How the Smartest Founders Are Quietly Winning with AI

Episode 713: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Jason Lemkin ( https://x.com/jasonlk ) about cloning yourself with AI and how ChatGPT will be the end of incumbent apps. — Show Notes: (0:00) AI body doubles Users tell AI things they won't tell humans (15:15) The incumbents are dying (27:25) Inside the office of OpenAI (34:12) How to be an AI billionaire (44:40) The story of Saastr (55:49) Being a relentless recruiter (58:52) Seeing through the fog of war (1:07:53) The future of work for gen alpha — Links: • Want Sam's playbook to turn ChatGPT into your executive coach? Get it here: https://clickhubspot.com/ejv • Saastr - https://www.saastr.com/ • Delphi - https://www.delphi.ai/ • Windsurf - https://windsurf.com • Coursiv - https://coursiv.io/ • Lovable - https://lovable.dev/ • Higsfield - http://higsfield.ai/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Now zero to one is very likely in AI. You build an incredible tool that no one else can do. You can do a million in a week or two.

• 0:16Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so for this episode, what I'm thinking this is about is this is sort of, and guys, this can be generous to us, but what is the smart money doing with AI? And, you know, in betting and sports betting in Vegas, you always kind of want to watch, what are the sharps doing? They tend to be just, you know, maybe 10 or 15% earlier to understanding things or to recognizing things. And so similarly, Jason, I wanted you on because you've been doing really interesting stuff with AI, both from investing, you're talking to startups that are using him. You're reading all the reports, but also you yourself built this AI tool. And so I want to kind of get your reaction to a few of the different things. Can you first explain this AI experiment you did where you basically made a body double of yourself out of AI? And like, what was the experiment and what'd you learn?

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, so, so Saastr has a lot of content, as you guys know, we have 12 years of content. Some of it's out of date, right, for sure.

• 1:08Sam Parr?

  Saastr being, you're a previous founder who's exited multiple software companies. Now you're like the godfather of like SaaS because you have this blog and media company and events business called Saastr and you have a huge fund. So that's kind of the.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  But probably most interestingly for like seeing the future a little bit is I have about 10,000 pieces of content I've written over the years. A lot of it, which is not out of date and I update it personally. So about 10,000 pieces of content. And then we have several thousand interviews like you guys do, but with so many great folks, early ones with Darmesh, middle ones from Darmesh. Darmesh, when HubSpot had just IPO, Darmesh the other day, Yamini last week, Brian Halligan over the years. And we have all of it and our AI took everything I've written, every tweet I've ever done, every LinkedIn post, every Saastr video from every speaker for 12 years. Aaron Levy, the week he went IPO for the first Saastr annual to last week, when we were talking about AI, all of it ingested in this AI.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  And so what I instantly saw was as soon as I would talk to this AI, it was much better than me. It was much better than me because I forget stuff.

• 2:14Sam Parr?

  How did you get that information in there?

• 2:16Speaker 00

  You just hook up RSS, right? The feed for a blog. It can scrape the web, which is pretty easy. Soon we'll be able to do other things like MCB, but it's just scraping APIs and RSS. It's really just scraping. You just give a URL.

• 2:28Shaan Puri?

  But did you use like Delphi? Or you you built your own tool or what did you do?

• 2:32Speaker 00

  I tried a couple of things and then I used Delphi. And then at first we had so much content, it was a little difficult to ingest it. So there is, there is a little bit of work. And then I spend about 10 minutes a day training it, which we could talk about. So there is a little bit of maintenance involved. But it's better than me. And the thing I didn't get until I saw something that was hyper trained, like this is a lot of content, 20 million words, right? Very few mistakes, very few hallucinations, and the ability to connect things that I can't. I just don't remember. I don't remember what Sam and I said on the Hustle on stage years ago versus when we did an MFM a while versus today, but the AI knows it all.

• 3:11Shaan Puri?

  By the way, 20 million words is like 200 books worth of content. An average book, I think, is like 100,000 words. So 20 million words you're saying is you basically gave it 20, 200 books of your own brain and the brains of other guests that have come on your show.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:26Shaan Puri?

  And your goal was to build, was it to build basically an advisor, an AI version of you that could be an advisor to a founder who wants to come and talk to you, ask questions, but you don't have enough time of the day to book calls? Was that the big idea here?

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Well, now, I just wanted to learn like you guys did. I just wanted to learn. I didn't think it would be as good as it was because I used other products and I've used other things and it wasn't as good as my, my digital AI was. It wasn't as good.

• 3:50Shaan Puri?

  But the use case would be what? Is it what I said or is there something else?

• 3:53Speaker 00

  The other interesting thing is the use cases with AI are much broader than you'd expect.

• 3:58Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  So I didn't expect people to upload their board decks before board meetings and ask for feedback before a board meeting. That's a niche use case. I didn't expect hundreds and hundreds of founders to use it as their therapist for their company where the growth has slowed. I didn't expect that. I didn't expect so many folks to use it to review their sales scripts, their SDI scripts when there's, when there's specific tools to do it, right? I didn't expect it's so good at reviewing VC pitch decks. It's so good at it, better than anything I've seen.

• 4:29Sam Parr?

  Can you get tactical for one second? So you go to Delphi.ai and you just uploaded the Saastr's RSS feed and it did all of the work?

• 4:38Speaker 00

  YouTube, RSS, Twitter, blog.

• 4:43Sam Parr?

  But could I go to a health guru or a business guru who I subscribe to, who I love?

• 4:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 4:48Sam Parr?

  Can I say youtube.com slash Alex Hermosy, upload that and it automatically does it? Is this that simple?

• 4:55Speaker 00

  Well, it's an interesting question. It is prohibited, right? It is prohibited by their website, their terms of use, they prohibit it. But honestly, this is an AI risk. You could do it. Absolutely, you could do it. You could redo what I did. It might take you a little while longer, but you could just clone exactly myself, yourself. And then you would, you could do it just as well as I did.

• 5:13Shaan Puri?

  Sam, I've never felt so used and abused when Jess Ma came on the podcast and she was like, "Yeah, actually, I have my team training an AI of you so that if I'm brainstorming ideas, I don't have to ever call you. I'll just ask the AI what, you know, basically you'll just be in the meeting with us."

• 5:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 5:29Shaan Puri?

  And she's like, "We just took all the podcasts and we're training it on how you think, the questions you would ask, what you would say, reactions you would give, and now you're just there in the meeting." So she basically hired me without ever paying me, right? Because I have this corpus of content out there. I've actually put my brain out there in the public.

• 5:44Sam Parr?

  But how do I do that? Like, can I just upload a YouTube channel and say, "This YouTube creator has great advice", and I could upload 800 videos and it will transcribe all of them? I could go to Delphi.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  It may take a day or two to fully ingest all that content, but it will do it just from the URL of your YouTube.

• 6:01Sam Parr?

  Just on Delphi.ai, so I could make a mini Sean.

• 6:04Speaker 00

  I think it is a great product. There are other people that can do it too. That is not, there are, I'll tell you what I think is interesting about Delphi, but we're looking at all this cursor and windsurf stuff and lovable and like, you don't realize like, They're just so far ahead of like B to B and regular people only because they're better people working on them. If we had the quality of people working at Windsurf, working on CRM, okay, or working on marketing tools or podcasting tools, your jaw would drop today. But this is why your jaw is going to drop over the next 24 months because just mediocre engineers cannot like the engineers at OpenAI are so good. They're just so good. And so, but the average engineer working at a struggling CRM, right, is just not, just not that, that good, but they'll catch up.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  But yeah, you can build all of this. And here's the interesting learning. So we could build a digital Sam and we could do this for next week or whatever. You can do it. My learning from my AI, it's okay that it's not you. This is why, for example, you can train your voice. It uses a level 11. Is that the product or love? I get a little confused. 11 Labs, right? Yeah. 11 Labs. 11 Labs. Yeah. 11 Labs. And 11 Labs is epic, right? But you can choose, do you want it to be exactly like you, which is what Brian Halligan did? And then I realized that was creepy. I don't want Digital Jason to be me. I want Digital Jason to be a prime version of me that 90% of the time is much better than me, but is distinct. I don't want people confused like Brian. I get like Brian

• 7:29Speaker 00

  Halligan. And so it's okay that it's not Sam. Like it could be a version of Sam that is better than Sam.

• 7:36Shaan Puri?

  So, okay, let's walk, let's walk through these top 10 learnings. So you build this AI. It has 35,000 conversations with people. You did it as an experiment.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  Almost 50 now.

• 7:45Shaan Puri?

  There are 50,000 conversations and learning number one, you said users will tell AI things that they won't tell humans. What do you mean?

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, first of all, before we can get there, one obvious, like, there's no way I could do 50,000 conversations, is there?

• 7:59Shaan Puri?

  Right?

• 8:01Speaker 00

  I'm not even a people person. I could do like one or two a day and I get tired. 50,000. Just think about the delta between two a day and 50,000. But yeah, this is the thing, like, there are some things that are somewhat unique about me that are early. The amount of content, Sean, like your math, right? The amount of books we're talking about here, right? The amount of content I've written just about B to B, just about biz, building business software. It's interesting. The other thing is there's enough people, I'm not like. Super influencer like you guys are, but there's enough people that know the digital me that they already know what to ask me. Right. They've already watched me at an event. They've read the content. So like they ask me things without thinking it's a prompt or a prompted. They just ask things they want to talk about their deepest fears. Like I've partnered with Sam on this podcast, but I'm not sure he's committed as me.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  I see him doing other things. He's into this accounting software and this Hamptons thing. I'm worried he'll quit my podcast on me. What do I do? And my AI is really good with talking that through you, right? And so people just think to ask me things. How does he know all this, Sam?

