#36 - Data Privacy Tools, Food Franchises & Silicon Valley Mistruths

The Hustle's My First Million presents: Million Dollar Brainstorm is back. Host Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and The Hustle CEO Sam Parr (@theSamParr) sit down and discuss what side hustles, trends and big business ideas that's keeping them up at night. Today Shaan kicks it off with food industry ideas: keto peanut butter, vintage fast food chains transitioning into the modern era, modifying US chains and taking them global. Then the guys chat about Aliexpress, pop-up esport tournaments, Tough Mudder bankruptcy, data privacy tools, targeting wealthy alumni for fundraising, networking hacks and a discussion about Silicon Valley mistruths. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  Let's talk about food. I just handed you something. You're not gonna be able to see this on the podcast, but it's a tiny little pouch called Super Fat. So I discovered this at HustleCon, actually, so you probably already know about it.

• 0:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so the story behind it started by David Hauser. David, you don't know him,

• 0:13Shaan Puri?

  I don't know him, but I heard him talk once because he started Grasshopper.

• 0:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he started Grasshopper in Boston. I really admire him. I look up to him. He's a very small angel investor in the hustle, but more so a friend and someone I admire. And he started Grasshopper, scaled it to, I think, 30 million in sales, sold it for 150 or 200.

• 0:30Shaan Puri?

  Something like that.

• 0:31Sam Parr?

  Him and his partner owned it all, other than 5% that they'd given a father, one of their dads for like loaning them money with like 10 or 20,000 dollars when they first started. Very savvy, very frugal, moved to Nevada before the deal happened, saved a bunch of money in taxes, and now is starting new projects, one of them being Super Fat Keto Peanut Butter, I think.

• 0:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, kind of. It's basically like a little snack or breakfast. I use it basically as a breakfast replacement. I like it a lot, actually, but the only downside, and you're gonna experience this now, which is that it's like kind of dry and like it turns your mouth a little bit like, because it's so dense. So it's like, it's not like the easiest thing to sort of palate, but

• 1:09Sam Parr?

  So I buy them as well.

• 1:10Shaan Puri?

  Taste is good and the health is good. I like it, so.

• 1:13Sam Parr?

  I told David this. I go, David, I hate these tops.

• 1:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:16Sam Parr?

  I don't like the tops.

• 1:17Shaan Puri?

  It definitely does look like baby food for adults, which in some ways is okay, but it's really hard to get the food out sometimes.

• 1:24Sam Parr?

  It's very, it feels, it makes me feel like, not like a man to eat this. The way it's set up. I'm like, I feel like I don't want to eat this in public.

• 1:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I feel like inadequate toddler because I can't, can't do it.

• 1:35Sam Parr?

  But it's cool and I buy it as well.

• 1:38Shaan Puri?

  I bought the variety pack to see, like, to try out the flavors, which is smart. I like, that's a smart decision on their part to have a variety pack first and then now I know which flavor I like, so I'm gonna go in. But I like food. What else you got on food?

• 1:49Sam Parr?

  Um, you want to talk about food? Okay, so I think I come prepared with ideas that are really big and hard to pull off. And this is one of them. And you have a little more practical zero to one, but let's talk about this one. Okay, so I'm into fast food restaurants. I don't know if I told you. I've been reading a lot about them. Do you know White Castle? I don't think you grew up with White Castle.

• 2:05Shaan Puri?

  I didn't grow up with it, but yeah, I'm familiar.

• 2:08Sam Parr?

  Okay, so background is it's 90 Thirty-three years old, one of the first fast food restaurants ever. I think it's the first, but like McDonald's and them were doing it at the same time and they didn't know each other. But I believe White Castle's first, family owned, 100% family owned, $600 million in sales in the last couple of years, flatlined 12 million in profit. Big company, no growth though, shitty margins. And the average manager, the CEO said that not one person who reports to him has been there for less than 25 years.

• 2:36Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 2:37Sam Parr?

  And the average manager and like throughout the company is 25 years, which is not good if your sales are flat and it's the 38th most popular fast food chain in America.

• 2:45Shaan Puri?

  And why are you looking into the fast food chain? You just like to know the economics because they're all kind of available or what?

• 2:50Sam Parr?

  Because I think that nostalgia in America is really cool. And like things that you and I thought were cool when we were eight, nine, 10 years old. Now that we have a little bit of money, we'll spend a lot of money on that stuff.

• 3:03Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha.

• 3:03Sam Parr?

  And so a lot of these nostalgic things, some of them have done a really good job of transitioning. So Levi's has done a really good job. Some of the car companies have done a pretty good job.

• 3:13Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 3:13Sam Parr?

  A bunch of other things have done great. Oh, Taco, okay. So I was reading about Taco Bell, bought by private equity, did an awesome job of transitioning. They like lean into the stoner, late night thing.

• 3:25Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 3:25Sam Parr?

  Wendy's.

• 3:26Shaan Puri?

  They're all about social.

• 3:27Sam Parr?

  I think is Wendy's own, I think Wendy's is owned by the same company.

• 3:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, maybe they own a bunch.

• 3:30Sam Parr?

  And they do the same thing where they say like funny, not PC things on Twitter and it works.

• 3:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 3:35Sam Parr?

  Taco Bell is in the news with the $100,000 salary thing. So we wrote about that and that's why I got interested in it.

• 3:40Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. I'm interested in Chick-fil-A because I go to Chick-fil-A all the time. And I've never seen a busier restaurant than Chick-fil-A. So I started looking at it. And basically Chick-fil-A has the highest sort of revenue per store of any fast food chain. They do like two and a half million, 2.4 million or something like that per store, which is insane.

• 3:58Sam Parr?

  That's cool.

• 3:59Shaan Puri?

  And then they have a pretty cool model, which is you can't just get a Chick-fil-A. So one of the reasons why the quality is so high is they did franchising differently. So if you want to be a franchisee of Chick-fil-A, you have to like apply, you have to go to this like thing. You cannot do it as a side business. So you can't be like, oh, and I own like, you know, Shaq owns like 25 Wendy's or whatever it is. Can't do that. If you own a Chick-fil-A, that's your business.

• 4:22Sam Parr?

  So just good quality control.

• 4:23Shaan Puri?

  So good quality control because just a few like nuances. One is you have to be the operator. You can't do this as an investment. Second is like, I think they filter pretty aggressively. So it's like, you know, harder to get into than Harvard type of thing. And then they reward, you know, they sort of really train those franchises differently. So they've gotten pretty phenomenal results. And I wonder why most people don't just copy Chick-fil-A because Popeyes got famous recently for trying to release their own chicken sandwich. But it can't be that hard to just copy their chicken sandwich formula, right? Like I don't.

• 4:52Sam Parr?

  No, I don't think it can be hard. It's definitely a branding thing though. So if you look at, I was reading about, I sound like an old man, Gen Z. I went to a conference and they were talking, this is, makes me sound very old, even though I'm not, but Gen Z, the number one place that they've spent their money on is food. And the number one place is Chick-fil-A. And it's kind of interesting because Gen Z is arguably the most open-minded generation. Like they, uh, they don't. Like when we were kids, like it's easy to like call someone gay or something like, I don't think Gen Z does that at all. They're, they're not into that at all. Which is Chick-fil-A has got a lot of crap because they're, uh.

• 5:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So my thought is you do, A, if you want to compete with Chick-fil-A, you copy their chicken formula. I don't know why everyone's not doing that. Two. You stay open on Sundays and you don't do the whole religious angle because that might, you can just do it with a different value set. Three, you can go where they're not. There's not a lot of Chick-fil-A's outside of like, let's say, South and you know, some, some different.

• 5:46Sam Parr?

  The closest one to where we live right now in San Francisco, I think is thirty or forty minutes away. Yeah, about thirty miles away.

• 5:52Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. I can't get it delivered. I gotta drive across a bridge to go get it if I'm in San Francisco. Uh, but also just internationally, like these food chains do really well when they go to Asia. Uh, they have to change the menu a little bit, but. I'm surprised people aren't doing Chick-fil-A in other places without the religious sort of like weird social stances. And staying open on Sundays. Like that just seems like a.

