#220 - 12 Startups That Can Make You a Millionaire (Sara's List)

In this episode Sam (@theSamParr) and Shaan (@ShaanVP) update "Sara's List". This was a list of companies Sam and his wife created 5 years ago when she was looking for a job. What was the criteria? They had to be established startups who had the potential to 5-10x over the next 5 years. She went with Airbnb. If you are looking for a new job, check out these 12. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (1:01) Sara's List 2.0 * (6:59) Flexport * (9:30) Zapier * (13:16) Uniswap * (18:07) Anduril * (21:45) Replit * (27:39) Airtable * (31:01) Figma * (33:38) Rippling * (36:35) OpenStore * (40:23) Faire * (41:33) NexHealth * (43:31) OneTrust

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  Can non-technical people apply there, you think?

• 0:02Shaan Puri?

  Of course, right? Every technical company definitely needs people that are in non-technical roles, whether it's again, marketing, community, sales, whatever, whatever the roles will end up being.

• 0:24Sam Parr?

  Okay, um, this episode is gonna be awesome. And then the, there's a story behind this. I don't know if I told you this story, Sean, but basically, my wife, Sarah, she about four or five years ago, so my wife is like, pretty type A, went to an Ivy League school, isn't particularly risk, doesn't like taking risks, doesn't want to like, she, she's someone who's gonna rise up in a, in a big company and be an executive one day. And she wanted to, she was like, I wanna join a new company and I wanna make a lot of money. And she was, uh, Sarah's, uh, gonna be 29, uh, next week. So she was, what, 25? And she said, I wanna join a company where I can make some money. And so we made a list of a bunch of companies where we thought if she was given, let's say,

• 1:05Sam Parr?

  $250,000 of stock that would vest over four years, we made lists of places where that stock could like 10x. And that's how she eventually, she applied and got a job at Airbnb. That was like five years ago. And now there, I think when she joined, what was their last valuation before they went public? Like 18 or 20 billion, I think. And now their valuation's like 100, I think. So, uh, it, what's that, 5x maybe? So it did okay. And we, you and I were talking and I-

• 1:35Shaan Puri?

  I think you're underplaying it. It did better than, okay, let's just frame this, this fully, right? So, joined a multi-billion dollar company that already had 3,000 something employees.

• 1:45Sam Parr?

  No, it wasn't that big. I think it had 1,200, but yes, it was big.

• 1:48Shaan Puri?

  Alright, so I, I was over 1,000 employees. So, uh, really, you know, not joining a risky startup, not buying a lottery ticket. And so she knew this is going to have some gain. It's just a question of like some value. It's just a question of how much got a job and she wasn't like an exec. So it was kind of like an achievable thing like she came in as like, I don't know, like a mid level manager. Is that fair to say?

• 2:10Sam Parr?

  Mid level. Yeah, I would say.

• 2:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 2:12Sam Parr?

  Lower, lower to mid.

• 2:14Shaan Puri?

  Right. Lower to mid. So didn't even come in as a hot shot. And before the age of 30 was worth, it was a multimillionaire because of the stock that that appreciated from this thing, right? From, from, from joining Airbnb, right? So self-made multimillionaire, self-made, self-made multimillionaire without eating shit as a startup founder, right? Right? Where you're stressed and you're making no money and you might fail all the time and all that stuff. And you have to make payroll and all that good stuff. And, um, you know, so, so had to kind of like cushy, you know, every day got to go in and pick which flavor of soy milk she liked from the company fridge and like had health benefits and had all the things that you get, the good things you get at a company, plus got to see it grow, right? So, so I thought.

• 2:57Sam Parr?

  By the way, I am, I cannot confirm or deny the multimillionaire. I, I, we can't, I can't completely pull up her spot or the, the soy milk spot. Shouldn't drink soy milk, but the, the point is, the point is, is that Airbnb was like they, they pay very competitive, you know, they recruit people from Google and Facebook, so they pay competitive salary. You get very competitive and wonderful benefits. You work really hard, but it's not a startup of 20 people where you don't have any resources. So, you know, you have resources to, to get help. And so the idea with this, we're calling this Sarah's List. We should come up with a cuter name one day, but it's, the idea here is that we made a list of companies that are cushier than like a 20 person startup, but still have wonderful upside. So you can

• 3:39Sam Parr?

  make a very competitive salary, have wonderful benefits, and there's like a five, 10, 15 X upside.

• 3:46Shaan Puri?

  So low risk, great reward. You're not going to become a billionaire doing this. That's okay. Most people don't really care about that. So when I heard this, when we were talking, I was like, oh, wow. Like, um,

• 3:58Shaan Puri?

  I think of myself as the hustler, but this is the ultimate hustle, right? You know, not in a bad way. What I mean was like, this was the hack. This was the lowest, low effort, low risk way to get a great outcome. Meaning, didn't have to work 120 hours a week, didn't have to like carry the whole company on their back, didn't have to like pick a winner. And it's really hard to pick early stage winners. It's like, no, pretty clearly it was going to be a winner. And still walked away with a great outcome or, you know, so had a great, great outcome. I thought, wow, that's, that's actually fantastic. I think there's a lot of people who would love that path. There's some people who want to be Elon Musk. They want to go change the world. There's some people who want to make a billion dollars. There's some people who want to just have, go sit on a beach and do nothing, right?

• 4:40Shaan Puri?

  But, but there's a lot of people who would love this. Hey, let me work at a great company with really smart people, working on a cool product and let me build, you know, you know, financial independence without risking it all. Like, you know, like a degenerate gambler. So to me, we got Craigslist. We got Angie's List. What's the one with the child predators? I don't know what that one's called, like Molly's List or something like that. We got whatever Molly's List and now we have Sarah's List. And Sarah's List is the companies that we think you could go join today. They're already valued, you know, over $250 million. They have, we think, a low risk profile. But if you stayed there for four years and you came in as a mid-level person and you got your grants,

• 5:22Shaan Puri?

  which is like 50,000 in stock every year or something like that, that that could make you a self-made millionaire or multimillionaire. That's the, that's the fun.