• 8:59Sam Parr?

  Hey, Jason.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Close to the heart there, Jason. You think it's funny, but like you might ask.

• 9:03Sam Parr?

  Hey, Jason. Jason, how about you shut up?

• 9:06Speaker 00

  Well, now you, but there are thousands of these types of conversations. My co-founder is not as committed. My, I don't know if my board's gonna fire me, right? I is, I'm only growing 18%. I have 11 months of runway, right? Were you Zuckerberging here? How'd you know what they were saying? Was there some privacy here? How do you know what's, what's being said? It is interesting. And on this app, you can set how much privacy you want. You can anonymize everything. No, you can. No, because there's different use cases. If you're using it as a support tool, think about it using it as a support tool. You don't want anonymity for support. How can you follow up with someone? Right. Right? Then there's like a therapy level where you want true anonymity. And then there's like a slot, everything's a slider in AI in a sense, right?

• 9:44Sam Parr?

  Dude, I think that like you said the therapy thing as if it's like, can you believe that?

• 9:48Speaker 00

  And yeah.

• 9:49Sam Parr?

  I'm like, dude, I use open a Chichapati for therapy three hours a day.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, everyone does.

• 9:55Sam Parr?

  Like the majority of, I'm like, this email pissed me off. How do I reply in a graceful way? Or like I argued with my wife or I'm upset about that I'm not doing this. Like, like the other day on Sunday, I saw someone who had a super fancy home. And I was like, how do I get over envy? You know what I mean? Like, like that's all I use it for.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  It is. And this is the same thing. It's just because it's got the 20 million words for. Business to business content, sales content, scaling your revenue. It's at, it turns out this, and this was a surprise to me. I didn't believe this. It's better, much better than ChatGPT. It's much better.

• 10:32Shaan Puri?

  And you, you, you said something like you trained it afterwards. Can you just, what, what do you, what do you mean by that? Well, how did you train it afterwards?

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Well, listen, I'm gonna embarrass myself technically. Okay. But basically those 20,000 words, it, you basically rag it. Okay. You vectorize 20 million, 20 million words of my content. You turn it into a, a, a very, a, a database instead of, and, and you just add that to ChatGPT or Claude or DeepSync. And the way you add it and the relative weights of my content versus the generic content radically changes the output. Like ChatGPT never asked my permission. It's already slurped up all my content, hasn't it? Every single YouTube is in ChatGPT. Everything I've written, I haven't been paid a nickel. So what's interesting is that content's already there. But by weight, by heavily weighting it toward my content for my type of knowledge. It's much, it's not a little bit better than ChatGPT. It's like much better.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  Right? How do I just, how do I create a sales comp plan? I have four SDRs and five AEs. Uh, our, our average deal size is 2K a year and we want to go from 2 million to 6 million next year. And, and my team won't really do outbound. ChatGPT is gonna give you a very mediocre answer, but my AI is gonna give you insanely good answers. Even though overall, we're pulling from the same content.

• 11:45Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so you, you had to do that manually? Was that the training or did you do more? Did you do more training than just that?

• 11:52Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, it auto updates every day, which is better than ChatGPT or Claude. It auto updates every day. It slurps up everything on my blog, on my social media, on my YouTube every single day. It does it essentially almost in real time. Okay. And then, yeah, you, it does it itself. It auto updates. Now, what I do do, here's what I do do is, and I'll tell you my learnings and my hallucinations. Okay. I audit a few of them. I read some and I see if they're wrong. Right? I see if the ones that are, that are not anonymous, if they're wrong. And when I see something that's wrong, and I'll tell you what I learned, if you're interested. Then I, there's a section where I just train it. Right? And I say, no, um, Sam and I first met in 2014, after I wrote a Quora post and he had me do a, a meetup at the Hustle. Okay. Cause it got it wrong. It made something up. Okay.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  So I do, I do that for about 10 or 15 minutes a day. And it turns out it doesn't get very many things wrong. And the things it does, it consistently gets wrong and I'll tell you why. And then I just fix it and the next day it's right. If you do nothing and you don't train it and you put no content in, yeah, this average VP of Sales is gonna say, "It doesn't work." You know, "I logged into ChatGPT a year ago and it hallucinated." Like, you're gonna lose your job.

• 13:02Sam Parr?

  But the hard part here is like, so I am so committed to ChatGPT, so it knows so much of my information because we've had so many conversations.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  It does.

• 13:11Sam Parr?

  Are we all gonna have like files, you know, like our health record? Where it's like, you know, my, the background? Because it sounds like I get nervous to switch to any other model because I'm like, "Oh, ChatGPT, I've already asked it so many questions. It already knows everything."

• 13:23Speaker 00

  It's an interesting question. Here's what I've learned. First of all, memory is a big deal, right? ChatGPT could already remember questions, but now it's remembering everything. Okay, so it's a mote. From the top folks I've worked with on this, there's, on the one hand, it's a mote, just like being in the Google ecosystem is a mote, just like being back in the day, being in the Yahoo ecosystem was a mote, okay? But the mote is not as deep as we think. Our ability to get trained and up to speed does not require 20 million words. So yes, it is a mote, but if you decided Claude was much better for you and you, the point is, and you spent a month, just including your day, each day, you're probably there. You're not 100%. It's enough. It doesn't need to go as deep.

• 14:02Shaan Puri?

  Somebody had a good startup idea. I think it was Aaron Levy or somebody was tweeting this. They were talking about Plaid for AI tools. So basically, you'd be able to just like, the way Plaid lets you connect your bank safely to any financial service, to be able to take your kind of memory and context, what ChatGPT knows about you, but port that to some new app that you're trying without handing over everything, but allow it to pull from that. And I was like, "Oh, that's actually a very interesting idea."

• 14:27Speaker 00

  If apps will even exist in the future?

• 14:29Shaan Puri?

  What will exist instead of apps?

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Why? We're going through a transition phase, right? We're going through, now we're chatting once again. We've been chatting since the ICQ days, okay? Since AOL, we've been chatting at our keyboards with people. Now with AI, we're chatting again, okay? But we're starting to not even know where we're chatting with, right? Right now already, like MCP is new, but already today, OpenAI and Claude can pull from other apps like HubSpot and others and Notion and just pull the data out. I don't have to go to Notion or even Google Calendar or HubSpot anymore, right?

• 15:00Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  As we live in this, and then, you know, people think this Johnny I thing for 6 billion is crazy. It's a great bet because we're gonna go from 20 minutes a day, 22 minutes a day in ChatGPT to 24 hours a day in ChatGPT. And when we're in ChatGPT 24 hours a day, we're not gonna like... Pull up a CRM. We're not going to use the interfaces like these interfaces are all already dying. You can see it, Sam, and the amount of time you spend in GPT like then go to like a B to B app. You're pulling your hair out. It's so dated, isn't it?

• 15:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  It's so dated already. It's only 2025 and it's already dated to go to any B to B app. They're all gonna die.

• 15:37Sam Parr?

  How does the excitement and rate of change right now compared to? I don't remember if you were involved in 99 in the year 2000, but you were you were close, right?

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was a kid. It was my first job back then. Yeah.

• 15:50Sam Parr?

  So how how's the? Because everyone talks about the dot com boom and I um I never got to. I mean, I never experienced it, but how's this? How's this today compared to then?

• 15:59Speaker 00

  Those days were the were the first time until AI where people feel like they could just do something out of nothing like it was miraculous. It was miraculous. And that is what AI is like today. People are just doing miraculous things and it's exciting, but man, it's super scary for incumbents. It's super scary for incumbents.

• 16:15Shaan Puri?

  Do you think that everybody who is maybe a content creator at least?

• 16:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:20Shaan Puri?

  Is going to have this sort of like the stunt double, this this intellectual stunt double, the way that you created here? Do you see it? Once you've did this experiment, are you like this is the future or this was novel? But no, I don't think it's gonna last like, you know, where's your? Where did you land after the experiment?

• 16:35Speaker 00

  I well, first of all, what I think I'm not a consumer content creator. I don't think anyone is going to create content without AI going forward and the tools are going to change. Like, for example, just for our last big Saastr event, like I did all this speaker promos in Higgs field. Have you ever used Higgs field?

• 16:52Sam Parr?

  No.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  It's incredible.

• 16:53Sam Parr?

  How do you spell that?

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Higgs field dot A. It's the ex head of AI from Snap. It's one of the coolest apps on planet Earth. Everyone's talking about this new Google video thing, right? But they were already doing it. Higgs field dot A. All you have to do to Higgs field dot AI is I can take a screenshot of us right now. I'll put it in Higgs field and it will create a movie out of it. Okay. And it will and you can and there's a lot of different ways, but there's a really simple way you can do it. You can take an initial photo and an end photo and it will just connect them with the narrative. So I had like, I would take like a picture of Yomini just off her headshot off HubSpot. And then take a picture of like a stage at Saastr and it would just make a video of of Yomini waving to the crowd and running on stage on Saastr and being excited. And so a year ago, all the, all the digital promos were a static, you know, classic static headshot with some chrome around it.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  Today, everyone got a video, a really cool video, right? Next year, it will be me and Yomini talking for 10 minutes about AI and neither of us will have had the conversation. It doesn't mean I won't exist, but of course that's already come, we could already almost do that. But I did all these things now I did instead of waiting for our designer two months to do a static thing and upload it to Dropbox and me forget where it was and lose the URL and have to do it. Now I just did it myself in Higgs field in like 10 seconds.

• 18:05Sam Parr?

  So I'm looking at Higgs field. This is, this is insane.

