Wait, My Intern Became a 21-Year-Old Millionaire??

Episode 510: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) sits down with his former intern Ishan Haque (https://twitter.com/ishanhaq). Ishan went from making $30k/year to $40K in one minute by taking one big bet. Today he’s a 22-year-old millionaire thanks to early investments in companies now worth billions like Animoca and Afterpay. (This episode is not intended to be personal financial advice). Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to our YouTube channel here. Want MFM Merch? Check out our store here. Want to see the best clips from MFM? Subscribe to our clips channel here. — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com/ — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (2:00) Recruiting tactic: Sliding into the DMs (7:00) Knowing your win condition (11:00) Content creation for serendipity (14:00) Ishan makes $40k in one minute (20:00) $100k bet on Animoca (28:00) Passing on $2,000,000 (35:00) Spending habits of a 21-year-old millionaire (40:00) Crypto casinos and starting Shuffle (48:00) Managing regulatory risk (51:00) Getting first customers (54:00) Influencer campaigns that work (1:05:00) Business Idea: YC for nerdy kids (1:10:00) Business Idea: CRM for cashed up niches (1:13:00) Business Idea: VIP Management Software (1:16:00) Business Idea: Cultural Concierge for Biz Dev (1:22:00) The underrated growth model behind MrBeast (1:24:00) Content creator rollups (1:26:00) No small boy stuff — Links: • AfterPay - https://www.afterpay.com/ • Animoca - https://www.animocabrands.com/ • Stake - https://stake.com/ • Shuffle - https://shuffle.com/ • Kick - https://kick.com/ • RuneScape - https://play.runescape.com/ • Spotter - https://spotter.la/ Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  I remember at one point you're telling me in Slack, you're like, these people just offered me 2 million bucks for this. Yeah. I'm like, holy shit, you did it. We started the podcast, my first million, you've just made your first 2 million. Congrats. Like, I can't believe this worked out. You're like, I'm not gonna sell though. And I was like, wow. This guy's insane. And I was like, that's an insane story. Alright, so I can't tell you how many times I hear this. People will DM me every single day and they'll say, hey, I'm just calling my shot right now.

• 0:38Shaan Puri?

  Today, I'm a small boy. In three years from now, I'm gonna be on MFM. I'm gonna be on my first million. I'm gonna make my first million doing XYZ. Yep. Every single day I get a message like that. Here's somebody who actually did it. This is Ishan. He was my intern, turned guy who's made millions and millions of dollars, lost millions of dollars and had a crazy journey in between. You were the guy who I created this podcast with. Yeah. You were the guy who, the cover art of our podcast, he created it. The intro song, originally, the original intro song, he created it. You know, I didn't even know how to record it, audio at the time. This guy did all of it. You went from behind the scenes to now you're on the stage, here in my house, and we're gonna record this episode. So, I've made it.

• 1:22Shaan Puri?

  You've made it. That's the teaser. Alright, let's tell the story. Alright. What's up, man? Yeah, what's up? I, uh, so people don't know this. So you are Ishan. Yeah. I've known you since you were 18 years old. You still are kinda like 18 years old. I would, yeah, yeah, yeah, I still look like you. You're 23 now? Yeah. Alright, so I'm thinking this episode is kind of like, your title wasn't intern, but it's gonna be good for YouTube. So we're gonna be like, intern, my intern became a millionaire. Yeah, I was glorified. And my official title is cheapest stuff. I'm just like, kind of like. And by the way, I got a good track record with this. I don't know if I'm doing anything, but I'm good at picking people because I worked with you at age 18. Yeah.

• 2:06Shaan Puri?

  Steve Bartlett, 19, maybe 20, uh, years old. There's a guy, another guy named Sean, who just tweeted out today that he's like, "Those four months I worked with you were super influential." He went from like guy just working someplace, now he's got an eight-figure agency. So that was cool.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22Shaan Puri?

  Danny Miranda worked with me for a little bit. People know him in the podcast game now. He was with us for a couple of months before he started creating content. So I feel like those two Ashans, and maybe getting people that like,

• 2:33Speaker 01

  "Sounds similar to your name."

• 2:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the closer the better, actually. All right, so you've had a crazy run, but let's do, let's do the history. So how did we meet?

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Well, I followed you on Twitter when I was like 12, 13 years old. I was tweeting. My whole strategy was let me get my like, like profile picture.

• 2:52Shaan Puri?

  And before you do that, I'm gonna reintroduce the one part, which is,

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56Shaan Puri?

  One thing that people don't know is this podcast was started actually not with me and Sam, me and you. I hit you up on Twitter DMs.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And I saw that you were doing, you were podcast editor for somebody else I knew. I think Corey or Angel List or something like that.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:15Shaan Puri?