• 6:11Sam Parr?

  Completely agree. And that's why I'm interested in White Castle because why, I was, I was going through the list of top largest fast food chains. I was like, what do I think is underperforming? But has an overperforming brand.

• 6:20Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:21Sam Parr?

  White Castle is one of them. Maybe Whataburger. You know Whataburger?

• 6:24Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 6:24Sam Parr?

  Uh, I think they actually just got bought by PE. So whoever's buying them might likely be doing the same thing. White Castle is definitely one of them.

• 6:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 6:30Sam Parr?

  Where it's like,

• 6:31Shaan Puri?

  You gotta reinvent.

• 6:32Sam Parr?

  Even if you don't like their food, it's so, it was really polarizing, which is always great for a money-making point of view. And anyway, I was thinking a ton about White Castle for every reason you said, because Chick-fil-A is just booming right now.

• 6:45Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 6:45Sam Parr?

  Booming, even though they've done many things that you would think like, oh, I'm not gonna go there. But then you're like,

• 6:50Shaan Puri?

  It tastes so good.

• 6:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So that's what I'm thinking. If I, I'm not interested enough to ever actually do this. Maybe one day. If I wanted to, or if I was into it, I would 100% put them as a target of, they have to sell to private equity, let it, a young-ish CEO who's in their 40s, run it and do a Taco Bell and Chick-fil-A did.

• 7:10Shaan Puri?

  Right. If you're starting a fast food chain, which you're probably not, but if you are, I want to know about it because, A, that was the first business I ever tried to start, was a sushi-related sort of fast casual chain. So I know a little bit about it, but B, I just think that there's more to do there. I think there's a lot more to do there. Also now with all the delivery apps, if you started today, you would start with that in mind as like one of the main ways you're gonna get your food to your customers.

• 7:33Sam Parr?

  So.

• 7:33Shaan Puri?

  Rather than drive-through.

• 7:34Sam Parr?

  To wrap this up, you know, Caviar, do you use Caviar?

• 7:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 7:38Sam Parr?

  We use Caviar. They sold to someone.

• 7:40Shaan Puri?

  Square.

• 7:40Sam Parr?

  Square. So the, I believe it's the founders who are doing this. There's a bunch of new restaurants in this neighborhood, and I start seeing them all over San Francisco. One's called Russo and Rice. Have you seen that?

• 7:49Shaan Puri?

  I've seen it, but I don't know anything about it.

• 7:51Sam Parr?

  One's called Bamboo Asia, or Asia Bamboo. Those are owned by those guys, I believe.

• 7:55Shaan Puri?

  And what are they doing it?

• 7:56Sam Parr?

  So.

• 7:56Shaan Puri?

  Just restaurants?

• 7:57Sam Parr?

  Yes. What they're doing is they've looked at what sold best on Caviar, and now their restaurants are.

• 8:01Shaan Puri?

  Tuned.

• 8:02Sam Parr?

  Russo and Rice, they only sell, or sorry, chicken and whatever it's called. They only sell chicken and rice and broccoli. That's all they have. And when they serve it to you, it's in a paper takeout box. So they're clearly setting this up to be.

• 8:16Shaan Puri?

  Delivery.

• 8:16Sam Parr?

  Profitable for delivery.

• 8:18Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:18Sam Parr?

  Same with the Bamboo Asia one. So piggyback off what you were saying.

• 8:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I like that. You also had the ramen thing. You want to talk about that a little bit?

• 8:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So I am an angel investor and also friends with a guy named Kevin. He started this thing. It's gonna be live in six months. It's called Immy. Immy eats. I M M I eats.com. He sent me the mockups. Very bullish on that. When I invested, he just said, keto ramen. And I was like, yeah, in. That may or may not be a good idea.

• 8:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:50Sam Parr?

  I also did it because he's a friend and I trust him. I just saw the mockups, they're doing this like momo fuku brand that I like, it's like, it's like a cool hip brand. They're not using like the millennial pink, which is, you know, what everyone does. I'm very bullish on that. I have no idea how they're gonna, how do you make a keto ramen? I don't know.

• 9:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he, what he told me was, you know, you go and you work with these things called flavor labs. And you tell them what you're trying to do, like, look, I'm looking for this outcome. And then the sort of food scientists are the ones there who were like,

• 9:17Sam Parr?

  Is Flavor Lab a company or an idea?

• 9:18Shaan Puri?

  No, it's just like, it's just like saying you go to a, a factory, you go to a manufacturer. So if you want to make food, a new food, you go to a flavor, flavor house or a flavor lab. And I think, I think they call them flavor houses, actually. And there they have food scientists will say, okay, you're trying to create this palate, like this flavor on your palate. But you want the macro nutrients to be like this, or you only want to use these types of ingredients. Okay. And then they do batch one, batch two, batch three. So these guys will go through a very painstaking process to figure out, okay, how do you with, you know, pea proteins and these other things, how do you make it high protein, low carb? Because ramen is this huge category, but all ramen is like real shit for you. And so if you make good ramen, that's not shit for you. I think that's a winning formula.

• 10:00Sam Parr?

  How much do you think one of these, what's it called a flavor, what?

• 10:03Shaan Puri?

  Flavor house.

• 10:04Sam Parr?

  Or Flavor Lab. What, where do you, where are those?

• 10:07Shaan Puri?

  Just Google for it.

• 10:08Sam Parr?

  Those aren't like Chinese companies.

• 10:09Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no, this is like in LA. This is like, you know, nearby here. And so I had a guy on the podcast who started, he started Fit Aid, the energy drink.

• 10:17Sam Parr?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:18Shaan Puri?

  You know, hundred million dollar beverage company. And he was same thing. He's like, yeah, I went to a flavor, blah, blah, blah, flavor house. And I told him like, look, I want to have these vitamins in it because I know that these give you energy boosts. But I don't want to have, be high caffeine and I don't want to have this like sort of acidic taste that Red Bull and others have. I don't want it to taste like metal. And they were like, ah, it's not really possible what you're asking for. How do we make it healthy and really palatable like that? Those don't go together usually. And then he's like, okay, I guess I'll go somewhere else then that can do it. And then finally he got to one there where they were like, yeah, we could do this. And so he, that's, they created his beverage formula.

• 10:53Sam Parr?

  That's badass.

• 10:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's how you do it.

• 10:55Sam Parr?

  That's great because I'm not in this space, but I would have thought I had to do a lot more work to like, I would have to like be in my kitchen making that shit.

• 11:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's what I thought too. And then when he said that, I was like, oh, of course, of course. And I actually think that food scientists are sort of in short supply right now.

• 11:08Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 11:09Shaan Puri?

  And so there's sort of like these niche professions that I think you could, you could do like a Lambda School type of model for, to pump out, you know, we, we kind of know about programmers and data scientists. But I think food scientists could be one that's sort of in short supply, given the way the world is going.

• 11:25Sam Parr?

  That is awesome.

• 11:25Shaan Puri?

  And how valuable, like Taco Bell and all them, that's what they do too. They basically work with these, they work with two things.

• 11:30Sam Parr?

  Well, they own their own thing, I think, you know?

• 11:32Shaan Puri?

  Well, they work with ad agencies who come up with like, dude, Dorito taco. And then they work with the flavor, they have their own flavor house, or they work with a flavor house to be like, try this 20, 20,000 zany combinations this year and tell us if any of them taste good type of thing. Cause they're constantly trying to do food innovation.

• 11:48Sam Parr?

  That, that's badass. Okay, that's cool. I had no idea about that.

• 11:51Shaan Puri?

  Uh, okay, let's see what else I got. Okay, a couple of things. I had this tweet that went viral that was basically, it's my most successful tweet. So I did that in 2019, uh, at the end of 2019, thousand likes. And it struck a chord because what I did was, it's not going to sound that genius. Basically anytime I see an ad on Instagram now that I'm like, oh, that looks kind of cool. Maybe, maybe I should buy that. It's like, there's this posture correcting brace.

• 12:13Sam Parr?

  I saw this.

• 12:13Shaan Puri?