• 18:07Speaker 00

  It's beyond cool. It's so good, so good. This is the, this is why AI is exciting because the really badass people can do crazy stuff now. It used to take a badass person like six months to do a prototype and then two years to get it good. Now someone epic like the ex head of AI and Snap can like, what you can do at Higgs field will blow your mind, right?

• 18:27Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I could even tell just why the way you're talking, I feel like if we did the same podcast, you know, five years ago.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:31Shaan Puri?

  Your rate of talking would have been like 10 beats per minute lower.

• 18:34Sam Parr?

  Well, dude.

• 18:34Shaan Puri?

  Even 12 months ago. There's like a baseline level of excitement that has just risen, like our new blood pressure is here.

• 18:41Sam Parr?

  Well, as long as I've known Jason, you were borderline grumpy. Like you were pissed, you were pissed off all the time. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You were like, look, like I remember you, you weren't tired, but you were, you were tired of people asking you dumb shit because you always had this, you had this energy of you where you were like, talking to someone and you're like, you're making a mistake. Stop this, you're making a mistake. You had like this like almost anger in you. Now it's the exact opposite. Now you're, you're optimistic.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  I am, I am, you're right. I, I'd like to think differently, but you're probably right. The way you perceive me is, is important. It is, I am very optimistic about it, but the difference is I used to think all these products were durable. That they were durable. Now I don't think any of them are durable. So

• 19:25Sam Parr?

  What's that mean?

• 19:26Speaker 00

  When I first started doing this SaaS for content, I made up this expression, which I stole from the mayor of Tel Aviv, and people have used it ever since. Zero to one million in revenue, impossible. We don't need another product. Okay. One to 10 million in revenue, unlikely. Like, there's so much competition. 10 to 100 million, inevitable. From impossible to inevitable. We had a book that sold a couple hundred thousand copies. That was his theme. So you go to this stage. Because what I learned as a B2B founder is

• 19:49Sam Parr?

  Sorry, you're saying getting from zero to a million is really, really hard.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:53Sam Parr?

  Getting from one to 10 feels impossible.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Unlikely, unlikely. Yeah.

• 19:57Sam Parr?

  Unlikely. But once you get to 10, it's inevitable to get to 100.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  If you had good founders, it was a punch card. Now it's disrupted. Now zero to one is very likely in AI. Like, you build an incredible tool that no one else can do. You can do a million in a week or two. But like, now everyone beyond 100 million is getting disrupted. There's so many software companies at 100 to 200 to 300 million in revenue that aren't growing anymore. It never used to happen four or five years ago. Like, you hit your punch card. You had 120% revenue retention, and you had a brand. All you needed was a brand and revenue retention, and products changing about every five years.

• 20:33Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  If the product changed every five years, and you had a brand and tens of millions of revenue, that meant you had product-market fit. Right? High revenue, like, high NRR meant it kept going as an engine. And this 120, 130% revenue retention, and it just kept going. It took you from 20 to 30 to 50 to 100. And it was like, and that's why, you know, this is crazy. In 2021, the average public SaaS company traded at 70x ARR. Public in 2021. It's almost unimaginable today when it's at five, right?

• 21:06Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  But it's because it worked then. Like, everything just worked. And now, you know, Okta growing 10%, Salesforce growing 7%. Like, they're good companies, but it's not durable the way it once was.

• 21:18Sam Parr?

  So are those companies, my premise, or what I thought, and what Morgan Stanley, I thought because Morgan Stanley had this report, which, who gives a shit about Morgan Stanley? But they said that the majority of value creation in terms of market cap for AI is going to be the big companies using AI to get better versus new AI companies. Do you disagree with that?

• 21:41Speaker 00

  I think that right now, today, as we record this, there's a hint of truth to it and and but Salesforce is not accelerating. Okay, Okta is not accelerating. Lots of folks are not accelerating. ServiceNow has a lot of AI, but it already had workflows that were automation. So people say that and there's there's there's there's qualitative proof of it, but we haven't seen it in the numbers. Okay, so there's a window for the big guys to leverage this because the the interface that we talked about is dying. People are not going to want to use these dated interfaces anymore. So even if it is benefiting the big guys today,

• 22:21Speaker 00

  what is the value of of a CRM if I don't you log into the app anymore? If I just talk to ChatGPT and I say, give me the 10 deals I have to work on this week.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Like, how valuable is one CRM over another? Or will I even know I have a CRM? Like, it just becomes plumbing in a database. Here's one problem. Let's step back and I'll one problem with AI, one problem with AI is there's been too much nerdy nomenclature the last year. Too many oh, oh fours, minis, oh, three maxes, L L M.

• 22:52Sam Parr?

  Dude, it's so complicated. It's like, it's like knowing the difference between an iPhone 13 and an iPhone 14.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  It's all that's all going away this year. It's all that complexity made sense. As crazy as these numbers are, Anthropic went from one to three billion in revenue in five months. They just announced one to three billion in revenue in five months. Okay. And that is basically all infrastructure plumbing revenue. Okay, so when the in when the in the area of infrastructure, you need to know the difference between the models and R1 and this. We're just starting the application age and in the application age, we don't, we won't care what models HubSpot uses. We don't even HubSpot already has a lot of AI. Do you know what models it uses? You don't care, right? You don't care. So, so, so these nerdy terms are gonna fall away, but what M think of MCP as the next generation API. And what MCP does is it lets any AI or others talk to applications without having to write inside of the AI.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  So right now, if you go to, now it's just rolling out, but if you go to, and you set it up properly, and it's still a little nerdy, okay? But right now from ChatGPT, you can change your Google Calendar. You can work with Notion.

• 23:55Sam Parr?

  Tell me how.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  You connect it with, well, I can't quite do it with you online. Maybe in two months, it's literally when you O off in, it will do it automatically. But I can show you offline. You just connect it to your Google Calendar. And then it's still a little bit of a headache around authentication and security. Like, there's a little bit of magic to go, but not much. And then you can just talk to your calendar and HubSpot has announced this. So.

• 24:20Sam Parr?

  But what are you using to connect the two?

• 24:24Speaker 00

  MCP is a protocol, right? So it's like a language. Imagine this, right? Like, you know, we have English, we have Spanish. Then when the internet browser came out, it was like, hey, there's a new language. We're going to call it HTML.

• 24:34Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  And you got to learn that language if you want to tell the browser what to do, how to show a webpage, right? So now MCP is a new language that came out that was basically saying, hey, if you're one AI app and you want to talk to another application, how are they supposed to talk to each other? MCP became a protocol that now any app who wants to be like, yo, like HubSpot, for example, they want all the AI tools to be using, to be integrating in with HubSpot. But they don't want to one by one, go work out a deal and do a technical integration with each one. So they say, oh, cool, we'll also speak MCP. We understand that language. We know how to do that. Right? It's basically like how APIs work for most websites. But MCP is like the AI specific version of that. But right now to integrate with, and I haven't ever used HubSpot's API, but I'm sure it's a great one. But, but that is bespoke.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Like each one is different. HubSpot's API is different than Salesforce and Notion and Linear. You have to learn it. You have to get a key. You have to code to it. You have to understand its nuances. It's a lot of work, right? Like, you may know startups, you've jumbled up, and you're like, why don't you have a HubSpot integration? Well, because it's work, right?

• 25:36Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  With MCP, it's early, but it's just starting. It won't be any work. You just tell MCP to go talk to HubSpot or go talk to Notion, and it will just do it. And all that work goes away. So if your AI can talk to any app you use, take all the data out and let you talk as a human, for 99% of the world, we won't use HubSpot like the way we use it today. There's no reason to log into this app, figure it out. Like, how does the UI work? What are these tabs? How do I configure a tab? And, and the kids these days will never know this. Like, this generation coming up, they will never use software like we use it. They will never use it.

• 26:13Sam Parr?

  What's the office of OpenAI like right now? Because you're saying like, well, it sucks right now, but in 60 days, it's gonna be the best, which is insane. So how many people work at OpenAI right now? And actually, Sean, for you as well, have you guys been to the office? What's it like there? What's it like at that office right now if they're able to do all these things so fast?

• 26:34Speaker 00

  I think it looks like they have about 4,500 employees. I'll tell you what's super interesting. They only have about 60% employee retention over two years.

• 26:42Sam Parr?

  Because what, everyone's going and doing their own thing?

• 26:44Speaker 00

  Probably, but it's just great. Like if OpenAI only has 60% team retention, what's your hope to keep your AI team? You better treat them really well.

• 26:55Shaan Puri?

  So I have a friend who told me about the early days of Twitter. And he basically, he had built a company. He was like scraping Twitter and he was like, oh, this is cool. If based on what people are saying, I could figure out what's actually trending in the world. And the way he did it was he was like, you know, if people, people always talk about New York. So if it's, if I hear New York a thousand times, that doesn't actually mean New York is trending. It just means New York is already big. But if suddenly everybody's talking about Tallahassee, well, Tallahassee doesn't normally get talked about that much, but it's being talked about as much as New York, that means it's trending. And so he had a separate site that was like trying to figure out what are the trends on Twitter? Now this, they ended up getting bought by Twitter and that's now what, if you go on Twitter, Twitter has trending, right? So my friend Abder was just, I was like, what was it like in those days? And he was like, I thought I knew what a startup was.

• 27:40Shaan Puri?

  I thought, and I, this, I related to this so much. He's like, basically, I thought a startup was, I wake up every day and I gotta go try to get some growth and I'm pushing, I'm pushing, I'm pushing the product forward, I'm pushing the marketing forward, I'm pushing my product out into the market, push, push, push. He goes, then imagine like, you know, you think you're pushing and then suddenly you're pushing a boulder up a mountain and you look up and there's a giant avalanche coming at you. It's pulling towards you, right? It's coming straight at you. And so he goes, my first six months at Twitter, he goes, I woke up and I had the QWERTY keyboard like imprinted on my forehead. Like I would just fall asleep at my desk and I'd wake up and I'm back at work, right? He's like, basically that's how I lived for like six straight months because, and he's like, everybody's making fun of us because the Twitter had the fail whale.