• 5:30Sam Parr?

  Before we get into this, everything that we're going to say, it's not like financial advice or anything. All the information that we have, it's basically what we've just read online or rumors that we've heard amongst friends. None of it, so like everything is hearsay and a lot of predictions, right?

• 5:45Shaan Puri?

  Yes. Yeah, we could be wrong, but we thought it'd be fun. You know, like we're not going to go take these jobs, but there's a lot of people out there who would love to know, hey, what would you all recommend? We know it's not a guarantee. We know it's not set in stone. We know this is just a prediction, but hey, some prediction is better than nothing. So we'll go on the record and we'll see how these play out. All right. So we each did a research. We got five.

• 6:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so you go. So we have five. I've got more than five, but let's go. You go, I go, and then we'll go back and forth.

• 6:10Shaan Puri?

  Okay, great. Okay, I'm gonna save my best one. I'm gonna bring in second. I'm gonna first jab, just feel feel you out, see how strong you're coming in, but my best one is coming next. My PowerPoint is coming second, okay. But for the first one, my first one that I'm gonna present for Sarah's list, my nomination is Flexport.

• 6:30Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 6:30Shaan Puri?

  Okay, what's Flexport? So Flexport is a company that you use when you are when you are shipping things. So you so, for example, my e-commerce company, we ship things. We need to arrange between an international supplier. We need our goods to go from their factory to our our warehouse. Well, how do you do that? You gotta you gotta go to a bunch of shipping carriers. You gotta say, hey, when are you? When do you have a boat leaving? My my ready date is August 3rd. Do you have a boat August 3rd? What's the price? They get some quotes. So what Flexport does, this is a job called freight forwarding. Flexport is basically software that does this thing that used to be done pretty manually or with very old clunky software. They made modern slick software that does this freight forwarding thing,

• 7:13Shaan Puri?

  right? So you go online, you could see all your quotes, you book your boat with a simple click, you pay the fees, it's all, you know, like, very nice and and the notifications come through. And basically, it is modern freight forwarding software. So Flexport's currently valued, last public valuation was about $3 billion. The SoftBank put in $1 billion at a 3.2 billion valuation. It's got about 2,500 employees. These are abouts. So, you know, about 2,500 employees. And they're in a huge space. So global shipping is massive. It's only getting bigger, the bigger e-commerce gets. And and what they did was there was all these small mom and pop freight forwarders, and they just sort of like, did what what

• 7:56Shaan Puri?

  many great companies do. They they sort of take a fragmented market with low NPS, and they build a best in class product that's, you know, integrated. And so you don't have to deal with kind of the the mom and pop telephone call game that you would have otherwise had to do.

• 8:09Sam Parr?

  And the founder is pretty amazing. His name is Ryan Peterson. I've hung out with him once or twice and I've read a lot of interviews with him. He's very charismatic. He once said that this company is either going to be worth zero or a hundred billion dollars or something like that. You know, he's like, this is going to be all or nothing. And he's pretty, he's

• 8:25Shaan Puri?

  By the way, we should compile an ebook of quotes like that. That's like Talk Dirty To Me, the VC edition. It's like, what are some offhand things you can say as a founder that just get every investor to like salivate? And they, they sometimes sound dumb. Like, why would I say my company is either going to be worth zero or a hundred billion? It's like, well, that's exactly what a VC wants, because that's how their economics work. So we should just, and you could just cherry pick these phrases. They're like pick up lines for VCs. And we should just make a little ebook out of those. But that's a great one.

• 8:53Sam Parr?

  All right. Next one. I'm going to go first. Mine will be easy as well. Zapier. So what they do, it's always really hard for me to explain what this company does. But once you use it, you immediately get it. And I'll give you a use case. So basically, what they do is they connect APIs. So for example, when the hustle first started, we had, we didn't, I didn't want to buy like greenhouse or one of these like really $500 a month applicant tracking systems. And so I created a Google form, and then I use Zapier to connect that to Asana. And so every time someone applied to a job, the information was automatically filmed, filled into an Asana board. And that's what we use to track our job applicants. Another example, and this is like a really simple personal use case, is I had a scale. And every time I stepped on my smart

• 9:35Sam Parr?

  scale, it told Zapier and Zapier put my weight into a spreadsheet and I compared it to all my friends' weight and we had a competition. Now, that's like a really simple use case, but they do incredibly complicated ones where they'll attach loads of different, so you could build an entire company using basically Google Spreadsheets and Zapier. They're interesting for a few reasons. First, they bootstrapped it to like 60 or 70 million dollars in recurring revenue, and they did it very quickly. They recently raised a little bit of funding at a $5 billion valuation by, I believe, Sequoia. They currently have 350 people. My opinion is this is going to end up very similar to Atlassian. So Atlassian is an Australian company that went public, I think in 2000.

• 10:19Sam Parr?

  14 and when they went public, it was like a 15 or no, maybe it was like a $6 billion valuation. And they sold widgets to small businesses, software to small businesses. And people slept on them and it slowly scaled. I think today at Lasting is worth $100 billion. I think Zapier is going to be similar. Wade Foster, the founder of Zapier spoke at HustleCon. And I hung out with him and he was like, everything I, he was just like, perfect. He was wonderful.

• 10:45Sam Parr?

  There is one downside. I've heard through friends of friends that they don't, they, so their pay is they, they're a remote team. They've been remote from day one. They only, they pay against Chicago market salaries. So they don't pay San Francisco salaries. So that might be a downside, but I would love to own Zapier stock.

• 11:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Okay. So, so what you're saying is it's a $5 billion company and kind of amazingly this was, it was at 1.3 million in funding to get to that 5 billion in value. Is that right?

• 11:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they basically only raised $1 million in funding and they got that to 60 million ARR. They're probably north of 100 million ARR. They're probably worth, they were rest valued at five. They're probably worth 10 at this point. I mean, it's like a crazy valuable company.

