The Reddit Revolt, Turpentine, & Shaan's Latest Business Venture

* Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ * Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant Episode 464: Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) talk about the Reddit revolt, the Turpentine network of business and technology podcasts, and how Shaan invested his Milk Road money. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. Check Out Shaan's Stuff: * Power Writing Course * Daily Newsletter Check Out Sam's Stuff: * Hampton * Ideation Bootcamp * Copy That ----- Show Notes: (00:50) - Reddit Revolt (30:00) - Turpentine (41:15) - What Shaan did with his Milk Road money (47:00) - Shaan’s newest acquisition ------ Links: * Reddark * Spezless * Turpentine * Aging Media Network * Shepherd * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ------ Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  So so that was the other thing that sparked drama. Now you got leaked phone calls. You got the CEO calling a guy crazy. He said, she said, and so that raised the profile of what was otherwise kind of a small thing. As the thing on Reddit, small things can turn into big things. That's like part of the beauty of Reddit, and that's what was happening here. Dude, I first of all, your energy is getting me psyched. This is a, this is a great story. Well, just wait, because I have a little more for you here. Are you ready? This is the part that that's the background. Okay. Now let me give you some foreground, right? Let me give you a little future, future play here. Okay, foreplay? Let me give you a little foreplay.

• 0:48Shaan Puri?

  All right, what's up? We're here. Dude, have you seen this Reddit revolt that's happening? Are you aware of this? I am aware of it, and is it gonna matter really? So basically, what happened is there's this app called Apollo, right? Apollo? Yep. Here's kind of the, I would say, the zoomed out version of the story. So what's happening today is if you go to Reddit right now, the whole site is down. So they broke all of Reddit. What they were trying to do was just a bunch of subreddits. So these communities on Reddit were trying to protest some new Reddit policies. So it started with a few of them that said, you know what? We disagree with this policy change that's going on.

• 1:31Shaan Puri?

  You know, we're gonna do this 48 hour blackout. We're gonna go private. We're gonna go dark. And they called it Reddit go, this subreddit's going dark. And more and more started joining to the point where 7,000 subreddits, including some of the biggest ones on there, like r slash funny and r slash pics and stuff like that. And I believe that's 30% of Reddit. That's what I read. Yeah, it's basically, it's a huge amount like, you know, there's, there's, there's a couple of cool websites that you can go to. In fact, we should go to, to one of them right now. So go to this site. So it's red dark. So red dark dot untone dot UK. Very strange site, but. You can see in real time, this thing's almost like this, this tool's even almost broken

• 2:14Shaan Puri?

  because so many are going dark at the same time. Uh, and Ben, if you could share your screen, so it says 7,240 out of 7,806. That's like 90% or something, right? 740 out of 786. 93% of subreddits have gone dark, uh, which is just an insane number. And if you do it, you could, if you click the large thing, there's like a live feed, it'll be like, um, animals with jobs has just gone private, 5,000 members. Music, music, uh, hoarder has gone private, 5,000 members. Um, crusty windows has gone private and you just see like in real time. And I've been watching this since yesterday. It's crazy. When I, when I opened this up yesterday, it was at 2,000 and now it's basically all

• 2:59Shaan Puri?

  of them. It's 7,000 out of, out of 7,200 out of 7,800. So almost every subreddit has decided to join this protest. And so you say, well, what's the policy? What, what's so bad? And what happened is Reddit wants to IPO. So Reddit wants to go public in the future. Reddit is not currently profitable. They make about, I don't know, somewhere between 400 or 500 million dollars a year roughly, and, uh, they're still not profitable. And these apps that other people had made called third party apps were just used to like, you could browse Reddit and they built like special features into them that made them maybe easier to use for certain types of people, power users or moderators, things like that. So that's why people love Apollo is because they had some power user features that were

• 3:42Shaan Puri?

  great for moderators and the Reddit made the mistake of not, they were, thought they were picking on Apollo, but in fact they were pissing off moderators and that was a really, really big issue. I'll tell you why in a second. So Reddit goes and says, hey, look, we can't keep giving these third party apps full access to Reddit. This has a couple of problems. First, they're hitting our servers with a bunch of requests that costs us, he said, what the CEO said was tens of millions per year in server requests. The second thing is those server requests are now serving Reddit content onto someone else's app. So that person could monetize their app and Reddit doesn't get a piece of that. So they were like, all right, we want to cut costs. We want to increase revenue and they had a third problem, which was they didn't want their data going to all these different places.

• 4:26Shaan Puri?

  Cause basically open AI and chat GPT had the scraped Reddit. Reddit was like one of the key sources to make chat GPT so good. And Reddit kind of was asleep when they did the first scrape, but now they're like, oh, no, no, no. If any other AI company wants our data, you're going to pay us a huge amount of money for it. So to do that, they needed to to basically pay all the data. They needed the data only to live inside their own their own walls. So they up their API pricing. They basically said for every server request you do, it's now going to be whatever 10 cents. And a fake number, but but the result was that a little app like Apollo, which is made by this basically this one dude who made it, you know, as a passion project at a at a college. He would have to pay 20 something million dollars a year just to maintain Apollo.

• 5:10Shaan Puri?

  And so he's like, dude, that's unfeasible. I he's like, I have 50,000 paying users. They pay me 10 bucks a year. So he's like, I make 500 K on this. Now I have to my costs are going to in 30 days, my costs are going to go to 2 million a month. And he's like, that obviously kills my app and it kills not just my app, all of all the third party apps. And Reddit's answer was basically like shrug like, you know, all right, well, sucks to be you. And and then the way that they kind of responded.

• 5:38Sam Parr?

  Well, so wait, hold on. I want to ask I want to ask you a question about how the word got out, but first we have to get background here, which is. Even though, so I just looked it up. Reddit is like the ninth most popular website in America. And even it's like, you know, it's like when someone says.

• 5:54Shaan Puri?

  No one you know says they use it.

• 5:56Sam Parr?

  Well, it's like, you know, no one goes to that restaurant anymore. It's too crowded. It's kind of like that. So Reddit is basically.

• 6:04Sam Parr?

  I don't even know how to describe it. Basically 100,000 plus forums all on one website. And the reason why this matters is because each forum, which is called a subreddit, and there's basically a subreddit on any topic you can ever imagine. And most viral news in America or viral memes start at Reddit and it's. Subreddits are forums that are owned by volunteers. So someone comes up with one and they create it.

• 6:28Shaan Puri?

  And they run it.

• 6:29Sam Parr?

  And then they run it. And I didn't realize how much autonomy they are giving, given. And the reason why this is important is now, like, this has happened before. Apparently Reddit fired one woman named Victoria like eight years ago. And she was a community moderator and everyone loved her. And so all these other subreddit forum leaders like did the same thing, but where they shut it down a little bit. Now.

• 6:52Shaan Puri?

  But by the way, and the result of that was the CEO got fired. They got two, back then, they got 200,000 people to sign a petition saying Ellen Powne needs to get fired. And so she stepped down like, I don't know, a week later, or days later after that happened. So they, you know, they, they do wield a lot of power.

• 7:09Sam Parr?

  They yield a ton of power. So, but here's what's crazy. A Reddit doesn't make that much money for how large it is. It's, if you look at the top 30 websites in America, I bet you, I'm not a researcher, but I would make a bet that it's on the very, very low end of revenue or even value created.

• 7:25Shaan Puri?

  Per user.

• 7:25Sam Parr?

  Per user. And part of it's because people are anonymous and Redditors are typically horrible with clicking ads and things like that. Uh, and the other part of it is that they're kind of in a weird way. This guy, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, they created this company Reddit and it's amazing. And their users own the platform a little bit. And that's what we're seeing here is these people basically set their channels or set their subreddits to private. So you can't access them. So that's what's happening. My question to you is when this guy, we'll call him Apollo, when Apollo guy announced that he was going to shut down his app. How did he get word out that it happened? And how did all these people rally around this?

• 8:01Shaan Puri?

  Well, again, the people that use his app were power users. And so when he said, hey, guys, you know, here's what's going on. And it actually happened in multiple steps. So the reason this got so much heat is because it happened in multiple stages. He said, they announced the, they announced that they were going to update their pricing. He's like, hey, we're going to have to keep an eye out for this, but I'm optimistic. Like, I'm sure Reddit's not gonna, they're not gonna like just do something that that doesn't make any sense. And Reddit's like, for sure, for sure. We're obviously gonna take this and take everybody's needs into account. But we will have to update the pricing. And he's like, you know what? That's reasonable. I can't wait to hear back what you guys have in mind. That was like post one.

• 8:37Sam Parr?

  And he shared that, but where did he share that?

• 8:39Shaan Puri?

  He shared it on subreddit, on Reddit, or maybe in the Apollo subreddit, plus some others. And so like the mods subreddit, because again, a lot of moderators like Apollo and because it helps them do their job faster. Um, cause these guys.

• 8:50Sam Parr?

  Do subreddit owners make money?

• 8:52Shaan Puri?

  No, they make nothing. So Reddit has this huge fleet, like of the moderators that are in the dark one, I think right now. There's 28 million moderators. I think that that was the number. Um, that are, that are like participating in this. Some, some insane number. Let me see.

• 9:07Sam Parr?

  I had a subreddit. It was called like apartment hacks and I was like trying to get people in it and it very quickly got like a thousand people, but I, I quit working on it.

• 9:15Shaan Puri?

  Sorry, I got the number wrong. 28,000 moderators on the 7,000 subreddits. So that are participating in the, in the, in the blackout, basically. So these moderators, basically they're constantly fighting spam. So when you have a site that's as popular as Reddit. There's this huge amount of people that are trying to get you to buy their crap. They're trying to get you to subscribe to their only fans that are trying to get you to click this link and install this virus. And, um, or just doing clickbait, like just making it where they post something super outrageous just to get clicks and engagement upvotes and a big battle in the comments. But then it kind of turns off people who were there for like, you know, they wanted, they wanted the entertainment without it getting ruined, without the party getting ruined.

• 9:55Shaan Puri?

  And so the moderators were the people that were keeping this house party working where it's like, yeah, we want people to come here and have fun. But no dude, you can't bring 17 kegs in here. No, you can't just come here and flyer your own party inside my house. Like, no, no, you can't do all that crap. And they're fighting this constantly and they do it as a giant unpaid thing. Now, what they pointed out during this protest very reasonably was that. Dude, Reddit is one of the only networks that's all run by unpaid volunteer moderators. So for example, Facebook has a huge moderation program. They spend about 200 or 300 million dollars a year just on moderate content moderation. Twitter spends a bunch of money in content moderation. Um, and so content moderation can be a very big cost center. And so the moderators are like, hey,

• 10:39Shaan Puri?

  you're trying to save $10 million by shutting off these third party apps? Have you thought about what happens when we stop doing all this free work? And like now you have to pay for content moderation or this whole site goes to shit? Like, uh, what's going to happen then? Maybe you should listen to us. And so that's the, that's where this has escalated to. But I'll, but just to finish the, the story. So he goes. He said, he says upfront, okay, Reddit announces change, it's going to affect us. But hopefully it's all good. And some people in the comments were like, dude, you're being naive. These corporations are like, just like Twitter killed all the third party clients. Reddit's going to do the same. These guys want to go public. They're going to want to own all, they're going to want to own the user experience for all, all, all users of Reddit.

