#163 - Plugins Making Millions, Gumroad's Crazy Valuation & Why a Studying App is Going Viral

Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ --------- --------- Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) discuss: (3:38) Shaan talks about his CNBC appearance (6:45) The opportunities and riches in Chrome plugins (33:03) MFM is upping its social game (37:34) Gumroad is raising at a $100m valuation -- crazy? (49:55) Is studystream.live the future of remote studying? (57:01) The post-show --------- --------- Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas.

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought? And he kind of had like a funny shit eating grin on and I was like, how big are you guys? He was like, we do over a hundred million dollars a year in sales. And I was like, would you ever believe it? He was like, yeah, I thought it could be done. And then, and then I go, you can just raise money? He goes, yeah, we raised a hundred million the other day. I go, why? He goes, because it's a north of a billion dollar valuation.

• 0:35Shaan Puri?

  What's up everybody? We just recorded the pod. We talked about, I was on CNBC today. So we talked about going on TV, going on CNBC. We talked about a bunch of business ideas that are Chrome extensions, which is kind of like a niche that nobody really talks about, but Sam's super into it and he brought the fire. And then at the end, we shoot the shit about a bunch of random things in maybe the last 10 minutes, talking about, you know, some of the stuff from the Michael Saylor episode and it's cool stuff we have going on. We just shoot the shit at the end. That might've been the best part. So stick around for that last 10 minutes of the pod. All right. Enjoy.

• 1:07Sam Parr?

  All right. Great. What's going on? Congratulations. Do you want to talk about family stuff or no?

• 1:12Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, sure. Had a kid, uh, four, five days, four days ago, I think now.

• 1:16Sam Parr?

  Congratulations. What are the details?

• 1:18Shaan Puri?

  Uh, but baby boy is here. His name is Banks and uh,

• 1:23Sam Parr?

  Banks? Why Banks?

• 1:25Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I don't know. We thought of the name a lot when we were trying to name my first kid and we, and her name's Blush. And so I just thought Banks and Blush go well together. I don't know. I just thought it was a cool name. Wanted to do something.

• 1:35Sam Parr?

  It's a cool name. It's a cool name. It's just a unique name. So I was wondering if there was a reason.

• 1:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, at least this one is a name. Uh, the first one, when we named her Blush, we Googled like, oh, blush name meaning. And there's literally like, it's like, that is not a name, bro. So.

• 1:49Sam Parr?

  What is Banks?

• 1:51Shaan Puri?

  Banks is a, so it's popular last name. And because of that, some people started doing it as a first name. Hillary Duff's kid is named Banks. I know that. Uh, that's pretty much the extent of the popularity of it. I don't really care to pick a popular name. I'd rather pick a, a, a unique name.

• 2:08Shaan Puri?

  But I could tell like, when we tell our family, they're like, what?

• 2:12Shaan Puri?

  Is there, is there a nickname? What are we gonna do with this?

• 2:15Sam Parr?

  No, Banks is good. My nephews are named Avit, like the Avit brothers and Jude, like, hey Jude. And then now they have a girl named Billy. So I'm team odd names.

• 2:24Shaan Puri?

  There you go. I know. We can't all be Sams, right?

• 2:28Sam Parr?

  Or well, people call you Shen.

• 2:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. There's people that just straight call me Shane and they just keep calling me that and I just not correcting them. And I'm just now it's like we're years into the relationship. It's like vendors that I work with.

• 2:43Sam Parr?

  Well, congratulations. So you're a year and a half older than me. I am I'm 31. I for the longest time I was like, I'm gonna wait to have kids. But then a few things happened. The first, so my wife Sarah is 28. The first is that a few of my friends, one of them's 39. And I think your wife's older than you, right?

• 3:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, by a year.

• 3:05Sam Parr?

  So like early mid 30s and then a few of my friends are late 30s. And these women are having kids and they're like, oh, my God, it sucks so bad. I wish I would have done it when I was younger.

• 3:15Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 3:15Sam Parr?

  So I've changed. I'm like, I've thought about having.

• 3:17Shaan Puri?

  Wait, the guy saying that or the woman?

• 3:19Sam Parr?

  No, the woman. Well, the guys are like, it's definitely harder to parent when you're in your 40s than when you're younger. But mainly for the woman, they're like, it's just harder on the body. And second, I had a friend and he was like, dude, have a kid now. I was like, why? Like, I wouldn't have all this freedom. He goes, it's way different. Once I had a kid, I realized the later that I had it, the less years I'm gonna be able to spend with him. And now I'm just gonna die sooner. And I wish I would have had 10 more years and done it at 25 than 35. And I was like, oh, that's an interesting perspective. So my opinion has been changing lately. I might have a child soon, but we're still deciding.

• 3:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 3:53Sam Parr?

  And by the way, before we get to the first idea, congratulations on CNBC. You're on there today. Did anyone reach out to you because they saw you?

• 4:01Shaan Puri?

  Not really. Only people who knew me already, you know, like my mom was probably the most excited, you know? Basically, like people who are 30 years older than me were like, this is amazing. CNBC, this is the shit. I was on CNBC for two and a half minutes or three minutes or something like that. And so, but nobody, you know, like, I don't know, if I go tweet something, I'll get a lot more messages than than going on TV, which is weird. But it definitely was a cool feeling and like, I don't know. It's like one of those things that like, I woke up before my alarm clock because I was like, okay, today's a good day. Today's a big day. I got something to do today that I've never done before.

• 4:34Sam Parr?

  These these broadcast networks, like you think they're huge and they are huge and they have reach and all that. But like the average viewers is only like 200,000 people at a time. It's not. It's not like crazy high in the world of social media.

• 4:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are, it's a kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it's hard to get like, it's hard to really make any headway in a three minute segment.

• 5:06Sam Parr?

  Yes, so like it's, I, it's prestigious, but it's definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you're coming on to talk about it was.

• 5:14Shaan Puri?

  Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I'll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn't have the same, it doesn't feel the same. It doesn't get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who's ever done this.

• 5:30Shaan Puri?

  Have you ever gone on, it's such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a TV thing? So you get, you get connected in and it's like a zoom call basically right now. And you can't see them. So on TV, it looks like you're all like split screen, like you see your face, their face and other person. But in reality, you have no, you, there's no facial expressions because you can't see each other's video. So you're only hearing each other. You don't know when, when it's your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going on this checklist of like worry. It's like, okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I gonna? And then like, it's never like the things you expect. It's always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like,

• 6:12Shaan Puri?

  like 10 seconds in, you'll look, if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere. Cause I have nothing to look at. They're not on video. And so I'm just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing. And I look like, like I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds that I realized, oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that's what will look normal. And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian's butt and I said,

• 6:37Sam Parr?

  I know, I thought that was funny.

• 6:38Shaan Puri?

  And stuff. So I said some stuff, maybe I wasn't supposed to say.

• 6:41Sam Parr?

  No, that Kim, you're, it was good. You, you were a good interview. It was great. I watched the whole thing. It was good.

• 6:47Shaan Puri?

  Thank you.

• 6:49Sam Parr?

  All right. You want to talk about the first idea?

• 6:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 6:52Sam Parr?

  You want to do this thing too, can?

• 6:54Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 6:55Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I, along with Joe Spicer, we, I'm kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing Hampton VC.com. And we're just investing, we're just investing in companies together.

• 7:10Shaan Puri?

  Why Hampton?

• 7:11Sam Parr?

  I grew up in a bad neighborhood on this street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.

• 7:21Shaan Puri?

  All right.

• 7:21Sam Parr?

  And we were thinking about names and I was like, I grew up on this street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons.

• 7:27Shaan Puri?

  And it's just your own money or it's a fund?

• 7:30Sam Parr?

  We're mostly are my own money, but him and I, Joe's an investor in your thing.

• 7:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 7:37Sam Parr?

  And he would like, man, I want to put even more money in. And he goes, you just want to invest with me? I go, yeah, sure. And then he's like, you want to do a rolling fund? I was like, no, that sounds like a lot of work.

• 7:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 7:45Sam Parr?

  He's like, you want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals? I go, okay, cool. I'll do it with you.

• 7:48Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:49Sam Parr?

  So it's just like a deal by deal basis. So we created an Angel List Syndicate, which so then basically whenever, whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have, you have to tell me and then I'll invest.

• 7:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Also, I heard this great description of Angel List, which is like, it's Substack for VCs, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. The same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It's awesome.

• 8:11Sam Parr?

  So, yeah, we did it and like, so we, I found a company already and we invest and I was just going to invest like, I, I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to 5,000, all the way up to $25,000.

• 8:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 8:30Sam Parr?

  I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And he was like, why don't you just do the syndicate thing? And I was like, all right, let's try it. So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we, we are about to finish with?

• 8:42Shaan Puri?

  So I know, I know about this company, but give the, give the, what is your kind of like two sentence description of it?

• 8:48Sam Parr?

  It's called Toucan and it's basically the really dumbed down version is it's like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it's a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you're reading into the language that you want to learn. So it's contextual learning. More complicated than that, but that's the simple version.

• 9:12Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It's kind of genius, honestly. The founder, what's her name? Taylor something?

• 9:22Sam Parr?

  She's magical.

• 9:23Shaan Puri?

  She's great. She's been a fan of the podcast, actually. She she messaged us a long time ago, like before this fundraiser, being like, hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I'm doing.

• 9:32Sam Parr?

  Or maybe I missed her. Did she really? Oh, I can't believe I missed it.