• 11:28Shaan Puri?

  That's insane.

• 11:28Sam Parr?

  They're growing crazy.

• 11:29Shaan Puri?

  You would need them to become a 25 to 50 billion dollar company and you're betting that they can and will do that.

• 11:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Over the course of four or five years, when all your stock would vest, yes, I think that.

• 11:41Shaan Puri?

  Okay. All right. Sounds good. Okay. So.

• 11:44Sam Parr?

  Do agree or disagree?

• 11:48Shaan Puri?

  They've surprised me every step of the way so far. So, you know, when you first, it's like Zapier, I'd be like, oh, cool indie hacker project. And then it's like, oh no, it actually got to like a million dollars ARR. It's like, oh, you know, that's cool, cool bootstrap software company. Maybe you can sell for 25, 30 million dollars. Oh, wow. They're doing 50 million in ARR. Okay. Uh, geez. How many times again am I going to be wrong here? So I'm just debating, do I really want to bet against them again? And I think the answer is no, I don't want to bet against them again. So I think I'm going to give you thumbs up on your, on your, on your one here. I would include it in Sarah's list. Flexport, would you have given it the thumbs up or thumbs down to be included on Sarah's list?

• 12:26Sam Parr?

  Can it be worth 50? Yeah, definitely.

• 12:29Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Good. So we have.

• 12:30Sam Parr?

  Keep in mind, we're, keep in mind, we're talking about like five years from today.

• 12:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, five years, five years. Exactly.

• 12:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 12:35Shaan Puri?

  So, okay. So we have two, two, two successful nominations to Sarah's list. I'd like to give you my next nomination. You're gonna hate this one or roll your eyes or something. Okay. Uniswap. Do you know what Uniswap is?

• 12:47Sam Parr?

  No.

• 12:49Shaan Puri?

  Oh my God, that's insane to me. Okay, so Uniswap, if you go to like, I don't know, I think it's uniswap.org is how you get to the thing. So Uniswap, what if I told you, let's just play this game. There is a company in the cryptocurrency space. And I have an opportunity for you to join. Here's, here's some of the things you need to know about this. It is, it's bigger than Deutsche Bank Credit Suisse and State Street all combined. It has.

• 13:15Sam Parr?

  Bigger in terms of what? Current market cap?

• 13:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, in terms of current market cap. Okay, let me tell you some other things about it. Oh, is that just market cap? Is that just one of those crazy crypto market cap things? Hold on, let me just tell you a little bit more. What if I told you it has the trading volume of Coinbase with 50 times less employees? Would that be something you're interested in?

• 13:33Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 13:34Shaan Puri?

  What if I told you that this company is doing 10 billion a week in trading volume? And what if I told you it was doing that with less than 35 employees? What if I told you that it took Coinbase eight years and 1,000 employees to get to a billion dollars in revenue? And I told you that Uniswap is only two and a half years old, has less than 50 employees, and is on pace to do over a billion dollars in revenue this year? Would that be something you're interested in? Because that's Uniswap right now.

• 14:01Sam Parr?

  In, in, in. So what do they do?

• 14:05Shaan Puri?

  So what do they do? Okay, so let's say you've heard of all the different like tokens that exist. So let's say, have you ever heard of, you know, DAI or Ethereum or whatever, like all these different tokens, right? There's thousands and thousands of different currencies. So Coinbase, what they're really good at is to say, you have US dollars, you want to go buy some Bitcoin or Ethereum, you want to go buy some, you know, some, some Solana, great. We'll take your US dollars, we'll connect with your bank and you can buy this crypto asset. What Uniswap does is says, thanks Coinbase, we'll take it from here. You're kind of slow and expensive. And you, you know, you have all these employees and all this red tape and stuff like that. From here, once you have a crypto token, this is, Uniswap is how you trade any crypto token for any other crypto token.

• 14:49Shaan Puri?

  So it lets you swap between any crypto asset instantaneously, and it's what's called a decentralized exchange. Means there is no central company with a bunch of employees that owns the exchange. It's a protocol that they built. And all it does, if you go to the website, it just says, what currency do you have? What currency do you want? Here's the, the exchange rate, push go, and it'll exchange it for you right there. And what they did was, the genius of it is. Normally for a centralized exchange like Coinbase, they have to have a, you know, sort of they're, they're the market maker. They, they, they find buyers and sellers and they match them together and they have to have, you know, a certain amount of reserves themselves to be able to facilitate, to bring liquidity into the market. What, what decentralized exchanges do, what DEXs do,

• 15:33Shaan Puri?

  that's, that's what they're called, is you have a buyer, you have a seller, and then you have this group in the middle that I can also come in and be a liquidity provider. So I can just go give Uniswap some money and I can earn a portion of the revenue that they have, that they make just by providing liquidity into the pool.

• 15:47Sam Parr?

  Oh, cool.

• 15:47Shaan Puri?

  And so they have, it's like a three-sided market. And so they have over, over $5 billion of liquidity that users just locked up into their market to create the liquidity for their market.

• 15:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a weird lending club type of, type of thing. That's pretty sick. Only 30 people. What type of person would be good to, wow. What type of personality would be good to work there?

• 16:08Shaan Puri?

  I don't know, crazy nut. I don't know. You know, these types of things that it's like you, typically these are going to be engineering-heavy like things. And so you can come and be, you know, do all the other stuff. So let's say you're a community person, you're a marketing person, you're a PR person, you're whatever. You can go and sort of say, look, I have this skillset that you probably need. But when you're at 35 people and this much scale, they kind of need everything. They need more of everything probably. And so I think anybody could probably fit in. You just have to figure out how to solve some of their problems.

• 16:36Sam Parr?

  Do you think they give equity?