• 28:23Shaan Puri?

  He's like, but you, there's, nobody had ever scaled a service like this, this fast. And so we just couldn't keep it up. And we was like, we were, trust me, we were trying. Everyone thought we were being lazy or stupid. He's like, we are the smartest people. We were trying our absolute hardest and it was just so, so difficult. And I think what's happening with a lot of these AI companies is that. You know, Sam, you and I, I think we probably only really experienced push for the for most of our startup career.

• 28:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's never felt like I was holding on. It felt like I was pushing and it got a little easier sometimes, but it was always resisting.

• 28:53Shaan Puri?

  Like I have this company now. We haven't announced this and I just like we have this AI bot that will come and tell us our new contracts and our new revenue. Last week, we closed a million dollars of new contracts in a week. And I was like, I have never felt this level of pull ever in any business I've ever done. And we're not working 10 times harder. It's just that like the market wants this type of product at a different level. I'm sure that the folks like, you know, OpenAI and all these AI startups are going, they're experiencing a startup experience that is not. We it was not anything like what you and I experienced, Sam.

• 29:27Sam Parr?

  I think it was zero to 800 million users in seven months. Is that what Mary Meeker said?

• 29:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. I just wrote it up on Twitter. We could look or X, but yeah.

• 29:37Sam Parr?

  10% of the world, 10% of the world in eight months or something like that.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  So that's why the rate of change is so high that everyone that's like a Luddite or a Debbie Downer is missing the point, right?

• 29:48Shaan Puri?

  And before it looked like it was a bunch of looky-loos, like people were going and testing the product, but it wasn't really high retention. And then they've showed that like the the action, it's not just the users that have doubled, but the usage per user has also doubled. Right? So you have like a double of a double. And that's it's pretty obvious to me now that I'm kind of an idiot for not investing in this company, even at really any price point like this is. This is basically the Facebook of this generation, right? Like.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't think we realized that open that chat GPT would have 85% market share at the prosumer consumer level. That that's what all that meant surprise if we if we know, because ironically, chat GPT was an experiment. It was a proof of concept. It wasn't really meant to be the product that the the center of OpenAI, but.

• 30:34Shaan Puri?

  Like, do you beat yourself up about this too? Like the way I do? Because I just look back, I'm like, how much? How many hours have I spent thinking about AI? I'm supposed to be an investor. You know, like you're a SaaS investor. This is the greatest SaaS, fastest SaaS growing business ever. Are you an investor in this?

• 30:48Sam Parr?

  Did any of you have the opportunity to invest in it?

• 30:50Shaan Puri?

  I didn't.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  You can hunt it down, you know, that's on that's on you. Yeah, for me, I wanna. Life is short. I want to own 10% or more of a startup and have fun. So hunting something down just is not my vibe, but it's the way to make the most money. Don't get me wrong. That's the wrong with hunting it down. And someone's never heard of Sean or my first million and just getting some money in. Like, that's the smart way to do it. But um.

• 31:13Sam Parr?

  I bet you, I bet you, so I think on the pod, Darmesh, I don't know if he explicitly said 15 million, but he sort of winked at it when we, when we said so. He owned chat.com, which he sold to OpenAI for what he paid for it, which I think was around 15 million. And he got AI, ChatGPT stock.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:29Sam Parr?

  There's a world where that becomes worth like in the ballpark of his HubSpot stock, I think.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  You know, that, that does, probably, right? It's none of my business, but I remember thinking with Aaron Levy, who's one of my favorites, you know, he was early in Stripe, early in Gusto, like, back in the day, Aaron had a window before Box went public where everyone went to him and he had a little time. Like, he wasn't, and he just did all of them. And I'm like, man, if this guy did Stripe in the seed and like, how, that's gotta be, it's none of my business, it's gotta be worth even more than his Box stock, doesn't it?

• 32:03Shaan Puri?

  For sure. He owned 4% of Box, I think, when it went public. And he's been grinding Box for like 20 years now.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  I love him for it, yeah.

• 32:10Sam Parr?

  Wait, so he, he was the seed round of all those companies?

• 32:13Shaan Puri?

  He made more money on the Stripe investors.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. There was a window, listen, it's none of my business, but there was a window, I've been doing this long enough, right? Where before Box IPO'd, he had time, right? And then you just get, you just can't do this stuff when you're public, right? Maybe Mark Benioff can. And so everyone, he was the guru, right? He was the one guy, he was, and everyone wanted Aaron. And so he would write these checks that, you know, but I know, we could look them up, but I know he did Stripe and Gusto and the seed round and a bunch of others. And it's none of my business, but I'm like, that's, there are these moments in time that could be worth more than all of his, his Box shares. And so it just gives me even more respect to keep going. Cause so many founders, these have a different relationship to money and investment than a few years back. And a lot of founders would quit today if their investments were worth more than their founder's stock. A lot of them do quit. A

• 32:59Speaker 00

  lot of them do quit now.

• 33:00Sam Parr?

  You know what this reminds me of? So it took me, at the hustle, I think it took me three years to get to a million subscribers, a million users. And that was like life changing for me to get as fast as some of these guys are growing. It's like, literally like that per hour. And it's sort of like, when you see a billionaire who's worth like 4 billion, like 4.2 billion, billion. And you're like,

• 33:23Sam Parr?

  And that point two divided by 10 would be awesome for me. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's so, it's like hard to grasp how big and how fast it, how, how, how big these things are and how big they're, and how fast they're getting that big.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Well, look, it's slightly under discussed and it's a crass topic. You might have discussed it, Sam, otherwise, but like.

• 33:43Sam Parr?

  It's a crass topic.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  It's right up your alley, Sam. But because OpenAI will be worth.

• 33:48Sam Parr?

  You filthy pig.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  No, but when, when, when HubSpot, I, I've been around long enough to remember when HubSpot IPO'd and it, Hub, IPO'd at about an $800 million valuation. Okay, today it's worth like 40 billion, but now like OpenAI will be worth a trillion. So my point is that the rich are so much richer.

• 34:02Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  They're, they're, like, the regular person's like a little bit richer in tech and it's great, right? But because the big wins are 100 or 1,000 times bigger than just 10 years ago. Just 10 years ago, the amount of billionaires, I wrote up on Saastr, the amount of billionaires just in SaaS and cloud. I could find this post, but your jaw will drop how many billionaires are in it just because the mark, the, the numbers and markets are so much bigger, right? There's already 100 billionaires in B2B software, I wrote up, 100 billionaires.

• 34:31Sam Parr?

  For the people listening, what, what personality types are like, who, who's poised? Like what 22, what does a 22 year old today look like who can pounce on this? Like, what's the, what's the profile type or the personality type of, of these people that are just excelling like crazy?

• 34:52Speaker 00

  I think it's just two things. And it really probably hasn't changed since Bill Gates days, right, started at Microsoft. But one is you have to be able to ship insanely good software, which maybe in some business software wasn't true for a while, insanely good. Like Higgs field that you're trying, ChatGPT, this is not trivial stuff. Okay, this is like insanely good software. And then the second one is you have to like be relentless to owning a market. There was a while in 2020, 21 where like being third or fourth was great. Hooray. Like, things were so good that like, you'd be like, well, if I'm number four in the market, but I don't have to sell a lot of stock and it's calmer and I could sell my company for 400 million,

• 35:37Speaker 00

  that's better than IPOing. Like, now, the best founders today are relentless to being absolutely number one and destroying and owning the market, right? And because the markets are bigger, it compounds to something crazy, right? I mean, again, just one example, but Sammy and I are both investors and owner, and like, you know, Adam was whatever, you know, high school dropout, started in this company. I mean, he's gonna disrupt the entire restaurant industry. He's already on the way there, not be number four. And he has an incredible technical co-founder, now an incredible engineering team. And that product owner, here's an interesting thing, because I invested in the seed round in 2021. Adam hates it when I say this, but the product was not very good. Dean was very good, the CTO, it did a lot, the product, but it was not very good. The reason it killed all its direct competitors, not indirect, it hasn't killed

• 36:22Speaker 00

  the big ones, is just because the software is so much better and that just compounds every quarter. And AI is accelerating that even faster. So you have to build epic software, but if you destroy these markets, that's the path. But I just don't think this is a good time to be number four. I could be wrong. I could be wrong, but it had its age. It had its time.

• 36:41Sam Parr?

  I actually disagree with you. I think I understand your sentiment, which I agree with, but I disagree with how you're phrasing it of, there is, it's not great to be fourth or fifth place, whatever. We've had a bunch of people on this podcast that have built apps that were really fast money grabs, where they got really big, really quickly, with tiny teams. And what I would tell them, which, what the hell do I know? But I would tell them, I'm like, this doesn't seem durable, but so keep your team small and ride the wave and take all the money and like, do something else eventually. But it's a little bit different than it used to be, because you don't need to build these huge infrastructures. You can have one-hit wonders that crush it.

• 37:18Shaan Puri?