  And then, uh, I basically just go to AliExpress and I just type the same exact thing in, or I could do a image search and you can find the same item. So the, the brace was selling for like, whatever, 40 bucks, 50 bucks. And I found it for like a dollar 80 on AliExpress.

• 12:28Sam Parr?

  Did you end up getting it yet?

• 12:29Shaan Puri?

  I didn't buy it. I, I like, cause I didn't, I didn't necessarily want it, but this is the hack. Like most of the things you're going to see in.

• 12:35Sam Parr?

  Do you want to explain AliExpress?

• 12:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Sam Parr?

  I don't even entirely know. It's one of those things I feel like it's underground and I'm like, wait, this is Alibaba.

• 12:41Shaan Puri?

  So some people have heard of Alibaba. Alibaba basically is like, it's like eBay, but on eBay, you're buying from like, you know, a random mom in the Midwest. And Alibaba, you're buying from a factory. And so you don't buy one unit, you buy like 500, a thousand. Because it's you're buying it to for your business to sell. You're buying wholesale to sell retail. So that's what how Alibaba got big because they had all the manufacturers in China who didn't have a big online presence. So they put them all in one marketplace and now you can find them to source products. What AliExpress is, is it takes some those same products, but you can buy a one, one piece. This is how Wish is powered. So Wish is just a layer on top of AliExpress essentially. Because the only catch for AliExpress is that you're gonna have to wait like three weeks for it to arrive.

• 13:23Sam Parr?

  Well, and if you go there.

• 13:24Shaan Puri?

  And the quality might be bullshit.

• 13:25Sam Parr?

  And if you go to the website, it's very poor English, like the descriptions.

• 13:28Shaan Puri?

  Well, AliExpress is actually a pretty good website, but the listing might have like, yeah, the, you know, the listings by the shop owner. So you don't know what it's low trust, low speed, low cost.

• 13:39Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 13:39Shaan Puri?

  And so for some people, that's a dope trade, right? And Wish made a sort of better interface.

• 13:44Sam Parr?

  That's what I mean. When you go into a product description, you're like, this person definitely, they're not an English first speaker. What am I getting myself into? Because it seems too good to be true.

• 13:53Shaan Puri?

  There's also weird things like every, like, if you're looking for one product, you'll see a bunch of the same photo. So you know, they didn't actually make that. They're just using the, the photo. So you don't know what you're really gonna get. But, but it is kind of amazing. Like I went and ordered, I think like 25 products and my bill came out to like $75. Cause I'm just testing different products. So AliExpress is kind of amazing because you go in for like three bucks. You'll be buying items that like cost 35 or 55 bucks when you buy them in the US. And so anyways, the, the hack is if you see an ad, uh, you know, some D to C brand.

• 14:22Sam Parr?

  How big did they get?

• 14:22Shaan Puri?

  They're probably just drop shipping from AliExpress and you could just go straight to AliExpress and get it at one tenth the price. So.

• 14:27Sam Parr?

  How big did that? How many people hollered at you?

• 14:31Shaan Puri?

  It had like over a thousand, like whatever retweets or likes or whatever it is. But my friend did, my cousin did this too, where he, shout out to Ron, he listens to the pod. So he did it with Theragun. So you know that massage gun?

• 14:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 14:43Shaan Puri?

  So this thing sells for like 600 bucks.

• 14:44Sam Parr?

  I know. When I was in CES, I saw the knockoffs.

• 14:47Shaan Puri?

  He went to AliExpress and got it for 50 bucks, had to wait two and a half weeks for it to arrive. It arrived and he's like, it's fantastic. And like.

• 14:54Sam Parr?

  Wait, did he say it's as good, you think?

• 14:55Shaan Puri?

  He was like, it's really good. Now it might break down or something, you know, the long-term quality might not be there. But you got it at a tenth of the price. So you could literally buy five of these. And still be all, you know, still come out ahead.

• 15:05Sam Parr?

  So remember when I, I went to, I told you I went to CS and there'd be like the TheraGun booth. I don't actually know if they have theirs, but there'd be like one like that. And then the Chinese knockoff right next door. And some of the stuff was not as good.

• 15:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure there's a, there's a quality drop, but okay. So that's just like a random thing from trends. I liked this, uh, AirPod accessories. So

• 15:24Sam Parr?

  Crazy.

• 15:25Shaan Puri?

  AirPod sales are going like this. I'm doing a curved line with my hands.

• 15:28Sam Parr?

  And now like, let's put math on that. We, we had a cool stat. What was it?

• 15:32Shaan Puri?

  I don't know the exact revenue. It is multi billions in revenue, like a product line for Apple. I believe it's a faster selling product than iPod, iPhone or iWatch. So it's doing phenomenally well for its first, whatever, two years of existence.

• 15:46Sam Parr?

  Oh, I know. It was something like if AirPod was own company, it would be like bigger than Airbnb or something like, it was like,

• 15:51Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha.

• 15:52Sam Parr?

  It like put it in context.

• 15:53Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so if everybody's getting AirPods, you know, I'm sure there's already, this is not a new idea. There's probably people doing this, but the sort of like, I bought an AirPod replacement case because I've lost three sets of AirPods. So I bought a case. This time I bought like a $25 case on, you know, non-apple brand off of Amazon. And it was just whoever's doing that sort of Amazon FBA business that has the number one rank for, you know, AirPod replacement case. So AirPod replacements, AirPod replacement case, aesthetic things that you can do to like, you know, make your case look better, make your AirPods look different. I think there's just like a lot of random niche things, but because this is a product that pretty much, once Apple removed the headphone jack, everybody needs Bluetooth headphones now.

• 16:36Shaan Puri?

  And so I just think being in that space, you could take a tiny piece and do quite well right now.

• 16:41Sam Parr?

  I agree. Yeah, I'm, I'm into that. And now they're actually selling, I never thought Apple would do this. They're selling non-apple brand AirPod cases at the Apple store.

• 16:49Shaan Puri?

  Oh, really? Oh, they shelve other people's cases.

• 16:52Sam Parr?

  I went there the other day and they had other people's cases.

• 16:54Shaan Puri?

  That's interesting. Okay. You got anything? Otherwise I'll just rattle off more.

• 16:57Sam Parr?

  Keep going. You're on a roll. I do, but.

• 16:59Shaan Puri?

  I'll rattle off a couple more. So Tough Mudder said that they were going bankrupt, which was surprising.

• 17:04Sam Parr?

  Wait, when?

• 17:04Shaan Puri?

  So Tough Mudder, I don't know what this means. It says like involuntary filing for bankruptcy, which I just assume is bad.

• 17:09Sam Parr?

  The guy who started Tough Mudder is a Harvard Business School grad. So maybe he's doing some savvy.

• 17:14Shaan Puri?

  That's kind of, there's always a thing with bankruptcy where sometimes it's like just a shrewd business move.

• 17:18Sam Parr?

  He's a former banker, so he's probably a shrewd guy.

• 17:20Shaan Puri?

  But, but let's assume for a sec, let's take it at face value. Let's assume for a second it's doing poor. Actually, this doesn't even matter. Basically, somebody was bringing up what are these other sort of experiential events that people will go to pay a hundred bucks to be at? They feel like they got a sort of different experience than they normally get in a weekend and they get a bunch of photos from it. One that I think is interesting because I'm in the world of esports is essentially a Tough Mudder for esports. So, most kids play video games, so like more people play Fortnite than play basketball in the world.

• 17:49Sam Parr?

  That's true.

• 17:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, in terms of playing. And so, you know, they've seen people compete, they've seen tournaments, but it's very hard to like, do your own tournament or have a tournament nearby because it takes a lot of overhead to like set up a bunch of computers, get the networking to work, blah, blah, blah. So if somebody did these sort of pop up, pop up, you know, like esports tournaments in the same way that Tough Mudder made it fun and approachable, a thing to do with friends. I'd be interested to see if they could take off with teams.

• 18:14Sam Parr?

  We wrote about something called Sandbox VR. Have you heard of that?

• 18:17Shaan Puri?

  I know about, yeah, I know Sandbox. So explain for somebody who doesn't know.

• 18:20Sam Parr?