• 16:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So basically, there's a company. So there's a company and then there's the, the protocol. The company owns some of the tokens using the protocol. But like, so, so their company raised a Series A from Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm and a bunch of others. They raised only a Series A. So I think, I think they've only raised $11 million to date. And they've reached basically the same scale as Coinbase on $11 million. And Coinbase is what, an $80 billion company? So, so, so I think, you know, this would be a very, very, very valuable group to be a part of. Now, the economics are different because it's crypto and everything's weird. It's like, what's the valuation? What's my equity worth? I don't know. It's all, it's all funky. You gotta figure it out yourself. But there's definitely enough value there. It's growing super fast.

• 17:19Sam Parr?

  It's kind of for a person who's, I imagine the personality type is like someone who's okay with a little bit, a lot of chaos and some risk.

• 17:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And like, uh, non-traditional. Okay with something that's non-traditional.

• 17:30Sam Parr?

  All right, I'm gonna give you another non-traditional one. This, this, this might be one of my stronger ones. So it's called Androl. I think that's how you say it. Do you know what that is?

• 17:40Shaan Puri?

  I had it on my list. All right, you stole it right off me.

• 17:42Sam Parr?

  Wait, did you really? Did you really? I didn't see it on yours.

• 17:45Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 17:45Sam Parr?

  No, it's not written up on here.

• 17:47Shaan Puri?

  Oh, sorry, I didn't put my, I have my own little cheat sheet here that you don't have.

• 17:51Sam Parr?

  All right, great. So mine's called Androl. So I'll, I'll tell you a little bit background, but you actually might know a little bit more. So basically, it started by the guy named Palmer Lucky. And the reason why this is interesting is Palmer Lucky started Oculus when he was like 16 or 17, and then he sold it to Facebook for somewhat like a billion dollars, just like a ton. And it's interesting because Palmer Lucky is very controversial. So he's a, a, a big supporter of Donald Trump, which is very atypical in Silicon Valley. He was fired from Facebook and a lot of people, or he was the one who said he thinks he was fired because he liked Trump and he sued Facebook for hundreds of millions in one. So regardless if you think that's cool or not, he is controversial amongst Silicon Valley folks.

• 18:35Sam Parr?

  And so he started this company out of Orange County. And they, here's another controversial thing. They make stuff for the government. Their first product was an invisible wall, basically. So it was a way to build drones, I believe, to keep illegal immigrants from crossing the Mexican-American border. So controversial, whatever. We can, we definitely can agree to that. They've raised money and it's worth about $4.6 billion. They have 510 employees. This would not be good for a liberal person or someone who, like, you basically have to be be moderate or right of center to want to work here. Palmer seems like a, like a fine enough guy, a little quirky, but definitely it's a right-leaning company, which is incredibly normal in Silicon Valley. I definitely think this could be a Palantir-esque company.

• 19:19Sam Parr?

  The way that I describe what they do, if I'm correct, is basically, if you ever see the movie War Dogs, people or the government says, "We need blank." And then people bid and they wait to get it. And then the person, they go, "We need some type of vehicle that can fly like a plane, but land like a helicopter." And then people go out and, and build it. Well, what Androl does, I believe, is they build stuff that they think the government needs, and then the government buys it from them and it saves a bunch of time. Is that basically what they do?

• 19:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so they, uh, yeah, exactly. Their, their, their primary revenue source comes from the government. And what they build is like pretty fancy hardware, software combinations. So they're like one of their, if you go to their website, it's like Century Tower. It's like this solar powered tower. It's like this giant pole that is, you know, used to like, you know, uh, basically, uh, monitor a border, right? Monitor an area. And, uh, and it's autonomous. And so there's basically like the hardware to be able to do that. So like top flight hardware, mixed with software that makes it like, you know, smart, intelligent, work well, you know, it's like a Nest camera for the government. And so, you know, they have drones, they have different, different things like that. It's not a huge product line because these things are hard. They probably take tens of millions of dollars to make each one.

• 20:30Shaan Puri?

  But they, um, they're basically trying to be the kind of like the most technology forward provider for, you know, the US defense budget, which I think is like, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars. I think is what you have here like $700 billion a year.

• 20:44Sam Parr?

  And the question is, can, so they're currently worth a little bit over four billion. They raised money from founders fund, I think. Can this company be worth 20, 40, 50 billion in five years? 100%, it definitely can. Um, it definitely can. This guy already built a billion dollar company at the age of like 22. Definitely. All right, your turn.

• 21:02Shaan Puri?

  Okay, that's a good one. I had that one on my list, so I like that one a lot. All right, Sarah's list is filling up. We got, uh, thumbs up there. Okay, I want to do one. I'm gonna do one that I invested in, actually. Okay, so disclaimer, it's not even really a disclaimer or disclosure. This is actually a flex. Yes, I'm an investor. Okay, so this company's called Replet. Have you ever seen Replet? Do you know what this does?

• 21:22Sam Parr?

  Only because you have been telling me for years it's going to be the greatest.

• 21:26Shaan Puri?

  So, um, so I'll tell you how I found them or how I kind of heard about them. So I heard about them from two different places. Anytime these two people talk about something, you're like, oh, wait, that's like a winning combination. So the first is like my teenage nephew is like using this tool, Replet, to learn how to code. I'm like, oh, okay, never heard of before. Kind of like, that's interesting. Stuff teenagers use, you should probably like pay attention to stuff teenagers use because those tend to be big companies, you know, whether it's Snapchat or, you know, Minecraft or Roblox or things like that. And I was like, all right, so, so, you know, I stashed it away, didn't really pay too much attention to it. Second time I heard about it was from Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator. He tweeted out a graph, a graph of a hockey stick.

• 22:10Shaan Puri?

  He goes, uh, he said something, you know, like one of the fastest grow, you know, this is one of the fastest growing companies I've ever seen. He goes, he's like, this is, yes, that's over 5 million users. And yeah, that may not sound like a lot, but when your users are all programmers, 5 million is a hell of a lot. And, um, and that's so true, like 5 million programmers on a network is like worth its weight in gold.

• 22:33Sam Parr?

  Every programmer ever.