  You know what I'm saying, Sean? Uh, yeah, I think one hit wonders the wrong phrasing, but I know what you mean, which is that you can, yeah, a base hit now can provide you enough cash flow to A, change your life and B, set you up with like five more doors, whether it's investing or it's reinvesting into another company you start. And you don't have to build one 20, 20 year durable company in order to be a winner anymore. So I think, I think I understand what you're saying. Like back when we were in San Francisco early on, like the small lifestyle business would get you the equivalent of a job. Now it gets you equivalent, you know, like you would make a couple hundred thousand dollars if you had a lifestyle business, you know, that was like, it was working, but it was small and it was solo and it was bootstrapped. Now those same solo bootstrappers have like eight million ARR. So it's just a different scale that. Okay, I remember.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  But you know what the difference is though? That, that is, I think that term is, you have to be thoughtful about it. In the age of AI, when there's so much competition, you can build a two or three person company that's small, but the lifestyle businesses are being slaughtered. Because when these three kids come to SF, working in the mission and they're working eight days a week, and they've taken your little idea, but made it much better, your lifestyle is going to be unemployment.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  So this term I think needs to die. It made some sense, I think, a few years back. It's okay. I just worry people are going to take the wrong lessons from it. You have to work, start in this conversation. You can do more with fewer people, but you better work harder if there's, or find a space with no competition, right? But the weird thing about AI is, is there's competition in spaces that two years ago had very little competition.

• 38:49Shaan Puri?

  Like what's an example that comes to mind?

• 38:51Speaker 00

  I'll give you an example. I, when I started investing, I did a couple of investments in legal. I knew a little bit about legal, okay? And no one wanted to invest in legal. They're like, ah, it takes forever. Lawyers don't buy anything. It takes forever. It's boring. It's a slow market. Now there's a 500 AI legal startups. And there's reasons for that, but you could not be at that sleepy pace. Same thing, I've done, some of the best investment I've done has been in support, in post-sales, okay? No one wanted to do this type of startup, boring, resolve tickets, pick up the phone, right? Now there's thousands of voice startups. There's thousands of these. And so if you think you can run a lifestyle, uh, customer support startup, good luck.

• 39:32Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  Good, good luck, because Delphi out of the box is probably better than you.

• 39:36Sam Parr?

  You you own a a media company. You you own basically if a trade show that's incredibly successful. So let's just categorize that as a boring company that is not a technology company.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 39:46Sam Parr?

  Which is what which is what I do as well. And Sean has done something like that in the past as well, I believe. For the people like like that, how are you using AI in like a in a in a not tech company? Are your employees now becoming significantly more efficient?

• 40:00Speaker 00

  I mean, we only have two people now. I take it back. We have five people and we do five million per person now.

• 40:06Sam Parr?

  Did you have more people before?

• 40:08Speaker 00

  We had much more people before. We had people in 2020 running. I didn't even. We have four designers. Now we have a little bit of a designer in AI tools. We used to have five people on this content team reviewing sessions. Now we have zero. Now we just have AI. So we we have none of the designers, none of the content people. All the ghost writers are gone. They're the worst, right? Well, I write my own content.

• 40:32Sam Parr?

  Good, let me drop you off at the airport.

• 40:33Speaker 00

  No, but what would happen? Let me go in verse or like, okay, nine months ago, Yamini would come to a Saastr event. She's done it three times. Okay. And she would speak. And three months later, a ghostwriter would write up a terrible summary of her thing, just terrible. And I would cry and we'd ask them to fix it because I can't do everything, right? And then about nine months ago, they got better. They actually they got they weren't great, but they got better. And I hadn't actually used Claude. And then I went into Claude. I'm like, this, she just put it in Claude and they start charging us $5,000 a month for this. So like, we can do this for 20 bucks in an hour instead of $5,000 and waiting two weeks with their clients, right? So we didn't need it. The ghostwriters we got rid of first, right? Then we had five people. Then we had an agency we worked with for years. And for a while, it was great. And they would review all these speakers. There's a lot of work to work with speakers. You've done it, Sam. And when you have hundreds

• 41:18Speaker 00

  and hundreds of speakers, it's impossible to do it all, right? But they decided they just didn't want to work that hard anymore. So they only they wanted to charge us two to three times more and only do half the work. So it just didn't help us, right? So then we're like, we're we're SOL now. We're five months before Saastr Annual. And we just said, well, let's have our AI do it. And it it reviewed 300 sessions, 300 slide decks, 300 presentations.

• 41:39Sam Parr?

  Do you have to chase those 300 people down to give you the?

• 41:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, we still have to like, it doesn't get rid of everything, but it does 90% of the work. And it better and it does 90% of the work three times better, 90% of the work three times better.

• 41:52Sam Parr?

  Was that you, the business owner who had to architect and come up with all these solutions?

• 41:56Speaker 00

  Between Amelia, who runs Saastr, this media business and events and me, yeah, we came up, no one else was like motivated to do it.

• 42:03Sam Parr?

  Of course. That makes sense.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  And, and then like we have a, you know, we have a little bit of a sales team, but then our AI just started to do all the screening and initial sales conversations for us. That helped a lot.

• 42:15Sam Parr?

  Even for, it's, this is a very niche business, a trade show business.

• 42:20Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 42:21Sam Parr?

  To say you do 25 million in revenue with five employees is pretty breathtaking because I would have thought that would be on the lower, your business would be on the lower end of like, well, I still need people, but you have just proven that not to be true. And so.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  It could do better with more people. It could do better with more people. It's not optimal.

• 42:40Shaan Puri?

  Your life gets worse.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  No, the honest, I don't mean to get off target. The real problem is I just can't, and Sam, this is why you think I'm grouchy because of early conversation we had. I've just struggled to find enough A tier talent that wants to do this non sexy stuff. Okay. I would love to have 20 people on the team tomorrow. I have budget for it, or at least 15, but, but I don't need someone that shows up to a meeting with the sponsor and doesn't know what we do. Okay. I don't need a designer that doesn't finish the design until after the event, which I had once in the past. Like send us a big bill, but didn't finish the assets until after the event. I just don't need that. Right?

• 43:17Speaker 00

  You know, I just don't, I don't need, I don't need someone managing 10,000 people in our, in our Saastr annual that forgets to do catering. Like I just don't need, I'd rather have the AI come up with the cater, the AI did our catering schedule this year.

• 43:28Shaan Puri?

  Could you talk about the start of Saastr real quick? So when you started this thing, you had sold your company.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:35Shaan Puri?

  Right. Was it, was it after you sold EchoSign or when did you start?

• 43:37Speaker 00

  A long time ago, 2012, but yes.

• 43:39Shaan Puri?

  So 2012, you sell your company, great exit. As I understand it, you're like, I have retired twice. I got in shape. I picked up a hobby and realized, you know, like I still love building. So, so you sell your company. Do you retire right away? Basically you take a break?

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Well, after, there's probably a little bit of parallel to Sam here. Both times after I sold my startups, I sort of didn't work for the better part of a year and just got restless for different reasons, right? And I just got restless. And in fact, both times after about 100 days, 120 days, I got a little depressed. Maybe depressed is too strong word. Lost, lost, right? Definitely lost. I remember, you know, my second startup, Emergence Capital, which is a very successful B2B venture firm, had a CEO, every year had a big CEO meetup, right? Where they would come and in my, in my class, my group, I had David Sacks and Aaron Levy and Peter Gassner from Viva and then after I got acquired, I got to go to one more and they said, you can't come back anymore.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  You're not, you're not part of the, you're not part of the CEOs anymore. I didn't, I got, I was off the team and you know, Ben Chestnut did an interview just a couple of weeks ago with Kleiner Perkins and said the biggest issue when he sold Mailchimp for 12 billion or whatever it was, is was he knew he would be instantly irrelevant. He knew he would be instantly irrelevant. He said, I am now. I'm irrelevant now. Mailchimp's of the past. He's like, you wouldn't even build a tool like a Mailchimp today in the age of AI. Right? Maybe that wasn't quite the point. So, yeah, so, so that was it. And then, but then what was fun for me, and this is, is a long time ago, but what was fun for me is because I was the first of those CEOs, like the Aaron's and the David Sacks that had an exit, I didn't have to pretend anymore.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  So I just, maybe Sam thought I was grumpy, but I just shared every mistake I made, how I screwed up my first VP of Sales, how I screwed up meeting customers in person, how I screwed up marketing. And there wasn't much content back. It's a little different than today. There wasn't much content, so everyone just started to read this.

• 45:31Shaan Puri?

  Were you being strategic? You're like, oh, I'm going to start doing content marketing. That's going to lead to this, to lead to this? Or you're just like, I've got time on my hands. I've got stuff to say. I want to start blogging.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  I did what now people give advice to, but I didn't, there was no one to give the advice. I just wrote one blog post a day on a mistake I made. That was my, my paradigm, right? A mistake I made as a B2B founder that got to tens of millions. And back when Quora was a platform and people listening to this won't even know what it is, but Sam, well, I answered one question. I answered one question. So people, this was a way for people to ask me questions. And they, those were great because they were very tactical, right? They were very specific. So I would do one a day, every day. And it does, you know, I'm a, it's a little different today in AI, but generally speaking, if you do that, it compounds, right? It doesn't compound the same way revenue does. But if you do my first million every week and you just keep working at it and it does seem to compound,

• 46:22Speaker 00

  doesn't it? Just not, not quite as linearly as we might hope, but it does compound. But I didn't know, there was no advice back then. I just did one, one and one a day.

• 46:31Sam Parr?

  You're also one of the first people to do Twitter. You're one of the first like tech people to, like, you know, for a lot of tech people, Twitter didn't boom until COVID. Um, but you were doing it very early, you know, it was like you and Gary Vaynerchuk.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  Twitter started with tech people. What do you mean?

• 46:47Sam Parr?

