#195 - A Discussion on Sam & Shaan's Recent Investments

Sam (@TheSamParr) and Shaan (@ShaanVP) provide a sneak peak into their portfolio on this episode, breaking down recent investments they've both made. For each deal they discussed the company, why they invested, why it can be good, and why it might not work. If you like this episode, Tweet Sam or Shaan if you want to see more of them. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (1:21) Intro * (2:40) AbstractOps (https://www.abstractops.com/) * (11:00) Jar (https://www.myjar.app/) * (21:01) Ruumr (https://www.ruumr.com/) * (30:50) 1Build (https://www.1build.com/) * (38:55) ConvertKit (https://convertkit.com/) * (45:00) World's Fair Co (https://worldsfairco.com/) * (52:35) Praxis (https://www.praxissociety.com/)

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  Props to this guy for doing this. I gotta give him credit. I'm more into this than you are. I kinda love that a guy's dreaming like this.

• 0:19Sam Parr?

  So we just did this other intro. Mike's got screwed up. We're gonna do it again. We could say what we said even faster, though. We're talking about the stuff that we're, the startups that we're investing in. I actually put it into a format. So like, the name of the deal, why each of us did it, why it can be great. But I also wanna say why it can suck, why it will fail. This is like the disclaimer here. We have a stake in everything that you're gonna, we're gonna be talking about. I frankly don't care if people use it or not. I mean, this is more so entertainment. I have a feeling some people will use it. But that, and also, this isn't like investment advice. A lot of these companies are very likely gonna go out of business because that's just how startup investing works.

• 1:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and you couldn't invest in them if you wanted to, most likely. The good outcome of this would be, A, you hear about some cool startups that are doing interesting things, and it just gets your wheels turning about like, oh shit, I never even thought about that. That's exciting. And then the other is, you get a taste of what it's like to invest in deals, and how you think, how, how an angel investor thinks about investing in early-stage startups. All right.

• 1:20Sam Parr?

  I also, I also wanna say really quick, that doesn't, I want people to know, I'll say for me, I'm not necessarily, I'm not saying I'm good at this. But I'm, I'm just kinda doing it like publicly. So people are watching me learn, like, get in shape publicly. I've probably done 30 deals. But anyway, you wanna, all right, let me go first, because I have this deal that I, I have to make an introduction to you because they specifically asked for you. It's the top one. It's called Abstract Ops. And I need to know if you wanna join this or not. I actually-

• 1:48Shaan Puri?

  I just emailed the guy today because I was like, shit, when I saw you write this, I was like, oh shit, I forgot to reply to that guy.

• 1:53Sam Parr?

  Did I introduce you?

• 1:55Shaan Puri?

  You told me about it and I was like, I forgot to ask about it. So I emailed.

• 1:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he, I, I offered you him or him one, somehow you're already in the know and he said he wants to talk to you. So I know this guy, there's two guys. I don't know the second one. The first one, his name is Adam Spector. He's one of the founders. I think he's the COO. I've known him since 2014 or 15, maybe. Uh, I've been in a book club with them. There's four of us who have a book club and I invested in the seed round. I didn't have much money at the time, but I think I invested either $1,000 or $2,000. I don't remember. But I got pro rata. So when, what that basically means is when they were going to raise again, I got to invest again. And that's how I found out about this. Adam's amazing. I ended up investing around $400,000. And, and I gotta preface this by saying that I do my own money that comes straight out of my checking account. And then I also have this thing called Hampton VC. So Hampton VC.com or is it dot com or dot co?

• 2:45Sam Parr?

  Uh, and you can, uh, it's where I use Angel List, where I invest. It's Hampton VC.com. It's where I invest like my own money. Uh, and then if someone wants to join, they can. So in this deal, I did both my own and Hampton's money and we invested about $400,000.

• 2:59Shaan Puri?

  So explain what it is. What's abstract ops?

• 3:02Sam Parr?

  So have you, the, like, if you're like, know what you're talking about a little bit, it's, you would say it's like Net, NetSuite for startups. If you don't know what that is, which a lot of people don't know what that is.

• 3:11Shaan Puri?

  I don't know what NetSuite is.

• 3:13Sam Parr?

  So when you start a company, there's all, I don't actually know if you had to do this because you actually had people earlier on, on. But when I started my company, there's a lot of stuff that I would always forget to do because I'm just an absent minded person. So for example, if you have, uh, employees in different states to file taxes into each state, or even just to register in each state, and it's not like a huge penalty. It's like a hundred dollar penalty. If you don't do it correctly and you get a notice, but it's important to do it all right. Otherwise it adds up or another example is like certain HR practices and certain backend practices, like, uh, onboarding contractors in a very particular type of way, getting them to re, uh, assign like an intellectual property release. There's just a thousand different things and abstract ops is software that helps you,

• 3:56Sam Parr?

  that basically adds in what all those things are and its workflow. So you can see which tasks need to get done. Does that make sense? It's a little bit fluffy, but does that make sense?

• 4:04Shaan Puri?

  That's a little bit fluffy, but I recommend people actually go to their landing page, not because, uh, that has anything to do with the investment, but. It's such a good landing page. So what you see if you go there, so it says, so I'm just going to point out a couple of brilliant things. I'm going to use this in my power writing course because this is an example of an amazing landing page for a fairly boring business that would normally have a cookie cutter, very boring, stock photo type of website. And so it says, "Stop running from your back office tasks," which is basically like, they had a million ways they could explain their business, like, "We make it easy to handle, you know, your back office tasks, or to handle HR legal and HR legal and finance ops." And so, "Stop running from it," I think is great. It shows me this person

• 4:49Shaan Puri?

  understands like how founders are, which is like, "We put this shit off as far as we possibly can, because it's a pain in the ass, and we just don't want to think about it." And then it has this stick figure running away from a tornado, like a little hand-drawn tornado, and I love it. And then the first, like, sub-headline is, "I started a company to do a bunch of back office work." Literally, no founder ever, right? And it's like, I just get that, I love that they have personality. I think what that does is it makes it way easier. It shows me that whoever's behind this knows marketing, and they're going to have a much easier time recruiting, like, customers and users, because they're taking the average mundane things, and they're turning them into little sales moments where I start to love this brand. And I think Slack did this extremely well. If you open up Slack,

• 5:34Shaan Puri?

  there's like 10 little delightful details that make you kind of like Slack, even though it's a pretty boring, like, work chat tool. And so that was something that stood out to me right away.

• 5:44Sam Parr?

  So I'll explain why I made the decision to invest. The first is, I know the founder, his name is Adam, and he had previously sold the company to Twitter. I don't know if it was incredibly successful, but I don't care. To me, it's like, alright.

• 5:54Shaan Puri?

  It's in what we call the sweet spot. You know, you did just enough that I don't think you're an idiot, but you didn't get rich enough where I'm worried that you're going to be, you know, some lazy wannabe Steve Jobs visionary type for your next thing. It's like, you're hungrier than you were the first time, and you're smarter than you were the first time, too.

• 6:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and so that's one of the reasons why. The second reason is the product. I like, I know, like frankly, I think they're still figuring out the product. They have like close to seven figures in recurring revenue, but I think they're still even figuring out the product, which frankly is a reason why you shouldn't have, I shouldn't have invested is like they're still kind of tinkering exactly what it's going to become. But I do know that when it comes to the back office of startups, this was something that I failed at for years. Like, I struggled so hard to like, make sure I filed my taxes in Washington because we had one guy who was working more than 40 hours a week there.

• 6:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 6:43Sam Parr?