• 11:20Shaan Puri?

  They're going to kill you. And he's like, no, no, no, no, they've, they said like, you know, they said they're going to be fair. Okay. A couple of months later it comes out and they're like, here's the pricing. It kills you and it takes into effect in 30 days. And he's like, what? Like, first of all, ridiculous pricing. Second of all, 30 days, like I couldn't possibly try to like, change my app to maybe make less requests to your server. Or like, I couldn't do anything in 30 days. Like you're just going to kill my whole business. And I took yearly subscriptions. So I'm not only am I app going to die, I'm going to have to refund like 250K to people who paid for a year subscription because my app's no longer going to work. So he was in a world of trouble. So he contacts Reddit and he does a call with the team from Reddit. And he records the call and after the call.

• 12:02Sam Parr?

  Which state is he in? You can, you could, you're allowed to do that in some states, but not in every state. Did he do it the right way?

• 12:08Shaan Puri?

  Dude, in neckbeard nation, it's all good, baby. It's, it's all legal. You're the little guy fighting the big guy. You can do whatever you want. And so, so he, uh, at first he doesn't do anything with it. Then Reddit comes out and says, this guy's crazy. He's making outlandish claims. He tried to extort us for, he asked for $10 million um, in order to like, keep supporting the app. We can't do business with this crazy guy. And they basically like, kind of like, just, you know, slandered him a little bit. And he's like, what are you talking about? That's not what I said. And what do you, what did I say that was so outrageous? And he's like, here's the recording. People can listen to it themselves and decide.

• 12:44Sam Parr?

  Oh man, did you listen to it?

• 12:46Shaan Puri?

  I haven't listened to the whole thing, but there's a part in there where he's like, look, like.

• 12:50Sam Parr?

  Did he sound reasonable?

• 12:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he sounds reasonable. And he's basically like, look, um, you know, obviously I'd love to just keep going independent. But you guys are saying it's too expensive. You want to raise pricing. That makes it untenable for me. But people like this app and they're going to be upset when this app goes down. He's like, you know, you guys bought Alien Blue back in the day and you made that the Reddit app. Like, have you considered just buying this app so that you can, like, you don't have to pay for all these extra, you know, it's not some external party that one that you guys could own it. But at least it lives on and like, it's a win-win solution potentially for, for all of us.

• 13:20Sam Parr?

  Did it mention the price?

• 13:22Shaan Puri?

  And so he was like, you know, um, he said something like, you're saying this costs you, this will cost me 20 million a year. You're saying this costs you tens of millions a year. Like you could buy the whole thing for $10 million and that's, you know, six months of my operating costs and you know, like it could work out that way. And Steve Huffman on the calls like, look like, you know, I don't, I don't appreciate the threat type of thing. He says something about like, that's a threat. And he goes, wait, what's a, what's a threat? What do you mean? Or, because the guy said something like, he goes, um, uh, you know, if, if, if you don't want all that, like, all, all this noise about this, like, you could just do this. And he kind of took it as a threat, like, oh, you're threatening, you're going to make a bunch of noise if we don't pay you $10 million. He goes, no, no, no, I'm saying, um, we have like, you're saying I'm making too

• 14:05Shaan Puri?

  many API calls. So if you don't want all this server noise for the API requests, you could just own it and just use your internal systems to do it instead. And he's like, oh, sorry. Like, okay, my bad. Uh, I didn't realize you're talking about API requests. Like, I apologize. I didn't mean to, like, say that you were threatening us. And he was like, okay, no problem. Like, I just want to, like, glad we're clear on that. Then later he comes out and says he threatened us. He's like, dude, even on the call, you apologized saying, saying, uh, sorry, I misunderstood you. And then you took that out of context and tried to make me sound like a, a guy who's trying to profit out of this. Um, or like trying to make unreasonable requests. So anyways, that caught, so, so that was the other thing that sparked drama. Now you've got leaked phone calls. You

• 14:44Shaan Puri?

  got the CEO calling a guy crazy. He said, she said, and so that raised the profile of what was otherwise kind of a small thing. As the thing on Reddit, small things could turn into big things. That's like part of the beauty of Reddit. And that's what was happening here. Dude, I, first of all, your energy is getting me psyched. This is a, this is a great story. Well, just wait, because I have a little more for you here. Are you ready? This is the part, that, that's the background. Okay. Now let me give you some foreground, right? Let me give you a little future, future play here. Some foreplay? Let me give you a little fore, foreplay. Um, so Reddit may have forgot, but this is how Reddit

• 15:23Shaan Puri?

  started. So Reddit started because the, the popular forum site of the day, Dig, made this big update and everybody hated it. And Dig said, screw you guys, this is better. And they said, see ya. And they went to this little site called Reddit and Reddit blew up. And that's how Reddit became what it is, is that the Dig fumbled the ball, released this anti, you know, this, this anti-user update and the users took their ball. They were sticking it to the man. Yeah. They stuck it to the man. Well, who's to say that doesn't happen again? So I have a little proposal. Somebody should run with this idea. I bought this domain and I think somebody should do this. If no, you know, this is what I would do if I was, if I was a little, little younger and hungrier than I am today. So here, here's what I think somebody should do.

• 16:09Shaan Puri?

  I think that was the perfect time.

• 16:10Sam Parr?

  The, the younger you, the equally conniving, just a little bit more ambitious you.

• 16:14Shaan Puri?

  My T levels were a little higher back then.

• 16:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Shaan Puri?

  I'm a mellowed out dad now. My daughter paints my toenails. I can't be doing all this kind of stuff.

• 16:22Sam Parr?

  Yeah. If you, if you woke up at 10 a.m. this morning and you wear a hoodie all the time. You know, this is for you. Neckbeard Nation, this is the call out.

• 16:29Shaan Puri?

  But I did. Okay. So I want you to just check out this little website here. So Sam, I don't know if you know what the CEO Steve's handle is on, on Reddit? Do you know what his, his username is?

• 16:41Sam Parr?

  I used to, yeah. If you said it, I would remember it. Dark, dark, something.

• 16:45Shaan Puri?

  Spez. So S P E Z. And so, I don't know. I just woke up this morning, 6 a.m. And I just looked at GoDaddy and I just saw that spezless.com was available. I thought, huh, one cent for spezless.com. So I bought it and I said, what's spezless? I think it's, it's Reddit without spez. Would you like Reddit without Steve? Well, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna make a Reddit as very, very, very, very, very similar looking to this website, but with one difference. There's, there's no Steve. There's no corporation that's gonna.

• 17:18Sam Parr?

  Dude, the tagline needs to be same, same, but different.

• 17:21Shaan Puri?

  Same, same, but different. Exactly.

• 17:22Sam Parr?

  Same, same, but different.

• 17:23Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So here's, Ben threw this up while, while we were talking, cause I gave him a rant this morning. I was like, dude, here's what someone should do. And I think he just bought, he told me right before we went on air, he goes, I'm gonna buy the domain. I'm gonna put it up. So he goes, it says, I love Reddit. I just don't like, don't like spez. So I'm gonna create a newsletter, new Reddit. It's called spezless. It's Reddit without Steve. Here's the master plan. It'll be very, very, very similar website to Reddit.

• 17:47Shaan Puri?

  It's gonna be a nonprofit and any revenue that it makes will get funneled back into the communities or moderators. Because this blackout, like this, this 48 hour protest that they said. It's cool. It's gonna get headlines, but Reddit really doesn't care. They're gonna lose about $3 million by being down for two days. And then they're just gonna move on with life. And the protesters made a big error, which is they said how long they would protest for. They said the pain will stop at 48 hours. So all Reddit has to do is just ignore it for 48 hours. They're gonna keep doing what they want. So when your, when your voice doesn't work, you gotta exit. And here's, here's a little, little exit boat for you. It's, it's basically Reddit without the bullshit. And there's a little email signup box. So if a million people sign up, then who knows, maybe we can create something here. And so,

• 18:32Shaan Puri?

  you know, why do this as a nonprofit? Your voice is already rich. We don't need to, we don't need to make a profit on this. We just create this for fun, because it's fun to, to see something burned down. I don't even have a problem with Steve Houghman, by the way. I think he's, you know,

• 18:44Sam Parr?

  I like Steve.

• 18:45Shaan Puri?

  Smart guy. I think he's, he's fair in his opinion, but also, this is the internet. And in the internet, you, you really gotta know who you're pissed off. And I think he's pissed off too many people with this move. I can't believe that nobody's making the alternative to this. The people that are trying to make alternatives, they're all trying to do it so different. You don't want to do different. It needs to look almost exactly the same. Change the shade of red by like two hex, you know, like little hex color over to the right. And then it needs to be the same site with the same structure. Everything's the same, except for who decides what happens. So how the money flows. And if you just change that, you could do this as a nonprofit thing. And I think it would be very entertaining.

• 19:23Sam Parr?

  In lieu of your morning cup of coffee this morning, you had a cup of rage. And I, and I, and I dig it. Dude, first of all, a few beautiful things. Neckbeard Nation.

• 19:33Shaan Puri?

  That was nice, right?

• 19:34Sam Parr?

  That's our new.

• 19:36Shaan Puri?

  That's our, that's our fan base.

• 19:37Sam Parr?

  So we hired this woman to help us with some t-shirts. If she's listening. She, dude, this lady, by the way.

• 19:43Shaan Puri?

  Hilarious, hilarious thing you did.

• 19:45Sam Parr?

  So listen to this, this woman.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  This woman sent me this beautiful.

• 19:52Shaan Puri?

  No, no, say the whole thing. What does she do? So you get something in the mail?

• 19:55Speaker 02

  I get this thing in the mail and it's like this beautiful, like 10 or 20 page outline. It's clever. It says what she's gonna do for us to make t-shirts.

• 20:02Shaan Puri?

  Is it beautiful? It looks like a giant PowerPoint deck that we just printed out because she knows like, ah, he might not click the links. Let me just print the PowerPoint out on white and black, you know, paper and just put it in an envelope for him.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  It's beautiful. Like when you see like a neckbeard guy doing very neckbeard thing where you're like, I'm just happy this exists. This is a beautiful display. In that sense, it's a beautiful. It wasn't physically beautiful, but it was very, it was, it was very clever. And she said, you can reach me at [email protected] or something like that.