• 9:35Shaan Puri?

  And so I, so I've been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn't pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. But I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest, it's okay. So here's my thing. Anything that there's a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, I should, I should, I should. And you, as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you're just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it's that hard to learn a language. It's hard to make the time to like, sit down, open the book or download the app, open the app and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. It doesn't sound that hard, but in practice, it's like, it's a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what Toucan is doing is

• 10:20Shaan Puri?

  you don't have to make it a separate thing. It's like, you're already just browsing the internet. So why don't we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you're visiting? So you're not, you don't have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You'll learn the language in bits and pieces while you're browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don't even know why I didn't invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I'll hit her up after this and see if I can get in.

• 10:50Sam Parr?

  Have you talked? Yeah, do it. If you don't know her well, I can try to introduce you and you could just do it directly with her. But this woman's a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, oh, well, you're going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company like.

• 11:03Shaan Puri?

  Oh, really? Okay.

• 11:04Sam Parr?

  I I hope it's this one, but like, she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just, she just oozed CEO.

• 11:14Shaan Puri?

  Interesting. I've never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there's, does anyone come to mind?

• 11:20Sam Parr?

  Um, the guy from Superhuman, whenever I heard him talk, I was like, oh yeah, like you are a I would bet on you for just about anything.

• 11:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, whatever he was gonna do. If he said, I'm gonna write a book, I'd be like, oh, it's gonna be great.

• 11:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I was like, I'm pretty sure you're gonna be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. When we met with the Shopify guy Harvey or Harley Harley, uh, I kind of, but obviously he's already hugely successful, but like there was a handful of people we've interviewed.

• 11:48Shaan Puri?

  When he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody's business. And so he just had this good looking guy in this great looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn't, he didn't even say a word. I was like, oh wow, this guy's like a power player.

• 12:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, oh, you, she just, she just was on top of it. I just felt great. Another person, and this is a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that's her name who started ClassPass.

• 12:14Shaan Puri?

  Right, Payal.

• 12:15Sam Parr?

  Pile. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, oh, you're really special. Uh, so, uh, anyway, this woman Taylor met with her. I was like, oh, you're, I'm, I'm whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I'm in no matter what. Um, and so, but I started like, also, I mean, let's, we'll just, we'll move on past Toucan, but it's join toucan.com. The reason it's interesting is they have this like heads, she worked at Headspace. So they have this like Headspace cute branding shit.

• 12:39Shaan Puri?

  Right. By the way, we should say Toucan is like the bird Toucan Sam type of thing. It's, it's not, yeah, it's spelled like that. T O U C A N.

• 12:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah, Toucan, um, which I don't know. Do those birds like speak or something? I don't know.

• 12:50Shaan Puri?

  Maybe, maybe that might be it. Yeah. So, so do you have any kind of stats you can share about them? Like, give us a sense of why you feel like this is working?

• 12:58Sam Parr?

  Uh, I didn't ask her for permission to add, to talk about that, but basically Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like, I think five million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that, and what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I'm like, well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It's a $5 billion company, I think.

• 13:22Sam Parr?

  I, I, I've been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over a hundred million in sales and just say, well, how can I do this, create this in the form of a Google plugin? Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don't do it because there's a little bit of friction? And how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction?

• 13:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 13:43Sam Parr?

  Now, there's a ton of downside with Google plugins, you know, you're a Google plugin. So Google can ruin you, but it's incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that's what I wanted to bring up was some Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this, I don't know if this is how she did it, but she basically,

• 14:02Sam Parr?

  or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is, what behaviors are people already doing? So for example, learning a language, people already want to learn a language. You just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar, so you just fix it as you write. One that I use all the time is SimilarWeb, so it tells me the traffic of someone's website. Passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis. So a plugin just inserts different passwords and Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?

• 14:30Shaan Puri?

  Oh yeah, my buddy was with the guy who started it.

• 14:32Sam Parr?

  Isn't that worth like a billion dollars?

• 14:35Shaan Puri?

  Not yet, but getting close. It's several hundred millions, I think it was the last round.

• 14:39Sam Parr?

  And all it does is a screen recording.

• 14:44Shaan Puri?

  Recordings, yeah. So they basically say, oh, you want to show something on your screen? Here's a click, boom, record, share. So the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several.

• 14:57Sam Parr?

  Four billion.

• 14:58Shaan Puri?

  Four billion dollars. So Honey had, I think 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you're about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background. It's looking for, is there, is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else? Or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don't have to take an action, I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It's just going to do it and it's the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over a hundred million dollars a year.

• 15:32Sam Parr?

  So the Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he's an engineer. He's like a very by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He's really cool. His name's Max and I was like shooting the shit with him. And I was like, dude, a freaking plugin, who would have thought? And he kind of had like a funny shit eating grin on it. And I was like, how big are you guys? He was like. We do over a hundred million dollars a year in sales. And I was like, well, did you ever believe it? He was like, yeah, I thought it could be done. And then, and then I go, you just raised money? He goes, yeah, we raised a hundred million the other day. I go, why? He goes, because it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation.

• 16:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 16:09Sam Parr?

  I was like, oh, my God, you pulled it off.

• 16:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they did. Exactly. So those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as I believe a Chrome Chrome extension. So it was the pin, the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a good, cool app. You needed a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there's others that like, like, for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have adblock or, you know, Ublock origin or whatever. That's definitely one of them. And so I think, I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas. Cause it kind of feels like not a serious company. It's like, dude, you're just making this like plugin. And definitely there's a lot of people like my mom doesn't know what Chrome extensions are.

• 16:54Shaan Puri?

  She doesn't know there's a Chrome extension store. She doesn't really know how to install them. Like she knows apps, but she doesn't know Chrome. So you're going to get a little bit more of a tech savvy audience. You know, it's a smaller market overall, but the friction business is a big deal.

• 17:08Sam Parr?

  I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the, the numbers. There's 1.6 billion iPhone users. Okay. 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There's a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn't know how to do this, but does your mom? If she saw a commercial on TV for Grammarly, I bet you she would know what to do. You just go to Grammarly.com.

• 17:39Shaan Puri?

  Actually, she does know Grammarly because of that. She saw it and she's self-conscious about her English because she learned English later in life. And she's like, doesn't want to write something stupid. So she downloaded Grammarly for that reason, actually.

• 17:49Sam Parr?

  And so that's why when I saw this toucan thing, I was like, oh, you guys just run a commercial for this on TV? That's easy. You're going to get so many users and the, the plugin, the reason why the plugins are interesting to me is the churn is so low. Churn on plugins are so low compared to iPhone apps or.

• 18:06Shaan Puri?

  And we both, we both have plugins. You have a plugin for the hustle. I have a plugin for my, my one big thing framework of just like.

• 18:13Sam Parr?

  What's the churn on it?

• 18:15Shaan Puri?

  There's like no churn on it. We have like thousands of users now that the engagement's not super high, like they don't always use the thing, but they leave it installed. And it's like, you know, so we've both dabbled in this, not seriously, I would say neither of us took it super seriously, but we were interested enough for both of us to build a Chrome extension and get it out there to, you know, five, 10,000 people.

• 18:35Sam Parr?

  It's interesting, and I think that, uh, I just think that people discount it. And I think that it's far more, it's far more interesting than most people realize. And so I actually had a Bray you pull some of the biggest plugins. So it's AdBlock, AdBlock Plus, Adobe Acrobat. What do you use Adobe Acrobat for?

• 18:55Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. Probably like Flash or something. I don't know.

• 18:57Sam Parr?

  Um, Safe Price, which is a deal thing, video conferencing from Cisco, Google Translate, which is kind of an indicator about for Toucan, which is interesting, Honey, Pinterest Say Button, Skype. What's Tamper Monkey?

• 19:13Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I don't know. It looks like it's trying to keep you safe.

• 19:15Sam Parr?

  Steve.

• 19:16Shaan Puri?

  There was a cool one called Ghostery back in the day that would just show you who, who's trying to track you on every website you go to. That was kind of cool. And I'm trying to shut, shut that down. Uh, there's also these paid ones. So are there, was there anything interesting in the paid group?

• 19:28Sam Parr?

  No, but tell me about the ones that you've invested in because they're actually similar. Cause I, and so in this document that we have, I said screenshots would be great. And you said, oh, I invested in this thing called bubbles, which I remember you telling me about it. But what is that?

• 19:41Shaan Puri?

  Bubbles is a lot like Loom, which we talked about earlier. So the idea is how do you easily share what's on your screen with your coworker who wants to see it and be able, uh, and so how do you do that? Some people just take a screenshot, right? They use the hot key on their keyboard. They take a screenshot and it goes into their desktop file. Then they have to go grab that, then they drag and drop that to their friend and then the friend has to comment on it, but they can't comment on it. They have to like, send it back as another file. It's kind of annoying, right? So what Bubbles does is much simpler. It says, it's a little Chrome extension and on any page you go to, you can say, I want to record a screen recording, like a video. I want to take a screenshot or my favorite one is a scroll screenshot. So like, you know, when you're on a website that like is long. And you want to take screenshots of the website, you have to take like eight screenshots and then send them as separate files to somebody.

• 20:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's a pain in the ass.

• 20:26Shaan Puri?