  Corey Levy. And so I had this idea, all right, I want to do a podcast. I hit you up. I didn't know how old you were, but I was like, hey, do you want to, you want to produce for me? Then we got on a call, I was like, oh man, this is like a kid summer. You were at school at the time. And I was like, will you, do you know how, how audio works? And you were like, yes, I got you. So the, if people see the, the cover art of the podcast,

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:37Shaan Puri?

  you made that. The initial like, you know, 20 episodes or whatever, all those intros and all the audio, you made that.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:44Shaan Puri?

  Then we started doing business experiments together. This was at a time where I was kind of like, I think I want to build an audience.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:51Shaan Puri?

  And I also want to just launch some businesses. We launched e-comm businesses. We launched a bunch of shit together. And then we all went off our own ways. And then you had a crazy journey after that where you made millions of dollars, lost millions of dollars and all the rest. So we're going to talk about all that. Let's start at the beginning, so. I DM'd you, but you actually were on Twitter where you said you were, what, 13 years old?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, 13 years old. I followed you. I was trying to just get my face like on all these people. And because I'm from Australia, right? There's no, there's no Silicon Valley. There's no like VCs and cool angels and all these people. So I was like, let me, this is my avenue to get to these people. And then let me just like, even if it wasn't like a lot of value add, I'll let me just tweet random shit at you guys.

• 4:32Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  I was doing that. So if you just go on my Twitter, you'll find tweets of me, you know, tweeting off to Sean random shit and you'll respond here and there. But yeah, so I was like, when I was, yeah, literally like 13, 14, whatever. And then a couple of years off later, when I started the podcast with Corey, is when, yeah, you DM'd me and I was like, yeah, I already know who you are. Let's do this. I think your name was, I think I found you because your name was also Sean and I was like, this is, this is it to me. But yeah.

• 4:56Shaan Puri?

  So you, um, talk about the start. So when we were working together, tell me some of the things you remember. Cause I remember, I only, everyone's got their own version of history.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:05Shaan Puri?

  I remember in my head, like, you know, what we were thinking back then, but I'm curious. And this is our first time catching up in person because you live in Australia, uh, when you're just in town. So I said,

• 5:14Speaker 01

  And you used to live where I lived. I was living in Brisbane. You also like way back when lived in Brisbane. Yeah.

• 5:20Shaan Puri?

  So what's your version of history? What do you remember?

• 5:22Speaker 01

  The first thing I remember, well, I think the first thing I remember is when we were doing the podcast, like cover art and stuff. I sent you over some like, uh, you know, like here's version A, version B, blah, blah, blah. And then you were like, hold on a second. You should add your name to the, to the cover art.

• 5:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  And I thought, I thought that was really cool. That, that gave like me a lot of confidence. Like, oh, okay. Yeah. This was, I'm like, I'm, you know, a part of this as well. I remember that was, that was a cool thing you did because I think maybe there's some learning there with people that hire.

• 5:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. You make them feel special.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. You make them feel special. Do that. So that was also a really cool thing I remember. Also, I'm just like the kind of craziness of like, let's start a crystal store today. And then like a few weeks later, let's start this other D to C thing, like make up, make the store 72 hours, go off and, and do it. It was like, it was, it was like some variation of like an incubator, but it's just like, you guys.

• 6:15Shaan Puri?

  At this time, I'm working at Twitch. I'm hurting out my deal. We sold the Twitch. I'm now earning out and I know, okay. In a year, I get this vesting check.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:23Shaan Puri?

  But in the meantime, like frankly, I was pretty bored inside of a big company. I, you know, it's not. I knew that's not my long term. And I was like, you know, on the side here, what can I do to entertain myself? The podcast was one cool thing I'd always wanted to do. And then the other would be like, I would meet somebody and I'm like, oh, this person's killing it in Ecom.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:43Shaan Puri?

  Yo, Sean, I'm making an Ecom store. And I remember for the crystals thing, I was like, I read some article. I saw some magazine, like, I always try to look outside of, like, I don't look at TechCrunch to get tech ideas or like business ideas. I look, I was surprised. I remember reading like a People magazine and it was like Adele was saying she won't go on stage unless she has her like rose quartz crystal. And I was like, what? Like, that's insane. Like you, who believes in this crap? And I Googled it and I was like, after Kim Kardashian got mugged, she had like a $4 million ring. She got mugged and it was like, how did you recover? She's like, well, my crystals really grounded me. And I was like, and then you see all these celebrities. I'm like, if, again, I just think people are sort of like, I have this tweet that's like,

• 7:27Shaan Puri?

  the economy is just smart people paying beautiful people to market to, to, to sort of like the average people. And I was like, if all the celebrities are doing this, then there's got to be a bunch of other people that believe in this. And so I remember calling you and you were like, the best part about you was your game. That's like my favorite thing is like, if you hire somebody with no experience, there's a bunch of bad things. Like, I'd be like, dude, like, I haven't heard from you in two days. Where'd you go?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:53Shaan Puri?