  Like, it was just like a nightmare and it stressed me out. And there, when I was selling my company, there was so much stuff that was like loose paperwork. The, the, the things that make me worried though, is that Zenefits, Gusto, or the thousand of other companies that they can just, once you, because like, it's hard to get, once you start using Gusto or some payroll provider, getting out of that is a pain in the ass. So if these companies are smart, which some of them are, but they're still big, slow companies, then they're gonna do a good job of ripping abstract ops off and offering these features as a add-on. But I actually, I think that can be said for a lot of different companies. Also, because it's this like huge, it's kind of vague now because it's not a very narrow product, because this is like huge idea, I get nervous

• 7:28Sam Parr?

  that they're not going to be able to sell this to customers. But they've done a pretty good job of getting some of like the cooler, hipper companies already as beta customers. So it's incredibly interesting to me. What about you?

• 7:37Shaan Puri?

  So, so I kind of agree. So I guess like, the one thing for me is, it's not super clear, like even on their website, they have a bunch of these like little examples. So it says, if you're a CEO, we handle and automate your HR, legal ops, finance, so you don't have to. And then I like it how it says, be scrappy, not sloppy, which is definitely a distinction I've failed at many, many times, falling into sloppy, but calling it scrappy as my, as my cover. But they have a bunch of like use cases, like pay legal invoice, send equity grant to advisor, set up health insurance, compose investor update. And so I'm not sure how one platform can either do all those things, or is it just a to-do list so that you actually do this? So I don't actually know the product well enough because I haven't used it. But I would say that's one challenge is it seems like it's trying to do a whole bunch of things, which means it's either a very generic

• 8:22Shaan Puri?

  horizontal tool, or it's a complicated tool. Which one is it?

• 8:26Sam Parr?

  I think it's going to be a complicated tool at first. That said, I think that like a company like a NetSuite, which does a little, which is like a, you know, QuickBooks?

• 8:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 8:35Sam Parr?

  NetSuite is like that, but plus a lot more. And what I've noticed is that being, particularly being at HubSpot, once I can get, if you can be a good enough salesman and get someone to start buying your shit, it's incredibly easy just to start selling them more and building more stuff on top of that. And I'm hoping that's what we can do with AppShuck Ops.

• 8:53Shaan Puri?

  And one of the kind of question marks here is, is this automated? Or are there just humans in the backend that are like helping do all this stuff?

• 9:02Sam Parr?

  A little bit of both, currently. Currently, a little bit of both.

• 9:05Shaan Puri?

  But I think that's, that's the question is can they get it to be more software than, than humans so that it scales better?

• 9:11Sam Parr?

  Are you going to invest?

• 9:13Shaan Puri?

  Uh, we'll see. I want to actually use the product because I, I'm guilty of this, like I said. So like, I have a company that, um, that, you know, my, basically my, my personal company that's like back office is kind of sloppy. It's kind of a mess. Like our QuickBooks, like I don't want to open any of those tabs. Like, I don't want to open Gusto. I don't want to open QuickBooks. It's like something I like choose to avoid. I'd rather like, I'd rather put it off until shit breaks. And then it's, I know it's too late, but like, fuck, I just, I hate thinking about this stuff. I'd only, I only want to think about growth if I can. And so I actually think I would be a potential user for this. And so I'm going to use it and I'm going to see, is this magical for me or not? And that'll be the, the make or break for investing, which is always the best. If you can be, if you are the customer, it's way easier to invest than things that you're guessing about.

• 9:58Sam Parr?

  Tell me about one that you're excited about.

• 10:00Shaan Puri?

  All right. I'm going to tell you about one called Jar. So I, I think I emailed you this deal because I think you should do it.

• 10:08Shaan Puri?

  But what is it? So Jar is, uh, you know that app Acorns? It's like kind of a big fintech app.

• 10:14Sam Parr?

  Didn't they go public?

• 10:16Shaan Puri?

  I don't know if they, I think they're like spacking or something like that. They're like a, they're like over a billion dollar valuation.

• 10:21Sam Parr?

  Two point two.

• 10:23Shaan Puri?

  The genius there was like, you would buy something and they would just be like, hey, do you want to like, do you want to, it would just tell you upfront, do you want to be a saver? Okay. You want to be a saver? Great.

• 10:34Shaan Puri?

  Well, here's, here's why we can make it easy for you. You don't have to think too much. When you buy Starbucks and it's your bill is, you know, three, 23. Let's just round up to four and we'll just round up the savings and we'll just deposit that. And oh, look, over time, if you just keep rounding up, you'll, you'll save. That's how it started at least. And it was a pretty clever idea. People like that. And so what these guys are doing is they're taking the Acorns model. And tweaking a little bit, but they're doing it in India. And so here's what I like about it. You, most apps, when you want to go invest, it's like you download some fintech app. And then you got to like link your account. So you got to deposit money. And then it's like, great. What do you want to invest in? Or how do you want to set this up? You know, do you want to do a mutual fund? Do you want to do an index fund? Like, what do you want to do? And it's like, shit, I need knowledge now.

• 11:19Shaan Puri?

  And then it's like, hey, by the way, you can't just start investing right away. Like we have to verify your identity. So like, scan your driver's license, hold it up to the screen, you know, with a nude photo and whatever else, right? There's like all these steps that go into just getting started with any investing app, because that's the law. And what these guys figured out is a.

• 11:37Sam Parr?

  Did this used to be called Spenny?

• 11:40Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 11:41Sam Parr?

  Are you sure?

• 11:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think they're, I don't remember Spenny. They didn't mention that at least. It's called, their, their URL was like changejar.in. And so what they were doing is they were like, look, the average person in India is, this was like their story. They were like, I got my job when I was 21, like most people, but I don't start, I didn't start saving anything or investing until I was 30. And when I was 30, it was like, oh shit, I want to like buy a house sometime and like, I want to get married. And like, I really should start doing adult stuff. And so he's like, that lost decade between 20 and 30 is like a huge difference in your net results if you had started saving earlier. Like everybody's seen these compound savings charts where if you start at 21 versus 31.

• 12:26Shaan Puri?

  You know, you end up with millions of dollars more because you've been able to like save for an extra decade and even in small amounts. And so what they said was, how do we solve that problem? How do we get you to start investing at 21 instead of 31? And what they did was they're like, we're going to simplify the shit out of this. We're going to simplify it where in 45 seconds, you can have your first investment done. I said, well, how do you do that? And they said, well, here's the thing. In India, everybody believes in gold. And I know this because my family in India has like gold shops. They like sell jewelry and whatnot. And gold is like the thing. Every like, if you ask a mom there about stocks, they can't tell you a single thing. It's not even a big, stocks is not like a big thing there. But everybody has like a gold set of jewelry as their like, safety net.

• 13:07Sam Parr?

  Crazy to me.

• 13:07Shaan Puri?

  And like, if we ever have to flee, we're just gonna grab the gold and we're gonna run. And like, this was literally happened in India where there was like, where Pakistan and India split up. So people literally did have to flee. So it's like, kind of baked in that way. And so they're like, we only offer one asset. It's gold. Everybody already believes in it and they want it. The second thing is, your first up to a certain weight of gold, you don't have to do all the financial compliance that you have to do for like stocks or real estate or other like larger investments, or different asset classes. So they're like, there's this loophole where basically, we can get you to start saving right away. You don't have to verify your ID and you don't have to like link your accounts and do all this other stuff. So I love that, like, the simplicity that was in their go to market, because I was like, oh, people will actually

• 13:51Shaan Puri?

  do that. If I can in 45 seconds get saving, great. And then, once I reach this threshold where I've bought a certain weight of gold, then it asks you to put your, put your, put way more information in. But by then, I'm kind of pot committed, because I already have my, I already have wealth here, even a small amount, I'll like protect that. Versus a normal app, you just bounce before you even put the first dollar in.