• 22:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So, and so then, uh, so I can't hear too much about it, but basically companies value just under a billion dollars right now. So if you're looking at this, you're like, okay, can I, does this end up at 5 billion or more?

• 22:47Sam Parr?

  But what, what's it do though? What's it do?

• 22:49Shaan Puri?

  So what does it do? Okay. You want to learn how to code. It's kind of like a sandbox that does a few important things. The first is if you ever try, have you ever like gone down a path where like, dude, I'm going to learn how to code. I'm going to, I bought this Udemy course. I'm going to learn Python. Have you ever like gone down that path at all? Cause one of the most confusing things that happens is you're like, oh shit, where do I type this? You don't write your code in a Google Doc, right? Like you've got to type your code in a code editor. And like, then it's like, oh, great, but you need to install these like Python packages. You're like, what the hell is that? It's like, you need to like install NPM or like, what the hell is NPM? And then you're like, it's like, oh, you need to deploy. So now you need servers and you're like server, what do we get in one of those? And so it's all just very confused, just the environment, which is basically like the equipment you need to code.

• 23:32Shaan Puri?

  Setting up that developer environment in itself is like, for me was very confusing. Now I'm like, you know, average person. So like, if, if an average person finds it confusing, that means it's too confusing. And so what Repli did was the first they were like, dude, look, it's just a website you go to. It's already got all that stuff baked in. You don't have to install anything. You don't need five different programs just to be able to deploy code. Like you write the code here, then you push run, you test it here and then you push deploy and you deploy it here. Great. All built into one. So that was really useful for young hackers, young engineers and hobbyists who wanted to like learn this stuff. So the first thing was they made all the stuff you need to learn it. Then they were like, okay, cool. But this is kind of like a social network. Cause we got all these programmers all writing code. It's kind of like, if you've ever looked at GitHub, GitHub is this big network. It's probably the biggest network of developers.

• 24:16Shaan Puri?

  And they all put their code here. Well, what GitHub did was like, you could fork something. So you put some code, you make it publicly available. I can read it and then I could fork it, make my own version of it and you'll get notified that, hey, Sean, remix to your thing. So Replit does that like on steroids. So they're basically, it's almost like a game. It's like all the different programmers can see what all the other programmers are doing. They can get inspired by those. They can literally take their code and remix it, make their own version of it, or they can like contribute to each other. And they could take little parts that somebody made. Somebody made this bouncing ball. Cool. I'm going to grab that. I'll, I don't have to remake it from scratch. I'll just use their bouncing ball. Program, you know, code and I'll add that to my basketball hoop thing that I'm making. And so it's like a multiplayer.

• 24:57Shaan Puri?

  Little like game almost for programmers to be able to like, um, not just, not just write their code, not just deploy their code, but also. You know, like, uh, find other pieces of code that they can interact with and monetize it. So you can actually launch full apps, full programs on here and make money. It's like all built in. So the bet here, if you look at their graphs, it's like everything is a hockey stick, like crazy, crazy upwards curve.

• 25:23Sam Parr?

  All right. I'm on board with that.

• 25:24Shaan Puri?

  So, so I think that's, they, they do this side by side comparison. Like here's our growth compared to GitHub's growth from zero, you're zero, you're one, you're two, you're three or four. And they're like outpacing GitHub's growth.

• 25:35Sam Parr?

  All right. I'm on board with that. I think that's a good one. Um, can non-technical people apply there, you think?

• 25:40Shaan Puri?

  Of course, right? Every technical company definitely needs people that are in non-technical roles, whether it's again, marketing, community, sales, whatever, whatever, whatever the roles will end up being. Yeah, for sure. And in fact, usually those companies, technical companies get built kind of like engineer first. And so they actually need people that are non-technical to be able to join.

• 25:59Sam Parr?

  All right. That's a good one. I'm on board. I'm on board with that one. All right, my turn. This one is similar to Zapier, Airtable. So Airtable is a Microsoft Excel alternative. It's a Google Sheet alternative. When they first came out, I was like, why on earth? Why on earth would anyone need this? Like, Google Sheets works great. And then I use Airtable, and I realized they're kind of making it their own category. It's very sticky. It's very neat. Right now, they're valued, since 2021, they raised money at a $5.7 billion valuation. I actually think they could be much larger. There's another company that I kind of compare them to. They're not quite the same, but I think they're a little bit same in terms of stickiness.

• 26:41Sam Parr?

  And they came out at the same time, or they got popular around the same time. That's Monday.com. And they're worth, they went public at like 18 billion. I think that Airtable could definitely do really great. They currently have 645 employees.

• 26:55Sam Parr?

  The guy who started it, I think his name is Howard Liu.

• 26:58Shaan Puri?

  Howie.

• 26:59Sam Parr?

  Howie Liu. And he's kind of like this prodigy genius guy. Like, that's like how they stereotype him in the media. But I've seen interviews.

• 27:07Shaan Puri?

  He went to my school. He went to Duke.

• 27:09Sam Parr?

  Did he?

• 27:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 27:10Sam Parr?

  I saw interviews with him, though. He was definitely like a prodigy, young genius, but he was very like wise. And like, he wasn't like a wacky weirdo. He was like, pretty well thought,

• 27:21Sam Parr?

  well spoken.

• 27:22Shaan Puri?

  You want to know something funny?

• 27:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 27:23Shaan Puri?

  So, seven years ago, so we were in a mastermind group. If you remember, me, you, and a couple other guys, we used to get dinner every month or two or something like that, talk startups. And we would occasionally invite other people in. And so, I have a DM where I DM'd Howie, back when Airtable was very, you know, was a lot smaller. I think it was still probably, I think it had just raised money, maybe under $100 million, I think was the valuation at that point in time. And I was like, Howie, I love Airtable. Think it's fucking great. I think it's gonna be big. You know, you're a fellow Duke guy. That's awesome. Hey, I host these mastermind dinners. You should come to one. And he's like, oh, I'd love to. And we scheduled it. And you were scheduled to go to it. And then I think you and one other person canceled.

• 28:04Sam Parr?