  I don't think it was taken seriously. I think that, uh, I think Jason looked at it as a craft where he was like, I'm gonna grow a huge audience here. I, I think Sean, that for a long time, Twitter was an afterthought to a bunch of different social media platforms. Now I think it's bumping.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  I just think I approached it as a microblog, which is what Twitter in the old days called it. So I would put valuable content on Twitter instead of being grouchy or just, just, just, you know, and so I was early to putting valuable content, I think, on Twitter, right? Um, I think if I benefited anything in content, I think it was just being early.

• 47:17Sam Parr?

  You were early? You've been, dude, you are an output machine and the stuff that you write about is lyrical. Like you write about things, SaaS is a stupid, boring thing. You write about stuff where I'm like, I don't even own a software company, but I want to, I love reading what he's, you know, it's kind of like dyed workwear with clothing. It's like, you don't have to know about clothing, but when he talks about ties, for some reason, it's kind of exciting. That's how you are.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  My actual real goal of doing it was to make it more fun, building boring business software, make it more fun. Not, not, not in jokey way, but to celebrate the fun part, the exciting parts of it, right? That, that, that was my version of what Sam said. Did you think, okay, then I'm gonna be investing, this will help with deal flow? And like, where did the conference come in? Because that's a pretty gangbusters business. I can't imagine you thought at the beginning, we're gonna be doing $5 million per employee. We're gonna do $25 million a year in this business where we have kind of like a little, like our monopoly, we're the big fish in this small pond of, of, of basically like thought leadership for SaaS businesses. Well, the pond, there's more thought leaders today, but if you, if, I mean, it's a while ago,

• 48:20Speaker 00

  but if you are curious, I just wrote this just because I was a blue and it was something to do, something to share, something to add value to the world, right? No goals, no goals. Um, I certainly wouldn't start off with a blog today if I started off today, right? As, as archaic it is, there still is SEO, but.

• 48:37Shaan Puri?

  What, what would you do?

• 48:40Speaker 00

  Uh, even it's not me, right? But of course I would do video. I do video, but I'm not you got like, it's not my natural, I'm a good writer. I'm not like a Ernest Hemingway, but like Sam said, I have something special. I'm able to convey ideas in a way that helps people in writing and I still think today that's a rare skill. Right?

• 48:57Sam Parr?

  Dude, I hate video. Sean's pretty good at it. Sean can talk to a camera by himself and succeed. I hate it. I hate video. I think that like, I think there's a generational gap.

• 49:06Shaan Puri?

  We need to put a supercut of Sam's ad reads.

• 49:09Sam Parr?

  Oh my God, they suck dude.

• 49:11Shaan Puri?

  Ad reads.

• 49:12Sam Parr?

  It sucks, man. I, I, it's not, I, I'm incredibly uncomfortable doing it. I think, but I think that like the 25 year olds today, just like the fact that FaceTime has existed, they're so much better at it. Uh, so there's like a huge, there's a generational gap that I'm like four years too old to have caught.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  But if it's of interest, it, it, it might not be. The investing was an accident too. It was an accident. I actually, for about a little less than two years, I worked at a VC firm that had invested in me. So they, they recruited me to help them. I had no real interest in investing. And I showed up and I like, I don't know what the hell, like this is not me. I don't know what to do here, but luckily I'd started this blog and founders started to come by the office. So first the founders of Pipe Drive came by the week I started, and that was my first investment. That sold for a billion and a half, right? Then other founders started, then founder of Talkdesk came by, that one was worth 10 billion in this last round. Then the founders of Algolia came by, that's worth two and a half billion. Um, then the founder of Salesloft came by, we sold that for 2.3 billion cash in 2021 and they kept coming by.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  And I'd be like, well, let's just invest in these ones because this is the best ideas I got. Like I'm not the outbound guy, like finding Sam Hulpen. So I just invested in the five best guys that came by the office the first year, but they're all worth, ended up being worth a billion dollars. So, so that's I only, so the weird thing about me for investing, and then I could tell you about events real quick, but I don't want to spend all this time. I only, I'm, I'm different than 99.9% investors. I only do Saastr super fans that are high intent inbound. I don't take favorite meetings. I don't do warm intros. If you tell me, Sean, there's a startup that you want me to meet to invest in, or Sam did, I would ask, is this, do they desperately want me? And they'd be like, no, they haven't heard of Saastr. I'm out. Right? But if they really want me, they probably

• 50:56Speaker 00

  just email me. So I don't even want a warm intro. I don't even want a damn warm intro.

• 51:02Shaan Puri?

  That sounds like such a leak in your game, by the way. That sounds like an unnecessary bar, right? Like, not only if I get a warm intro that they say this person's kick ass and they'd love, you know, but it's like, are they a huge fan? If they're not a huge fan, I'm out. That, that just seems like unnecessary.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Investing so much harder than it looks. The odds that any start, like seed startups is going to truly be worth billions of dollars is much lower than it looks in the media. It's really hard. And if you don't have like, if you're not incredibly intense, if you're not incredibly, if you don't want this more than life, you're not, you're gonna, you're just gonna sell your lifestyle business, which is very logical. Right?

• 51:37Shaan Puri?

  Oh, so you're basically saying, if they're not like, basically digging my content, they're not taking as seriously as they should. Is that, is that the implication basically that if somebody is seriously trying to build a generational company, they should be loving our content and therefore they should want me on the cap table?

• 51:52Speaker 00

  I want them sending me a cold email that is so good, that you would invest off the cold email. This is how I invest. I want a cold email that is so good, that is so good, that you don't even need, you almost don't even need to meet them. The only point of the meeting is confirming that you want to invest. Like every investment I've done that's good, I've wanted to invest before the meeting. Every good outcome I've had this before.

• 52:13Shaan Puri?

  That's how I invested in owner. I'm a little bit after you guys, but I got an intro that was like, this guy's one of the best founders I've ever met and ever invested in. And this, this company's growing incredibly fast. And then he sent a cold email basically right after that, which was like, hey, here's why I want you on board. And here's my last three investor updates. And in that, one of the things that he shared was, They had done like a hack week. So there was like some loom videos of the team sharing their hack week projects. And I actually just watched those.

• 52:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:40Shaan Puri?

  And it just like the caliber of the team was really incredible. Like you can see the caliber of team in a hack week project, right? Cause almost by definition, it's here's just like one or an engineer and a designer. They come up with their own idea. They have a very short timeline to ship it and then they have to pitch it and present it. So you get to see like the, the quality of idea, the quality of speed of execution and the quality of salesmanship. All in one from like without abstracting away the founder. It's like, that's the team itself. And I emailed him back with, you know, I was like, we don't need to meet. I'm in.

• 53:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, you, that's, it's not the only way to invest, but what I can tell you is if the email's mediocre, they're not going to make it.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  There are exceptions. Okay. I know there's exceptions, but man.

• 53:23Sam Parr?

  Wait to, dude, so we just, um, at Hampton, we're hiring a bunch and I'm putting together like values to look for when hiring.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:30Sam Parr?

  And I only made it, um, I think I'm only going to keep it at like two or three values, but ability to write in the email and communicate is the, is one of the three.

• 53:40Speaker 00

  And I will tell you of the, one of the reasons we only have the five people is I have lowered the bar at Saastr in a way I never would as a software founder. I've lowered the bar again and again. I've hired folks where the email wasn't that great. I've hired folks where they put an E in Saastr. I've hired folks that didn't do the research before they started. Hundred percent failure rate, hundred, like we already know this, right? But I've, I've lowered the bar because I'd be like, well, this isn't as cool, cool enough. I gotta take who I can get, right? Always a neg, worth less than zero, right? Total, total zero.

• 54:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. You have this great tweet. You said, you think startups are about a great idea, but in the end they're about great recruiting. That's what you're talking about.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  They, they, yeah. And if you talk about owner, not to use one, but it's because it's a mutual, I will say there, there actually are lots of risks with owner. And I invested very early. You didn't see the two times we almost ran out of money. Now we have infinite capital, a lot of other things, but I actually do not know a more relentless recruiter than Adam. I don't know a more relentless recruiter than Adam, and that that is a rare skill. We all learn it as as CEOs like we get bet. We always get better at recruiting, right?

• 54:46Sam Parr?

  What does relentless look like? Like, what does that mean?

• 54:48Speaker 00

  Literally reach out to the 200 best people in the job. Talk to all of them, set up meetings, cold, warm, lukewarm, direct LinkedIn. Who are the 200 like, talk to everyone in the world? Who are the 200 best CMOs that I could possibly hire? Don't pretend to talk to 200. Don't actually only do five interviews and pretend you're doing them. Do 200. That's what the S tier recruiters do, right? The S tier. I had an old co-founder and I wish we'd gotten along better. But he was one of the best I ever knew and I'd roll into work every day at eight o'clock. And he'd already handed me two candidates to talk to that were really good every day. Every day I've never Adam has that, but I'd never seen that magic, right? And I don't have that skill to every day he'd found a way. Hey, I've got this marketing. The sales guy wants you to meet.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  Can you talk to them today? I'd be like two more, but then they'd always be great. They're not. They weren't always be a fit, right? And that's, that's how you only way you can scale as an executive unless you have a three person startup.

• 55:42Shaan Puri?

  You have a few more of these really great, like how to be a great CEO concepts. So one is to be a great, great CEO, you have to enjoy telling the same stories again and again and again. Hundreds of times.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Even Sam Altman does that, doesn't he? It's pretty much the same story, right? It is that that one, the one I like that Sam does, I can comment. He tells you the future like Elon Musk, if you're listening.

• 56:07Shaan Puri?

  What do you mean by that?

• 56:08Speaker 00

  Well, you know, he does this. You can make fun of this goofy video he did with Johnny Ive. I don't know if you saw it when they did it like perfectly lit and having coffee in North Beach.

• 56:17Shaan Puri?