  It just takes one long screenshot and sends it to the person. So it's, it's easy to capture the what's on your screen. You can then comment like bubbles. So it's like a speech bubble. So you just click anywhere where you want to point something out on the screen. Like, let's say for the hustle, you want to make the trends website better, you would click bubbles, you would record a screenshot. You would tap on the part of the screen where you're like, this thing is stupid. We need to change this. And you would write this thing is stupid. We need to change this. And then that's a, the whole file is a link. You just share a link with somebody else and they can comment back like a Google Doc. And so.

• 20:55Sam Parr?

  Is it doing well?

• 20:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's doing well. It's doing well specifically, actually, the, I think the niche, initial niche that they've done well with is agencies. And so agencies, like creative agencies, there's always creative people within the team that are sending ideas, mockups, concepts back, back and forth with each other. And then they have to share with the client also, and the client has to give feedback. So there's a lot of showing screen stuff and commenting back and forth on it. And so that's where they're getting initial foothold. And I think it'll kind of break out from there. So it's like Loom, but it does more than what Loom does.

• 21:25Sam Parr?

  And what's Dashworks?

• 21:27Shaan Puri?

  So Dashworks is a company I've invested in that is, um, it's like the homepage for your company. So this is, this is a Chrome extension that's sold to companies. So let's say, um, somebody joins the hustle, you give them their laptop. If you work with Dashworks, when they, when they open up their Google Chrome for the first time to use the internet, they would not just see like the generic Google, like new tab page. They would see like the Hustles branded page and that page can do three things. One, there's a search bar and you could type in anything into that search bar and it'll find the file inside your company. So like most companies now use Slack and Google Drive and Dropbox and Asana and GitHub. And like all these different tools that are all in the cloud.

• 22:09Shaan Puri?

  So like, if you've ever been on your MacBook and you want to find a file, you just use like the little spotlight search finder, right? You just type it into spotlight, it finds the file on your computer. But the thing is now with the cloud, none of the files you need are on your computer. They're all in the cloud. So this is basically that search bar for all your cloud apps. So now, so what it does is it helps any, any employee find any file that's in your network without knowing where to go to find it. Right? It's just like

• 22:33Sam Parr?

  It's just working?

• 22:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this is cool. So then the second thing you could do is you could search anyone's name. So I could be like, oh, what does Steph Smith do at the hustle? I type Steph, it'll show me her profile, show me what she does, who she reports to, and that sort of thing. And then the last thing is that you as the kind of CEO or your kind of your, your admin as a company can post announcements or updates that will show up in their Chrome like new tab bar. So you can be like, oh, welcome these new employees or like happy birthday to this person or hey, remember this Friday, we're all doing, you know, happy hour or whatever. And so it's a kind of a communication pipe also. So that I, that I thought was cool. They're taking the Chrome extension to deliver critical internal company stuff, a search for people, search for files and, and internal announcements.

• 23:17Sam Parr?

  So this, this is interesting. And another one, I actually don't know how to say this company, but you wrote it in here. How do you pronounce that?

• 23:24Shaan Puri?

  Luster.

• 23:26Sam Parr?

  Jack, our friend Jack was one of the early users and I think invested in it. And he says that it's awesome. But basically they look at Wirecutter, Amazon and dozens and dozens of other sources. And anytime you have a product in front of you, it tells you the average review. Kind of interesting. I don't know how

• 23:45Shaan Puri?

  I think it's a little better than that. I think what they do is you say your

• 23:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, my description was about a year ago.

• 23:49Shaan Puri?

  You, you, I think what it does is you go on Amazon or whatever, and you search for flat screen TV. And you know, it's, there's so many products out there and all of them, you know, great, it's four stars. What do I make of that? And so what Luster does is try to make the buying process simpler. So it'll basically say, here's the recommended option for what you searched for is the most, this, our, our AI has searched all the reviews, all the different websites. Has all this data to tell us that this is the most popular result for what you're looking for. And then here's the high end version of it. And here's maybe the low end version of it. And so I don't know if the products evolved too much since then, but that's what it kind of did at that time was it would help you figure out which products should you actually buy using data. And again, you didn't have to remember to go to Lester.

• 24:33Shaan Puri?

  It was a Chrome extension. So you're just on any website shopping, you can go to Walmart, go to Amazon, you go best buy.com, wherever you're searching and Lester will be like, hey, here's the product we recommend. And here's why here's what the reviews say about it summarized automatically for you, which I thought was pretty cool.

• 24:49Sam Parr?

  I think that that's a, this could be a good product. When he pitched it to me and when Jack told me about it, I was like, this is stupid. I'm not in. I understand though. I actually, I think I, I was wrong about it. It's really cool. So

• 25:02Shaan Puri?

  The founder Stuart is really smart. And, and for this one, he showed me a chart, a graph that that was doing pretty well. So here's some other ideas of things. So those are ideas that we've either invested in or seen. I have a couple more for you. So let's use your framework of take a popular app like Duolingo. That shows that there's a need or a demand. People want to learn a language and you make it a Chrome extension as the user experience instead of a mobile app.

• 25:26Sam Parr?

  So at least one of the main widgets or main points of distribution.

• 25:30Shaan Puri?

  Right. So let's take meditation, right? You have headspace, you have calm. Why don't you have a Chrome extension, a Chrome plugin that will basically say it'll see, you know, you've been on, you've been browsing for two hours straight. You've had, you have 85 tabs open. Hey, let's take a minute. Would you like to earn some, earn some mindfulness points and take one minute quick meditation? And it just, you tap the thing, it turns on because of clock. And there's like a guided voice that's doing a guided meditation for you. I think so. I think a, I think meditation delivered through a Chrome extension could work because it's so popular as a mobile app. But again, for mobile app, you have to remember to go do it. Whereas this could just kind of like, as you go, it could pause you and, and help you out.

• 26:12Sam Parr?

  That's great. I think that has that has legs. I'll, I'll, I'll keep going with this game. Do you know the, you know how, do you on your iPhone? What's that thing called where it blocks you from using a website after a certain amount of time?

• 26:23Shaan Puri?

  Oh yeah, like time, something. I don't, I don't know.

• 26:26Sam Parr?

  Do you use that?

• 26:27Shaan Puri?

  I never use that shit. No. Do you?

• 26:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I mean, I have it installed.

• 26:30Shaan Puri?

  Screen time.

• 26:32Sam Parr?

  Screen time. Um, I used to have this Chrome plugin called Nukem. I think it was called Nukem. Or the option was called Nukem where after a certain amount of time, you would nuke your website and you cannot go to certain websites. So you can only go to like Google Docs, email, and that was it. Uh, I loved it. So similar to meditation, I would 100% try to create more of a, of, of these. What do you call this? A changer, uh, stop using stuff app.

• 27:02Shaan Puri?

  Right, right, right. Yes. Defend yourself against yourself. Okay. I have a, I have a smart idea and I have a gimmick idea. Which one do you want?

• 27:09Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 27:09Shaan Puri?

  The smart one or the gimmick one?

• 27:10Sam Parr?

  Smart one first.

• 27:11Shaan Puri?

  All right. Smart one first. Okay. We had the founder of, you, you mentioned the founder of Superhuman. He's the guy who built Reportive before that. We both loved Reportive. It doesn't exist now, so some people might not know what it is, but what Reportive was doing was when you were emailing somebody, as soon as you typed in their name or their email, a little sidebar would pop out of your email that would just show you their face, show you their name, show you their last few tweets.

• 27:32Sam Parr?

  It was like, at the time, it was like magic. We were like, how on earth do they know all this? It was crazy.

• 27:37Shaan Puri?

  It just makes you a more thoughtful person because you can see the person, you can see what they're up to, you can click their LinkedIn, get a little more information. And it kind of did the, like it served it up. It was like you had an amazing assistant, executive assistant who was like, you know, by the way, sir, you need to know this about this person. So I think you could take Reportive all around the web. So I think you could make it where anytime it sees a name on a webpage, it just highlights it yellow. And then if you just hover over that, it'll just tell you something about that person. So I think you could bring this idea of like, anytime you see a name, tell me a little bit more about that person. I could think you could turn that into a Chrome extension rather than something that was just for email.

• 28:11Sam Parr?

  How would you make money off of it?

• 28:14Shaan Puri?

  Um, ads. Boom. That's my easy answer. I don't know.

• 28:17Sam Parr?

  Oh, all right.

• 28:20Shaan Puri?

  Okay, but here's my gimmick one, which definitely needs ads. So I think there should be a Chrome extension. Let me take that back. I don't think this should exist. I think this would be funny if somebody tried to do this. So if you ever remember Million Dollar Homepage, it was kind of this cool idea of like, here's a website, there's a million pixels on the page, buy a pixel and sponsor it. Okay, that's cool. I've always thought about similar ideas. How could you make a million bucks off something simple and goofy? And there's this concept in the Bitcoin world of, I think it's called a fountain or a tap. It's basically a website where you go to and then sometimes there's like, think about like a spout, like a fountain, and sometimes Bitcoin, free Bitcoin comes out. And so a bunch of people like to go to these to, so some projects use these to say like, go

• 29:05Shaan Puri?

  collect your coin, my new coin, go there and get some. And you like go to the website, you like collect some of the new coin that you can get. And then other people have done this to be like, hey, sometimes something comes out, sometimes it doesn't. It's a game of chance.

• 29:16Sam Parr?

  It's like a, what do they call this? They call it a, there's this company that did this with candles. We talked about them. It was called like diamond candles, I think. And at the bottom of every single candle, we're talking candles, like a wax candle that you burn in your bathtub or whatever, like, like cool candles. That's fucking the only way I know how to use fucking candles is what I'm sitting in the bath.