• 14:11Sam Parr?

  Was this your own money that you invested, or the fund's money?

• 14:14Shaan Puri?

  Well, I put my own money into the fund, but then all my investments have to go through the fund unless the founder itself won't let the fund invest.

• 14:23Sam Parr?

  Because that's like, like an angelist rule?

• 14:26Shaan Puri?

  Well, that's the rule I set when I started the fund because I didn't want to have a conflict of interest where I'm doing the good deals in my own money and I'm doing the borderline deals in the funds money. No, I wanted it to be clean so that, hey, every deal I do, I just do it through this one vehicle.

• 14:41Sam Parr?

  How much did you invest?

• 14:42Shaan Puri?

  So I put in 150K and it's got a $12 million valuation and a 20% discount. And so, so, so I put in 150K, they're raising about a million bucks. They already have good traction. So like, you know, what do, what do you look for? You like the team, you like the product, and then you gotta like the traction and the market size. And so, market size I like because I think this micro savings thing can add up really big in India. There's just so many people. And so like their average user after I think like two or three months has, has saved $300 already in the app, US dollars. And so that's like pretty significant for a very early, like just putting micropayment after micropayment in of just rounding up your expenses or just automating and saying, every day I want to put in 50 rupees, which is like, you know, whatever, a dollar or less than a dollar.

• 15:27Shaan Puri?

  And so it's like, every day I want to put in 50 rupees and because my goal is to save up enough where I can pay for my wedding, you know, in five years. And so it's kind of like sets the goal and then it says, great, you should put in 75 a day. And you say, yes. And then India also has this crazy thing. I don't know if you've heard of UPI?

• 15:43Sam Parr?

  No.

• 15:44Shaan Puri?

  So basically the country, like you know how like in the States, you have like every bank just kind of has their own clunky software and there's different payment, you know, you could use Stripe for payments, you can use something else for payments. And there's no like, there's no country level payments rails. And so in India, the government came in and was like, yo, in the next year, everybody has to move to this new payment standard. It's the universal payments, whatever, infrastructure or something like that. And this will just make it so that anybody who's taking payments, you just build on top of these rails and we're going to modernize payments in India.

• 16:14Sam Parr?

  That's cool.

• 16:14Shaan Puri?

  Through this. And so they did that big change. And so that's, that's changed the game. That's why there's a lot of innovation in India right now because this UPI thing was like a pretty major breakthrough. And the second thing is they just released this feature called Auto Pay, which is basically like a recurring auto investment. And so these guys are using that new feature of UPI. So I just think the like why now makes a lot of sense for, for this. And I like the, the hack that they have around just buying gold so that you, you reduce all the friction of getting somebody started.

• 16:42Sam Parr?

  Do you, so are you're totally okay with investing in India? Like, cause I don't, I've only invested in American-based companies. I've had Australia, I've had all over Europe and I'm like, for some reason that gap freaks me out a little.

• 16:55Shaan Puri?

  It, yeah, it kind of does to me too, but I've been investing in India. And, um, and so, so when I do, when I invest in India, there is definitely like some trepidation. So that's my, why it could fail. I just wrote, India, question mark, question mark, question mark. Like easy for me to be fooled, right? Like these guys could be well-known scammers in India that I don't know, right? These guys could be, I mean, they weren't, right? They went through Y C, I think. So, so, so, so, you know, I, I actually, I don't know if they went to Y C, but I know the other, other companies I invested in know these guys.

• 17:24Sam Parr?

  And they went, their competitor went to Y C, which is your second point, why they could fail is there's a lot of people in the space.

• 17:29Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So fintech is just super hot worldwide right now. There's like, every day, there's a new credit card, a new debit card, a new neo-bank that's popping up. And then there's bigger players that are trying to modernize. And so I think the one way they could fail is that there's probably like 10, between 10 and 50 legit competitors to this in India that are not doing directly this, but they can add this as a feature, or they could pivot into this. Or they could like recognize the clever things that these guys are doing and implement them. So I think that's the, those are the two, which is like, there's a bunch of competitors in fintech right now for every idea. And the second thing is, India is always a little bit of a question mark. And it's, it's very easy for shit to look good in India because, you know, cost of customer acquisition is always super cheap. It's like, oh, man, you're getting users for 80 cents. That's awesome.

• 18:13Shaan Puri?

  But like, the reality is, not, not all these Indian companies can be great. So, so I gotta like, my own filter for India is off because I come at it with a U S point of view. Having said all that, the two Indian investments I've done so far are probably two of my best investments. And so I'm going to keep betting there because I think that the country is like, it's in a sweet spot where there's just a lot of innovation. There's just going to be a lot of winners out of this batch. And I just need to bet in on enough of them that, okay, even if I get fooled by one or two, or I didn't understand the market landscape, I get into enough winners is my goal. Also, because I'm Indian, I kind of have this advantage where a lot of people in India follow me through this podcast or through Twitter.

• 18:51Shaan Puri?

  And so I am able to get into like any deal, like these guys, when they were reaching out, they're like, we asked only for two intros, you and Naval. And I was like, okay, bro, you have one of us in the wrong league there. But the, the reality is that's kind of an opportunity for me is like,

• 19:05Sam Parr?

  I agree.

• 19:06Shaan Puri?

  If I build my brand bigger there, I can get into any deal I want there.

• 19:09Sam Parr?

  I agree. I think it's why I like, um, like Bruno Mars is like the most watched person on YouTube. It's because when you see, uh, cause in the, uh, where's he from, in the Philippines, wherever he's from. If you see someone who you recognize in America who's crushing and kicking ass. Everyone rallies around that person from the outside country to like, like, oh, he's one of us. So that's so.

• 19:29Shaan Puri?

  Manny Pacquiao in the Philippines. He's, he's like the president there and he's just because he's like a famous boxer here. They just want to go all out for their guy.

• 19:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Or Bjork in Iceland. So you're like the, uh, you're the, you're the Manny Pacquiao of India.

• 19:41Shaan Puri?

  I'm saying if I keep betting, then I have a path to do that. But if I'm never investing there, then I can't build that. Like it takes a stack of, of, of reasons why you should be like known and, and, and respected in a place. And I think one of the reasons why you could be known and respected is having invested in some winners, but I got to plant those seeds now.

• 19:58Sam Parr?

  All right. Can I tell you one I'm really excited about? And I wasn't excited at first and then I started using it and I'm like, oh, I'm in. Okay. So the name is bad and they're going to change it. They're, they're going to change the name. I think. It's called, the name's really bad. It's called Rumor. So I'm actually highlighting it. You can see the memo that I wrote for.

• 20:14Shaan Puri?

  When you say it, the name's fine. When you spell it, you, you know, it sounds like you've got, uh, cotton in your mouth or something like that.

• 20:21Sam Parr?

  So I've talked about Bring a Trailer. Bring a Trailer is this website that originally started as like a car where they would show off cool cars that were on sale from around the web. They eventually launched their own, uh, auction platform, but they just did a really good job of making editorializing it, making it feel like a community. So you can buy classic or even newer cars that fit a certain demographic. Rumor is doing that for houses. And by the way, if you want to invest Sean, let me know.

• 20:48Shaan Puri?