  But then on the good side, it'd be like, he doesn't know any better. So I could just be like, hey, we're doing this and it's gonna be, we're gonna launch it in two days. And you're probably just like, I don't know, is that normal? Maybe that's normal, right?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because besides, like, I'd never, I've always been working for like internet people. I have never had like a traditional go to an office and like, and like, I was, I remember at the time, I was like, I'm like, I'm going to finish uni. Should I go and be a consultant for like some bank, whatever?

• 8:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you asked me that.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  So, because yeah, I just didn't know what the other, I guess I was just gay because I didn't know what the other world was like. I was like, all right, this is kind of right, normal. And doing this, so, um, see crazy stuff like just, yeah, creating different.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Ecom stores or different experiments. We did like a newsletter, the good, terrible, bad, very bad.

• 8:40Shaan Puri?

  And then dude, I was like that one.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Top five of free.

• 8:42Shaan Puri?

  Milk Road, right?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:45Shaan Puri?

  Milk Road became a successful newsletter company, but I guess before that, I don't even remember that. We did, we did launch a newsletter called the, the no good, very bad, terrible, something, something, something newsletter.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:55Shaan Puri?

  I don't know whether, why we called it that, but we basically were launching a bunch of experiments. And I remember at the time, one, one of my takeaways from that is that crystal store, for example, I didn't even know what winning looked like. So one problem with an experiment, because these need to use this word experiment, but the way a science experiment works, you have a hypothesis. You're like, I believe this, then you run the test and it either confirms it or it doesn't.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:20Shaan Puri?

  But I was using the word experiment wrong, which was like, I'm just going to try a bunch of shit. Without actually knowing like, what is the win condition?

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:28Shaan Puri?

  What is the success or failure condition of this? And so like, now that I look, now that I actually have an ecommerce bit like, are ecommerce business now, you know, is, is doing very well. It's an eight figure ecommerce business. Now that I know what an ecommerce business looks like, I can go back and think about our, our crystal store. Actually was doing very well, like I just didn't know. So for example, we were running Facebook ads. And the key metric for all ecommerce businesses is your ROAS, your return on ad spend. And I think we were getting like 1.7.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, like the rocks, we're selling these rocks for like 50, 60.

• 10:00Shaan Puri?

  They're crystals.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And yeah, I remember like the first few hours, we got that Shopify ding.

• 10:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's like amazing.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Like that was, I mean, most people start up a store that they don't have sales for like a couple of days or whatever, or weeks. And so, yeah, it, I think our problem was like, just didn't continue.

• 10:17Shaan Puri?

  We didn't continue, exactly. Cause now that I look back, it was like 1.7 to 2X.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:21Shaan Puri?

  And I remember thinking, oh, it's supposed to be three or four X, I think. Cause I had heard some idiot saying that somewhere. And I just thought that's what it is. And so I was like, oh, I guess this is bad. Turn it like, shut it down, let's do the next thing. Uh, you know, in retrospect, as I, you know, maybe I'm glad I'm not running a crystal store, but at the same time, like there is a lesson there of.

• 10:40Shaan Puri?

  I mean, sticking to it is obviously a crypt like you can't win without the stick to itness. But one of the things that makes you stick to it is not just willpower. It's like knowing your win condition. So like you, do you even know what to look at? And do you know what winning looks like? Do you know what the benchmark should be so that you can actually assess a successful versus unsuccessful experiments? That was one of my learning, one of my things I remember from back then. The other one I remember is like with the pod, we kind of like, we called our shot a little bit like we made this Google doc. Yeah. Of the plan, the one page plan. And now I call that my kickoff doc, but it was like, before we started it, I wrote this out. Do you remember that, that doc? Yeah, I remember. And it was, well, the first thing that you helped them was like, you need your 1,000 true fans.

• 11:25Shaan Puri?

  Like that was the very, very first thing that you're like, if we just got this, you can build a pretty big business just with, with a thousand people. That was like the first thing I remember. And then you had a few things like, we need to get to 100,000 listeners and get a bunch of other, other, like maybe build a business of, or like, you know, these ancillary businesses, adjacent businesses across it. And I mean, you did all that. That's the one thing you just kind of step back and it's like, I'll share the doc. I'll put the doc, uh, if you're on YouTube, I'm going to put it on the screen so you can see literally like word for word what we wrote back then. And it's not that it, it wasn't all right in that, uh, it all happened, but it definitely didn't happen on the timeline. I remember thinking we're going to hit, let's get to 100,000 downloads per episode. So that's the thing, like per episode, I want 100,000 downloads by the end of the year. So it's like 12 months.