  What?

• 28:05Shaan Puri?

  Like, oh, I can't come. And so I canceled the dinner. And so I never met him. And like, you know,

• 28:10Sam Parr?

  Fuck.

• 28:10Shaan Puri?

  Who knows what could have been. We could have been homies by now. We could have been invested

• 28:13Sam Parr?

  Damn.

• 28:13Shaan Puri?

  A long time ago, you know, under a hundred million dollars.

• 28:16Sam Parr?

  Did you hang out with them?

• 28:17Shaan Puri?

  No, that was the, that was the excuse I had been made. I was like, I do these as excuses to hang out with people. Right? I don't want to just say, hey, I'd love to meet you. It's like, yeah, great. I don't love to meet you. I don't want to ask them to coffee, but I was trying to invite them to something cool. It's like, hey, we do this founder thing.

• 28:31Sam Parr?

  My bad. Howie, I'm sorry, dude.

• 28:35Shaan Puri?

  All right. So I have one that's very similar.

• 28:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah, or no.

• 28:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah. Because Excel is like the, there's this great quote, which is like, every SaaS company, you actually compete with Excel. You don't compete with other SaaS companies. You compete with Excel because people just use Excel for everything. And, um, and so, yeah, I think that like, I don't, I don't know what Excel's market cap would be, but I think Excel's, I don't know what it would be.

• 28:58Sam Parr?

  Dude, Excel is like AirPods to Apple. Like, AirPods would be a hundred billion dollar company on its own. That's what Excel is.

• 29:05Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So if Excel is a hundred billion dollar company, I think that the, the best threat to Excel is going to end up being worth, you know, 20, 30, pretty, I think there's a pretty good chance of that. And so I like this a lot more. It was recently at one or two billion. I liked it a lot more there than at 5.7, but like, you know, we didn't do the episode then. We did it now. So, okay, so I'll give you one that's very, very similar, real quick. Figma. So Figma's.

• 29:29Sam Parr?

  Oh, I have that one too. I have that one too.

• 29:32Shaan Puri?

  Instead of, you know, and I'll do it quick because people already know Figma, but I would put it on the list. You know, the way Airtable, what Airtable is doing for Excel, Figma is doing for Photoshop. So it's the younger, slicker, cloud-based, sexier version of design software. And it's kind of eating Photoshop's lunch. And I don't know what it's worth now. What is it? Seven billion now? It's like.

• 29:56Sam Parr?

  No, it's, uh, so in July of 2021, they raised $200 million at a $10 billion valuation. But here's, that sounds like a lot. But to the listeners, Andy, you Sean, how much is, uh, what's Adobe's market cap? So Adobe, uh, I believe almost all the revenue at this point is from Photoshop, right?

• 30:17Shaan Puri?

  Well, it's the Creative Cloud, which is basically a bundle that you're like, I want Photoshop, but buy fireworks and you know, like buy all this other shit that we like bundle in with Creative Cloud.

• 30:26Sam Parr?

  Okay, so tell me what you think it is.

• 30:29Shaan Puri?

  I would have guessed Adobe's market cap is, I don't know, $150 billion, something like that. What is it?

• 30:37Sam Parr?

  It is 315. And if I'm not mistaken, that might be one of the, let's look it up. It might be one of the 50th, let's see, Adobe would be, is one of the biggest companies in the world. So Adobe is the 30th largest company in the world. So when you think about how big this can be, you think $10 billion, that's so much money. Well, Adobe's the, one of the biggest companies in the world. Figma's going after it. Totally should be on this list.

• 31:06Shaan Puri?

  It's like, it's like all the business trends. It's like first unbundling. It's like, well, Creative Cloud brings in $12 billion a year. Well, let's unbundle the most valuable part of it. Photoshop and let's do it differently. Okay. What's different? Second trend, cloud-based, right? Third trend, multiplayer, right? Like when I'm using Figma, my mouse is moving around. Your mouse, I'll also see what you're doing on the same canvas. That's really cool, right? And so they're, they're piggybacking off all these like kind of macro shifts and doing it right. Just, just sort of like, by the way, if you think, oh, it's already at 10 billion. Is it really going to 5X? Last five years, Adobe has 6Xed. So Adobe was trading at $100 a share. It's now at 660 a share in five years. That's at Adobe's large thing. You know, that's their growth rate.

• 31:48Shaan Puri?

  Figma's growth rate should be in the next five years, much faster than Adobe's was in the last five. And, and so I think there's a fairly good chance of that. In fact, I should just go invest in all these companies that are on this list. This is, this is a great, great list to be on.

• 32:01Sam Parr?

  All right, my turn. So I agree. I had Figma on mine, so I completely agree. So we're about 100%. So Rippling, that's my next one. Rippling, very boring company. I used it. It's a payroll software provider, but it also manages devices and gives you permissions to different stuff. So basically, if, if you're a small startup and people sign up to your, to work at your company, you, I can easily track which person has which computer and I could. Software through there and I could do HR management and issue healthcare stuff to people. Why it's interesting, the founder is names, what's his name, Parker Conrad? So he has the controversial past. He started Zenefits, which was at the time, one of the fastest growing companies ever. He got fired because he kinda, the culture was kinda crazy. People were like having sex in the hallways and kinda being bro-y and shit like that.

• 32:47Sam Parr?

  And so this is kind of it.

• 32:48Shaan Puri?

  He, he was like, oh, you know, in order to do this HR thing, you have to like, have this like compliance training. It takes 60 hours. Well, cool. Here, I just, I created a macro that will go through the training for you. Just push the enter key every, you know, five minutes or something like that. And you're, you'll be done in, in six hours instead of 60. Like shit like that. That was a little bit like, oh, that's actually like slightly illegal, I think.

• 33:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but the good news is he has experience. The also good news is that he fucked up. And so you would think that you'd learn because he got ousted. So I kinda like that. I always like that in a company where someone is like, it's their second time around. And they're, they've already been mildly successful. I think that's actually a good thing. They were, here's why I think this company is interesting. So they were last valued at one billion, 1.3 billion dollars. And I use them and they're amazing. I've used them for years.