  My favorite rom com of the year.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, you think, oh, this is silly, right? But but listen to what he's saying. He's telling you that in the not too distant future, you will be on chat GPT 24 hours a day. And I'm making the bet that Johnny Ive is the guy to do it. I'm not betting that he's going to build a rabbit pendant. It's not that I'm making a big bet that he knows UI and UX so well for the next generation. That he will solve this problem where we are on and Sam's already on chat GPT more than the average today. Right? The average person's on like 22 minutes. You said you're on it more, aren't you?

• 56:48Sam Parr?

  I am on it all day.

• 56:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so Johnny Ive is gonna figure out a way that it's in your ring, and it's in your phone, and it's in your glasses, like Ray Bennett. And he's gonna figure out stuff we haven't figured out, and it's in our, it's in Sean and I's headset. And we are just, like, what if it was in this headset? Like, this is totally passive, right? I mean, I don't know if you guys have used Granola or the newest Notion. It records everything you do all the time in the background without permissions or visibility. You know why Granola is so successful? By, for note-taking versus, I don't know if the one you said is, does this, Sean, but, you know, Granola just records everything at the hardware level. Like, I could be recording us in Granola right now. And you, we had, we had, we had a chief customer office, officer summit. Two hundred of the best chief customer officers at Saastr this year. And the guy that put it on that day wrote up the whole summary of every single session.

• 57:33Shaan Puri?

  That day, like, very, very good. Even I could do it. He's like, oh, yeah, I just, Granola just listened to everything and it wrote it for me, and it was done that day.

• 57:40Sam Parr?

  Do you feel this way, Sean, where I hear this, and I'm like, this is so exciting? And then, but the other side of me is, says, um, this is so intense, I have to, like, I, hopefully I can invest in something and, and make a profit. Otherwise, I need to take my winnings and go home, and hopefully they compound, compound by themselves, because there's an intense future that you're painting here. Like, I, I don't know how I feel. I, sometimes I'm like, this is so exciting, I want to get in. This is, this is amazing. But then other times, I'm like, but if my life depends on this, I don't want to play this game. This seems so intense.

• 58:09Shaan Puri?

  I know exactly what you mean. I've, I've now experienced, basically, like, I graduated 2010, right? So when I graduated, I, basically, like, that's when the light bulb turned on. I don't, I don't, I don't even remember life really before that. You know, I, I didn't even know the great financial crisis was happening. I was sitting at a Chick-fil-A somewhere in 08, you know, I, I just was oblivious to the, to the whole world, right? But when I came out, 2010, basically, three things have happened since then that were of note. There was mobile. So right when I moved to San Francisco, I remember, you know, I joined Birch's startup studio, and there was a single mobile developer, and he would, my very first day, he was giving a tutorial to the other 12 engineers who were like, you know, super seasoned Silicon Valley engineers, but they just never built an iOS app before.

• 58:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 58:49Shaan Puri?

  And, and like, that ratio of like, one mobile developer to, you know, 12, 15 non-mobile developers, within 12 months, it flipped. It was like, if you're not doing mobile, what are you even doing? Why would you do a startup if it's not a mobile startup? It was like a, a dumb idea in, by the time you're, you know, a year later into the job. And so I saw mobile come, and mobile was one of those where... I would say it was obviously going to happen, but it was a fog of war. You didn't know where the opportunities were. And actually, the opportunities were very different than the previous wave. So like, Michael, who had made a billion dollars in Web 1.0 or 2.0 or whatever, like, you know, the Facebook era. He didn't realize, even Facebook didn't realize, Zuck didn't build mobile apps, right? He was like, no, no, no, it'll be mobile web responsive, that'll work.

• 59:33Shaan Puri?

  And, you know, the fact that basically Uber was like the big, Uber was like the biggest winner, basically, during that, like, that era when we, when we launched. And Uber was like physical world interaction. Like, you push a button, but a car has to show up, and you have to manage these drivers, and that looked nothing like the winners before. So there was like, we all knew mobile was big, but we didn't understand. The fog of war prevented us from seeing the path to victory.

• 59:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 59:57Shaan Puri?

  Then the next one was crypto. Crypto had a different flavor, which was, it was not consensus that this was gonna be big. In fact, it was very fringe, and you looked a little crazy for saying this was gonna be big. And so, most of us missed it for that reason. And now, this is the, really the third one. I'll like take COVID out, uh, cuz that was, that was a little bit of a different thing. Uh, this is the third one, where again, everybody agrees this is gonna be huge. This is gonna be the biggest of all of them. It's the biggest opportunity ever, right? So everybody agrees on that, but there's complete fog of war, because like you're saying, even the apps that are working get disrupted. There's like so much creative destruction there. One moment, you think it's the models that are gonna get all the money. Then you think it's Nvidia that's gonna get all the money. Then you think it's the applications that are gonna get all the money.

• 1:00:40Shaan Puri?

  Nobody knows how to win, uh, even on the investment side. Like, the VCs also, you're sitting there and you have this really weird feeling, because you know this is the time when all the money's gonna get made. The generational money's gonna get made now. You still have no idea where to put it, and people are trying to figure that out in the fog of war.

• 1:00:56Sam Parr?

  It's like that Warren Buffett phrase where they, where he says, um, uh, every, every, you see him swimming naked when the tide comes in or goes out, you know what I'm saying? Uh, where the, the idea being like, uh, you know, when there's turmoil, that's when you get greedy. But the hard part is A, the courage, and B, to know when the turmoil is actually happening. You, are you in that period? Now, we all know it's happening. Uh, this is the time, but do you or I have the want, desire, courage to actually get after it? And half the time, I think, hell yeah, this is amazing. The other half the time, I think, This is, this is scary.

• 1:01:29Shaan Puri?

  I'll read a book.

• 1:01:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I want nothing to do with this. You know, do you guys agree?

• 1:01:33Speaker 00

  There was someone, I wish I knew it was, someone on Twitter had a good tweet that resonated with me on this point. He's like, the smartest play, if you can possibly pull it off today is to go make five or 10 million, cash out and just chill. Because you can't predict where it's gonna go. Like this is, the world's gonna, like, whatever you could do to liquidate your assets now, they may be worthless down the road. So liquidate them right now and chill if you don't, if you don't see the future. Because this is the time, right? I, I do think, and I also think, you know, I used to, it wasn't until we ran our own AI. Again, I used to think the node coastal, I mean, obviously off the charts smart, right? But when he used to talk about how AI was gonna bring mass unemployment in tech, I used to think he was just being crazy, right? But now I can see it. It's also coming. I can see all the, I mean, McKinsey just laid 10% of their, their team off,

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  but it's just a start because they put in all of their learnings, all of their data into their own AI like Saastr. And now they just ask, they, they don't need the kid anymore, right? Half of our sales and marketing teams are gonna be gone in two years. There will be no BDRs in a year. And so this mass change, and it is hard to make bets. So what's happening in venture, for what it's worth, there's really two things happening right now in venture. 70% of the money's going into growth. And right now, it's a great play. You do Claude at a billion, and then it goes to 3 billion and the valuation goes 5X. You put in 200 million, that 200 million goes to 600 million, right? You take home 20% of the profits. You make $80 million in a year, right? That's where venture's going. All growth, it's all growth.

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  And then it's doing seed, early stuff, but implicitly, people are assuming a very high loss rate, and they're paying very high prices. 60 million, $100 million valuations at seed. And they're hoping it's worth billions, but they understand, like, there will be uniquely high loss rates, too. They're not saying it, but they know it, right? They know it.

• 1:03:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and that seems hard to make money, right? Those two, that combination of high valuations and high loss rate, doesn't that?

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  Well, if you have $100 billion outcomes, if you get one per fund at all, that, that's the bet they're making, that there'll be $100 billion outcome for each venture fund, right? But back when Hub, again, when HubSpot IPO'd, the bet was you'd have a billion dollar outcome per fund, one. Now it's 100 billion per fund. So if you believe you'll do that, you can do some, you can do a little analysis or waterfall, and you can just have Claude do it for you. You don't even have to do the analysis yourself anymore. I did this over the weekend. You just gotta find one of them, and they all, the rest can crash and burn, right?

• 1:03:50Shaan Puri?

  So what is your game plan?

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  I have decided that.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  Whatever brand I still have and my excitement and my ability actually to know more than because I've done my AI actually know more than most people that aren't that aren't on the like programming tool side. I've decided that I'll get one, at least one $10 billion deal done in the next three years, two years, one. No matter, I'm only in it for one. Whether that means I have to do 20 investments or one more, it doesn't matter. I'm in it for one, right? At the seeds, at the early stage. Yeah, I want to own, I want to try to get one deal where I own 10% or close that's worth 10 billion. I've sort of done it once on paper. I've done a couple billion dollar ones and I'm, and I've missed a lot.

• 1:04:34Sam Parr?

  What would that be worth to you if you own 10% at seed of a company that outcomes at 10 billion?

• 1:04:40Speaker 00

  Well, multiply, if it's just 10, if it's just only 10 billion, that's it. But multiply it by 10%. So that's a billion, right? And then you keep 20 or 25% of that. But there's going to be so much dilution along the way too, right?

• 1:04:53Sam Parr?

  That's what I'm asking. You don't account for dilution?

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  No, I'm simplifying my goal. You could own more, like you'll own more and then there'll be investments that are highly dilutive.

• 1:05:01Sam Parr?

  So at a, at a $10 billion outcome at a seed stage, you are looking to make $200 million?

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, that would help.

• 1:05:09Sam Parr?