  I wouldn't have been interested in this except for the bring it. When you've educated me on how bring a trailer is a great business and then we've looked into different auctions through the podcast. So now when I look at this, I see it differently than like, oh, just another home buying website. Okay. And I don't really, how are you different than?

• 21:02Sam Parr?

  No, it'll be cool because look at some of the example auctions and then click comments and read the comments. That's kind of like why it's neat.

• 21:08Shaan Puri?

  How do I go to an auction?

• 21:09Sam Parr?

  I don't even know if those are fake auctions or, or what. The founder bought a bunch of homes just to put on that site for auctions. And so go to the web.

• 21:18Shaan Puri?

  Bought a bunch of homes to seed the marketplace?

• 21:20Sam Parr?

  I think he like owns like 20, he's like a, he was like a, he's a property owner. Like he owns, uh, he's like a landlord.

• 21:25Shaan Puri?

  So let's just, let's just explain it. So I'm on rumor. It's R U U M R dot com right now. They might change the name. So I go, Washington looks to be the only market that's open. So I'm there. Right now, and I'm just looking at this for the first time. So I see that there's this house in Washington. There's a bunch of pictures and it's on sale for a hundred, $3,000. And it says that there's 13 hours left presumably in this auction. And then there's some details about it, like all the normal house details. And then I can log in, I can make an offer and then I see people who are making offers. But then there, I see people who are also commenting like, is the electric heating system baseboard or something else? And you see replies from like, I assume either the owner or the agent.

• 22:05Shaan Puri?

  Like answering questions in the chat here while people are bidding 100,000, 101,000, 102,000. And it's currently at 103,000 is the

• 22:15Sam Parr?

  It's neat, right?

• 22:16Shaan Puri?

  It's eBay for houses.

• 22:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And yeah, but it's a little bit different than eBay. It's a little bit different, but yeah, that is. But the reason it's, one of the reasons why I think this can exist is let's say you're buying a house for half a million dollars. And they do like a first and final offer process where everyone submits their offer on a Friday. If you're bidding half a million dollars for a house and you see that the winning bid was 505. You're like, well, fuck, if you guys would have told me, I would have bet 510 and you would have made more money and I would have got what I wanted. And so it's kind of trying to solve for that, but let me explain to you why I think this could be cool. So first, I'm, the founder was pretty interesting. He's a military guy. So I like military folks. He also started Stay Alfred. You know Stay Alfred?

• 22:53Shaan Puri?

  By the way, we should, we should highlight the groups that we are inherently biased to invest in Mormons, military guys, Russians. Jews, what else have we got?

• 23:03Sam Parr?

  Israeli Jews is what we said.

• 23:05Shaan Puri?

  Right. You know, who else?

• 23:07Sam Parr?

  Immigrants. I'm always partial to immigrants.

• 23:09Shaan Puri?

  Any, any immigrant, anybody who's lived in the US illegally, you know, for a period of time. Anybody who is, you know, a single parent, I'm in, you did, you already did the hardest thing of your life.

• 23:20Sam Parr?

  McCandie.

• 23:21Shaan Puri?

  Oh, McCandie. No, that's, that's a, that's a no for me. The, the other ones that I guess like are, are, I'm always like, I lean in, I'm a little bit interested. It's like, oh, how'd you, what, what were you doing like when you were younger? And it's like, well, I was like, you know, flipping cars or I was flipping shoes on eBay or I kind of don't want to say, cause I was like this affiliate marketer for these like shady dating sites. I'm like, no, no, no, you don't understand. That's like

• 23:44Sam Parr?

  Shady internet stuff, I like.

• 23:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Shady internet arbitrator.

• 23:48Sam Parr?

  So this guy started Stay Alfred, which was like a, you know, Sonder, it's like a competitor to Sonder where they would like rent out entire buildings and then sublease them for Worked, traveled, got to a hundred million in revenue, raised sixty million dollars, crashed and burned and went out of business. And you know what? That's awesome. I love that. So that's initially why I was interested. I told them I love Bring a Trailer and he goes, oh, great. Their co-founder works here and so does three other team. Bring a Trailer sold the rumors like half a million dollars. And since two thousand

• 24:19Shaan Puri?

  Half a billion.

• 24:20Sam Parr?

  Half, sorry, half a billion. Since two thousand and twelve, I remember in two thousand and twelve, I was playing around with the real estate stuff online and I thought homes should be bought and sold online, just like we buy and sell clothing. And I, a lot of people with rumor, you can actually still go and see the house and open home, like at an open house. But in my mind, I still think that in ten, twenty, thirty years, it will be normal actually to buy a house site on scene, even though a lot of people don't think that now, I think, I think that will be the case. And check this out.

• 24:49Shaan Puri?

  So why would I, okay, so let's say, let's say I'm a seller. So why would I sell here when I feel like, okay, I'm gonna have this thirteen hour auction? I don't know what's gonna happen. Do I have to take the offers or do I just reject all?

• 25:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you can have a reserve.

• 25:03Shaan Puri?

  Okay, great. And then is it because I think I'm gonna get a higher price? Or because I save money through the fees? Or what's the reason I choose this over like traditional listings?

• 25:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah, the higher price, that's the goal. Higher price by creating like a, like a

• 25:17Shaan Puri?

  Do they take the same fee as like a normal five percent of whatever agent fees?

• 25:21Sam Parr?

  They take less because what the problem with real estate is the agents are still like integral, like they're still very important to the industry. If you cut the agents out, then like the agents are gonna be like, oh, fuck you guys. I'm gonna badmouth you. I'm gonna make sure no one ever uses them. So they actually get the agent in on the deal and they just like make the agent's job a little bit better and a little bit easier.

• 25:39Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:41Sam Parr?

  And so we'll see if it works, but let me explain two things. First is we invested along and the reason why I was intrigued is all of Stay Alfred's competitors, this guy's whole company, all the CEOs, all invested in this company. And I was like, that's kind of an interesting signal.

• 25:56Shaan Puri?

  If your competitors respect you, like I'll bet on your next thing, that means something.

• 26:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and they were all real estate guys. So this is still related to that business business. So I was like, that's intriguing. Second, so I invested and then I get a call. Jordan calls me, the guy who's starting this, he goes, Adam Newman just put two million bucks in. I was like, fucking A, got it. Like, I think that's pretty good. I think that's a good sign.

• 26:16Shaan Puri?

  Why is that a good sign? Because some people would think that's a bad sign.

• 26:19Sam Parr?

  No, no, no, no. First of all, like, I'm not saying what Adam did is great. I frankly don't even know the entire story. But I, I, I'm pretty sure.

• 26:26Shaan Puri?

  He's the founder of WeWork, who like, kind of like, whatever, did a bunch of shit and ended up walking away, kind of like drove the company into a weird spot and, and, and was accused of a lot of things. And then he walked away, you know, pretty wealthy as part of the, his agreement to leave.

• 26:40Sam Parr?

  And my thing is Adam Newman, regardless, let's say he did a lot of bad stuff. Let's say he was unethical. Let's say all that's true. I'm not saying it is, but let's for argument's sake, say it is. He's still built something huge and amazing in a very short amount of time and has access to all types of stuff and sees all types of stuff. So I think if he's interested, it's a good.

• 26:57Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:58Sam Parr?

  Um, and then why can they fail? I think if they execute this poorly, it's gonna, it's gonna be bad. I also think that, um, like, oh, I put, I put, it could be if they raised too much money. I actually don't think that's gonna be the case. I think they have to actually, this company's gonna have to raise a ton, a ton, a ton, a ton of money. What can make this fail? I don't know. Maybe if Zillow offers this.