• 33:35Shaan Puri?

  It's an every company problem. Every company on boards new employees and needs to get their computer set up, needs to get them connected to all the systems. It's a every person, every company problem. And that's why it's kind of genius.

• 33:47Sam Parr?

  And they're, uh, so workday, which is in the space is worth 67 billion dollars. Paychecks, which is a, uh, uh, just a payroll provider is worth 40 billion dollars. So I don't think that this, their valuation is still true.

• 34:00Shaan Puri?

  I think they're their, their own category, which is why it's even better. Like if you said, does Rippling end up? I, I think Rippling, if it's at a billion now, I think it's maybe one of the best candidates, uh, to like 50x on this list, right? It's one of those like, like, you know, when Square went public, Square went public at like, I think three billion or two billion valuation.

• 34:19Sam Parr?

  Now it's like 150.

• 34:20Shaan Puri?

  Now it's like a hundred. So Square, after it IPO'd, which was again, de-risk, de-risk, de-risk, now it's liquid. It's already had like a 30, 40x since then. Um, and so that's like, wow, that, that's, you can get some insane appreciation on your, on your stock. And so I think Rippling is one that if you told me this 30 to 50x's, I'd say of the things we've said on this list, that might be the number one candidate so far.

• 34:43Sam Parr?

  All right. So then we're, we're, we're, we've got a hit. And when I used the product, it did everything well, but it was still pretty clunky. So I think a lot of your product designer, if you're customer support, sales, I think these guys are hiring for a bunch of different stuff. So that's my pick. All right, your turn.

• 34:58Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I'm gonna do one that's a little

• 35:00Sam Parr?

  By the way, I think we're fucking, these are hits, I think.

• 35:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think so too. All right. So, so here's one, Open Store. You know what Open Store is?

• 35:09Sam Parr?

  Uh, it's new, isn't it?

• 35:12Shaan Puri?

  It's new. Okay. So he

• 35:14Sam Parr?

  This might not, this might not, this might not, well, no, this might hit, but this might be too early, but go ahead.

• 35:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So, okay. So what is this? So first, let me say who's the founder. So the founder is, is two kind of powerhouses. Now, I don't know how much of their time they're spending on this, but one is Keith Raboy, who was the CEO at Square. He was part of the PayPal mafia. He's a big time VC. He's a total dick on Twitter. Entertaining dude. I enjoy, he's very smart and he's an asshole on Twitter, which I find to be hilarious. And then this other guy, Jack Abraham, Jack Abraham was kind of like wonder kid, built a company, sold it to eBay pretty early on, was like kind of a hot shot at PayPal, spun out and he has his own like studio. And so they together came together and they made, they made Open Store, which is a riff off of Keith Raboy's other previous, last company that's now worth $5 billion,

• 36:06Shaan Puri?

  Open Door. So what Open Door did was you want to sell your house? Don't go through the whole like dog and pony show. I will buy your house now. You don't have to stage it. You don't have to fix it up. You don't have to hire an agent. You don't have to do anything. Sell me the home. I'll just give you a price right now and you could sell it today. So I give you liquidity in this house market instantaneous sales. Open Store is the same thing for e-commerce. They're saying, you want to sell your e-commerce company? I'll buy your Shopify store right now. You don't have to go through the whole banker process, make a dag, do, do all this stuff. I'll just plug into your data and I'll just give you an offer right now. And so what they're trying to do is roll up Shopify stores. And so they're, they raised, I think their first round maybe was, was at a $250 million valuation. So to get your 5X here, you have to bet that it becomes a billion dollar company.

• 36:51Shaan Puri?

  What this guy's track record, Square, Open Door, with Jack Abraham's track record, is a very good shot that this ends up being, being worth more, more than a billion dollars. This space is very hot. So do you know Thrasio? We've talked about them before.

• 37:04Sam Parr?

  Of course.

• 37:04Shaan Puri?

  The one that Thrasio was the first hot company that was rolling up Amazon businesses, businesses that sell products only on Amazon. They're called FBA, fulfilled by Amazon companies. And they rolled them all up. Do you know what Thrasio is valued at right now?

• 37:19Sam Parr?

  What? It's like five or 10?

• 37:21Shaan Puri?

  They're gonna go public at a $10 billion valuation. I think they might be the fastest company to a $10 billion exit ever. I think they're up there.

• 37:28Sam Parr?

  Three years old or four years old.

• 37:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, three years old and very capital efficient how they went there because they used a lot of debt to buy these companies because the companies already are profitable or producing a lot of revenue. So they're able to use big debt to do this. And so Open Store is doing the same thing without the Amazon style. It's for Shopify. And so I think that this model, this open store model is one of the fastest, easiest and fastest ways to build a billion dollar company. And I think that this company at 250 million, I see a lot of value in this pick here. Yes, it could go to zero. This could also not work. This has higher risk than the other stuff on this list. So that's the disclaimer. It's much higher risk, but I think the reward is a lot higher here, too.

• 38:05Sam Parr?

  Okay, so this, I agree, this could 10x. This borderline wouldn't be considered part of the list because they just, no, it's because they just launched. There, it's a year or less, right? It's July 15, 2021. So this wouldn't fit in the category of being like a cushy gig, but I, I'm cool with adding it, but.

• 38:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think it might be on the like, hey, you're on, you're in the batter's box. You're not in the batter's box, you're in the on deck circle, right? We're just waiting for you to mature. You gotta season up a little bit in order to be on this list, given the criteria of the list.

• 38:44Sam Parr?

  Also, but we could swap it. So Keith or Boy has another company that's incredibly interesting. I believe it's called FAIRE. F A I R E.

• 38:53Shaan Puri?

  He's just an investor in that one.

• 38:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I didn't add it to the list, but it's a wholesale marketplace for retailers and brands. So you could just basically, it's almost.