• 29:39Shaan Puri?

  I like when you start dropping F bombs to like, get masculine real quick while talking about bathtub candles. You're like, I don't fucking know.

• 29:45Sam Parr?

  Dude, I use my, my bath bombs, or what are they called?

• 29:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, bath bombs.

• 29:50Sam Parr?

  Anyway, I've got all of them. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a sensitive guy, man. And anyway, they at, like, one in 10,000 candles probably has a $1,000 diamond. The rest have like, nothing. Something, but like, like, like a cracker, cracker jack ring. And what you could do with this is, you could always have coupons or discounts off of something. And if you redeem them, you get, the Chrome extension gets a kickback. But every once in a while, one out of X does get a Bitcoin.

• 30:21Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah. So something like that where basically every time you open a new tab, there's a little, little package in the middle of the screen. You give it a quick click and then you're either gonna get nothing, you get air, you get, you know, a tiny little something. It's like a puzzle piece or, you know, maybe like a little something, I don't know, something, or you can actually get some Bitcoin. You can get, you can get little satoshis, basically. And so it would just become this little, like the little hamster game where every time you open a new tab, are you really gonna not click the thing? And, um, and so I think you could get a lot of people to install this to try to get free Bitcoin while they just browse the internet. Every time they open a new tab, it's like a little mini scratch off Lotto ticket that they get to scratch off that might have some crypto inside. And, um, you could give away little shit coins. You could give away micro amounts of Bitcoin. You can give away little puzzle pieces.

• 31:06Shaan Puri?

  And if you get it right, it's like the Monopoly game at McDonald's, where you actually earn the Bitcoin. If you get all the pieces, you can make a game out of it, basically. And, uh, and then the rest of the screen, you just plaster with ads. Or sometimes what comes out of the box is just an ad. And, uh, I think that's how you make money off of my gimmick Chrome extension.

• 31:23Sam Parr?

  Well, I hope someone tries this because I think it would be hilarious that they create a product out of your joke. So, long story short, we'll move on to, we'll move on from, uh, Chrome plugins, but I think it's so cool. I think people are underestimating this space a ton and I'm excited to see what comes out of there.

• 31:43Shaan Puri?

  The last thing I'll say on this is the general idea here is just, um, there's, there's a platform of three billion users and it has an app store.

• 31:53Shaan Puri?

  There's gonna be winners, right? That now that I look back, isn't it obvious? Like, I still stand by, hey, there's only 200,000 Chrome extensions and there's 2 million apps, right? So it's 10 times less, but hey, like, that doesn't matter. There's several winners that we've talked about here. So I would say, how many other platforms are like this, right? So like, you know, there's, everyone talks about apps and, you know, Google Play or the Apple Store, but what else is there, right? Like HubSpot has a platform, uh, you know, Salesforce has a platform, Slack has a platform. You know, where are all these platforms? And there's gonna be winners, like, once these platforms reach a critical mass, somebody's gonna build something that's frictionless on top of it that, um, is able to generate revenue.

• 32:34Shaan Puri?

  So I think there's, there's money to be made in the unconventional app platforms that you don't really think about first.

• 32:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And I could go on forever about it, but I think there's, it's WordPress. I think there's Google Sheets. I think there's Gmail. I mean, it's a lot of Google stuff, but I think there's way more than people think.

• 32:53Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 32:55Sam Parr?

  What do you want to do?

• 32:58Shaan Puri?

  Um, let's do, uh, what's the update on social stuff? What is that?

• 33:03Sam Parr?

  Oh, I was saying just like our videos, man, our videos are crushing it. We're, uh, the guys, um, Henry and Jordan, or Henry and Dylan, who are making these, um, we made an offer to them to make dozens and dozens a month.

• 33:18Shaan Puri?

  Like, are they doing it? Cause I love their videos.

• 33:20Sam Parr?

  I think they're gonna do it. So we're gonna do like, I asked them, I'm like, send me a quote to do 30 to 60 of videos a month.

• 33:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 33:28Sam Parr?

  So they'll do our stuff. I actually think that they can reduce the quality a little bit, like,

• 33:33Shaan Puri?

  They're too good.

• 33:34Sam Parr?

  Well, like they take a long time. I think that, I think they can reduce the quality on YouTube. Because I think people watch YouTube a bit more passively. I think, and they should continue with the high quality on Instagram and Twitter, because it's only two minutes long.

• 33:48Shaan Puri?

  So, um, weird. So, so people need to subscribe to watch the videos because they're not just, it's not just a video of what we talked about. It basically takes this hour long thing where we're just shooting the shit. It finds the most interesting two minutes. It edits us down so that we sound smart and it animates over the top of it. So it's like actually fun to look at. And it makes way more sense than just hearing us talk about it. So where do they go to actually watch the videos? Cause we need them to subscribe to the video place.

• 34:13Sam Parr?

  So there's a few ways you can do it. The first is you follow either Sean and Sean and I on Twitter and we share them a lot personally. The second is the Hustles Twitter, which is just the Hustle. The third is the Hustles Instagram, which is the Hustle Daily. The fourth is our YouTube channel, which we actually have to figure out how to do this because we're using our old YouTube account called youtube.com/hustlecon. So just Google the Hustle My First Million on YouTube, you'll see it. But we have to figure out how to manage that because they're actually kind of getting popular now, you know, five or 10,000 views a video. Um, and if we do three a week, which we're going to start doing, that's kind of, that gets to be somewhat interesting.

• 34:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 34:52Sam Parr?

  So we gotta figure that out, but those are the ways that they could find it right now.

• 34:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I like the, I go through the YouTube one. I like YouTube myself. And so, uh,

• 35:00Sam Parr?

  But they're getting a ton of comments.

• 35:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the comments are great and I love responding to the comments. So I'm right now, it's early days, right? I'm responding to all of the comments because it's fun and,

• 35:09Sam Parr?

  They make fun of me a lot. I get made fun of way more than you.

• 35:12Shaan Puri?

  Soon there'll be too many comments to respond to, but for now, I think there's like 17,000 subscribers. So I want to like triple that just off of the listeners from this podcast. So go to youtube.com/hustlecon, like HustleCon and then, um, Subscribe to that thing so that you get the videos from us and then we're

• 35:29Sam Parr?

  And there'll be a video, a video will have only 5,000 views, but like 100 and some odd comments, which is kind of been crazy. And then the Instagram is getting stupid amount of engagements. And I think Sean, you're actually crushing me in terms of clips with hits. So a handful of your clips have gotten close to 100,000 views. We had one with Zach Crockett, one of our writers, and he got 70,000, I think, the other day.

• 35:55Shaan Puri?

  Nice.

• 35:56Sam Parr?

  And so we're just gonna start churning them out and we're gonna send them to way more of these. I think we're gonna launch a few more podcasts. It's TBD, but there's one called like how X makes money. So like Steph wants to break down how something makes money. And then a similar podcast is the economics of blank. Well, we'll talk about the economics of something else. What else are we gonna do? I forget a few, but anyway, we got like, we're gonna just churn out these clips.

• 36:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's way better to listen to, honestly. Like when I listen to those, I'm, if I listen to the podcast, I kind of cringe myself because I'm like, I hate hearing my voice. And also, you know, we wander. It's an, it's a off the cuff, unedited conversation. But the clips, they're great. They're just great. All right. Anyways, what else?

• 36:39Sam Parr?

  Let me wrap this up. One thing, and I just want to say this now, because I think I want to like, look back and remember this. I think that in one year from now, and maybe two years from now, these style of clips that we're doing on social are definitely, they're kind of their own genre. Would you agree? Like, it's not like we're changing the world here. So I don't want to like over.

• 36:57Shaan Puri?

  No, we're gonna get copied. If that's what you're getting at. Cause already, every time we, every time I retweet one of them, other successful podcasters or like YouTubers are like, holy shit, who's making your clips? And I'm just like, dude, you don't, I don't know their name. I forgot. I swallowed that key and that box is locked because I think they're great. I think they're better than everyone else's. And I don't want everybody copying us and having the same shit. But it's what is gonna happen.

• 37:21Sam Parr?

  It is gonna be the beginning of a new genre. Do you agree? Like, no one makes high quality shit for a Twitter video.

• 37:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And it's, it's like easy, it's easy pickings, basically for, for us now.

• 37:32Sam Parr?

  All right. We'll do one more segment.

• 37:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 37:34Sam Parr?

  What do you have?

• 37:35Shaan Puri?

  I got two quick ones. So first, Gumroad just raised $5 million through a crowdfunding campaign. I wanted to get your take real quick. We can go quick. I don't know how much we have to talk about this, but good investment, bad investment. And then second, yeah. Secondly, I want to know, because you raised crowdfunding also. So I want to hear your thoughts on that. But I'll give the two seconds on Gumroad. So. If you've never used it, Gumroad's awesome as a product. It's the easiest way as a creator. Like if I make an ebook or if I make a PDF that I want to sell that has a bunch of information on it, I'll go to Gumroad all in 10 minutes. I'll have a website up that can, that I can sell my digital product and I can take payments from it. So it does two things, right? It lets you sell a digital product.

• 38:19Shaan Puri?