• 27:18Shaan Puri?

  Well, also I think it's a new behavior and anytime you're betting on a new behavior, that's like, the risk of it failing is that like, maybe people won't want to buy the house sight unseen, or maybe people won't want to sell the house. In this way, they want their hand held through a traditional process because it's the biggest asset in their life. And they, they don't want to risk it, which is traditionally why a home has been bought one way.

• 27:36Sam Parr?

  You can buy this. You can go, this is not entirely sight unseen. But yeah, it's a new behavior. There's a lot of new stuff about it. But my thing was like, when I was doing the math, I'm like, you don't need that much volume to build something quite large. And once you have the home on there, you could upsell like property, uh, assessment, or what's it called? Um, inspections. I think you can upsell. I just thought it was interesting. I think that these.

• 28:00Shaan Puri?

  Closing. So, so one thing that's good here is you, you don't want all your bets to be logical, clear, good ideas. Because that means your risk profile wasn't right with startup investing. You need a few ideas that, you know, sound like they're gonna fail when you, when you invest in them. And then you either, either they fail and you're like, yeah, well, duh. Or you end up looking like a genius six years later, seven years later, because that non-obvious contrarian idea turned out to be something people actually wanted to do. Turned out to be a new behavior people were willing to do. And so I think it's good to have, I, I, this was the one note I told my team, uh, who like helps me with investing. I said, I don't think we're taking weird enough bets. I don't think we're taking wild enough bets

• 28:42Shaan Puri?

  because that's where the big outsized crazy returns are going to be, as in things that are non-obvious today, you know, like low valuation, not everybody wants to invest in them, the sort of thing.

• 28:55Sam Parr?

  Do you, did you do SACE?

• 28:57Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 28:58Sam Parr?

  Does that interest you to talk about or no?

• 29:01Shaan Puri?

  We've kind of talked about them before.

• 29:03Sam Parr?

  Oh, we'll do another one. All right.

• 29:04Shaan Puri?

  I want to do one. Okay, you'll kind of, I think you'll like this one. I think you'll want in on this one, although it might be too late. So it's called One Build. So what One Build is, is here's the problem, as the guy describes it. So I meet the guy.

• 29:16Sam Parr?

  How'd you meet him?

• 29:18Shaan Puri?

  Ben or Zach found him and then they really liked him and they were like, hey, you really got to talk to this guy. So I said, okay, great, let's do it. And I forgot, I don't know how they found him. I think he was like in some YC batch or something like that. So, so basically, I talked to this guy and he's like, yeah, I was working at Cloud Kitchens, the startup started by Travis Kalanick. He's like, I was one of the first 20 people there. And my job was like, you know, they wanted to go build out all these cloud kitchens, all these kitchens around the world. And they were like, all right, you know, we want to build this $10 million project. We want to build this $20 million project. And he's like, I'm a data guy, like my background is like data science. And they were like, look, we need you to like be intelligent about how we're going to like plan out these builds. We're trying to spend this much this year. It's a big number. So like, help us out with the data side of building out. So he's like, all right, no problem.

• 30:03Shaan Puri?

  How hard could it be? And he goes into it and he's like, okay, great. So we have this, let's say we're doing this deal and we're trying to build out this kitchen in Seattle. And the estimate is like 10 million, but like, it could be plus or minus like four or five million. And that's a pretty big difference. Like if it's 15, it's different than 10, which is different than six. So like, which one is it? And the guys were like, well, like, it depends. Like, it depends on what? He's like, it depends on the cost of construction. And he's like, okay, well, what does that depend on? And it all comes down to like, one of the biggest variables is material costs. So there are many ways that your construction costs can go out of whack. Like, if you don't get the permits in time, and so this, it gets delayed, labor, errors. But one big one is materials. And so what he was like, he was like, okay, well, how hard can

• 30:46Shaan Puri?

  that be? Like, let's just figure out the material cost and let's just spec it out. And they're like, no, no, no, it doesn't work like that. Like, here's the spec, here's the plan, like a construction plan. And now to cost this, you either, you need to hire a cost estimator. And what they do, and what you would do if you wanted to do this yourself, is there's this book that gets printed once a year, which is like, This is like the blue book of like all materials cost. Like if you want a three foot piece of lumber, it's going to cost you this much. But like, as anybody's seen, especially during COVID, like material costs, like lumber has like, had huge amounts of variance. I don't know if you've seen this, but like,

• 31:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:22Shaan Puri?

  Like, you know, a truck carrying lumber is like, like right now, it's like a truck carrying bricks of gold. It's like, if you robbed that truck, you would have like so much value right now because lumber was so expensive. And so he's like, the problem is that there's no real time data. And he said, so that's what I decided to leave and go build is basically an API that will give you real time material pricing for construction. So all you do is you upload what your, what your, your construction plan is. And then it basically gives you an accurate real time cost of it. And if that's changing over time, you'll see how it's changing week by week, day by day.

• 31:57Sam Parr?

  And companies who are building, I don't know any of the companies, but companies who are building construction, companies who work in the construction business who are, who are designing stuff, they will use one build software to integrate with their software. So it says in real time, how much is this costing?

• 32:14Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So, so basically you upload your construction plan?

• 32:17Sam Parr?

  And they're, yeah, they're selling straight to the, to the company.

• 32:20Shaan Puri?

  They're selling to the builder and to cost estimators who do this as their job. It's like, hey, here's a way to do your job faster. But I think over time, my, my sense is that over time it eliminates the need for cost estimators as a profession. But, but I think, you know, the main thing is if you're a contractor, whether you're, if you're building your own project, you want to know what are my real costs going to be? And you want to know how those change over time? And then, oh, if we swap this out for this, how does that change our pricing? And then the other thing is, let's say you're a contractor, you had to go bid for a job. If you bid too high, if you put your budget, if you put the cost too high, you may not get the job, right? Cause that's your sales pitch is, hey, I'll build it for 12. And if 12 is too high of a number, they're going to give it to some other guy who bid eight. But if the guy who bid eight is underestimating it and it actually costs him 10, he has to eat that loss.

• 33:05Shaan Puri?

  And so bidding for jobs and accurately bidding for a job is basically like a huge part of the sales process of construction. All right. So what do I like? I like that this problem seems real. I talked to a few people in real estate and they were like, yeah, of course this is like, this is a huge problem. You know, just the material cost for construction is twice the amount annually of all of e-commerce. So it's like humongous market. It's a multi, it's a trillion dollar plus market of just the of just material construction costs. And Smart Guy, I like their approach. I think they're kind of like the leader in that space. It doesn't seem like they have a ton of competition. Like, I don't think, like what I was saying before about savings at micro saving apps or credit cards. It's like, there's a hundred of those startups right now. I don't think there's a hundred of this startup.

• 33:51Shaan Puri?

  And then they already have some traction, right? They have seven figures of ARR already booked. And so I invested in this thing in their Series A. And, and I think there's also a big idea that I like, which is after you cost it for them, after you say, oh, here's the, here's your estimated cost for this, you could also just add a buy button down the road and then be like, cool. Purchase all those supplies and actually build a marketplace where suppliers can sell the supplies through their thing because the person's already at the, at the, at the, they already have their invoice basically ready, ready to buy.

• 34:20Sam Parr?

  This is amazing.

• 34:22Shaan Puri?