• 20:32Shaan Puri?

  THOT, right?

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, THOT, Thot, which stands for that hoe over there. And or she said, you can just DM me on my first thought. And so I talked to her and I was like, this is awesome. Let's do something. We'll, we'll work together. It worked. I emailed her with you on the line and I go, I think I said, dear Thot or.

• 20:52Shaan Puri?

  Comma.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Dear Thot. And she was like, great. I mean, by the way, uh, you should look up what Thot means. And I was like, I know what it means. I thought that you, you said it first. Yeah, you said it first to me. That was your Twitter handle. I don't, I'm not trying to disrespect you. You said it, not me. I'm just, I'm just playing the game here.

• 21:14Shaan Puri?

  By the way, the funniest thing is you go, all right, Thot, let's do this.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  She was like, I don't think you know what Thot means. Otherwise you wouldn't have called me that.

• 21:27Shaan Puri?

  She goes, LMAO at being addressed as my first thought in your email. Urban dictionary below for your amusement.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I immediately replied, I was like, I'm sorry. I thought, I thought, I thought this was a shtick. You're right. I'll call you your real name. My apologies. So we didn't get off to the doctorate start right away.

• 21:48Shaan Puri?

  All right, Thot, let's do this.

• 21:51Sam Parr?

  So dear thought, we're gonna.

• 21:54Shaan Puri?

  This is why we only have four female listeners because of this type of behavior.

• 21:58Sam Parr?

  I was trying to, I, I, you know, I was trying to relate. I was trying to like show that I read. Yeah, it didn't work out well.

• 22:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. It's like when you hear, hear someone call their friend, they're like, oh, Nikki. And you're like, what's up Nikki? And they're like, it's Nicholas. And you're like, oh, okay. Just cause he. Nicholas, got it.

• 22:15Sam Parr?

  Sorry, I was just.

• 22:17Sam Parr?

  I was in LA this weekend and I went to like the LA tech week thing and we went to this event and there was like 300 people and I'm not exaggerating. I had 30 people of like the 300 people come up to me and like say like, hey, love MFM. I'm a total man. And so two episodes ago or one episodes ago, Sean came up with this idea of this total man. We got a lot of flack for it. I don't know if you saw it, but people loved it in general. And I had literally 20 or 30 people like in a row come up and be like, dude, I'm the total man.

• 22:46Shaan Puri?

  By the way, you're doing it wrong. It's not total man with like a space in between. Cause then it's like, yo, I'm, I'm the total man. It's, I'm a total man. It's like one word. It's like, it's a, it's a thing. You're a noun. It's, it's a different type of noun. You got, you got, you know, mammals, you got humans and you got total man. It's just like a separate species.

• 23:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Get rid of the space. It's cleaner. I got you. Yeah. We're gonna get rid of it. And so total man, that, that's a hit. I think neck beard nation. With you being the mayor, I mean, that, or you being the president, that, that, that's, that's our new, that's a new thing.

• 23:22Shaan Puri?

  That's, we did it. We got a new thing.

• 23:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 23:25Shaan Puri?

  Totally agree.

• 23:27Sam Parr?

  Question, which side are you on? I think I'm team Reddit on this one, but they screwed up. They shouldn't have done it this way in the first place. You know, they're a venture capital company. They've got hundreds of employees, probably thousands at this point. They, they fumbled the bag here, not on the PR. Press or PR front, which they did, but like letting this get out of hand the way it has in the first place. I mean, you've got to, you gotta pay the bills. Why are they, what are they doing? Letting people build, build this stuff on, on their land.

• 23:53Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 23:55Sam Parr?

  You know what I mean?

• 23:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I, I get where they're coming from. I think they, uh, like many tech companies fumbled the communication and execution. But I'm also horrid at that. So, you know, I would have done this twice as bad if I was in their position. Cause I'm always like, I'm a very much rip the bandaid off type of person. And also like, because I'm. Very far on the spectrum of not easily offended. Like it takes a lot to make me feel like mad or upset. I severely underestimate how easily I can make other people mad or upset. And so I I get their position. I think, you know, most likely unless unless bezel's becomes a thing, they're just gonna be like, cool, nice protest. We hear you. We'll take you into account in the

• 24:41Shaan Puri?

  future. Continue using Reddit, you know, like life will just go on and nothing bad will happen from this unless literally somebody seizes the narrative. That's the thing. There's a narrative right now and somebody could come in and they could surf that momentum on the narrative.

• 24:57Sam Parr?

  That's hard, though.

• 24:58Shaan Puri?

  We are the thing.

• 24:59Sam Parr?

  That's hard. Uber had the same thing. Do you remember when it was trending delete Uber? Like, I think these things come and go.

• 25:05Shaan Puri?

  Like this happened in the crypto world. Crypto world is like the most like ruthless. It's like just like knife fighting in the streets. And so OpenSea had some policy issue or some change. Do you remember what it was? It was like fee change or something? Why did you get people get mad at OpenSea when they? I forget what it was. They changed something.

• 25:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they changed like the royalty take rate or something.

• 25:25Sam Parr?

  Worst podcasting etiquette ever to ask the guy in the room who's sitting like 10 feet behind you with no mic or headphones to ask him his opinion.

• 25:33Shaan Puri?

  Have you seen Joe Rogan? If Joe Rogan does it, anyone can do it. So basically, OpenSea, which was the big NFT marketplace, by far the dominant 100% market share type of thing,

• 25:46Shaan Puri?

  changed something in their policy. People didn't like it. And literally, like, in like a 48 hour period, somebody spun up a competitor and they did what was called a vampire attack, which was they, in crypto, you could do this thing where you could be like, okay, who are all the wallets that use OpenSea? I could find them. They're all public. Then I can airdrop them tokens that say, if you come over to our platform and claim them, create your account here, you get free tokens. And people are like, token? Might be worse something. And so they just like, they basically like vampire attack. They just suck the blood out of one network to another. And this has happened several times in crypto where they've basically tried to do this. Now, it's not always 100% successful, but to go from you didn't even exist to like a million to 2 million users.

• 26:27Shaan Puri?

  With like a shot at, hey, if you deliver a dope user experience, you know, this can work. You know, that's like better than nothing. And so in crypto, this has happened a couple of times. A couple of the like DeFi tools have had this happen where, oh, we don't like your policy. We're going to fork your source code, rename it, and we're going to incentivize all the major players on yours to come over here and get like a bonus token. If they, if they come claim their thing here, which builds the momentum and the narrative.

• 26:52Sam Parr?

  Well, I don't, I mean, like your energy, I don't know how to like one up you here. Uh, you know, like they say, when you're like supposed to like meet people, you're supposed to match their energy.

• 27:04Sam Parr?

  To like make them feel comfortable. I don't know what to say.

• 27:06Shaan Puri?

  I don't want to.

• 27:06Sam Parr?

  I feel like, I feel like we're going to a monster truck rally like Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. Like you're a gravedigger right now. Now I'm just in the stands trying to keep up with earplugs. You know what I mean?

• 27:18Shaan Puri?

  Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. That's so on fire. How do you even remember or know that? That's like their radio ads, right?

• 27:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 27:28Sam Parr?

  Monster jam.

• 27:29Shaan Puri?

  Have you been to a monster truck rally in the last 700 days?

• 27:33Sam Parr?

  Is the Pope Catholic? Of course I have. Yeah. I've gone to monster truck all the time. I've gone like five or six times. Dude, they do backflips now. I'm not, not going to go see a big ass truck do a backflip. All right. Let me talk to you about something that you actually are know more than me about, I think, because you're friends with them.

• 27:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 27:48Sam Parr?

  Uh, and then I want to talk about.

• 27:50Shaan Puri?

  That's a lot of stuff. Okay.

• 27:53Sam Parr?

  And then I want to talk about, I want to talk about the second thing about Milk Road and, and that thing. And we'll leave time for that. So, uh, Turpentine, is that what's called a Turpentine?

• 28:02Shaan Puri?

  I think time, yeah.

• 28:05Sam Parr?

  So basically there's a guy named Eric Torenberg. He's been in the game for a while. He's just done a bunch of stuff on the internet, including founding a company called OnDeck. He launched this new thing called Turpentine. It was very nice. He gave us a little shout out. But basically what I believe it to be is just a podcast network for business content, particularly some type of like startup be related stuff. So there's like one on media.

• 28:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 28:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, tech. There's one on media. I think there's one on, on fintech, a few other things. And he announced it. Have you seen this? What, what, what am I missing?

• 28:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I've seen this. Uh, so Eric Torenberg's behind this. Eric's an awesome guy. Did he talk to you about this before he did it? Cause I feel like if I was going to do something like this. You're my phone a friend, right?

• 28:49Sam Parr?

  No, he didn't talk to me.

• 28:50Shaan Puri?

  You're my phone a friend on that.

• 28:51Sam Parr?

  I've never talked to him.

• 28:52Shaan Puri?

  Oh, you never talk. So you don't know each other that well? Okay, gotcha. Um, because he's in our like friend group, I guess. Um, okay, so I'm curious what your take is on this because I think you know a lot about this.

• 29:02Sam Parr?

  I have a Sean opinion, but I want you to explain it.

• 29:04Shaan Puri?

  I mean, I think you said it well. He's trying to create like what? Uh, I would say the easiest analog is like The Ringer. So The Ringer was started by Bill Simmons. So kind of like famous notable guy in the in the sports journalism landscape. Basically was like, I'm going to create a network of sports podcasts. I'll have my show. I'll have this guy do NBA. I'll have this guy do NFL. I'll have this guy do, um, you know, pop culture. I'll have this guy do whatever. And so they created a network of podcasts, ended up selling it to Spotify for a few hundred million dollars, two hundred, two hundred something million dollars. And, um, really that was mostly because Bill had the number one sports podcast. And he's like very influential and Spotify had a strategy there. So, um, Eric's trying to do that for tech. So he's like, how do I be The Ringer? Or how do I be Barstool? But for the tech industry, can I basically create, uh, like intellectual,

• 29:49Shaan Puri?

  entertaining, but also highly intellectual conversations about things that people care about? Um, in tech and then he's looking for shows. So like basically if we were, you know, not the badasses that we were, we could be like, hey, let's join Turpentine. We're going to get their back office. We're going to get them helping us sell ads. We're going to get like, you know, help with production and we'll get cross promoted amongst, um, you know, their their network. It's very similar to like Workweek, which we've talked about on here before. Or Group's doing this kind of with like newsletters and, um, Turpentine is trying to do this with, uh, podcasts plus newsletters, plus other things. That's kind of the thing. He says, his tagline is where experts talk.

• 30:31Shaan Puri?