  So like Shopify is not great for this. Shopify is more for like physical products and it's just simple. It's like, I'm just selling one thing. I don't need a complicated store and I want to like, have to like write code. And also like, I just want somebody to be able to come and pay with a credit card. And the other cool feature they have is you can make it like, kind of like pay what you want. So it's sort of like a tip jar essentially for, for something you make. And so some people have made, you know, a lot of money doing this. I think some people at the hustle, I know Steph did a book on, I think Gumroad that did like $30,000 in sales, maybe 50 or something like that.

• 38:50Sam Parr?

  It did 70. I've made 10, I've made 10s of thousands of dollars on Gumroad.

• 38:54Shaan Puri?

  What was your product you sold on Gumroad?

• 38:57Sam Parr?

  How to, so before the hustle, I owned a roommate matching business and I mastered Craigslist. And in cities like San Francisco and New York, a person on Craigslist will get hundreds of replies to their apartment. And so I just taught people how to email people in order to get an apartment on Craigslist. And it was so successful that on the first date with my now wife, I asked her how she got an apartment. And she's like, oh, I just used some guide online and she bought my guide. I mean, I sold a lot of them. So that was my product.

• 39:27Shaan Puri?

  That's hilarious. I didn't know that. Yeah. So Gumroad is.

• 39:30Sam Parr?

  By the way, I'll plug it. Gumroad, the miracle Craigslist template.

• 39:35Shaan Puri?

  There you go.

• 39:38Shaan Puri?

  Okay. So, so it's, it's for that kind of thing. It enables a different kind of seller. Been around for like, I literally think 10 years now. They went through this crazy story where they came out, got hot, raised a bunch of money from like big name VCs. Then things didn't go so well, had to basically unwind the whole thing. So like laid off or let go or employees left or whatever, went back to like, kind of like a one to three person operation, I think. They went to like, kind of bootstrapping it and went back to kind of like focusing on profitability and because they realized they couldn't raise any more money. And then now they're back 10 years later. So that was like, you know, a 10 year arc. And now they're like, kind of restarting it again. Like we're going big again. And

• 40:19Shaan Puri?

  and they have some pretty interesting metrics. Aubrey, you pull up their, go to their fundraising.

• 40:24Sam Parr?

  The metrics are, are, it doesn't make that much money, but it has a, so basically the way Gumroad works is people post stuff for sale. And so in terms of gross transactions, I don't think they.

• 40:36Shaan Puri?

  No, they do. It's 200, 200 and something million, 220 ish million dollars in GMV, which is a.

• 40:43Sam Parr?

  A month or a year.

• 40:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, per year.

• 40:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So pretty high GMV. It's growing like crazy. It's a really good product. I love it. But the actual, not the net income, but like the net revenue, it's not significant, like $200,000 a month.

• 41:00Shaan Puri?

  It was like, I think I just read it. So, so I'll pull these up, but Aubrey, go get the Republic, their fundraising page. It has all the stats on it. But basically, if I remember correctly, it's like eight to nine million dollars of net income last year that they got to keep. And then from that, they had $1 million profit at the end of the year.

• 41:18Sam Parr?

  I don't think that it's that high, but that would be cool if it were, but.

• 41:22Shaan Puri?

  The business basically exploded during the kind of like COVID bump. And so you could check, check out this, this fundraising page real quick. We'll just, we'll just.

• 41:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, go ahead. Read, read out the stats and then I'll tell you my opinion. Well, I'll just tell you my opinion now while you're looking that up, which is I would not invest in this at all. I would run away from this.

• 41:38Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 41:38Sam Parr?

  And I'll explain, I'm going to explain why in a second.

• 41:41Shaan Puri?

  Last year, okay, I was a little high. So last year, 73 million, this year, 143 million. And then their revenue off that was nine million. Their gross profit, they say is 2.6 million. And the net income at the end of the day for them was $1 million in 2020.

• 41:58Sam Parr?

  And that was only $1 million because they only had one employee. So of that two, so they really had $2.6 million in revenue. And the only thing they had to support was one or two employees and server costs.

• 42:09Shaan Puri?

  Nine million in revenue. Nine million was their take off the total transaction. And then they have more than one employee now, I think, because he kind of like rebooted the company to grow again. And so nine million is what is what the company made. So, but they're raising, I think, at like a hundred million dollar valuation or something like that.

• 42:25Sam Parr?

  I would not, I would not invest in this at all. We've, I've really butchered the numbers here. Sorry.

• 42:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, me too. We should have prepped this one.

• 42:33Sam Parr?

  I would not invest in this at all, and I'll tell you why. I was a fan of Gumroad since 2012. My friend Nathan Barry told me about it because he had a book there and he went and spoke at the Gumroad office. And I went to their office and watched him speak and I was like, damn, this is great. What is this whole Gumroad thing? This is awesome, yada, yada, yada. I started, I began as a Gumroad user in 2011. But the founder was like a prodigy. His name's Sahil, I think, his name, uh, seemed like a, like a cool dude. Real smart. He left Pinterest as the third employee to start this. He was like a prodigy. Started the company at 19. But he failed, um, which is great. That's fine. You know, you take swings. It doesn't always work out. And he raised 16 million dollars. He got the investors to write it off saying like, all right, we'll give you back all the equity. This is dead for us.

• 43:16Sam Parr?

  And then he went and worked on it and he kept working on it, which is cool. But now none of the investors or the employees who previously worked there, all their equity got completely canceled out. Because somehow in good faith, they said, we're out of here. Fine. You could have it. And it's actually going to turn out to be something and I wouldn't want to invest in this person for two reasons. The first, I don't think that he cares about investors. I think that he just cares about creating cool stuff and making his lifestyle great. Which is no, no problem. I'm like that as a little bit as well, but I wouldn't want to invest money at a hundred million dollar valuation, someone with that attitude. Two, if he takes the money and doesn't give money back to the people who he gave equity to and tries to build this thing to sell.

• 44:00Sam Parr?

  Uh, I think that that's unethical and I don't want to be part of that. So that's why I would pass on this.

• 44:04Shaan Puri?

  Interesting. Yeah, I've, I heard somebody else talking about that as well. Uh, I don't know the whole situation, so. I can't say, you know, exactly how those conversations went down and what everybody was on board with and whatnot.

• 44:18Sam Parr?

  By the way, I don't know the whole situation either. A lot of what I've just said is, is, is

• 44:23Shaan Puri?

  That's the public

• 44:23Sam Parr?

  I've heard, I've heard rumors and a lot of it is hypothetical, but this is what I think is, I mean, if you, if you just read publicly what's going on, you can kinda

• 44:31Shaan Puri?

  Right, that's in line with what I've heard. So none of that's out of line. I don't think that he did it to screw anybody at all. I don't think so. I think literally the expectations of the company were too high. It wasn't going to continue growing at that pace. It wasn't

• 44:43Sam Parr?

  I don't think he tried to screw anyone either.

• 44:44Shaan Puri?

  So he was like, either we shut this down, we fire sale this, or we kind of unwind it and get it back to a bootstrappable company. But if we're going to do that, then this whole venture structure and all these employees don't make any sense anymore.

• 44:56Sam Parr?

  And I'm great with that. Right. I'm great with that until.

• 45:00Shaan Puri?

  Right. Now, now you're going back to the growth story. Now, the reason I wouldn't invest is just pretty simply, I don't think it's a great business. I don't like businesses like this. I don't like Patreon. I don't like Substack for the same reason. I think they are amazing products. They are good for the world, but they make for crappy businesses. If you just look at the numbers, if, you know, they, these guys doing a hundred and fifty million dollars a GMV, 10 years into the business, and they're making a million dollars a profit at the end of the day still. Is there, so that million dollars of profit, you're valuing at a hundred million dollars today, which means for me to get 10x on my money, which is what I need for a illiquid, early-stage startup. This has to become worth a billion dollars or more. And so you're telling me that this company that's doing, you know, sub 10 million in revenue, sub, you know, like about one million in profit,

• 45:44Shaan Puri?

  is gonna be worth a billion dollars? I find it like, I think it's a bad bet. And you're not getting paid for the risk you're taking because you're already paying up at a hundred million dollar valuation. Why? Because he's super popular on Twitter. He's super well-connected with other investors, like Novo is an investor and all this stuff. And because they're friends and whatnot. And so I think that I don't think the retail investor is getting a great deal here. I think that's also, I have this. General thing that's kind of unpopular, which is crowdfunding is the bottom of the barrel of companies, like the best companies, the ones that are hot, that are growing, get picked up by professional investors. And the stuff that you end up seeing on crowdfunding sites,

• 46:27Shaan Puri?

  I don't think are the big breakout companies in general. Now, I know the hustle actually did a small crowdfunding thing, but yours was a little different.

• 46:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I can talk about that.

• 46:35Shaan Puri?

  You raised from real investors and you could have raised all the money from real investors. You raised most of it. You just opened up a small amount. So your community would feel like bought into the product. I think that's a different thing than.

• 46:45Sam Parr?

  It is a different thing, but I still regret. I actually regret doing that and I wish I didn't do it. And I wish I didn't do it because when you do that, you now have a whole lot of people who are going to ask you questions and things like that. And it's quite distracting.

• 46:57Shaan Puri?

  And also. Did they get paid out by the way, from this deal, the Habsburg deal? They all got a check? So they all know what the thing sold for then, right?

• 47:04Sam Parr?

  No.

• 47:04Shaan Puri?

  How are you planning to keep it a secret if they are all going to get some multiple of their money?

• 47:09Sam Parr?

  Because the multiple that they get was because the total consideration was.

• 47:13Shaan Puri?

  Like the retention of employees and all that stuff. They don't get that.