  The thing it can fail, right? So why would I hesitate? First, the valuation was higher. So it was like at a over $50 million valuation. You know, so I put in a hundred K. I don't own a big piece of this, but I want it in rather than being on the outside. And then the second thing is, I think, construction is a pretty old school industry. It's all pen and paper. Like, that trillion dollars of material purchasing is all done just through pen and paper offline right now. And so bringing it online can be a brutally hard thing to do.

• 34:51Sam Parr?

  I'm looking at Meta Prop. I'm seeing who all invested in these folks. I think maybe I know some of these people. Who's leading this Series A?

• 35:01Shaan Puri?

  You know, I don't actually know. I don't remember off the top of my head.

• 35:04Sam Parr?

  Wow. This is sick. This is great.

• 35:06Shaan Puri?

  This is a cool one.

• 35:07Sam Parr?

  If they're still raising, I would talk to them in a heartbeat. My fear about this, like if I had to like say what the downsides are, is can you easily replicate this? Like, can?

• 35:16Shaan Puri?

  I don't think so, because what they're doing is not just the, it's not just the app that says, great, you know, upload your thing and get your cost. It's like, where does that data even live? So this is like, you know, that company Climate Corporation that basically, uh, like what they did was they basically organized all the agriculture weather data.

• 35:35Sam Parr?

  Sold for billions.

• 35:36Shaan Puri?

  Sold it for billions. And basically what they offered to like, you know, hey, farmers, like, here's all, you know, farmers and others. It's basically like, we took this unstructured. Offline data and we made it structured and online. So for example, they're first taking all of the material, all of the materials and they're turning them into SKUs. Like if you've ever done e-commerce, a SKU is just like, you know, if you're at a grocery store, a Hershey's chocolate bar, that's one SKU. And then a Twix bar will be another SKU. And the large Twix bar is another SKU. So basically they took everything you can buy in construction and they're turning them all into SKUs first. So first, that's the first step. Then they have to get the price feeds. Okay, how are we going to get real time price data on all these things when prices vary from supplier to supplier, vendor to vendor? And so then they're, they have to do that.

• 36:20Shaan Puri?

  And then they have to turn that whole thing into an API that like can be queried easily and get accurate pricing. And so, so I think they have a, I think that's the real innovation here is being the one to organize and collect all that data. Then after that, really anybody can build an app that just asks them, hey, what's the price of lumber right now in Tucson, Arizona for this size of this type of lumber? And they should get back an answer. And then if that changes in three months, they should get that change notification that the price is increasing.

• 36:47Sam Parr?

  That's sick. I'm into this. I'm looking at all this now. I'm taking down notes. I think this is amazing. I'm into this one a lot.

• 36:53Shaan Puri?

  You want to do one more you like?

• 36:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Okay, here's a boring one. Wait, let me look. Let's do a boring one. Okay, so I actually included this email in here because I wanted to show it and I blacked out a couple of things, so don't read those things. But this one's like boring. It's not a seed investment, but I just wanted people to see how this worked. So my friend Nathan Barry, Nathan Barry started this company called ConvertKit. You know ConvertKit?

• 37:19Shaan Puri?

  I'm a user. Yeah, I pay him a thousand bucks a year.

• 37:22Sam Parr?

  I love ConvertKit. If you Google ConvertKit revenue, you can see all their metrics, all their numbers. It's amazing. Nathan is, you know, he's young. He's like 28 maybe.

• 37:29Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 37:30Sam Parr?

  But he like comes off way older. He owns, I think, almost the entire company. So ConvertKit is like a MailChimp competitor, but slightly different. I don't, it's hard to explain unless you're an email marketing nerd, but it's just like MailChimp. It's just like HubSpot. It's just like a lot of these companies, but geared particularly, I believe, towards bloggers. And he has grown the company very steady for a bunch of years. And he asked me if I wanted to buy some secondary at a 7X multiple. So their revenue is 28 million and he's raising at 7X that. What's that? I don't even know.

• 38:03Sam Parr?

  Three hundred.

• 38:04Shaan Puri?

  Two hundred million.

• 38:04Sam Parr?

  Two hundred million dollars. I invested. I thought I invested fifty thousand dollars of my own money. And the reason why.

• 38:11Shaan Puri?

  I would do that in a heartbeat. Yeah.

• 38:13Sam Parr?

  Well, you want to?

• 38:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I do want to. That's great. It's like no brainer.

• 38:16Sam Parr?

  All right, I'll make an intro. Hold on, let me write this.

• 38:18Shaan Puri?

  I know the guy, but yeah, I didn't know.

• 38:20Sam Parr?

  I made an intro so I get credit. So he owes me one. So the way that it worked was, he goes, Nathan emailed me about a week ago. He goes, funny story. After you and I talked on how secondary liquidity works on my podcasts. I guess I could say his name. Dharmesh heard the episode. Dharmesh is the founder of HubSpot, who's going to be on in a few days. Heard the podcast and he reached out saying if he could buy X worth of shares directly from our shareholders. After surveying former and current teammates who hold stock options, we're putting together a secondary round at seven times ARR. And we're looking to raise 2.5 million in total with 2.05, so 2 million already committed. ARR is 28 million. Net revenue is 27.3 million, which is up 34%.

• 39:03Sam Parr?

  Revenue churn, 3.8%. Customers, 36,000. Profit this year, 11%, 12% profit. He sent me that email and I just said, all, here's what I replied. I go, how will I get liquidity? He goes, I'm either going to keep buying more companies.

• 39:20Sam Parr?

  And then I'll go public or I'm going to do more offerings in the future to sell. And I go, great, in 50,000.

• 39:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:29Sam Parr?

  And so here's my thinking. My thinking is.

• 39:32Shaan Puri?

  Super safe, right? Like the, the odds of this going south are under, sub 5% easily.

• 39:39Sam Parr?

  And I, and so this is my safe bet. So to me, this is not, so the way that I'm doing my net worth is one percentage of the vast majority, let's say 95% is in index funds. Boring. 5% is going to be in angel investing. And this, uh, this is considered private equity, I guess it's, but it's not angel investing to me.

• 40:03Shaan Puri?

  Right. It's more of the boring stuff. This goes in your boring stuff budget?

• 40:07Sam Parr?

  Yes, but it's not quite boring. Like I can't sell it overnight, but I know Nathan, he's trustworthy. He's ethical. He's amazing. I've been asking to invest in him since he started the company. Right. So I put 50 grand of my own money in this and this is going to come straight from, this is coming out of like the boring pool. What do you think about this? You like this?

• 40:23Shaan Puri?

  I like it a lot. Yeah. I think that, uh, this is a really defensible, stable company. There's a lot of people that are super interested in, you know, email software. There's like bigger companies. And then there's like the sub stacks of the world that are trying to do things, but, uh, I've used all their products. ConvertKit is the best, best product out there of the, of this batch. Once you're, once you're hooked on it, it's hard to stop paying. Um, in fact, I told my team, I was like, hey, guys, our convert kit bill is like two, two, two to three grand a year. Um, like we should just, isn't there like a free thing that will just let us do all this? I feel like email software is everywhere. And then sure enough, they go kick the tires of a bunch of different things. They're like, ah, we can switch, we can get it cheaper, but we're going to give up X, Y, and Z. It's like, well, X, Y, and Z all seem like the important things. I don't want to give those up.

• 41:08Shaan Puri?

  And so, so I think he's built a very steady business that, you know, today I think convert kit could sell for more than 200 million. I think, I think if you wanted to sell this business today, he could probably sell it for somewhere like 30 to 40% higher than that. That's, that'd be my guess. Um, and it's just going to keep growing, I think 25 to 35% a year.