  So it's a network of podcasts covering tech, business, culture and trends that are driving the future. And he's got, I think, three or four shows right now. It looks like maybe five. Three that he's doing and then, uh, a couple that other people are doing. But they're all like very like fancy schmancy, like the cognitive revolution. Um, you know, media empires, moment of zen. And so they're, they're kind of like, I would say highbrow compared to what most podcasts are.

• 30:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So here's my opinion. Um, I don't think anyone that you mentioned or anyone out there is really doing it perfectly, but.

• 31:09Sam Parr?

  This is beautifully done. Uh, you go to his website.

• 31:12Shaan Puri?

  Wow, I thought you were gonna be anti. You're pretty anti most media things, so I'm surprised.

• 31:16Sam Parr?

  No, I, oh, no, it's gonna come. It's gonna come.

• 31:19Shaan Puri?

  Oh, you're doing, you're doing that sandwich thing?

• 31:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 31:23Shaan Puri?

  My bad. I stopped you with the bread.

• 31:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 31:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, sandwiches always have, it's not, it's not.

• 31:32Shaan Puri?

  Love your logo, hate everything else.

• 31:35Sam Parr?

  Like a sandwich is not meat, cheese, bread. It's bread, meat, cheese, bread. Okay? You gotta, it begins and it ends with that. No, I, I do like it. So here's the thing about these companies, I think. If he doesn't raise money, I think it's awesome. I think so long as he doesn't raise money, I think this could be really, really cool. I think owning this outright is amazing. I think that's really cool. I think when I go to his website, I think he borderline, like if it was done a little bit the other way, it would be really douchey. But the way that he's done it, it's actually quite awesome. Like, for example, he quotes Pablo Picasso and, you know, that could go either way. That can go either way.

• 32:16Sam Parr?

  He went the right way. I think when you go to the website, I think the name is nice. It's all like pretty slick. It's upscale. It actually looks really good. I think that if you, if you, if you did that a little bit differently, it would not work. But he's like, what's the, what's the quote for Pablo Picasso on there? Do you see it?

• 32:31Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, it says, "When art critics get together, they talk about form and structure and meaning. When artists get together, they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine."

• 32:40Sam Parr?

  Cool. I think that's cool. I think it's cool. And it's got a nice little picture of Pablo. I think it's awesome.

• 32:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Dude, on my next company, I'm gonna get a quote from Benny Blanco.

• 32:51Sam Parr?

  What's he gonna say?

• 32:52Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. Just, he got Pablo Picasso, I'm gonna get Benny Blanco on the other side.

• 32:58Sam Parr?

  We can do Bugs Bunny next, too.

• 33:01Sam Parr?

  I think it's good, man. I think it's good branding. So my opinion is I think it's cool if you own it. I think it's cool if so. I don't know if you know this, you probably don't because who cares? But Business Insider's writer, the writers are on strike. Do you know that?

• 33:16Shaan Puri?

  Yes. Well, a lot of like, isn't Hollywood also on strike right now?

• 33:20Sam Parr?

  I think they're totally unrelated, other than maybe they inspired each other. I think there was like a contract up and Insider formed a union or something like that. And they are protesting and they're doing this thing called a digital pick line, I guess it's called, where a digital picket line where they're like, telling all the customers like not to click on Business Insider links now, uh, which is crazy. I mean, someone who follows a Business Insider journalist is probably not also someone reading Business Insider, I would imagine. So I, I don't know if that's gonna go well. But if you have to, if so, if you're gonna start a media company, I think you have to be incredibly careful not to hire folks who will unionize.

• 34:00Sam Parr?

  I think that is actually an existential crisis to a lot of media companies right now. Um, and I think that that's like a real, so if you're, so here's the takeaways. I think A, it's awesome. So you're gonna do this? I think it's cool. I think you should own the whole thing. B, look out for union types. C, him going B to B, that's 100% the way to go. And I want to give you an example.

• 34:21Shaan Puri?

  But is this B to B? I don't think this is B to B. What makes you say this is B to B? I think he just has, uh, I think he has, uh, probably, he's probably going for like, high-end customers more so than B to B, right?

• 34:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but your ad salespeople can spin that nicely to Salesforce. Uh, like, it's not like true crime, you know what I mean? It's borderline. It's kissing cousins with the, with the B to B, uh, real B to B. It's, it's close. But let me give you an example of a real B to B one.

• 34:48Shaan Puri?

  B to B-ish, B to Bish.

• 34:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's, it's Bish. Um, have you heard, by the way, did you see that guy who's getting in trouble? His name's George Santos. He's like, clearly, I think he's like from South America, but he was, um, I'm gonna butcher it, but he was some type of elected official out of Long Island. And, uh, he's getting in trouble because he did a bunch of fraudish stuff. I think, but one thing that's funny is he told everyone he was Jewish. And he goes, well, I didn't say I was Jewish. I said I was Jew-ish.

• 35:18Sam Parr?

  I'm friends with the Jews. I was Jew itch. Like, you know, like I'm buddies with them. Have you not seen?

• 35:25Shaan Puri?

  All time, all time excuse.

• 35:27Sam Parr?

  He like stole $500,000. So he's actually a crook, but like the funniest part, he goes, I'm Jew ish. And you look at him and he's uh, uh, like from Brazil or something like, what? Uh, so that's pretty funny. But, uh, anyway, I think that instead of going B to B ish, gotta go all the way. Have you heard of aging media?

• 35:45Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 35:46Sam Parr?

  Okay. So type in aging media. It started by this guy named John. John's a member of Hampton, but everything I'm actually about to say, I just kind of stole from similar web, but I have heard some rumors about them. But basically if you go to aging media, what's, what, what's the?

• 36:02Shaan Puri?

  You mean on his Hampton application where he had to write his revenue, profits, uh, names of all his children and social security number? You may, you may have some info on this.

• 36:11Sam Parr?

  He's in the me.

• 36:12Shaan Puri?

  Like, I'm. I just clicked similar web on their site. No info. So I know you ain't getting shit from similar web right now.

• 36:19Sam Parr?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. So here's why. Here's, I'm going to explain it to you.

• 36:22Shaan Puri?

  You gotta be a pro.

• 36:24Sam Parr?

  No, listen, aging media is their like corporate website. So what's it say?

• 36:28Shaan Puri?

  They have like their brands, like senior housing news, hospice news, skilled nursing news, that sort of thing. Those have.

• 36:33Sam Parr?

  So what, what, what's the, what's that meta tag on there? Is it like, uh, nursing home profession or?

• 36:39Shaan Puri?

  Media for the senior care industry.

• 36:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So click like one of their websites and you can go to similar webs. Each website only has something like 50,000 visits, I believe. It's like, it's like, not a lot, but they're doing something like 12 or 11 million dollars a year revenue. And like three or $4 million a year in profit. And this is a B to B hardcore B to B site. They make their money through lead gen. So basically I imagine they'll do like a webinar or something. And if you like are in the nursing home industry, you give them information. They also have ads and I think, I don't know if they have podcasts, but they do have newsletters on their site. This is a hardcore B to B.

• 37:18Shaan Puri?

  This is.

• 37:19Sam Parr?

  And I love it. I love it. I love this.

• 37:23Shaan Puri?

  You just did this guy such a disservice by sticking four, four, four to 40 copycats on him. By talking about how good of a business this is on here.

• 37:33Sam Parr?

  Well, no, so like.

• 37:34Shaan Puri?

  People who listen to this podcast are like, if Sam or Sean say the N word, I don't mean the N word. I mean newsletters. If they say that this is a good newsletter business, they instant copycats, bro. They saw what you did with the hustle. They saw what I did with Bill Crowe. They're instantly looking for a new newsletter to clone.

• 37:49Sam Parr?

  No.

• 37:49Shaan Puri?

  I apologize on behalf of whoever this guy is.

• 37:52Sam Parr?

  I DM them. I DM them on in Hampton. I go, hey, don't tell me anything, but just can I talk about your company? And I said, here's what I see on similar web.

• 38:01Shaan Puri?

  He didn't know what he was saying yes to.

• 38:03Sam Parr?

  No, I got permission. I go, here's, here's what I see on similar web. This is what I'm going to say. Are you cool with it? And he gave me a thumbs up, like literally a thumbs up emoji. That's how I roll. I get that emoji. We're good. That's a hardcore B to B media company. So anyway, my point with this turpentine thing, I think it's cool. I like it.

• 38:21Shaan Puri?

  I think it's cool. I hope he pulls it off. I've thought about doing this idea actually in the past. I ruled it out for a bunch of reasons, but it doesn't mean, it doesn't mean somebody else can't do it. I think, I think it'd be great to do. It takes a lot of energy and I'm totally with you that I hope he didn't raise money. He's in his tweet thing, announcing it. He didn't, he didn't say like, so happy to have Mark Andreessen investing in this. So, so I think there is, uh, I think there's probably a good chance he raised money, but he didn't raise, okay. He didn't raise money. So, so I hope he is taking it that way.

• 38:48Sam Parr?

  Well, he probably learned from, uh, from his other company on deck. Like that's another company where I think they raised a hundred plus million. I forget, but I think the valuation was $500 million. So I don't know how much they raised, but I imagine it was the nine figures. That's another company where it's like, that could be cool if you don't raise money. Basically screwing up your cap table is like one of the only mistakes in business that you can't really make up for.

• 39:12Shaan Puri?

  Speaking of screwing up your money. Can I tell you what I did post Milk Road with the, with the money that we made?

• 39:20Sam Parr?

  Well, I do know that you sent me a text. I have to go look at when that came and you said, I've sold all my equities. I think it's gonna go, I think the market's going down. And since then, you've, it's double. It's about double.

• 39:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 39:36Sam Parr?

  A lot of, so I know you did that with your money. So what else did you do?

• 39:41Shaan Puri?

  So I tell you about my next best decision?

• 39:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah. What else did you do besides not make money off your money?

• 39:46Shaan Puri?

  For the record, for the record, uh, I've actually, I would be about even from where I was with my equities on that. Cause I kept, well, I kept a portion of it, but I also, uh, the stuff I sold has not doubled. You just look at HubSpot stock. Cause you're like, I got HubSpot. So you're like, HubSpot is the market. HubSpot is not the market exactly. So, uh, so I'll tell you that. So let me, um, let me tell you about what I did. So we got this money. So we sell Milk Road. Now this cash in and bank account. Got a couple of options. So it's like, do we just buy treasury bills, make 4% on that?

• 40:22Sam Parr?

  What bank did you use?

• 40:24Shaan Puri?

  What bank did I use? What do you mean?

• 40:25Sam Parr?

  Use Chase or one of the other ones that got screwed up?

• 40:29Shaan Puri?

  There's no upside in answering this question.

• 40:31Sam Parr?

  Did you use one of the ones, you were using one of the ones that got screwed up?