• 47:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like I personally am going to make a ton, like maybe more money just off the retention package than the cap table package.

• 47:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 47:28Sam Parr?

  So there's things like that. And also it depends, I'm not saying for my deal, but for some deals, it depends how the note's structured.

• 47:36Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 47:37Sam Parr?

  But it's, it's not fun, I think, because you have to report to people on a quarterly basis about certain stuff. And so it's basically like you're a publicly traded company.

• 47:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it may not be worth the hassle.

• 47:49Sam Parr?

  I don't think it's worth the hassle. And I do agree that a lot of them are bottom of the barrel. Not all, but a lot.

• 47:54Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah.

• 47:56Sam Parr?

  That said, if you're okay with the not having privacy, which some people are cool with that, I do actually think it's wise to get some users to invest in you. You know, this is actually how Samuel Adams Beer Company got started. They let their customers buy shares in the company before it went public. And then, and in their case, they said it helped them a ton.

• 48:14Shaan Puri?

  I agree. I like when you raise from customers. I don't, and I think that's a totally different thing than just going on a crowdfunding platform and saying, hey, person who wants to invest in tech, but you don't have the network and you don't have the know how and you're not in any of the funds. Like you should just invest in my thing. You're not a customer of it. Whereas like, let's say you're Samuel Adams or next week, next episode, I'm going to talk about Ben and Jerry's. Ben and Jerry's did the same thing. They did, they did a share offering to their local. Customers in Vermont so that they would be more likely to shop at their store, continue to come back to the store because they feel like a part owner. What you guys did with the hustle, you let the readers invest. I think that's very different than what you see on most of the crowdfunding sites, which is basically what when you show up on a crowdfunding site,

• 48:57Shaan Puri?

  it's typically I struck out with real investors. So this is my last shot, you know, and that's why I say bottom of the barrel. That's not nice. And, you know, I'm sure that's not the case for all the companies. I have friends that have done this and the friends I've had that have done this, that's exactly what happened. They struck out with the sophisticated investors. So they go to the unsophisticated investors and try to patch together $3,000 checks, $5,000 checks, or whatever to get, you know,

• 49:18Sam Parr?

  And it doesn't mean that they're not going to be successful. It just means they weren't, they couldn't get it done in the traditional way.

• 49:23Shaan Puri?

  Where the business is at today was not juicy enough where these hawks, you know, professional investors are like hawks. They circle these companies that are, that are high growth potential that could be big, big winners. And they pounce on them, but you can't even, you know, before they even start fundraising, they'll often get picked up. And so typically, if you're at the crowdfunding point, that means you've not only not got scooped up early by the hawks, you probably went and pitched to them and they said no, and now you're on the retail investor.

• 49:52Sam Parr?

  Great. Well, you want to do one more topic or?

• 49:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's do one more. The other one is this idea or something cool that Ben showed me called Study Stream Live. Have you heard of this?

• 50:03Sam Parr?

  No.

• 50:04Shaan Puri?

  So somebody tried doing this for working, but it's basically like, hey, everybody's working from home remotely. It can be kind of lonely. And I forgot what the name of the, of the work related one was, but it's basically

• 50:15Sam Parr?

  I had one. It was called Peak. And it was horrible. Dude, there was like times where like, we had this one plugin where it would take a picture every 30 seconds or every two minutes or something. So you could like, see your coworkers and do shit. But like, there'd be times like, like, look, this is, this sounds like bro-y and embarrassing, but there's definitely times where you're shirtless, where you're on the toilet using a computer, where you're like walking around in your underwear. And there was times it caught me like shirtless in a peak. And I was like, oh my God, this is weird. Like you're laid in bed, like playing on the computer or like,

• 50:49Shaan Puri?

  So that's a bit, that's a bit of a different thing. All right. So that I know what you're talking about there. That's like a, a kind of like, Spontaneity, like it's kind of like a passive way of sharing what you're, what you're doing. This is different. There's, this is, you want to focus, you want kind of like a study buddy. And so you say, all right, for the next hour, match me with someone else. I think Focusmate is the name of the one I was thinking about, which is it matches you with one person and you get to work to get, you're both going to work on something at the beginning. You're like, oh yeah, I'm working on my email newsletter today. And the other person's like, yeah, I have this report I need to give to my boss.

• 51:20Sam Parr?

  Okay, I'm on this right now. I'm on their website. I already know what's going to happen with this company.

• 51:24Shaan Puri?

  So, so let me explain what it is first. So, so you get paired for the hour, you're supposed to focus and get something done. So it's supposed to increase your productivity because you kind of have like a buddy who's holding you accountable from just drifting off and doing nothing. And you also can meet people and it's like, kind of like a speed dating thing where you're going to end up bumping into people and you're not just alone all day in silence in your house. So that's the idea. Focusmate was trying to do it for, for work. This study, the study thing, what, what, what was it called? Study what lives?

• 51:51Sam Parr?

  It's studystream.live.

• 51:54Shaan Puri?

  So these guys are doing it for studying for university students who are doing remote learning. And it is blowing up actually. And so if you go there and you try to join one of these rooms, they have like 10,000 person rooms, like you can go join like a server, like, okay, I'm going to join this server. There's a thousand spots. They're all full. Like go, go, I've tried, I've tried a few times, they're full. Most of the, most of the day and, uh, which is interesting. That means there's about 10,000 people like concurrently using this product at any given time.

• 52:23Sam Parr?

  How did Ben find this?

• 52:24Shaan Puri?

  He said, oh, this thing's going viral on Tik Tok. And so that, that might be like a temporary thing where they're full right now because they're going viral on Tik Tok. But you know, Tik Tok is kind of a younger generation and they're basically, it speaks to them, which is like, hey, you know, you're at home, it's kind of lonely, it's kind of boring and you don't meet anybody, you don't get to see your friends, you don't get to meet any people. And you want to focus, but it's hard to focus.

• 52:45Sam Parr?

  I wouldn't say it's going viral. Their most video has 35,000 views, um, but they do have traction for sure. Like every video has 7,000 views. So yeah.

• 52:53Shaan Puri?

  No, I think, I think it's other people, it's not their own videos. I think it's other people talking about it that went viral. That's how people discovered it. Somebody was saying.

• 52:59Sam Parr?

  I'm on the website right now. I go to their website. It says, boost your focus, join a 24 seven virtual room. I click a room to join. Uh, I click focus room and I click a room to join. It just takes you to a Google, a zoom room.

• 53:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 53:12Sam Parr?

  Like I just.

• 53:13Shaan Puri?

  Don't do it. It's going to mess up the podcast, but don't join it.

• 53:17Sam Parr?

  Well, I just clicked it to, and it like prompts you for a zoom room now. Am I weird or dirty in thinking I think this is just gonna become like dicks?

• 53:26Shaan Puri?

  This is chat roulette?

• 53:29Sam Parr?

  I mean, I think that the younger people, the people who use this are like better internet people than our generation. So I don't think, I don't, I actually like our generation, I think would default to thinking it would be dicks. I think that this, these folks would not default to that. But is, this looks like a really innocent and lovely internet community. Is it going to be ruined with that?

• 53:51Shaan Puri?

  That's probably, wherever there can be dicks, there will be dicks, right? So I think, I think that definitely there's going to be some people doing it. They're going to have to figure out a way to stamp that out. One thing might be, you know, the big thing here is can they, can they pull off a subscription? So can they get you to pay to have this, this, you know, study buddy kind of setup where you get to focus? And you get to meet some new people. Will people pay? I am skeptical of it, but I found it interesting. This is new. I don't know how to feel about it. And so rather than judge, I'm just, I'm just kind of like, I'm going to watch this one and see what happens.

• 54:21Sam Parr?

  So a whole bunch of media dorks that I'm friends with, they're all like, oh, media is like the future of education, commerce and community. Like they use these stupid ass buzzwords and they say all this bullshit. No, or they say like, uh, we're going to create like a 3D thing so you can, it's like, no, no, no, no. You guys are thinking about this whole, like, first of all, colleges are always going to exist and we're always going to need them, whatever. Yada, yada, yada. But this company that I'm seeing, uh, study stream, this is a crazy, unique Gen Z. Like the people who I've talked about who say this are typically in their thirties and forties. This looks like it was created by an 18 year old who's in the know and it's totally unique. It's so interesting. I don't care if this fails. I think it's a really good, uh, swing.

• 55:06Sam Parr?

  Very unique, very, very unique, very great branding.

• 55:09Shaan Puri?

  This was like a student project. I don't think this is meant to be like a company necessarily. Like there's a kind of like an about page on there. You can probably check it out, but it, it sort of said like, this was made by the student group of whatever, like some place. And it just seems kind of like a humble side project that is getting a little bit of momentum. And it kind of tells you like, there's something interesting there. It's not easy to get that level of traction. Uh, I don't know if it'll stay. It's probably not going to be the biggest thing in the world, but I thought there was a pretty neat idea.

• 55:35Sam Parr?

  I think that this is an incredibly successful project. Who created this? I'm looking for it. Is it a guy named Paul Scott? Did he create this? I just like in Googling the URL. You can't find anything about it. People on Reddit are talking about it. This is crazy. That's, yeah, this is super interesting. It's very, it's still very underground.

• 56:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Here he is. I thought this was cool. That's all I kind of have for today. I have, I have two good ones for next, the next pod. So I'm excited about that.

• 56:11Sam Parr?

  I found it. It had, this thing has funding.

• 56:16Shaan Puri?