  And apologies, the heater's gonna go off just, it'll, that'll stop.

• 18:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I feel like this room's haunted. What's going on behind me?

• 18:25Sam Parr?

  It's that we have like a, the radiator that the building controls, we don't control it. So it's just gonna beep for 30 seconds. Sandbox VR, I think it's only, you're only allowed to have six people in a room, maybe seven, but you pay a fee of 20 to a hundred dollars and you get to run around in a room playing Oculus games.

• 18:43Shaan Puri?

  Right. So the room is like four walls that are all green screened. It's like a, I don't know, 15 by 15 room. And you wear a backpack with a VR headset on and you're, yeah, they, then they create these experiences like, and it's a team game. So that you'll go in with a bunch of people and it'll be like, hey, zombies are coming at you guys from all angles. Shoot them. And then it shows you who's shooting more and who's shooting less.

• 19:04Sam Parr?

  And it's pretty cool. The downside is I think the games are only okay.

• 19:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the games are only okay.

• 19:08Sam Parr?

  But the idea is cool.

• 19:10Shaan Puri?

  Idea's cool. It's fun to do. Definitely wants, you know, this will get better and this will be a thing down the road. But for now, it's like a novelty.

• 19:18Sam Parr?

  Yes, I agree. So experiences, so Tough Under's going out of business.

• 19:21Shaan Puri?

  So the, so I think the esport one is, is interesting because I think that for teenagers who want to do something, and I think, I think that setting up these pop up esports festivals, esports tournaments where you get to come and experience playing in a competitive gaming tournament, that's going to be bigger and bigger over time.

• 19:39Sam Parr?

  I have two more of those.

• 19:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 19:41Sam Parr?

  You went to one, you already know this one. House of Ice Cream.

• 19:44Shaan Puri?

  House of Ice Cream, yep.

• 19:45Sam Parr?

  They raised $25 million at a $200 million valuation. A lot of people mocked them.

• 19:51Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I went to it. Underwhelming.

• 19:52Sam Parr?

  Underwhelming?

• 19:53Shaan Puri?

  Underwhelming.

• 19:54Sam Parr?

  Always a line. There's always a line outside of it.

• 19:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, doing phenomenally well.

• 19:58Sam Parr?

  How much did you pay?

• 19:59Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. My friend bought my ticket, so I don't actually.

• 20:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you and Suli and you guys went with your kids.

• 20:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 20:03Sam Parr?

  Or Ramon and you brought your kids. Yeah, it's always a line. And their real estate's prime time. I don't know if they own that place or they lease it.

• 20:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's a cool idea and there's cool things, but I was like, man, they got away with like not going, I thought it would be like walking into Willy Wonka's factory. I got, I don't know, maybe my expectation was crazy. I just thought it would be really well done. And it was like, nah, I mean, you just felt cramped. Each room is like, just like this hot little small thing. And then you sort of move on.

• 20:33Sam Parr?

  So basically what it is, is it's a, it's a 10,000 or 5,000 square foot room with multiple rooms. It's like a museum.

• 20:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 20:39Sam Parr?

  But it's all ice cream stuff and you could like play with it.

• 20:42Shaan Puri?

  Eat and take photos, which is genius. That's genius.

• 20:45Sam Parr?

  Yes. Another one of those is called, it's based in Arizona. One of my investors invested a lot of money into it. It's called Meow House. I think it's called.

• 20:55Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 20:55Sam Parr?

  The name has to do with cats. It's either like cat house or meow house. And so you have to look this up. It's not popular here because basically what they do is, I think they raised money at 200, 300, $400 million valuation and they're making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. And basically what it is, is this guy was an artist and he lived in a house full of artists and he goes, we're not making money. We gotta make some money here. Let's do something. And they made their house cool. It's almost like you walked through like a haunted house where you like would walk through this house and there was like interactive things, very similar to what you're talking about. But these guys are based in Arizona or Nevada, a place where you can like get a huge space. And anyway, maybe it's called Meow Wolf. Anyway, they do like $200 million in sales.

• 21:37Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 21:37Sam Parr?

  Ticket sales.

• 21:38Shaan Puri?

  On what house? Or multiple houses.

• 21:40Sam Parr?

  I think they only have a few. They only have a few.

• 21:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Sam Parr?

  But they're huge, but like

• 21:45Shaan Puri?

  Out of home experience.

• 21:46Sam Parr?

  Hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands of people a year go to them and they charge thirty dollars or something.

• 21:51Shaan Puri?

  Right. And now that I have a kid, my daughter's too young to go to Chuck E. Cheese, but my nieces go. And I don't know if you've been to Chuck E. Cheese in like twenty years, but Chuck E. Cheese is like really garbage now compared to like, I guess, like at the time.

• 22:03Sam Parr?

  Trashy.

• 22:04Shaan Puri?

  At the time where the standards were, or maybe I was just a kid, it seemed all right. Now that I go back, I'm like, man, this place is trashy. And but the need is there for something where kids want to go play games, eat pizza and ice cream, and feel like they're in a mini Disneyland that's nearby your house instead of going to, you know, Florida.

• 22:22Sam Parr?

  Well, Dave and Buster's kind of did a good job, but that too is pretty trashy.

• 22:25Shaan Puri?

  But I also think that's more adult. I still think that kids, you know, kids need this, kids need a place for birthday parties, that sort of thing. So there's all these other ones. There's like a House of Air, which is a trampoline park. So there's a whole bunch of these.

• 22:36Sam Parr?

  So dangerous.

• 22:36Shaan Puri?

  If you're like a brick and mortar type of person, I really believe this out of home entertainment, whether it's like Museum of Ice Cream, whether it's like a new age Chuck E. Cheese, it just seems like there's a lot of.

• 22:47Sam Parr?

  That amazes me that that Tough Mudder went out of business, by the way, because I think they bootstrapped to a hundred million in sales.

• 22:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's very strange. We should look more into it. We should see. You were talking about privacy companies.

• 22:58Sam Parr?

  I love privacy companies and I'll explain why. Tim Westergren, someone I like and look up to.

• 23:03Shaan Puri?

  Sorry, Pandora.

• 23:04Sam Parr?

  He started Pandora. He was the CEO for a while, but he started it. He, I asked him, what's something that you think is going to be big soon? And he goes, at Pandora, what we noticed Pandora isn't like a hip company, like average people use it, not like Silicon Valley nerds. And he goes, even like moms in Missouri, where I'm from, would care about their data and privacy. And I think that's actually really going to be a big thing.

• 23:28Shaan Puri?

  And so what are some companies that are interesting here? Or where do you think there's opportunity?

• 23:31Sam Parr?

  VPNs are intriguing to me. I'm also looking for more. I'm really, I love this space. I love DuckDuckGo.

• 23:37Shaan Puri?

  Do you use it?

• 23:38Sam Parr?

  I started using it because I did start getting nervous about this. When I heard about DuckDuckGo a few years ago, I thought it was so stupid. I saw they make all their, the number of searches they get a month, they make public.

• 23:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 23:49Sam Parr?

  Crazy.

• 23:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 23:50Sam Parr?

  They're growing like crazy. I love DuckDuckGo. I love VPNs. Other than that, I like privacy.com. Do you know privacy.com?

• 23:57Shaan Puri?

  I like privacy.com a lot.

• 23:58Sam Parr?

  I love privacy.com. What else? But there's not that many.

• 24:01Shaan Puri?

  There's Brave Browser, which is. Maybe doing okay, it's hard to say. They say good things, but they're basically making a private, more a privacy focused browser, a privacy focused search engine. That's DuckDuckGo, a privacy focused, sort of like checkout experience. That's privacy.com. So I agree with you that pendulum is swinging back in that direction. People care about this stuff. And if you can make it convenient, if you can make it easy to control this stuff, people will adopt it. But you gotta make it easy. And I think that's where, you know, if you make it hard and expensive, only sort of the really like conscious folks will do it.

• 24:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And the thing that I don't like about this space is the majority of people were like, yeah, you just sign up for this and then you get all your data. And I'm like, I like, I don't know what that means, man. You're not making this like actually apply to my daily life and making me benefit.