• 40:34Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no, no. I didn't use Silicon Valley Bank. No. So money sitting there. I was like, could buy treasury bills. Uh, no, that's too boring. Um, could do what Sam does. I could just index into the stock market. It's reasonable, but like, you know, I think, uh, seems like we're coming off of a, of a 13 year bull market.

• 40:54Shaan Puri?

  Don't really need to, to put this, the full amount in right now. Uh, let me just kind of wait and see what happens there. Is there something, is there something that can do better than the 8% uh, that I might be able to get on that? I thought, well, should I, should I just invest in a, in a new company we start? Uh, I don't know. Maybe if we have a great idea, we'll do that. But, but let me just, let me not do that. And so I started doing this process where I was like, Can I, I worked backwards for basically like, can I get 30% a year compounding? And 30% a year sounds like a high number, but we have a few friends who have done it. And the way that they've done it has been through buying private companies. So they buy businesses and they own them. Andrew Wilkinson, I think is the one that most people who listen to this pod will know because he's been on a bunch of times and talked about this.

• 41:36Shaan Puri?

  How they built Tiny from a few million dollars into, you know, $500 million by doing this sort of 30, 40% compounding over, over time.

• 41:44Sam Parr?

  Did you read the Tiny annual report? We'll have to talk about it next time.

• 41:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I read this annual letter.

• 41:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 41:51Shaan Puri?

  So, so and we have a few other friends that have been doing this as well, that are less public about it. So I said, okay, well, let me do that. I said, but I don't want to buy these companies and operate them. So I thought, what if I bought 30% stake? So it's sort of like, can I buy a minority position in companies so that they keep running them? But I give them capital. So basically like the founder oftentimes was like not taking a lot off the table or they were kind of always worried like, should I put this in my pocket and spend this? Well, I don't know, what if the company needs it? Even if we're profitable, they were kind of worried about that. So I say, here, let me give us some money and then could I help them grow? And so I went through this exercise. I don't, I don't think I've told you about any of these, but I talked to about 25 companies in the last, I want to say six months.

• 42:33Sam Parr?

  Every company that you talk to DMs me and they say something of a variety of, I was talking to Sean and now we're not talking anymore. But they like, they like messaged me to like, talk to you and I just ignore it.

• 42:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you're like the wingman who refuses to wing.

• 42:52Sam Parr?

  You, you, you don't have to tell me which companies I already know probably half of them.

• 42:56Shaan Puri?

  My funnel was this, I was just doing a review of this at 1000. So talked to about 20, 24 companies, I think. Got serious, like did, like did diligence. I would say talk to means like, talk to means like I was interested. You know, obviously we looked at a little bit more than that, but talked to was like, oh, this could be interesting. Well, you could kind of squint and see a possibility. Then got into kind of like more serious talks and either negotiated numbers or diligence with about nine. Got to a LOI stage with three or four and ended up doing one deal in the last, I want to say six months post, post sale.

• 43:36Shaan Puri?

  And so this ranged from everything from so newsletter businesses, OnlyFans businesses, journal apps, virtual events, bookkeeping companies, merch companies, and then a bunch of random stuff that I know nothing about that. We're like, oh, that sounds interesting. Like some company that like does something called laser peening on machines to make the parts last longer and they their clients are like Boeing and stuff like that, or autism clinics that seem to make a ton of money. But I'm like, okay, I don't really know how I would add any value to this. And in each one, I was like, all right, can I find a good operator where I can acquire minority stake of the business at a good deal and I could help them grow. And ideally, they're the category winner for for what they do. And so that was kind of like my process. I want to before I tell you about the deal

• 44:21Shaan Puri?

  that we ended up doing, I want to hear any, any thoughts or questions on my my approach here, because there's a bunch of learnings.

• 44:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, there's no way you're going to get 30% for that long. Right? Do you actually think that's possible?

• 44:34Shaan Puri?

  What do you mean for that long? That long means what?

• 44:36Sam Parr?

  I don't mean, I don't know anything about markets. I haven't read like a Warren Buffett biography, but like, what's he compounded at every year?

• 44:43Shaan Puri?

  Oh, yeah, he's been at 20% for like 50 years or something.

• 44:47Sam Parr?

  Okay, but if you but if you got it for 10 years.

• 44:49Shaan Puri?

  He's putting billions and billions of dollars to work, and that's very different.

• 44:53Sam Parr?

  Right? Okay, I think that's smart. Do you think you're going to enjoy this? I think you'll enjoy it, right?

• 44:58Shaan Puri?

  I'm not sure. So this was a test, basically, to see like, is this fun to do? It's definitely fun on the learning side. Now that we made the first acquisition or the first, I kind of, I would say not acquisition, like kind of minority investment. And it's different than startups. Like we've done startup investing. Startup investing is very, very different. Startup investing is you look at a business, you're trying to figure out, is this, are these three dudes in this bedroom going to be able to build like a multi billion dollar company, right? Like, is this husband and wife couple going to be able to pull off this this gargantuan exit? And like, kind of right now, they have usually nothing, just an idea, product, maybe a little bit of traction.

• 45:34Sam Parr?

  It's way more of a lottery.

• 45:35Shaan Puri?

  It's a lottery, and you put in $100,000, and then you do that with 40 companies. And you know that 38 of the companies are going to be kind of like just a write off or cost of doing business. And two or three of those, those 30 or 40 companies are going to be your winners. But hopefully, they're winning at 100x or 1,000x or more returns. And so it's very lottery like, and you you spend very little time with them. So you're not like, they don't want you advising them. You answer questions when they call, you could proactively nudge them a little bit, but you're mostly hands off, I would say is angel investing. Whereas if you buy 15, 20, 25, 30% of a business, you're a little more involved. You know, you're a little more active. These businesses are not like all or nothing businesses.

• 46:19Shaan Puri?

  They're like, oh, it's already a good business. It's profitable and it's already growing. So the question is, can we accelerate the growth? Right. So like the one business we bought is, I don't know, super profitable. It makes millions of dollars a year in profits. It's a, you know, more than 50% margins. And, um, you know, we were able to buy a piece of that. And I think that, uh, that's just so different than every startup investment I had ever done. You know, it's probably not going to become a multi-billion dollar business. I would almost guarantee that, but it doesn't need to. It's not supposed to. It's a cash flow business and so.

• 46:48Sam Parr?

  Isn't it funny how you have mocked me for like the last eight years about my slow and steady approach? And now you're, you know, look, you're still, at first it was like laughing at 8%. I'm going for 10x every year or whatever. Right. Now you're, it's, it's, it's coming down. Now 30% is really attractive, which I agree, that is really attractive. Before you know it, you're going to say.

• 47:13Shaan Puri?

  No, dude, that's, that's not true. Even in a startup fund, even when you have your winners that become billion dollar companies, the overall fund, like a great fund is doing 30% IRR or 20% IRR.

• 47:25Sam Parr?

  I'm just saying you're getting more boring.

• 47:26Shaan Puri?

  It's still the same.

• 47:27Sam Parr?

  Boring.

• 47:28Shaan Puri?

  No, it's down, down, down, down. I reject that. I reject that premise. I would say.

• 47:33Sam Parr?

  You used to make a live streaming app and now you're looking at a company that sells parts to Boeing.

• 47:41Shaan Puri?

  But cash flow is always interesting. It's always been interesting. Um, and now it's more interesting than it was in the past. I really didn't, I really didn't have a lot of exposure to these types of business. I lived in San Francisco. You say cash flow and people think you're talking about like, you know, like a leaky faucet. Like, nobody knows what the hell, the hell that means. And so, uh, once I started doing this podcast, we got a lot more exposure to, like, most of the people who listen to this podcast are entrepreneurs all around the world. And so when they reach out about their business, it's like, oh, this guy in Minnesota with this, you know? Marketing agency that does this per year, or this person sells parts and this person does whatever. You know, they're rolling up bookkeeping services. And so you you learn about different types of businesses more through this. And so I've been getting my like MBA on on non Silicon Valley businesses for the past two years.

• 48:26Sam Parr?

  Look, the cool thing is is that, you know, we research stuff. And like, if I really dive deep into a topic, I'll research it for eight hours. And I that's not enough to make an investment, but it's enough that I say to myself, oh, wow, this space is really intriguing. You know, I could see myself doing this. You're doing that, but instead of eight hours, you're doing weeks. And so it's oddly in the similar vein a bit. Of course, you have to do more due diligence and actually look at the numbers and get to know the people. But yeah, it's like getting used to the space.

• 48:56Shaan Puri?

  So the the most interesting thing is what happened between the four deals that we signed LOIs on and the one that we closed. And I'll try to do this without giving away any info about the companies that we didn't do the deal with. I could talk about the one we did, but I can't talk about the one we didn't. But the things I the reasons that the mistakes that we were making along the way. Here's here's trap number one that we already experienced.

• 49:18Shaan Puri?

  I can fix him. Like the classic girlfriend mistake, like, yeah, he, you know, he sucks, but maybe I could fix him. It's basically like, maybe I could fix this business. And when you do this minority investing, you're not the majority. You're not going to be able to fix anything. And so that was, you know, trap number one was getting really far down the road with a business that I thought had a ton of potential. But for finally realizing, I'm not going to be the one to fix it. And fixing it is the wrong approach to doing going into a business like this. That was mistake one. Mistake two was. I can totally, I can totally see this working. But working at a small scale.

• 49:59Shaan Puri?

  And so you have to remember, basically, like, as you play the game, it's kind of like this is how I felt about like your Airbnb, which is like, you do one Airbnb. That's you basically can't do one Airbnb. You can only do one as a test to see if you want to do a bunch. One Airbnb is like a bunch of headache without the size of the prize being big enough. And so we had looked at one business that I was like, yeah, this could.

• 50:18Sam Parr?

  Which is what I have, by the way.

• 50:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we all make this this mistake. But I think you were at least looking at it the right way, where you were like, maybe I could do a bunch of these. You talk to people that had 50 of these in their portfolio and you have to do one to know if you want to do 50. And so we got really far down the road with this one that like, if it all worked, it's like, dude, we could be making. $200,000 a year off this. It's like, wait, what are we doing? Why are we doing this? Yeah, it's a great deal and it's highly likely to work, but it's highly likely to be very small and like not worth the mind share of even doing this. And so we pulled out on that one. The one that we did was basically a company people probably know. So it was in a cat. So this one was not. Are you gonna name it? Yeah, yeah, I can name it now. It's official. So we first looked at the category. So I was super bullish on companies that let you hire internationally.

• 51:04Shaan Puri?