• 12:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Took me three years. So like, you know, now we do that, but like, you know, it took three years for us to ever hit that mark. So it's kind of this old phrase like, don't confuse a clear view for a short distance. It's like, I feel like we had a clear view. I just thought things would happen faster. I overestimated kind of like what could be done in one year. But with that one, because it's so fun, I just kept going and like, sure enough, like, you know, it all, we, we, we. That was like the right thing to keep going. Those are the other things, shiny things. And that was like the right one. The one that was making no money, actually costing me money. Cause one of the things I wrote in that doc is I planned to lose $10,000 a year doing that. Oh, yeah. But it'll be worth it because I thought, you know, Creates like some serendipity.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:51Shaan Puri?

  You kind of talked about that too, like content creating serendipity or like just being online and being like in the mix.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:57Shaan Puri?

  Creates fortune.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Liking a post or applying to something or putting putting yourself out there. Who cares if someone that's like when you, I mean, it's different for you now. If you post, there's millions of people that look at it, but like just for like a regular person, when you post like a tweet and it says like 116 impressions, it's gonna like, that's all like, that's still some people that have looked at it and you don't know who it is, but you know, later down the line, that could, that could come in handy. And when we talk about some of the stuff I'm doing now, I can, I've gotten all my opportunities. Every single one of them has been like through Twitter or like through some like LinkedIn or some email or thing I've sent and late years later down the track, it's all come.

• 13:32Shaan Puri?

  Well, tell the story about the billionaire. So what what happened there?

• 13:35Speaker 01

  That's out it on Twitter? Yeah. Uh, that was a, that was me just like saying, I need a, I just made this like kick ass investment and let me like, I want more people to know about it. So I was like talking to like journalists and stuff like that, like, hey, write about the story and no one was really taking the time. But there was one dude that was actually, yeah, on Twitter. He, um, I just, he wasn't responding to anything else. I went on Twitter. I saw he's active there. I was just like, I just kept liking his posts. I didn't actually say anything. And then like, he checked out my LinkedIn profile and we started talking. He's like, okay, yeah, let me write about the story. And it was like, it wasn't like a Forbes or anything. It was like a pretty small news site that it's, it's so weird that they posted that article and a few days later, billionaire, I read that article and then reached out to you.

• 14:18Shaan Puri?

  And then we'll tell that story. So even that is like, um, there's this phrase that I read once, I think Mark Suster did a blog post about this called lines, not dots. Basically, the idea is like a line is just a collection of dots, like mathematically, that's what a line is. It's multiple dots, just all all connected. And so what he says is like, you know, and he's like, what people think happens is they see on TV that you go in, you meet this investor cold, you blow their socks off with this pitch and then they write you this check and say, you know, here you go, son, go, go on. And it's like, that's not what happens. Like that's movies. That's Shark Tank. That's not real. And the real thing is dots. And so he's like, you know, many interactions that stack up that when you look back later is a line. Um, and he's like, investors invest in lines, not dots. Meaning they're not just gonna like, it's not the very first interaction typically where it's all just gonna happen for you.

• 15:08Shaan Puri?

  And so it's. Following the person, liking the post, replying to something, they noticed that this person said something smart. Not the first time, but the third time.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:16Shaan Puri?

  And then after that, they follow you back. And then because of that, they see this other blog post you wrote. You don't even realize that one of your 98 views.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:24Shaan Puri?

  Was this person who's actually legit. And then go, you know, like, and then so those dots stack up and ultimately that's how trust gets built. That's how.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Framework. This is the framework king.

• 15:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Watch me cuss, baby. This is what I do. Yeah. So that's, I think, you know, what you've done really well. So, all right. So let's get to the part where we break up. So at some point we break up. We worked together for a while. I got a year.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  I think it was actually a couple of years of like knowing each other and like doing something.

• 15:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So we get to some point where you're like, you come to me one day. You're like, I want to day trade or something. And like, to be fair, you were actually kind of good at this. I remember one time we were on a call. And I was like telling you like some instructions or something like some action items. And then like, there was like no feedback.

• 16:09Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, yo, are you listening? Like, what are you doing? What happened? Where did we, is this thing on? And you were like, oh, hang on. Bitcoin just crashed to $3,500. I'm like, this motherfucker is looking at the Bitcoin price while we're supposed to be working on our very important crystal store or whatever we were doing. Whatever, you know, scheme we were in at the time.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:28Shaan Puri?