• 39:02Shaan Puri?

  It's a genius idea, dude. I used to recently for my brand. I was like, oh yeah, we should sell wholesale too. I was like, okay, so what am I gonna do? Go contact every brick and mortar store and say, hey, would you like to carry my brand, my online brand in your store? It's a good brand. Here's the details. Here's my catalog. I made it in in Excel and I have to update it weekly. And then here's my pricing and then here, uh, just go to my Shopify store and just buy some stuff like it's like you have to string together five tools to set up wholesale. Fair is basically like, you want wholesale, list yourself as a company. The brick and mortar stores can all like just choose to to buy from you. Your catalog is stored here. It just takes through that whole problem. I think it's like a $15 billion company.

• 39:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I don't know if that can 10x, but it's doing really well. And I didn't do research on it for this project, but I've, uh, I tell people if they want to look, whenever people ask me this, this question of where they should join. I say that company sounds incredibly interesting. Um, all right, we'll do maybe one or two more.

• 39:59Shaan Puri?

  One last one. Yeah.

• 40:00Sam Parr?

  All right.

• 40:02Shaan Puri?

  On your side.

• 40:02Sam Parr?

  All right, I'm gonna do one that I also, I'm an investor in this one, so I'm, there's a disclosure. It's called Next Health and the reason why I think it's cool, it's basically the very simple dumbed down version. It's almost like Shopify for doctors. So basically when you go to a doctor, you have to fill out a form and they've automated the form. So you just fill out online, but then if every other doctor uses the same, uses next health, all your information is on that platform. And so it's much easier. And so you have basically one medical record and also they've opened it up to third party developers who can build apps using your health data. And you're like, uh, your, your whole health record and you could see interesting stuff.

• 40:42Sam Parr?

  An example, a very tiny example is if you're on Smile Direct Club and you want to find out where an orthodontist is nearby, who could fit you for your orthodontist. They say, hey, next, here's all the doctors and next health that are in that network. Just click here, you're good to go. And that's like a third party app that whatever they are worth $500 million. Their CEO is young, 26, 27. I've gotten dinner with him. He basically has told me, and I don't exactly remember how he said it, but he was like, yeah, I kind of want to take over the world. Like he, he was like, I, I, I've, I thought about. Yeah, he was like, yeah, he was like, well, I think he's, I think he told me his, his parents are from Bangladesh. And I think he goes, you know, Bangladesh is, is an interesting country because it has a really large male population.

• 41:27Sam Parr?

  And it has a low unemployment rate. So if I wanted to take over the world, I think I could go there and rally the young men. And we could build our own army. And I think that'd be a good, and it's like, like he had this like well thought out. And I was like, you're nuts. I love you. I'm it. So Next Health is interesting to me. And they've raised a hundred and fifty million dollars, I think. And so it's big enough that they, uh, maybe they've only raised fifty million dollars. It's big enough that it's a little bit, uh, settled and they can pay well.

• 41:54Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 41:55Sam Parr?

  All right. You want to bring it home? You bring it home with one last word.

• 41:57Shaan Puri?

  One, one that ones that's a little bit unorthodox. I think we said a lot of popular names. Uh, here's an unpopular name. One Trust. So One Trust is a company that specializes in making your company GDPR compliant. And

• 42:11Sam Parr?

  Oh my God, the most boring shit on earth.

• 42:14Shaan Puri?

  Valued at five billion dollars. Um, you know, you have to, you have to sort of endlessly keep up with privacy laws. Uh, are different in all these different countries. You have GDPR for Europe. US is going to have their own version of this. Other countries are going to have their own version of this. And they're always going to evolve and, um, and they have the customers and they're going to basically continue to service these customers. And for the companies, you have huge, huge risk because it's like, if you're not compliant on GDPR. It's like fines that are like, you know, multiplied per user or something like that. It's like your fines can be exorbitant. And nobody wants to deal with this. Nobody wants to become an expert of this. Nobody wants to throw huge amounts of engineering and design and, and policy, uh, headcount towards doing this. It's going to be much easier to like buy a solution and pay for, pay for somebody else.

• 42:57Shaan Puri?

  As your cover your ass insurance to take care of your GDPR needs. I think it's one of the fastest growing companies in the country right now. It's called One Trust. I think they're based in Atlanta, if I'm right. I might be mixing them up with another one. There's actually two companies that are both billion dollar companies in the space. I love these companies. I want to invest in these companies. And if I, you know, was going to send, send somebody to go work at one of the, work at a company that has this profile, this would be one of them. So I think it's a good contender for Sarah's list.

• 43:22Sam Parr?

  All right. I think, um, I think that's the list. That's, I, I think, I think this is this to a listener applying to jobs could be one of the most life-changing episodes. This is good. I think this is a really interesting idea. When we, when I, I used to have this product called just jobs, where I would write companies that do this and I would pay users to, people would pay to have access to it. This is going to become maybe a recurring segment. We'll see. This is pretty interesting.

• 43:47Shaan Puri?

  Well, I, I told you the thing I wanted to do with this was I'm going to curate 50 companies that meet this criteria. And I'm going to basically create a job board from this. And the, the thing with the job board is you can't just be a company who wants to come list on here. No, only these 50 companies that are curated can post on this job board. They have to pay to do it, but, but, but if they don't pay, they're just on the list, but no jobs will show up. And so I want to have a running job. So we take this segment idea. But basically the reason I had a bunch of these companies listed is because me and Ben have been cooking up, oh, we should launch a job board. And when we launch a job board, what would add some value? Well, if I could curate companies that I think people should work for, this is not an original idea. I think you did something like this. There's just a bunch, a bunch of people have done things like this curated companies that you think are cool.

• 44:30Shaan Puri?

  And you turn that into a product. And so we're going to do that with a job board pretty soon. We're going to launch that pretty soon with Palette.

• 44:37Sam Parr?

  Sick. Well, that's freaking awesome. Good episode.

• 44:40Shaan Puri?

  All right, man. I gotta run.