  So specifically like how to hire the Philips Peens and LatAm and you know. Why? Why were you interested in that? What insight? Like kind of scar tissue. Like dude, you came to my office. I remember you. You came to my office in San Francisco when I was doing Bebo and you were like, what's your burn rate? Which again is like a question. Nobody asks somebody else out loud. It's like, you know, that's like asking somebody that's asking a woman their weight. Like ask a founder their burn rate and see how they feel. In my head, I was like, that's bubbly. You had a bubbly burn, man. And I was like, three million a year. And that's what we were. We were basically a startup that was burning three million a year pre-product market fit. Cause that's what it cost. We had, we basically had a team of engineers. So we had like, you know, I don't know. What's that a month? 10 to 12 engineers. 250,000 a month? 240. I think we were doing like 240,000 a month in burn. So you get like.

• 51:47Shaan Puri?

  And that's net burns. Does that mean no, does that assume no revenue? We had revenue from one of our projects, but like, no, I was just saying like the overall bill. So, um, so we basically you hire 10 people that are 200,000 each. You're doing 200,000 plus you pay rent, plus you have your cloud bills, plus you have whatever else. And, uh, so that was really expensive and those were all Silicon Valley engineers and they were below market. Those people, if they were working for us for 200K, they could have been making 400 or 500K at Facebook, but they wanted to be a part of a startup. So I did that and it was very stressful to have a very high burn rate for a company. Like I just didn't like it, but I didn't know any better at the time.

• 52:26Shaan Puri?

  And then afterwards, as I got a little more savvy, like with our e-comm biz, we'll do probably somewhere like a little under 20 million this year in revenue. We're profitable because 65% of our team is overseas. So we have our like our data analysis person, Argentina, our designer, India, our customer service Philippines. Are the person who's running our whole wholesale channel like built it from scratch. It did not exist and now it's like a new revenue unit in the Philippines. And we did the same thing with Milk Road. We were profitable with Milk Road from day one. Like I remember coming to your office at the hustle and you had like, I don't know, 15 people running around there in San Francisco. And like, that's a bunch of San Francisco issues. They have to go home and pay $6,000 rent. So you gotta pay them money.

• 53:09Shaan Puri?

  And for us, we had one person in the US for Milk Road and we had everybody else in the Philippines. And so it was again, lean mean profitable machine. And I was like, oh, not just is this cost savings. Like if you hire some of the Philippines, they're basically 10 times cheaper than the US. So like, you know, you can hire somebody in the Philippines for a thousand dollars a month. So 12,000 in a year. With that same person, the US will cost you 80 to 120K. And these are skilled people like in Latam, like the guy we have doing our data stuff. He's like, you know, got his MBA, like they're, these are highly educated, highly, you know, he's like a wizard with like, you know, Power BI and Looker and all these like data tools that I couldn't even start to use. Do you get to know? Yeah, yeah, of course. I'm talking to them all the time.

• 53:51Shaan Puri?

  The one good thing is, especially with the Philippines, this sounds terrible, but I'm going to say it anyways, because it's honest.

• 53:59Shaan Puri?

  I hate managing people and I love hiring people to Philippines because they need so little management. Like I. Why does that sound horrible? What did I miss there? Because I think what people want is for you to be like, I'm a good manager and I talk to my people. And I'm like, dude, it's fucking great. I only talk like, for example, my assistant, I only talk to her on Fridays. People are like, well, that's kind of mean or like, it's great. They don't want one on ones and like career trajectory coaching and they don't want like, like the same, like in San Francisco, I had, let's say I was eight direct reports, that's eight weekly one on ones I had to do. Well, dude, I've had. That's essentially eight hours out of the 160 hours a week that, you know, that I have that I'm like, you know. I'm spending doing basically like touchy feely stuff, which is fine. I understand it,

• 54:43Shaan Puri?

  but it's really nice when you don't have to do that because it's not the baseline expectation.

• 54:46Sam Parr?

  There's a bunch of roles where you don't want someone who's entirely ambitious. Like with an assistant, it's like, you don't want someone that's like, no, I don't want to give you all these other opportunities. I want you to be great at this thing and not bail. Like I don't, I, this is what I need. This is the tool that I need and I want you to be that. I don't want to have to promote you tons and tons of times.

• 55:07Shaan Puri?

  I've hired a couple of people for like our hold co basically, um, and they're, they're cool. They're, they live in San Francisco. They're awesome. They're, they're super motivated to work with me. I'm like, great. What do you want? Like, I want to be you. And I'm like, wait, what? And then I'm like, cool. Like, you know, someday they're like, yeah, but I'm also spinning up my own newsletter, my own podcast, my own investment arm. Like, I'm like, okay, well, like, that's great. You could do that, but you, that makes for kind of a shitty person to hire onto my team. Because like, part of being on this team is being down for our mission, not like your own mission necessarily. And I totally get if you want to go do your own mission, but you gotta go do that on your own. You don't get, you don't get to have both. You know, at the same exact time, you could do one and get mentored for a bit and then go do your own, but you can't do it at the exact same time.

• 55:48Shaan Puri?

  And so it has been very nice to have people that are just like, they like literally like our, our management style is they log in, they say, logging in. Here's what I'm doing today. If you have any adjustments needed, you say something. If not, you just don't say anything. At the end, they say, logging off. Here's what I got done today. Here's everything I did. Here's the files. Here's the, here's the info. Logging off.

• 56:07Sam Parr?

  So how much are you spending now on, on these, on these folks?

• 56:11Shaan Puri?

  I mean, dude, I have like, in my own companies, probably almost 15 to 20 people that are international now. And so.

• 56:19Sam Parr?

  And what's the average salary?

• 56:22Shaan Puri?

  It ranges. So like on the low end, uh, 800, I think about it in months, monthly, because that's like when I push payroll, that's what it says. So like, you know, 800 a month would be the, the low end. And that's like, I would say most common. So that's a customer support, personal assistant, things like that can be that low. And then, uh, the higher roles will be like 2,500 to 3,000. And then there's one guy who's just amazing and I've promoted him up twice now. And now he gets paid like a US employee. Cause he makes the impact of somebody who's like driving a ton of growth. So I'm like, oh, great. Like you keep getting rewarded. You're, at some point you break, break through where you're, if you're driving growth, you get rewarded for driving growth.

• 56:57Sam Parr?

  And you also, I got an email. You, you have a course on this now too.

• 57:01Shaan Puri?

  I have a course on the personal assistant side. Yeah, I just created it. It's not even a course. Actually, it's just, uh, I don't like, I don't go and teach it. It's just a system. It's like, yo, basically the best hire I made this year was I hired my personal assistant and I had thought, okay, personal assistant is, uh, uh, you know, personal assistants, like for rich people for like mega, it's like for Jeff Bezos. It's like mega busy, mega rich. And, uh, and I also was like, ah, I don't want to have to tell somebody what to do all the time. Like that sounds like its own pain in the ass to come up with shit to do. And then I heard a few friends talk about theirs and I was like, maybe I'm wrong. Let me open my mind to the possibility that I'm wrong about this. Three people tell me, three people that I trust tell me that it's like been a huge game changer for them. Let me try it. Send it to me. I want to use it. I Basically created the whole thing last week and I was like, here's my system. So for example,

• 57:46Shaan Puri?

  like here's my, my email system. Like I used to be terrible with email and now my email system's like super organized on top of shit. Here's exactly what I do. Here's the exact scope of work. Here's how, here's how it works. I just texted Ben. I go, I said, send it to me. Yeah. Uh, and so, and we have, by the way, there's like a funny offer we did with it, but I'll, I'll explain the company that we ended up investing in. So I looked at all the ways you could do this. I'd done all of them. So you can hire direct. If you want to hire somebody nationally, you could basically have three options. You hire direct. So you hire somebody on like a job board, Upwork, online job, something like that. Upside, it's basically free. You just pay the software subscription, like in our 99 bucks a month. So, you know, you pay a thousand dollars for the year to be, to be a pro member on there. Downside, you have to do all the hiring, vetting, training,

• 58:31Shaan Puri?

  sifting through candidates yourself. Like you put up, hey, I need a customer support person or a personal assistant. You're going to get 200 applications. I'm like, good luck trying to find somebody good. Um, you could also go on the high end and use like a managed service. So this is things like, um, Growth Assistant or Athena. They're great. They do the, they do the vetting for you, but there's this huge upcharge. So those guys charge you three grand a month for somebody that actually costs $800 a month. So you're paying, you're paying 3X the price or more. Every single month forever.

• 59:03Sam Parr?

  How big are those companies? How big's Athena? I heard they're huge.

• 59:06Shaan Puri?

  They're big. And they're big because this is like a huge ARR thing for them and people don't really know about it. People don't really realize like you didn't have to pay triple the price every single month. And so that's like, you know, one path and they're, but they're good at what they do. I've tried them. Yeah, I've tried a bunch of these. The one I liked the best was the one we ended up investing in, which is Shepherd. So people have probably heard of Shepherd before. I think the URL support shepherd.com. Why I like Shepherd was it's kind of best of both. So they do the like filtering, screening, background checks, all that stuff. So basically you just say, I want a personal assistant. They present you three great candidates or they present you five great candidates for you. And they're, they're filtered, they're checked, and they're basically like, these are the best of the best. So they save you a shit ton of time, which is like, as any business owner, you kind of need that. On the other side, you don't have to pay the monthly upcharge.

• 59:50Shaan Puri?

  So they'll say, great, here's, you know, you can make the hire directly. And all you pay is the one time finder's fee for us having found you the candidate. And so it ends up being, you know, 10 to 20 times cheaper than these other ones in the long run. Because you just paid, you know, the one time finder's fee. So I like that model the best. I was like, I long-term, I think this is the most sustainable. Cause if I'm making in my business, like I did 15 hires internationally, I want, I don't want to be paying like this bloated cost every month from there on out, or nor do I want to do that, all that work myself. So that was the, the business we ended up investing in. I'm super excited about it.

• 1:00:24Sam Parr?

  The, the branding on their website, so it's support shepherd.com.

• 1:00:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Sam Parr?

  You, you have to be one of the testimonials. You need a testy on there.

• 1:00:33Sam Parr?

  It looks good. It, it's cute branding. Uh, so Marshall Haas is the guy who started it. Marshall, I've known Marshall since 2012, maybe. He's the type of guy who whenever he does something, it's awesome.

• 1:00:45Shaan Puri?

  It looks cool.

• 1:00:46Sam Parr?

  So like, if you follow him on Instagram, on Twitter.

• 1:00:49Shaan Puri?

  He's got showmanship.

• 1:00:50Sam Parr?

  He's got showmanship. He's got the juice. He's got the juice. So whenever, like, for example, I think he just bought a new house and I'm like following the bill of the house. He also like, he likes cars. So like, I saw him like redecorate his garage.

• 1:01:03Shaan Puri?