• 24:49Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 24:50Sam Parr?

  You're just making me feel a little better, but you're not, it's really hard.

• 24:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think, I don't know where the next sort of opportunity is in this space. If I did, I would go for it.

• 24:59Sam Parr?

  I'll tell you one.

• 25:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 25:00Sam Parr?

  It's still vague, but I think about it a lot. You know Safeway or Kroger or Target? When you type in, you know how they ask for your phone number every single time? Why? Why the hell do they do that? Well, they do it because they want to know all the shit that you're buying in your profile.

• 25:15Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:15Sam Parr?

  And have you read The Power of Habit, that book?

• 25:18Shaan Puri?

  Uh, no.

• 25:18Sam Parr?

  There's a great story in there about habits are so ingrained to us that Target, there was, I have no idea if it's true, but the story's cool, where a father saw, they were getting mailed ads about

• 25:29Shaan Puri?

  Pregnancy.

• 25:30Sam Parr?

  Pregnancy.

• 25:30Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:31Sam Parr?

  And he was like, my daughter's 16. She's not pregnant. I wouldn't know if she's pregnant. And he went and complained to them and they go, no, no, no, we think your daughter's definitely pregnant. And he finds out a month later that she is in fact pregnant. And Target knew that. So, so anyway, when I think about that stuff, I, this is like I said, it's vague. There's gotta be something, there's something there that I think about.

• 25:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, very leaky. You know, people say things like, you know, you have to sign this. Uh, but my signature's everywhere. You can literally electronic signature, you can copy paste my signature exactly as, as is and forge me. My credit card is, you know, you give it out over the phone. Sometimes you put it in every ecommerce site. That's like trivial to, to sort of like take and do something with.

• 26:10Sam Parr?

  And your email.

• 26:11Shaan Puri?

  Social security number, my email address.

• 26:13Sam Parr?

  When you buy something at Northam, they go, okay, what's your email address? I'm like, I don't want to give it to you. And they're like, always shocked. They're like, we have to. I'm like, no, I don't.

• 26:20Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, it's really crazy. And I feel like there's sort of no going back. You almost have to start the system from scratch again. I should bring on my friend Furcon, who he has his own workflow for sort of price, personal security and privacy.

• 26:31Sam Parr?

  But he's like an extreme.

• 26:33Shaan Puri?

  He's a programmer. So he's like, oh, cool. I built this little extension where every time it asks me for my email, it creates a burner email, puts it in there, forwards to my real email. I have a separate financial email inbox that only I know about. Uh, so even if you access my personal email, my financial emails.

• 26:48Sam Parr?

  There's your opportunity.

• 26:49Shaan Puri?

  And so he wants to like, he's like, dude, I think I could charge five bucks a month to just make this workflow like two clicks for people.

• 26:55Sam Parr?

  I completely agree. And I'll tell you insight with the hustle. We have loads of people that their email will be Sean plus. So if you put the plus sign, a lot of people don't know this. If you put the plus sign in front of a like Sam plus Nordstrom's at the hustle.co. Whenever Nordstrom sends me an email, I'm going to see Nordstrom in it. And if, and if I get a email from J. Crew and it says Sam plus Nordstrom and then I'm like, oh, that's where my, the leak was.

• 27:18Shaan Puri?

  Right. Nordstrom gave him my email.

• 27:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we see that all the time for our audience. When they give us emails, it'll be Sam plus hustle at.

• 27:24Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:25Sam Parr?

  It happens all the time.

• 27:26Shaan Puri?

  Private, privacy focused, uh, people there that are doing that proactively.

• 27:29Sam Parr?

  I'm into that. I, I, and I, I'm very into that. And when we asked in the trends group, I think we got 30 replies. It was really cool.

• 27:35Shaan Puri?

  I wanted to tell you about something. There's a group of people that have created a venture fund off of the insight that people have this weird attachment to their university. Do you know about these guys?

• 27:46Sam Parr?

  No.

• 27:47Shaan Puri?

  So basically I see Instagram ads all the time saying, hey, Tower View Ventures is investing in Duke startups. So Tower View is a, a street and I like known building at Duke campus. So they name it, they, they, they create all these like subsidiary funds. Uh, so the one for Duke and Duke alumni is called Tower View Ventures. It's like, hey, we invest in Duke, you know, Duke related entrepreneurs and companies. We've got, you know, 25 million in, in assets or whatever it is. You can come in for as low as five grand and be an investor in your alumni, you know, fund. And they do this for every, they just programmatically created this for like every university.

• 28:24Sam Parr?

  One company did?

• 28:25Shaan Puri?

  One company owns it for all these university funds.

• 28:27Sam Parr?

  What's the company?

• 28:28Shaan Puri?

  They advertise on Facebook. I forgot their parent. Company name.

• 28:30Sam Parr?

  Is it scammy? Is this like a legit VC?

• 28:32Shaan Puri?

  I think it's a legit VC, but it's just a smart like when you normally want to go raise a fund. Most people stop because they're like, well, I don't have access to super high net worth people. Or if I go pitch this, you know, most partner, most people who invest in VC funds are institutions like pension funds. And, uh, you know, you know, school endowments and things like that. And so, you know, they're going to pick the best VCs. They're not going to pick an up and comer that has no track record. So these guys got really clever and were like, well, what if we just got like 25K or 50K? From all the wealthy alumni of one school.

• 29:05Sam Parr?

  Oh, wait, is this for raising the fund?

• 29:07Shaan Puri?

  That's how they raised the fund. And then they say they invest in entrepreneurs from that school, but I don't know how strict it is. It might just be like.

• 29:14Sam Parr?

  Well, Siava did something like this. He had, he had the MBA fund.

• 29:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 29:18Sam Parr?

  And they would.

• 29:19Shaan Puri?

  These guys basically scaled that idea. So our friend Siava did this for, you know, he's at Wharton. He created, he went to, he looked up the Wharton alumni database, which is like public information, basically, if you go to the school. And just started cold emailing. I was like, hey, we are going to invest in MBA entrepreneurs, you know, business school graduates. Of Wharton, Harvard and Stanford. How does that sound? Those guys seem to do pretty well. And, uh, they raised money from alumni of those three schools. So what these guys did was that for every school and they did it programmatically through Instagram ads and no relationships.

• 29:52Sam Parr?

  Know who that is. So what's the opportunity there? Are you saying, oh, you're saying that's cool?

• 29:55Shaan Puri?

  I'm just saying it's cool.

• 29:56Sam Parr?

  Or interesting.

• 29:56Shaan Puri?

  I'm saying it's a very interesting approach to, yeah, very non-traditional approach to doing this stuff. So when, once I figured out what their model was, I was like, oh, that's fucking smart.

• 30:03Sam Parr?

  So for anyone who's listening, who wants to start a company and raise money, I think the takeaway here needs to be. And this is something that it's hard to know your first time. The, it is so easy. There's so much capital right now going on and so few places to put it. That people are doing these things like I, so I think that entrepreneurs, people who want to start a business, they undervalue themselves. They don't realize that there's just people seeking out, they like, we have to put this money in somewhere interesting.

• 30:30Shaan Puri?

  Right. And what school did you go to?

• 30:32Sam Parr?

  Belmont University, Nashville, Tennessee.

• 30:34Shaan Puri?

  And who's like, do you know like any of the badasses from that school?

• 30:38Sam Parr?

  One or two.

• 30:39Shaan Puri?

  I feel like this is a big. The reason I thought about this today was because Plaid just sold to Visa for $6.5 billion and the Plaid founder is a Duke undergrad guy. And so I reached out to him and I was just like, yo, congrats. But really, I was just thinking, man, the like, I paid all this money to go to school. And I don't care what school you went to, like, I think Duke's got a pretty big alumni network that's doing things. But really, any school, I guarantee if you're listening to this, you've not tapped into the value you paid for. Which was to get the stamp and get basically a free intro, a free foot in the door with anybody who's successful and from that school.

• 31:13Sam Parr?