  And I remember be like, like two reactions. One, like annoyed, like dude, this guy's like not paying attention. Two, wait, Bitcoin crashed? Like, shoot, you know, he's buying shit I buy? You're like, because you told me, you're like, Bitcoin crashed. I'm trying to, I'm trying to place an order real quick.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  It was down like 60% on just that day. And everyone, everyone in crypto like knows that day. It was a very like.

• 16:47Shaan Puri?

  It wasn't in March or something.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, and like, it was like, you just never see it happen. This is like, this is not some altcoin. This is like the coin. This is, this is Bitcoin. And so when that happened, I was like, I've seen a few of these. I just wasn't a part of it. As I was like. I was like, sorry, I know I should be working and listening right now. I was like, I need to act right now. And so, yeah, I mean, I grabbed all the money I had. It was a couple of thousand dollars and I, well, I didn't just buy the coin. I was like, the degenerate in me, I was like, okay, let me try and maximize the opportunity. So I went on, people know BitMEX, I went leverage long on Bitcoins. I took all my money, did that. And when I went like-

• 17:26Shaan Puri?

  And leverage long means what here in this case?

• 17:27Speaker 01

  So if you buy a thousand dollars of the Bitcoin and you buy it, you know, 20x leverage, that means you actually buy 20,000 dollars worth.

• 17:34Shaan Puri?

  But if it, if it goes down by even a little bit-

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're, you're going-

• 17:38Shaan Puri?

  Why not?

• 17:39Speaker 01

  You'll have, you'll experience a thing called liquidation.

• 17:42Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  So getting liquidated is like your worst nightmare.

• 17:45Shaan Puri?

  And I remember you were like, what, four or five grand?

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like four grand. That was my collateral. I was 20x or 25x leverage. And when I clicked the button to buy, like, everything went frozen. And I was like, I was thinking, oh shit, it's just me. Or like, I'm, I'm kind of freaking out. And I go on Twitter. That's why I was, I was, I was like, not really talking. I went on Twitter and everyone else is like, BitMEX just froze. And I'm like, okay, it's not just me. It's, it's like the actual exchange. And I was kind of freaking out because I thought, all right, it's gone. I've, I've already clicked buy. And, and I mean, when you, when you're looking at the chart, if you look at the one minute chart, it was just going down. Like it went down, down, down, down and it just stopped.

• 18:23Shaan Puri?

  You're assuming-

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you'd assume that when it like unfreezes, it would have just kept going down. Cause who knows? This was like a black swan event, right? So we don't know what's going on. And so that's why I was like frozen for a while. Cause I thought I just, I'm an idiot. I just lost all my money. But when it unfroze, I saw I was up like 40,000 dollars.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  I was like, oh, is it like my heart was-

• 18:46Speaker 01

  And yeah, and I think you went on Coinbase, you, you-

• 18:49Shaan Puri?

  When you told me, I was like, I was like, come on, man. I was like, but wait, what? What's the price? And I went and I went and bought 25K that day too.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:56Shaan Puri?

  And so, which was actually an amazing trade. Like we made more money in that, we made more money in that one minute.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:03Shaan Puri?

  Then we did like, you know, six months of experiments together, you know, whatever, you know, three months of experiments that we were working on at the time. And there is a lesson there, which was like, um- You know, the, the best kind of like ideas don't all just come from your head like, you know, you're at the time, I like intern chief of staff, but you were like, this is a buy right now. I'm going to do this. And by following you, I kind of like got the benefit of that at the time. And, you know, Bitcoin wouldn't trade it up to like 70 grand or whatever since then. And, you know, it's come back down to earth, but my takeaway from 10x from that day. Yeah. My takeaway was, uh, there's like, there's a very few moments where you can make all the money versus like trying to make a little bit of money every single time.

• 19:46Shaan Puri?

  I think like, I'm not a day trader. I don't think I'd go back to being a day trader or whatever. But I think all the money is made when there's like a few key decisions that happen maybe once a year or once every few years, once every few months, whatever it is. Um, and you just have to act on it with like, it's a bit degenerate. You have to like, there wasn't a lot of thoughtful planning around, I'm going to buy Bitcoin because of this mathematical equation that's for guy. It was just. Times like this doesn't happen every. Right. All the time. So let me act on it. In the moment, I was like, this guy's a fucking degenerate, right? Like I didn't even know exactly how an option trade worked. I was like, okay, this is crazy. But at the same time, you're right. Like, if you go read that Buffett quote where he's like, you know,

• 20:28Shaan Puri?

  there are moments or seasons where, you know, the, the, the clouds fill the skies. And it's about to rain. And he says, in that moment, let us not come out with spoons, but bathtubs to sort of like make hay. There's also, you know, Naval has a quote that's similar to this, which is, he's talking about luck. He says, one of the versions of luck is being able to recognize an opportunity. Yeah. So it's, uh, it's the version of luck. It's like, he goes at level two, whatever. Or he's not the inventor of this. I just heard it from him. Um, but, you know, the, the original guy who wrote this, he basically says, you know, it's sort of luck favors the prepared mind. So anybody could have seen that price. And most people, when they see something going down, they get scared. You were like, this is Bitcoin, Bitcoin flash crash.