  He owns like a boutique hotel. He did this like e-commerce thing that was like super simple and actually was like a really good, like, you know, a successful business. Because what you come business that was just like it was like a phone case and like, you know, it was just that. And like when COVID came out, they came out with this little like hook thing, like your captain hook. I was like, you can use this to open doors without having to touch the knob like a peasant. I was like, dude, this guy's great. He just makes these like simple little businesses and he runs all the reason he did this is he ran his businesses using international hiring as his like workforce. So then he partnered with this guy in the Philippines, opened up an office on the ground there with a bunch of recruiters to do all the vetting locally on the ground.

• 1:01:41Sam Parr?

  Is he going to the Philippines?

• 1:01:42Shaan Puri?

  His business partner lives there and is has the the office open there. So that's like how you that you got to commit if you're going to do these types of things. And so he basically partnered with the guy who was doing that. And that's how they created Shepard. And it started off just like, you know, solving their own itch, but turns out like a lot of people have have this itch and so and myself included. So.

• 1:01:59Sam Parr?

  So if he I found I I'm not used it, but I will, I will use it. I would like to use I'm I'm literally I just texted Ben, I really actually want your course. I want to figure out how you do this because I want this and maybe I'll use these guys. But if his business is going so well, why would he sell a portion to you? Like my head is I'm greedy. I'm like, get the fuck out of here because I mean, obviously, we're going to drive him a little bit or a lot of bit of traffic in the pod will. Is that the only reason why he would do this?

• 1:02:29Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, basically, they don't spend any money on marketing.

• 1:02:34Shaan Puri?

  At all. And so the way that it spreads is just word of mouth, people coming back. And then the other one is like entrepreneurs who have an audience saying, saying the word. So they first did this with Nick Huber. And Nick drove Nick has drove them a ton of business because Nick uses it for all of his businesses. And so when he talks about it, they get a bunch of they get a bunch of traffic. So I think he saw the success of that. And basically, you know, we have a large audience now, like through Twitter, through this pod, through other things. And so there's obviously a benefit of, I don't know, like the brand association, like as well as like, you know, the the ability to reach, you know, reach a large audience that I think was appealing to him. But I bought in, I didn't get free shares, right? Like I bought I bought into the to the equity pool. But I agree with

• 1:03:18Shaan Puri?

  you. When you have a really good business, you're always hesitant. It has to be like the right fit. And so I think the other benefit was he listens to the pod and so he's seeing, you know, if you listen to this, you know how we think and you can agree to be like this person's great or this person's an idiot. You know, if you want to, if you would want to do business with them, if you've listened to the pod regularly, you have a very good idea. There's no hiding our personalities on this.

• 1:03:36Sam Parr?

  Do they have a MFM like coupon code? Is it coupon coupon?

• 1:03:41Shaan Puri?

  So if you go to my website, if you go to shampoo.com/remoteassistant, basically here's what I got them to do, which is better than a coupon thing. So I was like, all right, if you want to do the personal assistant thing, the way I did, I was like, all right, here's my systems, 250 bucks. You get the whole, like all the templates, all the thing or whatever. But I was like, I only want to make money from people who don't take action. And so here's, here's how it works. Basically, if you just buy the course and you don't actually hire an assistant, I keep your money. But if you actually go to shepherd and you hire your assistant, then shepherd will give you 2X the money back. So basically you pay 250, you'll get $500 if you actually take the action and go hire. And I was like, that's kind of a no brainer offer. I was like, Marshall, we got to do this. Like do this where if people want their own assistant and they actually like take their action and go forward with it, pay them back, not just what

• 1:04:26Shaan Puri?

  they paid for the, for the system, pay them double. Because like I bet a bunch of people are just not going to take action, but who cares? Like I want the people who, who will take action to be rewarded for doing so. And so that's a pretty, pretty sweet deal. Basically it's like, you essentially get my system for free. Plus you make an extra $250 if you, if you actually go, go forward with it and make your hire.

• 1:04:45Sam Parr?

  So first I want, if you're into this shit, I have no stake in this by the way, but go to support shepherd. I do want them to sign up because here's what I want. I want you to report back and I want to hear if this whole influencer buys companies thing actually is good. I want to, so I want, I want the results to be reported back in like a month. And so I am curious to see like what the demand is. I bet it's going to be quite good. Number two, what I'm curious to see is if you like this. Uh, I don't know if you're going to like it or not. I could see going 50 50 either way. So far, how do you feel? I mean, look, if this deal works, then this is the greatest thing on earth.

• 1:05:22Shaan Puri?

  This one is a no brainer.

• 1:05:23Sam Parr?

  But that's not the hard part.

• 1:05:24Shaan Puri?

  This is already a, this is already a successful company. I'm already religious about hiring internationally anyways. Personally in my own businesses, it's like, I didn't have to be convinced that this is a good idea. Like, I already knew this is a good idea. The question was, am I going to start my own of these? Or should I invest in one that's already working? That I like, that I use. And I was like, okay, cool. Let me just do the second one. That seems like way less work, you know, to do that. So I think this one is kind of a no brainer in that it's kind of a proven business. I am a genuine believer in it. And whether we actually drive extra traffic to them or not, I think is is sort of like, I don't know, like, obviously for them, they want that, and I would like that too. But for me, it was already

• 1:06:01Sam Parr?

  Can you say, what percentage are you, is that too much to ask?

• 1:06:06Shaan Puri?

  Or to reveal publicly? That here, because I think, you know, their business, I don't want to, I don't want to give that away too much. But, you know, it's a, it's a good chunk.

• 1:06:14Sam Parr?

  I think, do you think they'll ever sell the company? Or do you make your money just through dividends?

• 1:06:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, just dividends. Like, it's a profitable business. It just pays out dividends. Like, I got our first dividend check yesterday. It was awesome.

• 1:06:25Sam Parr?

  You did? You got one already?

• 1:06:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it was fantastic.

• 1:06:29Sam Parr?

  This is going to be your seized candy, maybe. I mean, if this works out, that's exciting. I'm curious to see if you're going to like this because on one hand, I can actually see you loving this because you get to spend time seeing how things work. And you get to use your skill set, which is content to tell people about it. Like this segment that we just did. I'm actually interested. I want to keep talking about this just because I want to hear the story behind it. I think that's interesting. And so it's kind of a win win in that regard. But I'm curious if you're going to enjoy all the due diligence. Like, when I talked to Andrew Wilkinson, he actually, I don't think does a lot of the due diligence. He's got a team to do that. If you are able to pull that off, I think you'll be in a win situation.

• 1:07:06Sam Parr?

  So as long as you like, like doing that.

• 1:07:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm going to try it with two or three. This one I knew was a slam dunk. Because I'm just like, just a total believer in it. What's going to be interesting is what happens with ones that aren't like perfectly in my zone of like, I get it, I used it, I believe in it. Like, it's like, this one was like Bullseye. I don't expect every business to be exactly Bullseye. So the question is, what happens when it's not exactly? Is it still fun? Do I still believe? Do I, am I still willing to talk about it? Like, this one, I'm willing to talk about because I'm like, I literally wouldn't have my econ business work the way it does, or Milk Road worked the way it did, if I didn't use this strategy. So I'm like, I could talk about that. Now, what happens when? It's like one degree separated from that. Am I still gonna wanna to tell a story on it? Maybe it's not even that interesting of a story and I'm not gonna do it. Like, I'm not gonna come on this podcast and bore everybody with like a story that's not that great.

• 1:07:52Shaan Puri?

  So I can't, I can't commit to that yet, but I don't know. If somebody wants me to buy, you know, a minor stake in their business, hit me up. Let's see, let's see what happens. I'm gonna try two or three of these and see, see how it goes.

• 1:08:02Sam Parr?

  Was there anything that you learned looking at the 24 other than what you said about the,

• 1:08:09Sam Parr?

  like fix me shit? Like, was there anything, any other revelations? Not necessarily about what they had wrong with them or, but maybe what they had right with them? Any commonalities between the winners?

• 1:08:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. I would say that the,

• 1:08:26Shaan Puri?

  the businesses that I was most interested in were ones that had a clear,

• 1:08:33Shaan Puri?

  a clear sales model, I would say. So,

• 1:08:38Shaan Puri?

  they knew how they were gonna get their customers now and in the future. And I don't wanna say moat, cuz it's like you're just trying to be Warren Buffett. Like, it's not like, it's not that they had a moat, but they had, you know, either recurring revenue or they had something that was like, they're, they're actually the category leader, they're the go-to leader, and that there's some reason why they're not just gonna get copied into oblivion by everybody else. Maybe it's, maybe they have an operational advantage. Maybe they-

• 1:09:02Sam Parr?

  What's Sheppard's? I mean, I think branding is actually,

• 1:09:07Sam Parr?

  that separates them here. I think that they look cool. Is there anything else?

• 1:09:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think Sheppard's real advantage is that they're, they picked a business model that's actually more customer-friendly, like I said. So like,

• 1:09:19Shaan Puri?

  if your two other options are spend a bunch of time, have a bunch of uncertainty, hire somebody unvetted, and you save a little bit of money, or pay a 3X monthly upcharge, like, you're kinda nuts to do the 3X monthly upcharge for a long period of time, especially if you're gonna hire multiple roles eventually in your company, like, it's just not a sustainable path. So to me, support Sheppard's choice on the business model separated them from the current competitors. Now, somebody else could try to do it, but what are they gonna have to do? They're gonna have to go set up- Boots on the ground in the Philippines and in LatAm and really be good at recruiting recruiters where they're going to recruit the talent to actually deliver on these roles and hire high-quality people because they don't really like the money's not made in your first hire. The money's made when you're like, you see the light and you come back to them for your

• 1:10:02Shaan Puri?

  next six hires. Like what I did with eCom is like, I started with customer support and I was like, cool, I need somebody could do inventory forecasting. People in the US really expensive for that, 140K for that, that role here. Could I find somebody overseas that could do inventory forecasting? Can I find somebody that could do, can run our Amazon ads? Can I find somebody who could do wholesale as a channel? Like, can I find people that do influencer? Like, you start to be like, oh, wait, this isn't just about what it used to be, which was like VAs equals low-cost labor. Now it's like, dude, they're pretty talented people that could do these things. They got three or four years of experience doing that at another company. And so you're able to just pluck from the remote talent pool versus just your local talent pool.

• 1:10:41Sam Parr?

  Dude, I'm excited to see how this turns out.

• 1:10:43Shaan Puri?

  At Hampton, do you guys have any overseas people yet or no?

• 1:10:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. We have like, the guy who made our website is overseas and he's on staff. We have our accounting folks that who like, they're called Fuel Finance. They're overseas. If you go to, like, we have this whole backend thing built where people can log in. It was built by a guy in Hong Kong. Yeah, we have a ton of overseas and Marshall's a member. And so we're actually thinking about starting to use them for some data analytics stuff. So yeah.

• 1:11:15Shaan Puri?

  By the way, the funny thing.