  I agree with you, but I don't think that that value is high for most schools. So I agree with you that most people aren't using all their value. But when I have kids and they get older, I'm going to tell them, don't do what I did. You have to either go to a Duke, a Harvard, you have to go to a top 20 university that has a brand name. Or you have to go to community school or a cheap state school where you can get the experience and grow.

• 31:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 31:37Sam Parr?

  If you go to a Belmont University that costs, I got a little bit of a scholarship and I also was lucky where I didn't have to take out debt. If you go to a school like I went to, that's like not even a top one, I don't even know if it's top 100, it's not good.

• 31:49Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 31:49Sam Parr?

  It costs 35 grand or 40 grand a year.

• 31:51Shaan Puri?

  Private price, but without the.

• 31:52Sam Parr?

  That is not good. Do not do that. That is a horrible decision. So I think it's, so, and I married a woman who went to an Ivy League school. I see the network and I know the network, or I don't know your network, but Duke, I mean, when I think of Duke, I think of the University of California school system. All like, you are at a huge advantage with that network.

• 32:10Shaan Puri?

  Totally. I guess my thing is I don't tap into it enough. I think most people don't tap into it at all. And one of the questions I get the most, I think because of the podcast, people are like, man, dude, see, your network is killer. That's why you're able to do XYZ.

• 32:23Sam Parr?

  Bullshit. They don't realize that your network and my network came from cold emailing people.

• 32:26Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. I'm like, oh, you want that network? Here's a trivial way to do it. And then they still don't do it most of the time, but it's way easier than you think. And of course, you gotta ask like, where did this come from? This didn't just come from nowhere. Like the thing, to me, there's two principles on network. One is you gotta be interested. Like the reason you, you know, when the founder of Pandora meets you, you know, the way you got there was the cold email.

• 32:48Sam Parr?

  Cold email. And people don't realize I cold emailed him literally 30 times over a year.

• 32:54Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 32:55Sam Parr?

  And he never answered. Now we're homies and me and my wife, we got dinner with him.

• 32:59Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so like, there's the cold outreach part, and there's a science to that. And there's a persistence that has to come with that and the volume you gotta do. But on the other side, be an interesting person. Like the reason they want to hang out with you.

• 33:10Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 33:10Shaan Puri?

  Like, yeah, they did the favor after the cold email. It's like, all right, this guy emailed me 30 times. I'll, I'll go talk at HustleCon. But it could have just died there. The reason they like you is because you do interesting shit.

• 33:19Sam Parr?

  And you actually do this more than I do. You, from the other side of someone who, you have young people holler at you, and you actually take them under, under your wing way more than I do. You have like a pretty cool alumni network, like.

• 33:30Shaan Puri?

  Both ways.

• 33:31Sam Parr?

  Of people who, well, yeah, you did this with Michael and a few others, but you have people who email you and you're like, okay, come hang out.

• 33:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 33:38Sam Parr?

  Like, we went to, uh, we did a Spartan race with those two, with that one young guy who, like, you do that all the time.

• 33:44Shaan Puri?

  I do it all the time. Uh, I do it selfishly. Like, I don't, like, giving back.

• 33:48Sam Parr?

  Of course.

• 33:49Shaan Puri?

  But it's selfish thing is like, young people are more like dynamic, interesting, fresh, and, and doing more interesting stuff. And so I need to actively, like, my, my friends are now 30, or 31, or 35, or whatever. I need to actively do something if I'm ever gonna hang out with a 21-year-old.

• 34:06Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 34:06Shaan Puri?

  And so that's what I try to do. I try to like curate.

• 34:08Sam Parr?

  You do that really well.

• 34:09Shaan Puri?

  And I ask them, like, who are you hanging out with? And then we like hang out.

• 34:13Sam Parr?

  And I, that excuse of, and this leads into one thing I want to bring up, that excuse of, well, Sean, your network's really good. It's like, dude, my net, it, I did have a network.

• 34:24Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 34:24Sam Parr?

  I just cold emailed people. I had, in my wedding, I had six groomsmen, like, five of them I met via cold emailing.

• 34:32Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 34:33Sam Parr?

  I met you. We became friends. There's so many people who you know that you just know through Twitter.

• 34:39Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 34:39Sam Parr?

  It's crazy. People don't understand that.

• 34:41Shaan Puri?

  So I organized this thing called the Twitter Dinner. Have I told you about this?

• 34:43Sam Parr?

  No, that's awesome.

• 34:44Shaan Puri?

  So basically, uh, there's a whole bunch of people I followed on Twitter that were interesting. And I was like, all right, I'm always just thinking, what's an excuse to hang out with cool people? Cause that's fun and I'll grow and like doors open when I do that.

• 34:54Sam Parr?

  Twitter.

• 34:55Shaan Puri?

  The podcast was one of those. I was like, what's an excuse? I have all these dope people in my life. What's an excuse to hang out with them more? Uh, what if I did a podcast? Same thing with the Twitter Dinner. I hit up all these people. I said, hey, you know how you follow people who are cool on Twitter, but you've actually never met in real life? I host this thing called the Twitter Dinner where I just invite eight people that I think are cool that I've never met. And we all get together for dinner. I want you to be at the next one.

• 35:16Sam Parr?

  I think you told me about it, but you told me about it like half an hour ahead of time.

• 35:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And so I've done three of these now and each time it's not only awesome, but everybody's like, man, thank you for doing this. I also have experienced that where there's cool people on Twitter who I don't know in real life. No, no, no. No, they pay for themselves. I'm not gonna pay for their dinner.

• 35:32Sam Parr?

  I'm gonna do a Twitter Dinner. Good idea.

• 35:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 35:34Sam Parr?

  Do you have more ideas? Cause I have something that's not an idea that I can bring up.

• 35:38Shaan Puri?

  I have two follow-up questions. Are you still paying to freeze your sperm?

• 35:41Sam Parr?

  I paid to do it and I mailed it too late after I gave the sample and it got denied.

• 35:47Shaan Puri?

  Dead sample. Okay.

• 35:48Sam Parr?

  So, um, I'm looking for another place to do it. Or yes. Long story short, yeah.

• 35:53Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Uh, that's it. That's my only question. I just wanted to just know.

• 35:56Sam Parr?

  No, I went through the process and I like, I was an idiot. I like mailed it back. This is kinda gross, but I mailed it back on like, maybe a Friday and I didn't realize it had to be a 24 hour. So I went through the process.

• 36:09Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Give me your idea.

• 36:10Sam Parr?

  You and I did a little live podcast here at this office, uh, two months ago, maybe a month ago. And someone said something that was very San Francisco and they said like, I don't remember exactly, but something to the line of like, you gotta be passionate and solve a problem. And you and I both looked at each other, we're like, no, you don't. Like, or they're like, you can't, or they said something like, you can't just care about money if you want to like really get rich. You gotta like care about like the problem and you and I both looked at each other and we're like, no, that's not true.

• 36:38Shaan Puri?

  It's not true. You can totally do it that way.

• 36:41Sam Parr?

  You can do it that way. And you can also not give a shit and just be the best plumber and make a fuck ton of money.

• 36:46Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:46Sam Parr?

  And I thought that was funny and I was thinking about that last night and I was like, that was so funny how we both were like, uh-uh. Cause we know so many people that just kill it on random shit. And so I was thinking of things that are not true, that we all say they are because it sounds really good to tweet about it.

• 37:02Shaan Puri?

  Great. Love this.

• 37:02Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 37:03Shaan Puri?

  I'm excited.

• 37:03Sam Parr?

  Okay. And so there's a few. The first, which I just mentioned is passion. Like you have to like care about the, you really gotta care about the, the, uh, the problem that you're solving. It's gotta wait. So this list is for things that you can make a mild amount of money. Okay. So I think that to have the outliers, like the huge ones, I think that a lot of these will not be true. But to like, just make it to get your, a really good win, these, uh, this can happen. You don't have to be that passionate.

• 37:30Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 37:30Sam Parr?

  You really don't have to. The second thing is the best product does not always win. Oftentimes the things that are, make the most money, they fucking suck.

• 37:39Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 37:39Sam Parr?

  Okay. So you're, unfortunately your product doesn't actually have to be that good. The third thing, people say you gotta hire the best people. A lot of times you don't.