• 21:12Shaan Puri?

  Blink decision that this is a good bet for me, like whatever risk reward adjusted.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:18Shaan Puri?

  And you know, you were correct in that. Later, I'm going to tell a story. So you come to the States. We fly you out and I remember we go to a restaurant and we invite my buddy Sully and we're talking. It's always like, okay, Sean, like, you know, tell me like, what, what are you excited about?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:34Shaan Puri?

  And you go, I'm excited about this company called Anamoka. And you had told me about this company three times at this point and you were like, oh, I love the stock. Anamoka, I like the stock. It was like, you're like the GameStop guy, right? You're like, I like the stock. And I was like, Anamoka, I've never heard of this. Sounds like a yogurt. And then I was like, why do you like it? And then you told me something that I didn't really ask, but I was like, what does it do? And you're like, oh, they're making these like bubble games or something like that. Okay, whatever. Later, when we're at this lunch, I was like, hey, Sully built a mobile gaming company and sold it for whatever, a hundred million bucks more.

• 22:07Shaan Puri?

  Tell them about that. What's that mobile gaming company? And you started telling them, he's like, okay, interesting. So I had heard it like four times from you, never took action because again, I was not at that time listening and probably the way I should have. That's an investment you made millions of dollars off of.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:21Shaan Puri?

  Tell the story of how after we stopped working together, you go from intern to multimillionaire in a very short, like how long?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, it's a very short amount of time. So at, so I've known about Anamoka. It was Australia, the listed company. So it was on the stock market and initially bought like a few thousand dollars worth. And it did well, it went up like Forex, something like that. So I was like, okay, great. That's, you know, I've done, I've done my, done my thing here. And I, I was looking at it as an investment, so I didn't sell it. And then the Australian Stock Exchange, they came after it and they were like, oh, you guys are dealing this weird crypto stuff. We're going to have to de-list you.

• 22:56Shaan Puri?

  Well, they weren't crypto initially. They pivoted to.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So what about the time when I bought, so I bought them initially because they had an announcement and they were like, we're going to do a thing called CryptoKitties. And we're going to work with them. And so I saw that as like, this was before like a pretty boring robot company. Now it's like a sexy crypto.

• 23:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's like a sexy crypto thing. It's like, how do you value a blockchain game? Like this is like, think, things that are like hot to value is kind of what I like because then nobody knows what the price is.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:23Shaan Puri?

  So like as a degenerate, I like that. And so, yeah, so anyway, it did well. None of this episode is financial advice. This is actually.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  NFA.

• 23:32Shaan Puri?

  Me just. Laughing at the craziness of this story. So let's, let's tell the story. So you buy more.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  So yes, I bought it. It got delisted. So I'm like, holy shit. My money is gone.

• 23:43Shaan Puri?

  How much money were you in at that point?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  It wasn't a lot. It was like 25,000. That it became, yeah.

• 23:49Shaan Puri?

  But to you, that was a lot.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  That was, yeah, that was everything to me. Yeah.

• 23:52Shaan Puri?

  So you put, you put everything you have, which is 25 grand at a time. It gets de-listed off the stock exchange because the exchange is like, you guys now do crypto. We don't know. We don't like crypto. We don't know what crypto is.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:01Shaan Puri?

  Now you're liquid stock. You can't even sell.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't sell it. And so this was like,

• 24:06Shaan Puri?

  You tell me this. I'm laughing at you. I'm like, I remember you told me this. You're like, dude, I got fucked on Animoca and you're like, it's delisted. I'm like, wow. I thought you'd probably just lose money because the stock goes down. I didn't think you would lose money because you just can't sell it anymore.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:20Shaan Puri?