• 1:11:16Sam Parr?

  A lot of overseas stuff.

• 1:11:17Shaan Puri?

  When I was using for eCom thing, a lot of eCom people use agencies. I'll hire an agency and then they like, they're like, great, let's add, can you add these three people to Slack?

• 1:11:26Sam Parr?

  And you can tell by their names.

• 1:11:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And I'm just like, so like, for example, Design Pickle, I think is like a $10 million a year business to basically like design, unlimited designer on demand. We tried them out for a little bit. Every single designer is in the Philippines. Then I hired this email marketing guy. I was like, oh, yeah, just do our email, email marketing flows. He's based in Colorado. Every employee is in the Philippines. I was like, okay, that's another one. I hired a website, a web dev shop. Yeah. Owners in the US, entire team is in India. You know, another one that did the entire thing in Ukraine. And it's like, it's so funny that people are basically, this is now a business model is basically like, owner in the US does sales, fulfillment all done by, and they're good. I'm not even saying this like a bad thing. Like they're talented, but I'm like, wow.

• 1:12:12Shaan Puri?

  This is a whole business blueprint, a template that they could use to basically like make the margins work.

• 1:12:18Sam Parr?

  When are you gonna go there? When are you going? When's?

• 1:12:20Shaan Puri?

  The Philippines?

• 1:12:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah. When's neck beard nation going to the Philippines?

• 1:12:26Shaan Puri?

  We should host the next live pod there.

• 1:12:29Sam Parr?

  Do we have a following there? I have no idea.

• 1:12:31Shaan Puri?

  Unfortunately, I don't think we do. I don't think they give a shit.

• 1:12:35Sam Parr?

  Dude, you gotta go there.

• 1:12:37Shaan Puri?

  I've been to the Philippines. It's awesome. Very.

• 1:12:39Sam Parr?

  Tonight, I've never been. I'll go tonight and tomorrow. I'm taking a 15 hour road trip in my Tesla. My first time doing it. We're gonna see if I love it or hate it. So I'm gonna report back on Wednesday.

• 1:12:49Shaan Puri?

  15 hour, you said?

• 1:12:51Sam Parr?

  It normally takes 12, but you add three hours for charging.

• 1:12:54Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I did a charging road trip. It's horrible. Where are you going from? Where are you going to? What's the distance?

• 1:13:00Sam Parr?

  Austin to St. Louis.

• 1:13:02Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 1:13:02Sam Parr?

  I'm gonna visit my family.

• 1:13:04Shaan Puri?

  Would you get the X or the Y? Which one are you doing?

• 1:13:07Sam Parr?

  X, long distance, 350 miles.

• 1:13:09Shaan Puri?

  Is it a new one? Cause the thing I screwed up was the one I rented on Turo was like five years old. And it just needed charging every 90 minutes. It was an awful experience.

• 1:13:18Sam Parr?

  Well, how fast you go?

• 1:13:20Shaan Puri?

  I mean, it's a highway, right? So you're going like whatever 75 miles an hour.

• 1:13:23Sam Parr?

  I mean, I speed usually. So I mean, I'll go 85 or 90. So we'll see what's gonna happen.

• 1:13:27Shaan Puri?

  Crushes the battery. Absolutely crushed the battery. At least that one that I had, it absolutely crushed it. We had a terrible, we did a seven hour ride.

• 1:13:35Sam Parr?

  Driving.

• 1:13:35Shaan Puri?

  14 hours because we had to charge so many times. Well, by the way, you know, the charging thing, it's not like you can't just like charge like there's like certain chargers that are fast and some that are slow, you know?

• 1:13:45Sam Parr?

  But don't you just use the thing on the screen that like tells you what to do? What tells you where it tells you where to tell you where the charges are, but I'm saying some of the charging stations and some of the spots are fast chargers and some are slow. Like there's a like, it's like a gas pump where one will fill it up in twice the speed as the other. So make sure when you do it, you know that. So you go only to the fast chargers and none of the slow ones. The slow ones are like you, you'd have to be like, I wanted to go watch a movie so that I could do this slow charge. No, I, I use, there's this app called a better route. I think it's called this guy like has built this whole like thing just on routing out people's electric charges. And so I'm going to use that, but my wife's, my wife's flying and I was like, I'm driving, I want to drive, I want to see what it's like.

• 1:14:27Sam Parr?

  And so I'm driving and I'm going to report back on Wednesday to see how it feels. I did it. So I, I'm going to leave tonight. So I'll get a few hours in and then tomorrow that way I can, like I plan my life around this pod because I was like, it's, we record 11 my time, like I can't arrive that morning. Otherwise I'll be like tired. I won't have had to research.

• 1:14:44Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:14:44Sam Parr?

  So I have to plan it. So I get there Tuesday night, but I need a full night's rest. So I can like wake up and like research and shit. Do you plan your life around this pod?

• 1:14:52Shaan Puri?

  Oh yeah, to an extent, right? Like, you know, this is, uh, this is the one unmissable appointment on my calendar. Everything else is flexible. This is the one non flexible thing.

• 1:15:01Sam Parr?

  It's no days off. I think, I mean, we've recorded on.

• 1:15:03Shaan Puri?

  We missed this week though. So I guess we can't really say that right now.

• 1:15:06Sam Parr?

  Well, wasn't there like an issue?

• 1:15:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we, we had a sound issue, but uh, we were like, no days off. People were like, you missed last, the last.

• 1:15:13Sam Parr?

  That was like a technical error, but we've done like whatever the most recent holiday is, we were recording whatever. I think we've done Christmas Eve before, we would always record.

• 1:15:21Shaan Puri?

  Big thanks to everybody who listens. This is a fun thing for us to do. Thank you for listening. Uh, yeah, this is like one of the, one of the dope parts of our life. And I think it's attracted a bunch of like, uh, I mean Neckbeard Nation, right? It's attracted a bunch of people whose whose brain is weird in the way our brain is weird. And I think that's a lot of fun.

• 1:15:41Sam Parr?

  I want to end with this. So I was at this, I'll tell you a very, very, very quick story. I was at this LA tech meetup. First of all, our fans are, that sounds weird, but our listeners, they come in all shapes and sizes, man. All colors, all I like, I love it.

• 1:15:54Shaan Puri?

  What does that mean? What are you trying to say there?

• 1:15:56Sam Parr?

  Dude, like I had this guy that looked like he was seven feet tall guy, like basketball player. And I thought he was like a famous guy and he comes up and goes total man. And he gave me like, you know, like the black guy handshake of like.

• 1:16:07Shaan Puri?

  If you're seven foot black guy, you are a total man. Like you didn't even need to say it, bro. We know.

• 1:16:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah. He gave me like that type of handshake. You know what I'm saying? And, uh, and then I had this like 55 year old woman who was with her kid at the airport say what's up. And I just want to say, first of all, if you're a fan, thank you. And second of all, I can tell like walking by if someone listens or not, because if they're wearing like Lululemon ABC pants or like, if they look like they go to like Columbia, like university and they like make eye contact with you in a particular way, I could tell. And I would love for you to come and say what's up so long as it's like a quick like, what's up? Total man, like you can say something.

• 1:16:44Shaan Puri?

  Here's the etiquette. You come over, you fist pound, not handshake or hug. So let's do nucks. That's the way we do it. We're not trying to get a little too, too much, uh, not trying to be palm to palm with anybody. And so, uh, give me the nucks. You can say, uh, you could reference, you can no small boy stuff, uh, total man. You could use any of the, any of the isms that you want. That just means I know you and I'm, I'll give you the head nod back like, yep, you're one of us. Take selfie together and then, uh, and then we kind of, you know, we keep the show rolling from there.

• 1:17:19Sam Parr?

  But here's the shit that I need to announce to people and they, and we, we got to put this in every episode because.

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  Oftentimes, if they see me with my wife, they'll say what's up. They see me with like my in-laws or out to eat with friends, they won't say what's up. And every once in a while, they will. And it makes me feel so cool.

• 1:17:37Shaan Puri?

  Oh, my God. Yeah. The more people I'm with, the more I need you to be over the top with it.

• 1:17:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:17:43Shaan Puri?

  My wife doesn't listen to this podcast. She never heard a single episode. So she doesn't think this is cool. She thinks this is me playing video games up in the bedroom right now. So only when she sees someone come up in person. And then even, you know, I was with her mom there and they were like, wow, what? My dad was there and he's like, he, my dad literally goes, he must have thought you're someone else.

• 1:18:10Speaker 02

  We are famous enough that like our friends and family actually understand. And so if you see us out there, please come and say hi.

• 1:18:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, give us one.

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  Particularly if we're with friends, you have to do it. That will make my day. As long as it's a short thing. I was out to eat and like three different guys, when I was out to eat, I was with my coworkers, said what's up. And I played it off like, oh, man, I can't go anywhere. You know what I mean? And in my head, I'm like, I hope there's a fourth. I hope there's a fourth. It's so much. And my coworkers were like, does this happen all the time? I'm like, ah.

• 1:18:43Shaan Puri?

  You gotta say the most embarrassing version of this. So when we were selling the Milk Road, I went to meet up with the guy who bought it, Kendall, at a coffee shop. And we're at the coffee shop for a bit. And I see someone kind of like looking, like I think they recognize me, but I'm not sure. And I'm like, come over, just come over right now. Because he doesn't listen to the podcast and I'm trying to do this deal. And I'm like, I think it would help if he felt like I'm a big deal. I was like, I think that'd be a little nice little niche.

• 1:19:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:19:10Shaan Puri?

  The guy doesn't come over, right? So we go outside, we say, I say bye. He starts walking away. And the guy comes over and he's like, Sean? And I'm like, yeah. And he goes, hey, man.

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  And you're like, Kendall, come back.

• 1:19:22Shaan Puri?

  I literally go, I was like, Kendall, I want you to be my.

• 1:19:27Shaan Puri?

  I was like, hey, have you met Kendall? And the guy's like, no. And I was like, Kendall, yeah. Um, this guy just, he listens to the pod. I just wanted you to, it didn't even make sense. And I was like, I forced it so bad, dude. So bad.

• 1:19:43Speaker 02

  Validate me, please validate me.

• 1:19:45Shaan Puri?

  How do you take a cool moment and make it the most lame was me being like, hey, wait. You didn't hear that he recognized me? Come here. Have you guys met? No, of course not.

• 1:19:57Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. I said that before. I'm like, hey, say what you said again. But do it in front of my in-laws.

• 1:20:05Speaker 02

  So I just, this is the public service announcement. If you think you know us, or if you think it's us, even if you only think it's kind of us, just take a chance and say what's up. And feel free to be over at the top. Like, you know, it's awesome. We love it. It makes me feel good. And it more so makes me look cool, which is what I care about more than anything. So anyway, that's awesome. That's the pod. Good episode.