• 37:47Shaan Puri?

  And if everybody thinks they're doing that, by definition, you're not, by the way.

• 37:50Sam Parr?

  Yes. And, and, and look, I'm not saying don't hire the best people you can find. What I'm saying is I have seen proof and I've talked to people that say, I don't do that. And they have made tens of millions of dollars. So I'm not saying to do this. I'm just saying it is possible. And there are some people and they're like, man, my team's just okay.

• 38:08Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 38:09Sam Parr?

  We just do it every day and it worked out. Or I just am putting every, this whole thing on my shoulders and I'm gonna hero this and do existence. This is like another good one. Design. A lot of people have slick ass design on their pages and stuff. You'd be shocked. There are so many websites. We, you talked about Ramon. Ramon was on the podcast. Ramon's a guy who had a soap opera. News, news website that made, I don't know, $400,000 a month in profit.

• 38:37Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 38:38Sam Parr?

  It was littered with ads. It was not pretty.

• 38:41Shaan Puri?

  Right. It was a $49 WordPress.

• 38:44Sam Parr?

  It was horrible. People freaking loved it. The customers loved it. Not the design.

• 38:50Shaan Puri?

  We have a friend who's doing a DTC business. I can't say what it is. You know, we'll probably do 15 million in his first year, a first full year of existence in revenue, 50 million. And when I looked at the product, I expected, I was like, oh, well, it's probably so sweetly packaged. The brand is just on point and that's the innovation. And I looked at it and it looked like, you know, if you're at a pharmacist, you know, in the back, they have these, you know, these things that are unlabeled. That's how bad the packaging is. It's like, you would never expect that this is the brand that's crushing it. And it totally was. It definitely defies that, that assumption.

• 39:24Sam Parr?

  It totally does. Now, I think like to be great, to be great, great, great, great, great, like all time great. You, you do have to have all these.

• 39:31Shaan Puri?

  Right. That's the caveat to all these, right? Hiring great people is a great thing. Being passionate about what you do is a great thing. Great. Having great design is a great thing. But what trips people up is they think it is a requirement to success.

• 39:42Sam Parr?

  It is not a requirement.

• 39:43Shaan Puri?

  We have seen, we have exact examples that defy those rules. It's like the black swan rule. It's like, nope, you're telling me that's a requirement? Here's an example where it did not happen.

• 39:51Sam Parr?

  That's exactly what I'm saying. Okay. And another one is delegation. Okay. So they're both, this, this works in both cases. Sometimes, which we, the same people we're talking about, there are people who, everyone else who works there is just customer service and just handles busy work. And this person does everything and they don't delegate a thing.

• 40:08Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:08Sam Parr?

  I've seen success to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars this done. The exact opposite has been true as well, which is I just came up with the idea and I had, either had a little money or convinced people to do it and I delegated it all and I just check in with them weekly and I focus on other stuff. That has worked wonderfully as well.

• 40:25Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:26Sam Parr?

  A lot of people don't understand that. I didn't understand that. When I started my company, I thought I had to do everything. Now I realize, oh my God, the business can keep growing. I actually don't like, I don't need to be involved as much as I thought.

• 40:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:36Sam Parr?

  Or, you know what I mean? Okay. And the final thing is brand. Okay. So branding and. You would be shocked. Like, everyone thinks that brand means it's gotta look a certain way, or it's gotta feel. They're like, I care about the user experience. I know so many people, they go, no, fuck that. Like, it looks fine, but I'm just, when I, when people sign up to buy my product and they don't buy, and they give me their email, I'm gonna blitz them with emails and email them fucking five times a day. And like, they don't give a shit about user experience. Oftentimes, in these cases, it works.

• 41:07Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 41:08Sam Parr?

  People are shocked by that. And so, but this is a very, like, it comes from a place of fear.

• 41:13Shaan Puri?

  So I'll tell you one blog post that explains why these are true. Have you ever read this blog post by this guy, Paul Buchheit? He's the creator of Gmail.

• 41:21Sam Parr?

  I know who he is, but I've not read the blog.

• 41:23Shaan Puri?

  The blog post is called, "If You're Great, You Don't Have to Be Good." And what he said, he gives the example of Apple. He's like, "When the iPad came out," and he shows the links of people who were just bashing the iPad when they announced it on stage. They were like, "Oh, my God, this thing, it's a, it's a tablet, but it doesn't have, you can't do multitask, it doesn't have a USB port, it doesn't have a keyboard, it doesn't have like, this attachment, it doesn't do this, it doesn't do that." And he's like, "The iPad does a couple of things really great." He's like, "It's super lightweight, it's basically like a browser, so you can just like, browse the internet on the, on, you know, on this little thin device." And, you know, one other thing. And he's like, "When we made Gmail, same thing. Everyone said, when we were launching Gmail, dude, you gotta have an address book, of course, you gotta have a contact book,

• 42:08Shaan Puri?

  that's really good, it's gotta be great, blah, blah, blah." Didn't even have the feature at launch. And he's like, "Well, we decided we're gonna be great at three things for Gmail. We're gonna be blazing fast, we're gonna be unlimited storage, and we're gonna have threaded conversations." And he's like, "We're gonna be great at those three things, and we're gonna be literally nonexistent or dogshit at the rest." And he's like, "When you're great at the right things, you don't even have to be good at the other things."

• 42:30Sam Parr?

  That's cool.

• 42:30Shaan Puri?

  And I love that. And if you're designing a product or a business, you overthink it often and say, "I need to be great at all these things. All these things sound important. Branding sounds important, marketing sounds important, product sounds important, engineering sounds important. Oh, I gotta, you know, my back office has to be important." And reality is, pick a couple of things that you need to be great at to your customers and internally, and you don't even have to be good at the rest.

• 42:50Sam Parr?

  And that's really hard to take that advice because you're like, you just have like, you have to say like, I know this one part sucks. I'm gonna let it suck. And that's hard for a lot of people because they get fearful, but it is very true. And if you like, go to the top of the Fortune 500, you go to like, the top 10 brands and like, of course, Apple, their products actually are great. Most people think they're great. Their brand is great. They're very thoughtful, but go all the way down to like, maybe a Fortune 1000 and look between 500 and 1,000, or even like, the top 20, but not the top 10. And you'll be like, and HP, like, it's not that good.

• 43:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 43:27Sam Parr?

  Or like, but also why does it exist? Like, and you're like, they're just kinda good at a bunch of stuff.

• 43:32Shaan Puri?

  Right. Okay, I want, I'm gonna hand you my phone. This is in line with what you're talking about. Trying to be great, not good here. So I want you to just click go. I typed in the address already. So we, over the weekend, we made a website, myfirstmillionpodcast.com. And we've been talking about no code. We went to the extreme of no code. So what you're seeing when you go to this website is a very, is a extreme hack. So we were trying to make a website.

• 43:56Sam Parr?

  This is a Google, this is a Google site?

• 43:57Shaan Puri?

  It's a Notion, it's a Notion doc.

• 43:59Sam Parr?

  That's awesome.

• 44:00Shaan Puri?

  So we were trying to make a website and we were like, oh, should we use, you know, should we hire a programmer? I had a bunch of people reach out to the podcast being like, I'll do this for free for you. We could have used a WordPress guy, an Upworker. I was like, no, no, even simpler. Should we use Webflow? Should we use a no code tool? I was like, no, even simpler. We basically had already in Notion, this like, Notion's like a document editor type of thing, like a text edit.

• 44:21Sam Parr?

  Just like a Sana.

• 44:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's just like a, it's a little, you're like a word pad at Evernote. And so we went in Notion, we already had like, an outline of what we wanted the website to be. And I was like, what if this was just a website? Can we make our website just load this? Because this is super easy to edit.

• 44:35Sam Parr?

  I've wanted something like this forever.

• 44:37Shaan Puri?

  And so we found, I tweeted the founder of Notion. I was like, hey, can I do this? Can I make a website? That's my domain name, but it just loads a Notion page. He's like, no, we can't do that yet. I found a workaround online that let us do this. So over the weekend, we built this where now.

• 44:50Sam Parr?

  This is awesome.