  But you did something even crazier. You doubled down on crazy. So tell,

• 24:24Speaker 01

  So throughout that year, I did a few things. I learned about like secondary markets or something I didn't, you know, I wasn't really exposed to before. I learned about that. I did a lot more research into like what they were doing. And I've always been in the, and I was the perfect person because I, you know, I had a Minecraft server when I was a kid. So in high school, so I understood how if you turn these in-game items into something that you could sell, this is a win-win for everyone. So there's that. I was a gamer at Haas when you, when you, and I was in Bitcoin way, way long before, maybe 2016. So when you mix all of that together, I was like the perfect person to see the light. I was like, okay, what they're doing is actually something that I want to get more exposed to. And, you know, why buy a bunch of different tokens and

• 25:09Speaker 01

  companies, but I can just buy the, get exposed to the people that I think will be the overall winners here. And so once I, you know, got, had that conviction, I was like, okay, well, how do, how do I, I can't market buy the stock, right? So I was like, how do I actually buy this thing now? And this was like a year it's been delisted. So in that time, I was working for you and another guy. And I had a few other bets that did really, Afterpay was one of them that ended up being,

• 25:34Shaan Puri?

  You told me about that one too. Yeah. We were talking about buy now, pay later.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:38Shaan Puri?

  And I had met Max Lech from Affirm.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:41Shaan Puri?

  I was like, oh, this was a great startup idea. And you go, oh, we have, actually Afterpay is better.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:46Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, bro, your little Australian version is not better. You were like, no, look at these numbers. It's better. And that stock just went.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  That went crazy.

• 25:55Shaan Puri?

  From how you told me like really early on that one.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  So I, yeah, yeah, so I did, yeah, so I did really well with that. I also have a pretty crazy story there where I followed one of like, like, I didn't have a lot of edge being like a kid from Australia, investing in a public stock. So I followed, you know, all the C suite people on Strava to see where they're at. And one of them was like near the Square offices and they never like, so that's when, um, you know, they ended up acquiring. So I got like the little edge there.

• 26:23Shaan Puri?

  Billion.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  But that was a, that was like a little hack.

• 26:26Shaan Puri?

  You're like, I don't have satellites to track cars, but you, that's legit. You follow the guy.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:31Shaan Puri?

  And I, oh, he was at the Square offices. You're like, they might get bought.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  So as a guy from Afterpay, um, the C E O was at, he was in San Francisco and he was like, pretty close to Square offices doing his run. And I was like, this, there might be something, I didn't know what was going to happen. I'm like, I feel like a partnership would happen, but then, you know, Square came out and bought them for like 30 billion or whatever. And, you know, the stock go away crazy. But, um, anyway, I made a bunch of stuff, I made money from doing trades like that. And working for you guys. All right. So how do I buy Animoca? I want to buy more. And, you know, the way I went to like Facebook groups initially.

• 27:03Shaan Puri?

  You told me you were like, there's a Facebook group of people just like commiserating.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:07Shaan Puri?

  We're wailing.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:08Shaan Puri?

  Recovering, uh, Animoca stockholders were just there bitching and moaning like.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  They were generally disgruntled. Like they were talking about at one point doing like a, like a class action against Animoca or whatever, like all this stuff. And so I was like, okay, this, like at the time when they were listed, they were worth like 80 million or a hundred million dollars. I was like, okay, I could get a huge discount on that. Um, and so, yeah, I went to Facebook. I got a few people and they're like small trades. I was like, I need bigger, how do I get like people that have the big money? So I got the list of the top shareholders. You can, you can request it publicly in Australia, might be the same here in the States, but I got the top holders and I was like, all right, let me go through each one of them. Which one of them is disgruntled? And. There was a few that I still couldn't, like, the Australian press wanted me to, like, name these people.

• 27:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Um, I think one of them, say Republic, but they're like pretty big time people that, I mean, they're already rich.

• 27:56Shaan Puri?

  Money, yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're smart money. They're already rich. They had this because they invested in some fund, had some allocation, blah, blah, blah. So they were like just willing to get rid of it. They're like, it's de-listed. They don't know, they probably don't know that they were in crypto or they're gaming. It's just one of the things in their portfolio that's, you know.

• 28:10Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  And so.

• 28:11Shaan Puri?

  So yeah, buying it for like what discount? Like?

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Fifty percent.

• 28:14Shaan Puri?

  Eighty percent.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  It was more like eighty, ninety percent discount to what the law.

• 28:19Shaan Puri?

  And I remember when you told me, I have the Slack messages, what you told me, I'm buying it for, you know, ten cents on the dollar.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:25Shaan Puri?

  And I'm like, bro, you're just lighting money on fire. Like, you're going crazy. Like, what's gonna, like, that's a insane reaction to the bad news bears.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:35Shaan Puri?

  Was I'm gonna like double down. But it worked.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  So I didn't, I think I.

• 28:39Shaan Puri?

  Mother.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  I know the double down. I, as I, yeah, I put everything I had is about a hundred K that I just like, uh, this, this should work out. Well, it's also like, um, if I lose all this money, all right, I'm in my twenties. I'll like.