• 41:27Sam Parr?

  And there's a world. I can see Nathan being the type of guy, and a lot of people say this, but I actually believe if he told me this is what he wanted to do was, he was like, uh, I, I think I'll run it for 25 years and try to grow at 25% every single year through buying different companies. I'd be like, oh, okay, cool. I believe you in.

• 41:42Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 41:43Sam Parr?

  I, I believe you're going to try that and I believe you're capable of that.

• 41:46Shaan Puri?

  And we see pretty much every major like creator economy deal and they're all just like, you, I think you're sick of creator economy at this point.

• 41:54Sam Parr?

  Very sick of it.

• 41:55Shaan Puri?

  There's just so many creator tools and creator economy startups and honestly, most of them are not very good. It's like, there's more funding in the creator economy startups than there is like actual revenue in the creator economy right now. So, so there's like this, there's like this, I don't know, overhype in that space, but this is an actual, this is a real business in the creator economy. Right. This is like independent creators use this as their like backend for sending emails to their audience bloggers and newsletter folks. And, um, and I think that there's a lot of room to run. Like the thing I would do if I was him is I would figure out. I would go into the ClickFunnels market. I think ClickFunnels is a bigger company. I think ClickFunnels has over a hundred million a year.

• 42:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but they're turn of shit.

• 42:35Shaan Puri?

  They're turn of shit, but you know, the, I think as a upsell, I think there's a lot of people who use ConvertKit that also create landing pages and try to like sell stuff. And I think that ClickFunnels is actually one of the better products for doing that, even though it's real janky. It's just, it's very effective at actually converting people. And I think that that's the way I would go with this as a like, as a route to getting bigger. But, but yeah, I think this is a pretty safe bet.

• 42:59Sam Parr?

  Well, I already made an introduction, Nathan. It's in your inbox.

• 43:02Shaan Puri?

  Awesome.

• 43:03Sam Parr?

  You want to do one more?

• 43:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's do one more. Okay, I have a crazy one. Yeah, I have a crazy one. Actually, can we talk about that other crazy one that you were telling me about? Let's do that one. Let's do that one.

• 43:11Sam Parr?

  Okay, so, uh, what, Cam, his name's Cam. I had this guy reach out to me because he was a volunteer at HustleCon years ago, and I've always stayed in touch with him. I love Cam. He's a nice guy. And I, I, I thought he would always go places. He emailed me like a week ago or a five weeks, like maybe a month ago. And he's like, I got this idea. I'm going to build a, build a world fair. And I, you and me, Sean, are way different. Immediately I said, nope, nope, I'm out. Like, I was never even entertaining this.

• 43:39Shaan Puri?

  Explain, because I, I didn't even really know what the world fair is. So explain what that even means. I'm going to build a world fair.

• 43:44Sam Parr?

  Because it's like, it's, I'm just not imaginative or smart enough to understand these things. You go ahead.

• 43:50Shaan Puri?

  So, and actually, if you can link me the, link the memo in here, because I think it'll be, it'll be useful to talk about. But basically, what I understand is a world fair is an event that happens, has, has happened like, you know, 70 years ago, and then 20 years before that, or whatever. It's sort of like the Olympics. It's basically this world scale event. And in the same way that, you know, the Olympics, every four years it happens and it goes into some country, like, you know, some city, like takes over the whole city and it brings like tons and tons, millions and millions of tourists. And, and so, you know, The previous world fairs, so here's, here's previous world fairs. So Seville, 1992 had 42 million attendees.

• 44:31Shaan Puri?

  Shanghai, 2010 had 73 million and Milan in 2015 had 23 million attendees. So basically this guy's trying to throw an event with 50 million attendees. So that's like the, that's the premise is, hey, I'm going to build this event. And it's going to have 50 million people attend and I think I can make billions of dollars. He, he, he estimates, uh, you know, over $5 billion per fair that he'll generate in some combination of tickets plus additional spend when you're there. As well as like, you know, the virtual live stream media rights to the, to the thing. And, um, and forget about the fact that like, you know, the, like the city itself gets like this huge amount of economic activity.

• 45:13Shaan Puri?

  When you get 50 million people coming to town, that generates a lot of economic activity for the city. So his idea is basically go city to city and say, hey, do you want this like jumpstart of economic activity? Host the world, like put up, put your city up and put funding up and put resources up. Let me host a world fair here. So, and it's like Disney world on crack.

• 45:34Sam Parr?

  I told Cameron this earlier today and, uh, so he's a listener. So I want to let him know, I love this guy and I think he's very competent. I just think this idea, I think it's stupid, particularly for like a VC funded thing. I have hosted of like, we're calling this a world's fair venture thing. This is a conference. This is a trade show. Can conferences and trade shows make money? Yeah, they can, but like to start Coachella, Coachella makes a hundred million dollars a year. And they've been around for like third, no 20 years now, or Lollapalooza, 20 years. Like, this is, oh my God.

• 46:08Shaan Puri?

  The degree of difficulty on this is, uh, like at, at an insane level, I would say.

• 46:13Sam Parr?

  An insane level.

• 46:15Shaan Puri?

  So that's the reason not to invest. The reason to invest is also that the degree of difficulty is insane and the person behind this is insane and it's going to compete against nobody. And it's sort of this like-

• 46:25Sam Parr?

  What do you mean against nobody? There's tons of these. Like, like this is what-

• 46:28Shaan Puri?

  Who's trying to do this?

• 46:29Sam Parr?

  I mean, Web Summit did something like this. Like, dude, do you want to compete against the Olympics? What happened to the Olympics last year?

• 46:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's the thing. Who is competing against the Olympics? Nobody. It's like when Elon goes and competes against NASA. It's like nobody else is competing against NASA.

• 46:42Sam Parr?

  Sure there are. There's the Commonwealth Games, there's world championships in different sports. There's all types of stuff. There, there, you know-

• 46:47Shaan Puri?

  Nobody entrepreneurial. Nobody who's trying to do it for capitalism, basically. Nobody's trying to make a profit.

• 46:52Sam Parr?

  There was one person, Ted Turner. He launched the Commonwealth, what did Ted Turner launch? The Goodwill Games.

• 46:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I mean, is that even, did that work? Did it not work? What do you know about that?

• 47:03Sam Parr?

  I don't know. I don't know if it made profit, but I know that it was a thing. He invented it because he needed a programming for-

• 47:11Shaan Puri?

  For his TV station?

• 47:12Sam Parr?

  For TV stations. Yeah. I believe it was called the Goodwill Games. Anyway, no, I mean, like, do they work? Yeah, they don't not work. It's kind of like, does the American pageant work? Like, well, it kind of probably makes money. It's like an annuity. It kind of works like every year for 40 years and it does only okay.

• 47:28Shaan Puri?

  So is your, okay, what's your criticism? Is your criticism that he's not going to be able to do it at the scale or that even if you do it at the scale, it's not going to make that much money?

• 47:38Sam Parr?

  It will never, ever, ever happen at that scale. I'm just saying that, like, look, like, and this is me saying someone betting my own money. Like, I'm not willing to bet my money that it will. I'm willing to bet my money that Cam will do many amazing things. I just think it's like, literally, like, it's, this is like, it's like against physics. I think, like, like, do you know what I mean?

• 47:59Shaan Puri?

  So the most, most relatable version of this is the Summit, right? So, so the guys who created Summit and then they bought the mountain and they're like, you know, doing that. I think that's sort of like the closest analog that I know and I've personally seen.

• 48:13Sam Parr?

  And it's not a good business.