  It's like a company company?

• 56:20Sam Parr?

  So I Googled the study stream dot live and I went to a guy's LinkedIn page and he's the co-founder of a VC firm. It's called Knowledge Collective is a venture builder focused on global impact by disrupting health, education and sustainability. And he has study stream dot live as one of their portfolio companies, along with study pal dot live, young leaders dot digital and KC dot institute.

• 56:46Shaan Puri?

  I think that's all, that's all for this episode. Let's wrap it. Abra, you, what'd you think of this one?

• 56:51Sam Parr?

  Oh, by the way, everyone said that the recap at the Michael thing was the best thing. So I guess we should do those more.

• 57:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I thought that was good. I hope people stuck around to the end because we didn't, I think we probably should have put a line in at the beginning that was like, hey, this is an interview with Michael Saylor. He's an awesome guy for this reason. And you know, the interview was a little bit weird. We actually debrief it at the end of the show. If you want to skip to the last 10 minutes, you want to listen to it, that's the last 10 minutes, but blah, blah, blah. I feel like there's probably a lot of people who got five minutes in or 10 minutes in and we're just like, what's going on here? Yeah, I'm going to listen to something else. I'm going to go do something else. But the people who did make it to the end gave us a lot of good feedback on it. But by the way, some of the feedback that we got was like, why'd you guys try to bro out with him at the beginning about cars and shit? Like he didn't want that, like blah, blah, blah.

• 57:40Sam Parr?

  Dude, we actually, what's so funny is we like planned that. We're like, what should we like do icebreakers? We said like eight ideas. And I was like, I can just ask them about cars.

• 57:48Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 57:49Sam Parr?

  And then we're like, that's the best of the worst. Just ask them about cars.

• 57:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I would agree with them, but it didn't work. But I would not agree that you should just like not try to get the guest into like. Like to shake out their PR speak, right? Like it, you know, more, more times than not, it's better to get somebody feeling loose and comfortable and laughing and talking about something that they're genuinely like something about themselves than them just showing up for their, you know, eighth interview of the last week and just saying the same thing again, which, you know, for a guy like him, he does a ton of interviews. So, you know, if you want to listen to one of those, like I've listened to many of them. They're all the same on YouTube. You can go, listen, they're good, but they're all the same. And so I was hoping to shake them. We failed at it. And I actually had a kind of an interesting learning afterwards that I'll,

• 58:37Shaan Puri?

  I'll tell you about. I, I was thinking afterwards, I was training, I went and worked out right after the thing. And my trainer could tell my head was kind of somewhere else at the beginning. He's like, what's up? And I was like, man, we just had this interview with this guy. I was so excited about it because I think he's a baller. But honestly, the interview was kind of awkward. And, um, and I felt like we, he was, he was a little bit flat. It didn't seem like he wanted to be there. And then I feel like, you know, I thought we could shake him out of that. I thought we could make it good, no matter how the guest comes in, but like, it didn't work. The shit we tried didn't work. And he was like, he asked me a question and I, I sort of thought about it. He goes, you know, he got me thinking, there's this woman named Glow, who is the executive coach for

• 59:20Shaan Puri?

  a bunch of the top dogs at Twitch. I think for the COO, she's been her exec coach for like 14 years or something like that. And she always comes and does these like with the exec team, she'll do this like team building thing with us, where she'll come to our offsite. And normally, if you get all the execs in a room, it's just very type A. It's like, we need to talk about our problems. We need to talk about our goals and our plans and like how we need to be more cross-functional and blah, blah, blah. And when Glow is there, she won't let you just like stay in the logical part of your brain. You have to like get real a little bit. You have to be like, More of a human being, more, more open, more emotional. You have to be able to say if you're pissed off at somebody, she'll get you to actually say what's on your mind and not to stay at the surface.

• 1:00:01Shaan Puri?

  So she's like a master and this woman's like, I don't know, 80 something years old. So she, she is like, uh, she is so good at this. Like I remember the CEO Emmett, he has this like Twitch type, uh, little like a tick, like a kind of like a speaking tick he has where when he's thinking hard or if he's like disagrees with you, he'll start like, kind of like grabbing this thing on his neck and he'll just do this for like 10 minutes while he's talking to you. And I noticed it. Many people noticed it, but nobody's ever going to say anything to Emmett about this. Like, I'm not going to be like, dude, what are you doing? Um, or like, hey, you know, you do that. Like I would just never say it and nobody ever says it. So he always does it. But it's like, um, and so this was the first time I knew she was a baller was as soon as he started doing it in one of the big exec kind of off sites. She was like, Emmett, knock it off with that thing you're doing on your neck.

• 1:00:47Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, I was like, whoa, this lady is like, and like, that was just like, she was, she didn't even think about it. She said it. And she said it in such a like harmless way. He took no offense. He's like, oh yeah, thanks. He just moved on. And then for other, and then she'll like actually do like some pretty sophisticated techniques where you say something and she'll be like, you know, you kind of hesitated when you said that. And I know you, you're a confident guy. You typically don't hesitate. What's, what was that? And then you like start pouring your soul out to Glow and she like gets you. She opens everybody up. So anyways, I was thinking, what would Glow have done if she was in that interview with Michael Saylor? And that's when I realized what we should have done. We should have just five minutes in, when we both recognized like, hey, this is not going super well.

• 1:01:32Shaan Puri?

  And, um, I don't know about you, I, that's how I felt. Would you say the same about five minutes in?

• 1:01:35Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 1:01:36Shaan Puri?

  And so what we should have done is just been like, you know, Michael, like I'm, I've watched a ton of your videos. You are super smart. You have, uh, taught me a lot about this space. And honestly, I was really, really excited to have you on. Like I'm a fan of yours and I don't say that about most of the guests. And I've seen you when you're switched on and like, you know, when you explain something, it just, it's so spot on and it really resonates. And I feel like you're not fully switched on right now. Like, and we should have just addressed it and just been like, hey, like, I know you probably do a ton of these, but I've seen you at your best and like, can you give us your best? Like, can you give us your A game?

• 1:02:17Shaan Puri?

  Can you, and we should have, I don't know what the phrasing is. It doesn't really matter what the phrasing is, to be honest with you. But I think we should have, at the beginning and not in the debrief, while it was happening, we should have found a way to just, just open them up. Just say, hey, look, let's call what it is right now. Like, what are we doing here? And let's make this great. You know, there's people out here who have never heard, I've heard all your interviews. There's people that listen to this that have never heard of you. They've never heard.

• 1:02:43Sam Parr?

  We should have 100%. And I think what a lot of people don't realize and what I didn't realize until I got into this game was,

• 1:02:52Sam Parr?

  we're like, try to be like friends with these people or at least cordial, friendly. And it's really awkward to, to be like, this is weird, isn't it? Like, it's like, imagine just like having a conversation with a stranger at a party that you met. I mean, that's kind of what we're doing.

• 1:03:07Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 1:03:08Sam Parr?

  And it's really, it's really uncomfortable to do that, but we should have done that. And that's what we should do more of.

• 1:03:15Shaan Puri?

  And even now, while I'm rambling, I'm not saying the right thing. Like, it's not coming out right. But what I do know is that was the move. That was the move and there's no, there's no,

• 1:03:27Shaan Puri?

  that was the lesson. That was, that was the big gain of that. Like, I thought the episode was going to be amazing. Frankly, I don't think the episode was amazing. But an amazing thing came out.

• 1:03:35Sam Parr?

  Really liked it.

• 1:03:36Shaan Puri?

  I know, but for me, it wasn't something I'm proud of. But the thing I, the amazing thing that did come out of it was, we got into an uncomfortable situation and we got a rep trying something that was hard to do. We kind of failed at the rep, but because of that situation, I now know next time what I will do if I'm ever in that situation again. And so like, that was the, that was the gold that came out of that for me. I wanted to share that.

• 1:04:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and I actually want to interview more crazy, interesting, off the wall people. I think we just need a few more reps to get to get in there. Most people we've interviewed have been pretty easy. I mean, Tyler Lopez was hard and we I think we actually kicked that one in the ass.

• 1:04:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I thought we did on that one. That one was also challenging and I was thinking. I actually think you're really good at naturally doing the thing, which is naturally warming the guest up because I think you're very informal. You're very casual. So that just like they're like, oh, that's the tone of this thing. He's not trying to like, give this polished intro. You'll just be like, you're like a interesting guy, right? Like, you're cool. And then they're like, well, then you're like, you know, you're like a cool guy and you're totally smart and like, you know, and then you do this thing. And like, I remember with the guest who came on for Deep Sentinel, you were like, talking about how you wanted to like, convert your truck into an overlander and then he like, had that in common and it actually worked out amazing to just talk about like some, you know, something that was not just, hey, tell me about your company and why it's so great.

• 1:05:01Shaan Puri?

  Cause he knows that pitch, he'll go into, it'll go into autopilot. And you got him talking about something that was not autopilot. And with like others, like the David's tees guys or whatever, you were like, I think you called him like a handsome dude or something. And they're like, you know, he's like, it like gets them into, they get some laughing. It gets them out of there.

• 1:05:18Sam Parr?

  I called him really good looking.

• 1:05:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you're really good looking.

• 1:05:24Shaan Puri?

  He doesn't expect that. And so I think you do a good job of it, but sometimes obviously it's a swing.

• 1:05:28Sam Parr?