  Okay, that'd be cool.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  I think, listen, if you really want to know how venture, if you really, I know we're going off topic. There's two ways that I think venture works if you want to simplify a lot of it. One, it's a great job. One, it could be a mediocre job. It could be a great job, or you could try to make at least 100 million dollars. I think anything else is, doesn't exist. There's a gap that doesn't exist. Cause you're either in it for the fees and the job. Like initially, like, wow, I'm a kid. I'm getting paid $250,000 and I just get to take meetings. It seems great. Then you're finally a partner and you make a couple million bucks a year and that's like much better than like some other job. But there's a pretty big gap between that. Like you don't, it's really actually, unless you're great, it's really hard to make profits in venture or carry. So the game is to make a fucking lot of it. Okay, and listen, and the thing is, if you're in a big winner, if you're in multiple big winners,

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  just do the math, Sam. Like, that's why most VCs make nothing except a good salary. But there are a bunch that have made billions, because if you're in like three or four or five of those $10 billion outcomes, which is very hard, then you make a billion bucks. Now, the founders hopefully make much more. It is fair, right? But you're either playing that game, or it's a performative game, or it's really just for fees and salary. Like, there really is, there's nothing in between.

• 1:06:17Shaan Puri?

  But you also have the media and events business, too. So you also have this cash flow. I assume that that's a very profitable business.

• 1:06:24Speaker 00

  It wasn't before COVID, but it is now. Yeah.

• 1:06:26Shaan Puri?

  So you have that either way?

• 1:06:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I made enough as a founder. I have a safety net. But I don't, I actually view it as a net negative for investing, but it is, but it's a passion. We do a good job, but yes.

• 1:06:40Sam Parr?

  Last question. I know you have college-age kids.

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  Freshmen, sophomore.

• 1:06:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah, what are you advising they're gonna do? When they're saying, "Dad, you know, what should I do for a job?" If they, if they ask you that, what would you advise them to do now?

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  First, I don't think a lot of these kids will ever have a real job. They'll find ways on the internet to make money. So, so it is interesting, there does appear to be a gender difference, which I don't like, between boys and girls. Of my sons, my son's a sophomore now. 10% of his class didn't even want to go to college at all. And they just decided that they could, they all had this vibe, "I'm gonna go to Eastern Europe, where it's cheap, and I can just make money on the internet, and I'm never gonna have a real job." There's no interest in ever having, and I don't think my son really wants to ever have a real job. And he's super smart, like, he's much smarter than me, math. He's now, he's deep in AI, he can, he's deep into Cursor and WinSurf. He pays for Cursor out of his own pocket. He's learning assembly language now, so he can code to the metal and do everything. But he'll never have a real job. Okay? He's like, "Worst case, I'll work for Airbnb."

• 1:07:37Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  So he's never gonna have a normal job, ever. Okay?

• 1:07:43Speaker 00

  My daughter, it's interesting, she's at Stanford, okay? And the vibe at Stanford, this is, if you ask, it's kind of interesting. This was a shocker to me. They all want to go to grad school now, as freshmen. So they're all, they're all architecting their classes, their majors, so they can go to grad school, so they can defer work.

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  Like when I was in college, people cared about grad school. Then I think people made fun of grad. Like, why would you go to grad, like, why would you go to grad school? Like, go to, go to, go to the internet, right? That was the vibe for, for 15 years. Now they all want to defer reality and I don't, I don't know that there'll be any, any jobs. And I don't know that people want to work. I honestly don't think, and I don't mean this negatively. I don't think a lot of the, they want to be creators or they want to do other things. I just, whatever made us want to work, the three of us, I don't see it in the next generation. Very rare.

• 1:08:29Sam Parr?

  The women want to be educated and the men want to. Move to Eastern Europe and make money on the internet.

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  I'm not sure it's the women want to be educated. I just know her group does that may not, but, but the men not wanting to work at all. Like, like coming out of high school and just saying, no fear, like, no fear. I don't know what it was like when you, when I, during my life, I was worried I wouldn't have a job at different times, right? I was worried during college I wouldn't, during, I was always worried, there's no fear.

• 1:08:51Sam Parr?

  When I was a, when I was a senior in college, I remember thinking, man, I would kill to work at KPMG and make $45,000 a year. Like, I, I, I remember thinking like, that would be a home run if I could. Seen your yearbook quote? I'm like, KPMG in Nashville, Tennessee? If I could make, if I could get 50 Gs from Deloitte, that's a home run.

• 1:09:10Speaker 00

  But it's, so, so I think, I don't know that they're going to work. And then I think a lot of the 2021 generation isn't going to work again either. I'll give you an example. So someone I knew a little bit, um, there's a lot, so I, I did this exercise. Just like lowering the bar for hiring. I did this exercise, I know I shouldn't do it, but I want to try it anyway. I reached out to folks that had that, the circle on LinkedIn. What's the circle on LinkedIn? Out of work, what's it called, looking for work?

• 1:09:33Sam Parr?

  Uh, yeah, open to work.

• 1:09:34Speaker 00

  I looked, I worked out to folks that I knew a hint of. I hit, maybe I met them backstage at a hustle event or something. I, I, I'd met them in passing, okay? Enough that I had like a micro connection that had been out of work for six months and I gave them, uh, jobs. All of them in the end basically said, I want to make 200K or more only to do meetings or manage teams. None of them were willing to do any work themselves. None of them, the people with the circle.

• 1:09:54Sam Parr?

  The young people, the Gen Z's folks, their, their expectations, their, their expectations for salary or for comp is so high.

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  Well, there's that too. I'm talking about folks that are already been out of the workforce for six months. But yeah, the expectations are, they'd rather not work. That's the thing, a lot of people would rather not work than get their comp, right?

• 1:10:12Sam Parr?

  I mean, yeah, that sounds good to me too.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  I don't know how everyone's like, listen, there's obviously an element of privilege in this, right? And for folks that are living in different geographies or others will think this is disgusting. And I think they're right. But I also think folks who have made a little bit of money in tech or otherwise are happy to live on relatively low amounts of money with with their savings or others, rather than just take a job, no matter what it's what what the Internet says, right?

• 1:10:37Shaan Puri?

  Jason, is this a stupid mental model? I do this sometimes. If I want to hire somebody, and I'm interested, they're $200,000 a year, let's say. And let's say my business is 20% net profit margins. I think to myself, this person has to basically generate a million dollars of extra revenue just for me to break even on their salary. Now, maybe they're maybe they're doing it in coordination with a team, but like, the addition of this person, in order for it to be a positive ROI, I have to believe that adding this person yields me a million dollars of extra revenue. And when I do that, I mean, 90% of the time, I'm like, there's no chance. No, this is like, that wouldn't even make sense here. So I don't know if my mental model is broken, or if I'm actually on to something with that. Is that is that? Is that a really dumb way of thinking about that?

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  That is, that is the model for sales reps. Like, traditionally, a sales executive, whether they sold software or an automobile, a sales executive in base and bonus would take on 20% of the profits. If you look at how car dealers, car dealers have low margins, right? But if you look at the margin to a car dealer, the guy selling you the new Lexus, net-net would take on 20% of the profit to the dealer, right? If the dealer made no profit, they'd make nothing. If they ripped you off and got you to pay list, plus the CD player for $1,000, they'd make a lot, right? Sales is the same way, because in software, the margins are almost 100%. Reps would traditionally take on 20% to 25% of what they closed, right? Sales. For other roles, it's really just about leverage, and you're often just hoping to break even.

• 1:12:05Shaan Puri?

  But even to break even, let's say it's a $200,000 employee, to break even, you need a million dollars of incremental revenue to break even on that.

• 1:12:11Speaker 00

  Yes, but one way, this is what I learned. For example, one way that law firms traditionally were structured, this is slightly interesting, and it may be different today, but traditionally, law firms actually, most law firms, not the big, not the litigators, but like your corporate law firm that helps you on stuff, they'd never made money on the associates.

• 1:12:27Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 1:12:27Speaker 00

  So why would you have associates? I didn't know this till I asked a partner that I worked with back then. He's like, because I just don't want to do that work anymore. I don't want to write the certificate of incorporation for Sam. I don't want to do the NDA. Like, I don't, we don't make any money net of training and offboarding and churn and the desk and the computer. We don't make any, but I just don't want to do the work. So for your organization, you'll also, like, just to not have to do the work, right? But the problem with AI is it lets us do more of the work. That's the weird dislocation. So instead of paying that person, like, you can't even find the $200,000 person, dollar person. At some point, you'll just do the work yourself with AI, right? That's the cognitive load. But that's why it's the mix. I don't think everyone can be profitable. Some folks just have to reduce the load on everybody else. But AI is going to do more of it.

• 1:13:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  Right?

• 1:13:10Sam Parr?

  You're full of information. I, you know, I think Theo Von described one of his guests as a blind Russell Terrier or Jack Terrier or, no, sorry, a deaf, what was it? A deaf,

• 1:13:23Sam Parr?

  I fucking ruined this joke, but.

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  We're in a lot anyway.

• 1:13:27Sam Parr?

  What was it?

• 1:13:29Sam Parr?

  A deaf Jack Russell Terrier, where he like gets out of the car, he like goes crazy, you can't stop him from yapping. That's kind of like what you are, where it's like, we just like hit record and we just like, you just roll and we just are on board and listen to you and you're the man. You, you're just full of, I think, really good comments that are done in like, strong taste and tend to be right.

• 1:13:55Shaan Puri?

  Jason, don't get confused. When he calls you a blind deaf dog, that's, he's trying to give you a compliment. He does it a little bit differently.

• 1:14:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and grumpy.

• 1:14:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and he goes, you're grumpy. So you're welcome. And welcome to the show. There's a goodie bag for you on the way out.

• 1:14:11Sam Parr?

  Thanks, man. You're the best. That's it. That's the pod.