• 48:14Shaan Puri?

  That was not a great business.

• 48:16Sam Parr?

  A horrible business.

• 48:17Shaan Puri?

  It was nowhere near, well, okay, why do you think it's a horrible business?

• 48:19Sam Parr?

  They ran out of money multiple times. It doesn't make a profit.

• 48:22Shaan Puri?

  The event part or are you talking about the mountain part?

• 48:24Sam Parr?

  The event, both, all.

• 48:28Sam Parr?

  What are you talking about? Ryan will tell you for a second. Ryan made all of his money selling trade shows and ads for a real estate newsletter and trade show business. That was a killer business. Then they invested it in this other thing and it was just okay. Like, would you want to have invested your money? Like, I just, this boggles my mind. I have only a few dollars to pick between X, Y, and Z. This like, doesn't even come up on the like, I'd rather go all in on abstract docs. Just like, give me some boring ass software that's just gonna make money for 50 years.

• 48:54Shaan Puri?

  So I agree with you from that point of view. If I'm, if I'm gonna invest, I'm not personally gonna invest in this. But I, I think from his point of view, from the guy who's building this point of view, I don't know, you could be, if you're a lunatic, you can do some kind of amazing things. You can really exceed like where others have gone. For example, I know Patty who started Web Summit. And

• 49:17Sam Parr?

  You know him? That's cool. What's he like?

• 49:19Shaan Puri?

  Awesome. Awesome guy. Like, you know, should be the whatever of Ireland someday, Prime Minister, President, or whatever they have over there. He's amazing. He's a really amazing guy. But at the same time, if you are trying to build a huge conference, you're gonna approach it very differently than trying to create a world fair, than trying to create like an Olympics. And so I think it is really not that much harder. I think maybe it's, it's harder, but it's not that much harder than pulling off what Patty did over seven years of Web Summit. The good thing with Web Summit is he was able to iterate. So he was able to start super small. Like, oh, great, I got 100 people to come to Ireland for this conference. And the next year I got 1,000, next year I got 10,000, then I get 100,000. Like, he was able to step it up. Whereas I don't, I think with the World Fair

• 50:02Shaan Puri?

  thing, there's no like, tiny World Fair, I don't think. So I'm not sure, you know, how he's gonna possibly do this.

• 50:10Sam Parr?

  I, yeah.

• 50:11Shaan Puri?

  His two, his two phases are, phase one, host 25 million guests, phase two, host another 25 million guests.

• 50:21Sam Parr?

  I don't wanna.

• 50:22Shaan Puri?

  I gotta say, props to this guy. Is he like, young? I hope he's young.

• 50:26Sam Parr?

  Twenty six. He, he.

• 50:28Shaan Puri?

  Props to this guy for doing this. I gotta give him credit. I'm, I'm more into this than you are. I kinda love that a guy's dreaming like this. I also think it's insane and slightly, you know, impossible.

• 50:37Sam Parr?

  I bet you, you don't put your money in it.

• 50:39Shaan Puri?

  I will not put my money into it, but I did put my money into something slightly crazy also. Uh, I put a very small amount, put 25K into a, uh, which is like below what I would invest in any other startup, into a guy trying to build a startup city. So, uh, but I think that that has better odds of succeeding than this world fair.

• 50:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, cuz you have rent every month.

• 50:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, well, can I talk about that real quick? I know we're late for the other thing, but basically what this guy's doing. So we've heard about startup cities. Balogy came on this podcast and he kinda said, I think the 2010s were about crypto and I think the 2020s are gonna be about startup cities. Balogy also invested in this. So it's this thing called Praxis. And basically what they did was they created this, um, social network, like kinda like a club in New York, LA SF with just a bunch of cool people like founders, entertain, people from entertainment, like Hollywood, New York stuff.

• 51:27Sam Parr?

  Circle jerk shit.

• 51:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, just like, you know, Soho House type shit. And so they host cool parties. So they've just been hosting cool parties and then basically they were like, awesome. We have this seed community of dope people. And, you know, a city is basically just like, if you wanna create the next Hollywood, right? You need all that aspiring actors. You need the filmmakers, whatever. If you need, if you wanna create the next Silicon Valley, you need the fun, the VCs and the entrepreneurs and the engineers to build stuff. Um, and so either these guys premise is basically like, if you're gonna build a new city, you need to have a, a network effect of dope people who wanna be around each other. And, um, so he's been curating this community for a while and then they're going to the, um, like Mediterranean and they're going to these countries like, hey Croatia,

• 52:10Shaan Puri?

  can we get like a piece of land that's ours? Like, give us this land for free. Um, that's beautiful land by the ocean. And let us crumb up with our own financial regulation, rule of law, and we're not gonna do Croatian law. We're gonna do our own law. And like, just give us total sovereignty and in exchange, you own a piece of equity in this land and we're gonna bring like the best. American cool kid talent to this like this startup city, basically to come live here. And and then we're and basically it's a real estate company that's just building buildings and renting out the the office space and all the residences to the cool kids.

• 52:44Sam Parr?

  Theoretically, I'm into this. I would have to, I would want to know, are the people like buttoned up? Real estate people or are they like people from Burning Man who wear like Coachella hats all the time and? You know, like leather shoes, like, like, like, like leather, like pants. Like, I need, I need to know, like, what they look like and what they're about. If they're buttoned up, maybe.

• 53:05Shaan Puri?

  Want one of both. You want.

• 53:06Sam Parr?

  You want one of both. I agree.

• 53:07Shaan Puri?

  Who's just gonna, he's gonna be out there recruiting the community and then you need the real estate guy who's like, yeah, yeah, go do your thing. Let me, let me actually set this thing up so that this works.

• 53:14Sam Parr?

  Right. So, and by the way, on their website for practice, Cameron Weiss from the last company, he.

• 53:20Shaan Puri?

  He's a member.

• 53:21Sam Parr?

  He started blogging about the World's Fair on March 16, 2021. I linked it to you.

• 53:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he's a member. That's, that's, that's the kind of dreamers you'll get in this community. So I put a small amount of money into it because I'm just really interested to learn and like. This is, this is a wild idea that, um, you know, I think the portfolio has to have some wild ideas. It cannot just be. Like things that are easy to understand and easy to like imagine working because I think we'll miss out on the the large outlier winners.

• 53:48Sam Parr?

  So, all right, pimp your, uh, can people still sign up your rolling fund?

• 53:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, go to, go to Angel List, type my name in and then you could just, you don't even need to email me. You could just subscribe to my rolling fund and then I'll email you. So you can invest with me. We're doing, we have about four million, uh, and four million a year. We invest across about 30 startups.

• 54:06Sam Parr?

  And for me, I don't do a rolling fund. I have a syndicate. If you go on to Angel List and type in like, it's called Hampton VC because I used to live on a street called Hampton. Not because I'm from the Hamptons, but Hampton VC.com. If you just go there and then just click learn more, you'll get taken straight to the Angel List page and just click apply. And then whenever I have a deal, you just are notified and you can invest or not invest. It's up to you.

• 54:27Shaan Puri?

  And Sam's memos are dope, so you should go subscribe.

• 54:31Sam Parr?

  Well, thank you. By the way, everyone's saying great stuff about power writing.

• 54:34Shaan Puri?

  Oh, yeah, they love it. I'm putting my heart into it. I, I'm like, I was like too embarrassed if it sucked. So I like really, really tried.

• 54:41Sam Parr?

  Well, everyone's saying great things. Sarah's class is going live soon, but they're saying great things about it. All right. We'll talk to you soon.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.