  It didn't work, dude. Like, Michael Alalfred me, Alalfred me so hard. I was like, yeah, I got this card so fast. He's like, yeah, I got the jet. He's like, I prefer jets and yachts. I was like, all right.

• 1:05:40Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:05:41Sam Parr?

  All right, daddy. You got me. Um, Abreu, what do you think about today and last week, actually?

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  One of the comments on that video was, is I've seen dozens of these videos and nobody's ever asked him about that ship. So that there you go. Sam was the first to ask about the ship.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  I think we should have him back on. I think second time around might be better.

• 1:06:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and I think Sean, one thing that I don't think I'm handling well, and tell me if you're struggling with it, is with these videos getting out, we're getting way more comments and becoming a little bit more public figures. It definitely is not like I'm a, I think I'm a pretty tough guy, like in terms of like, I don't let a lot bother me. It bothers me sometimes. Does it bother you?

• 1:06:24Shaan Puri?

  Uh, it's definitely the case that one negative thing I hear it 20 times forever. You know, it's like one negative is worth 20 positive comments. And doesn't even have to be negative, just like, cause often it's like something totally true and or it's just something, you know, ridiculous. But a negative thing does like sit in your brain a little bit more. And I think that there's probably some like getting used to of that where eventually that'll just wear off, right? Like, like in any public speaking or any kind of like anytime you put yourself out there, like you do develop thicker and thicker skin as you go. For us, we weren't like, I wasn't podcasting on it like over a year ago, right? I didn't, I didn't make content. I didn't put my face on video.

• 1:07:06Shaan Puri?

  I didn't put my name behind ideas that are good, or I didn't try to like go, you know, interview a billionaire and do all this stuff. I wasn't really trying to do that. And so it's definitely getting, definitely getting thicker skin. I would say like, on the whole, I don't feel like I'm too sensitive about it because, um, uh, like I just, I spend very little time thinking about it. But if I, if I'm honest, yeah, a negative comment definitely does, um, you know, reverberate in my ears 10 times more than a positive compliment, which I just kind of brush off immediately and don't even.

• 1:07:37Sam Parr?

  I don't care about positive compliments. They like, they might as well not exist. I don't even see them, but, and, and it's not to the point where it ruins my day, but it like gives me, it's like a shitty half hour.

• 1:07:47Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:07:48Sam Parr?

  It's like a shitty half hour.

• 1:07:49Shaan Puri?

  I also think I'm more harsh than my, than anybody, right? Like when I did the CNBC thing today, I watched the video in the first 10 seconds. I'm like, why the fuck do I blink so much? But what, what am I doing? Do I always blink?

• 1:08:00Sam Parr?

  If it makes you feel better, I think you look cool. I think you looked cool. I, the, the way that you look now is like a hundred times cooler than you, where you looked a year and a half ago.

• 1:08:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, my hair out, it passed the awful zone of growing it out. And now it's like, okay.

• 1:08:17Sam Parr?

  No, and you're like, you used to have a little baby face. You just look better. I just think you look like a cool person.

• 1:08:22Shaan Puri?

  Oh, thank you. Appreciate that.

• 1:08:23Sam Parr?

  The facial, the facial hair, I think you look like a cool guy.

• 1:08:27Shaan Puri?

  I say it back, I like compliments. All right, there we go. I'm back, I'm back in the game.

• 1:08:30Sam Parr?

  Right up, Bray you, am I wrong? He looks way cooler now.

• 1:08:33Shaan Puri?

  The thing that you probably don't like is when they compare, when like one of them likes, it's like, if they love you and they hate me, or they love me and they hate you, those are the ones that suck. Cause it's one thing just to be a hater, but if it's like, no, I like that guy. I just don't like this other dude. It's like, it's like more personal than just being like, you guys are idiots. It's like, yeah, whatever.

• 1:08:52Sam Parr?

  What's interesting though is I don't think there's a favorite so far. I think that you, I think they hated you more. And they liked me more. And I think it's slowly shifted a little bit. So now I actually think we're equal.

• 1:09:05Shaan Puri?

  We'll see.

• 1:09:07Sam Parr?

  I think we're equal in terms of the dislike and the likes.

• 1:09:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's good practice, though, to do this kind of thing. I really recommend to anybody who, I don't know, like, if you got time, if you got like that extra hour that you're spending on like just watching TV, like make content, you'll learn a lot of shit making content. You'll learn a lot about yourself. You learn a lot about what makes other people like resonate with something and not. And you have to like, come up with interesting things to say, which means you mean you become a more interesting person. So I really think making content is, uh, is something everybody should should go do for a period of time, just so that they experience it.

• 1:09:44Sam Parr?

  What do you think about you?

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  I think this part was almost better than the podcast, the last 10, 15 minutes.

• 1:09:52Sam Parr?

  I don't know if that's an insult or a compliment.

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  No, the podcast was good, but this part made me, this part made me smile and laugh. And when the podcast can do that as well, that's great. But this podcast did it, although it was informative.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you guys should take the good with the bad, right? Like being out there, Sean, you've been able to create this big newsletter. You raised the fund. You got all this positive stuff. So like a few bad comments, like, I don't know, you, the positives weigh outweigh the bad, I guess. It's like, I think that's the way of looking at it.

• 1:10:25Sam Parr?

  Do you have a big newsletter now?

• 1:10:27Shaan Puri?

  Uh, that's like the same. It's like, actually, the, the thread that went viral just now, the clubhouse thing that added few thousand people to it. I think it's like a 22, 23,000 subscribers now.

• 1:10:40Sam Parr?

  I will say it makes, I feel so validated in my sense of self-worth that I was doing newsletters five years ago. And now all the cool kids like Sean and Greg and all, every cool kid.

• 1:10:51Shaan Puri?

  And I literally thought it was stupid what you were doing. I was like, what is he doing?

• 1:10:55Sam Parr?

  Finally, finally, all of the cool kids get it. It took, it took them forever. But I do feel validated.

• 1:11:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you did it right. You got it big and you cashed it out. And I think that's the, you know, that's the, you went full, you, you're lapping us at this point. Like you already did the whole thing. And all of us right now are still like, oh, we gotta make interesting content and we gotta capture that person. We'll get that, let's get their email address. That'll work. Like, that's a good idea. And then like, let's, let's hit them up regularly with something. And then, then let's figure out how to make money. It's like, you've already done like eight of those steps. We're all just like,

• 1:11:28Sam Parr?

  No, I think, I think there's, there's room to build significantly bigger things in significantly shorter times. But I 100% feel validated. I mean, I, I, I'm, I'm wrong all the time. This is just the one time that I've been right. And it makes me feel validated. My sense of self-worth has just boosted.

• 1:11:44Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I tried this thing. Okay. So check out this thing behind me. This Vesta board. Have you seen this before?

• 1:11:50Sam Parr?

  No. Is that a Bitcoin ticker?

• 1:11:52Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no, no. I don't know if you could see, I don't know if you could see it because my camera like doesn't autofocus on it. I tried to have this behind me. So on, on the thing behind me right now. So for those who are listening, you can't see this. I basically have this giant, like board. And the board is like, if you go to a train station, and you see where it's like, you know, like you, those little like flipboard signs where it's like, you know, this train is at station six and it's like, and it switches. It's like, train departs at station eight now. It's like, so it's one of those. It does that thing. And so you could put any message on here. So you can program it where like, I could put like, you know, today's revenue and it'll like, keep updating every hour on there. I could put a message. I could put like a quote that I like

• 1:12:36Shaan Puri?

  on there. So it's like an art, piece of art that kind of changes behind me. But I tried to get this up for the CNBC thing. Uh, cause I was going on, I bought the domain, thatdudeontv.com. Cause I was like,

• 1:12:47Sam Parr?

  Oh my gosh, that is awesome. Great idea.

• 1:12:49Shaan Puri?

  I was like, what if I can get a chance to shout something else? Like, oh dude, if I try to do my name, no one's gonna spell that. No one's gonna remember Sean Puri, Sean with two frigging As. Like, that's not gonna work.

• 1:12:59Sam Parr?

  Great idea.

• 1:13:00Shaan Puri?

  So I got, I got thatdudeontv.com. If you go to it, it just redirects you to my website. And then I just had it behind me. Uh, during the interview, so that anybody who saw it could like, go to it. But the, but the guys at CNBC were like, hey, we need you to move over to the middle. I was like, oh shit, it's gonna block my sign. But he's like, no, you need to be centered. I was like, oh, okay, whatever. But that was my little attempt.

• 1:13:22Sam Parr?

  Did it get any traffic?

• 1:13:23Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. I haven't had a chance. This morning's been so busy, dude. We did the, I did the CNBC thing, and then I had to take care of my daughter. And then, and then we had this crazy like situation with my wife's e-commerce store where there's like, you know, like crazy theft going on in the warehouse. We're like trying to deal with that and trying to feel like, okay, how do we deal with that? So, you know, there's crazy stuff going on, but I'm just trying to get back to my like, paternity dad life and just chill with the baby. That's, that's what I want to do. I'm basically just going to chill with the baby for the next few weeks and just try to record this podcast, you know, for, you know, one hour, one hour a week or whatever, two hours a week that we do this.

• 1:13:59Sam Parr?

  Well. Abreu? A, B, C, D?

• 1:14:05Shaan Puri?

  A.

• 1:14:05Sam Parr?

  Ah, alright.

• 1:14:07Shaan Puri?

  We could never leave without, Bray, you're like, kind of like, you tell us the bedtime story. We like can't get off the air until you give us the validation.