where is the new one? These are like hundreds of years old. There's an opportunity to build something fresh and we want you to be a part of it. You know, I think that that pitch would get a lot of people excited to cut, you know, $500 checks.

• 58:33Sam Parr?

  I think that was a 9.5 out of 10 pitch. I think you did pretty good. You did a great job by starting it off of, what do you think Harvard's worth? And I'm like, I don't even know unlimited money. Not, it's, it's, it's not even sellable probably. It's not even buyable rather. What's Stanford worth? What's University of Penn? I like it's, I don't know. It's there, there, it's invaluable almost. That's a, that's a very good pitch. Bravo.

• 58:55Shaan Puri?

  All right. Well, that's, that's the episode. That is the how to make a million bucks and how to make a million dollars, uh, from, from your boys at My First Million.

• 59:03Sam Parr?

  A million and a billion. That's the pod.