• 44:51Shaan Puri?

  My First Million Podcast, check it out. It's so, it's so budget, but it's so amazing.

• 44:55Sam Parr?

  Dude, this is better than a lot of websites.

• 44:57Shaan Puri?

  I, I agree. I agree. And so it has like the embedded player, it has the transcripts of the podcast, it has like, I shortlisted like my favorite episodes, like stuff like that.

• 45:05Sam Parr?

  That's better.

• 45:06Shaan Puri?

  And it was so easy and like literally zero code.

• 45:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and I just hate when people say the excuse of I gotta hire a designer, I gotta do this. Like, you don't.

• 45:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 45:15Sam Parr?

  You don't. Like, you're just overthinking it. That looks good, I think. I actually think that looks great and that will work really well. But I was thinking about that time when someone said it to us and you and I completely looked at each other and were like, uh-uh, that's not true. Like, I could give you 10 examples of people who show that that's not true. And I felt like we were crushing his soul a little bit. And I almost felt bad, but I'm like, just so you know, that's not true.

• 45:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, because if you come to the live show, it's like, I look up to these people, I kind of want to hear, you know, things that are in line with me. And I think he looked at us and was like, oh.

• 45:47Sam Parr?

  Now, that doesn't mean you should, like, if you have those, I actually think you will be better.

• 45:51Shaan Puri?

  Of course.

• 45:52Sam Parr?

  But you actually don't.

• 45:53Shaan Puri?

  That's the A+.

• 45:54Sam Parr?

  If your goal is to, like, you could make billions of dollars, actually, just being I.

• 45:59Shaan Puri?

  Totally. The way I look at it is you gotta bring energy to whatever you do. So if you're gonna do something, you definitely have to have the energy and enthusiasm to push. But for some people, that energy enthusiasm comes from being really passionate about the problem. For some people, it comes from, I just like business. For some people, it's like, I want this type of lifestyle and I'll run through anything if it gets me this lifestyle of financial freedom.

• 46:21Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 46:22Shaan Puri?

  I don't care what's giving you the energy, you just gotta have the energy.

• 46:25Sam Parr?

  And it actually oftentimes doesn't even matter what problems you're solving because, or if you're even solving a problem, I know a handful of people, they make $20 million a year off these scammy bullshit, I think they provide no value and I would never do it because I think it's stupid, but they crush it financially. And it's like a click to download our toolbar and install it in your browser. And they're like, yeah, we do $20 million in sales with three employees. And I'm like, yeah, you're, if that's what you care about, you totally can do it by doing this bullshit arbitrage.

• 46:55Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, there's many ways to.

• 46:57Sam Parr?

  And I actually should, I'm not hating on it. I think it's stupid, but. I don't hate them for doing it.

• 47:02Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 47:03Sam Parr?

  There's this great company that I like called Wonderful Brands. Do you know them?

• 47:07Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 47:07Sam Parr?

  Stuart and Linda Resnick, they're in their late eighties. They own Fiji Water, they own Palm, that Palm drink.

• 47:15Shaan Puri?

  Oh.

• 47:15Sam Parr?

  No, what's that drink? It's like pomegranate juice.

• 47:18Shaan Puri?

  Oh, Palm. Yeah, yeah.

• 47:19Sam Parr?

  The Palm. And then they own pistachio, like a pistachio brand that you maybe heard of. And then they own like 20 that you probably don't even know what they are. And the way that they got started was they started selling like memorabilia, like those $50 like quarters that like, are like, it's like a, President Trump was unelected in 2016. Here's a memorabilia coin.

• 47:39Shaan Puri?

  A $50 quarter.

• 47:40Sam Parr?

  Um, that's how they got their start. That's how they started making it and they still do that and.

• 47:44Shaan Puri?

  I'm looking at all their brands. These are great brands. So they have the Halos, oranges, Fiji Water, Palm, pistachios, almonds, these two wine things. This is great.

• 47:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And when they first start, they're billionaires. I think they're, they got in trouble because they're, they're in the news because they, you were using too much water for their almond farms during a drought in California. And I started reading about them and I'm like, okay, these brands Fiji Water, that's a good brand. But I started reading about their other brands and how they got started. I'm like, these are all just okay. But these, this family is worth like $5 billion.

• 48:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 48:13Sam Parr?

  And it, that's kind of when I originally started, I'm like, man, you don't actually have to do like, you, you, you don't gotta build the Facebook or you don't have to build like an Apple. Like you can build like pretty okay stuff, but be really savvy at operations and also have high perseverance.

• 48:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 48:29Sam Parr?

  And do it for fucking 40 years, 50 years.

• 48:31Shaan Puri?

  And if I'm reading you right, you're saying this not because you're, you're not trying to say build shitty products. What you're trying to say is don't overthink it. There's a whole bunch of things that you can do to win and you don't have to do all of them at the A plus level in order to win. We know successful cases where you have to get some things right, but not all.

• 48:49Sam Parr?

  And I am saying that there are a thousand different ways to get it done. And what a lot of people tell you is you have to have a product that's 10 times, that's what Sam Altman from Y Combinator said. Your product has to be 10 times better. No, it doesn't have to be. Maybe the likelihood of succeeding or like being a huge outlier will be higher if it is 10 times better. But there are examples of something being actually worse, but it wins.

• 49:13Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 49:14Sam Parr?

  And I just don't want people to take, and I have taken, I just accepted everything that I read. And now that I've been around a little bit, like experienced a little bit more with business, I'm like. That wasn't true. I wish I didn't believe that.

• 49:25Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 49:25Sam Parr?

  And a lot of my friends who didn't believe it, I are better off.

• 49:29Shaan Puri?

  I'm always wary of advice where if you just looked at the person giving it, and if they say this, do they look better as a person, as a human?

• 49:38Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 49:38Shaan Puri?

  Like, does this signal, is this virtue signaling them to look better? Because I always discount that advice. And if I hear the opposite, if I hear someone advocate for something, I'm like, wow, that actually doesn't make them seem more virtuous and good and sort of holier than thou. I sort of elevate, I'm like, wow, if they were brave enough to say this, they must really believe this because it's not benefiting them from a signaling perspective. It is only benefiting them because they just think it's freaking true.

• 50:03Sam Parr?

  I had a guy at HustleCon who had a huge company that you, many people that know, and his talk was all about his employees and how he empowers his team. And afterwards, he came offstage, I was like, I know you, you're really aggressive and a lot of your employees hate you. Why did you say that? And he said, um, because that's, I think that's what people want to hear and it will make my employees feel good. And I was like, do you really believe that? He goes, I definitely believe it, but not as much as I, he's like, no, I'm way aggressive and I just want to fucking win. And I was like, man, I wish we, we missed the mark on that one. We should have been honest and like told the truth. I think people would appreciate that. But if he thought that and he, he only told me because they knew me, so many more people would think that.

• 50:41Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 50:43Shaan Puri?

  Cool. You got any other?

• 50:43Sam Parr?

  No, I'll save the rest. Well, we could talk about the Casper S one another time.

• 50:48Shaan Puri?

  Okay, we're back next week.

• 50:49Sam Parr?

  Oh, if you happen to listen to this whole thing, maybe we could do a tweet about it. So who knows how many people listen to the whole thing. We're going to consider doing these daily or more often than weekly.

• 50:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 50:59Sam Parr?

  And I would like to hear people's.

• 51:00Shaan Puri?

  I think we're also going to bring in some guests to do this with us, uh, to do the brainstorms with us. So I've had, I've been having a lot of fun with these. And what I realized is the interviews with guests are good. Like the last one we did with a Peak Design guy, I think was actually a really good like story and interview.

• 51:14Sam Parr?

  People say they like these the most, which is odd.

• 51:16Shaan Puri?

  They like these the most. And I actually think it'd be fun to bring in some people who either already were on the podcast or forget telling your story, just come do the brainstorm. And.

• 51:24Sam Parr?

  Well, because you can just give like a three minute background, like this person does this, they do this.

• 51:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 51:27Sam Parr?

  So what are you, I'm going to, what do you think about this? You know, like you can like.

• 51:31Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. Okay, cool. That's it. We're done.