• 28:53Shaan Puri?

  You told me this.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:54Shaan Puri?

  You go, you're like, I'm twenty years old.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm just gonna, I'll just like get a job and I'll save up again and I'll, I'll just, I've got, this is the time to do every, take all these crazy bets. Um, I don't have kids. I don't have anyone that's heads on me. So, uh, yes, I made the bet. Um, I did all the transactions. It, that itself was like a bit of a crazy thing, cause they take some time to do, to do private transfers in Australia, like the documentation for that. Um, the people that were handling the transactions, they were taking a long ass time. So one of them, actually the biggest transaction, after Anamaka, you know, announced they're now worth a billion dollars, they did a raise. I was like, do I even have these shares? Cause it was still, it was still taking time to process. I'm like, I put the money in the escrow account, like, I, I obviously ended up getting the shares.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  But yeah, it was like the, this whole new world of, all right, I couldn't, like, I wasn't like an angel investor before. I didn't understand how to do this. I had to just like, sort of claw and.

• 29:48Shaan Puri?

  Did they even know you're like, do these guys know they're dealing with like a twenty year old counterparty?

• 29:52Speaker 01

  And these, I'm actually, I don't know, like, they had no clue that they were, yeah, that was, yeah, it was pretty, like, these are, these are like pretty serious, legit guys that were. I mean, they thought they were, you know, shoveling dirt onto me and then.

• 30:03Shaan Puri?

  Right. They're probably laughing. Yeah.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, their perspective was, let me give dirt to this person. And I thought I was buying a goldmine. And so I was like, all right, let me, let me do this. But I remember I, and it, a lot of this, there's a lot of luck involved, obviously. And so when I bought it, you know, I thought this was like a very long-term play. Like after five years, there might be something here. But it was only after about three months. So I bought it, the valuation I bought it, that was like 30, 40 million. And a few months afterwards, they raised it a billion dollars. And I remember getting a call, there was like this Hong Kong fund that reached out to me and, cause I, you know, I was, I had to like flex a little bit to people. And I put it online that, you know, I bought this company. So you're up 50X. Yeah, I'm up. Yeah, it was, it was worth like, I think $2 million. And I was like, holy shit.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Let me like, let me like, I'm not, let me like have a think of what to do here, cause people want to buy it. And I had a Hong Kong fund that reached out and was like, we'll buy all of it.

• 31:00Shaan Puri?

  We'll give you $2 million today. You're 21, 21 years old or something.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  This was actually right before they actually announced they're raising it a billion dollars. Some fund probably heard they were going to raise it a billion dollars. Then were trying to get it off me at a like, at a discount. So I was like, I think the initial, the initial offer was like a million dollars or like whatever. And I remember calling my dad. I was like, holy shit, like this is worth a million dollars. And I was saying like, grandparents, you know, this is a million dollars. You took this to Jared, but like, take the money. Like, what are you doing? Take the money right now. And so, like you said, I was like, just wait a few months. Maybe this will be more. I was like, I, I don't think that like this is it here. And especially cause I was tracking all the numbers, especially NFT like volume, like NFT volume sales. And I've been tracking this every single month and for like, it was like a flat line. It was like someone was dead here.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  And then in this month, there was a little uptick. So I'm like, this, these little upticks don't just like start and here there's, there's some like praise that goes on here. So I was like, if this is worth a billion dollars now, and this, this, the hype is just starting now, let me like ride this way.

• 32:03Shaan Puri?

  At the peak, Animoca was worth what?

• 32:05Speaker 01

  At the peak, they raised, their latest round was $6 billion.

• 32:08Shaan Puri?

  $6 billion. So you were buying in effectively like a 20, $30 million valuation.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:14Shaan Puri?

  It runs up to $6 billion. I remember at one point you were telling me in Slack, you're like, these people just offered me $2 million bucks for this.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:21Shaan Puri?

  I'm like, holy shit, you did it, dude. We started, I guess my first million, you've just made your first $2 million. Congrats. Like, I can't believe this worked out. You're like, I'm not going to sell though. And I was like, wow, this guy's insane. And I was like, that's an insane story.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  So you held it.

• 32:37Shaan Puri?

  What did I add now?

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Uh, who knows? No, no one knows. I mean, I was with, uh, I met, I met Yad and I met the board. It was a few weeks ago in Sydney. Um, and the, the real thing here is I, I forgot who said it, but they were like, never count your winnings unless it's like cash in bank, it's realized. And so I was like, hey, you have to exit this. And the way to exit it is either I sell it privately. All these unicorns, they're at massive discounts right now. So it's like, I could do that. I like, you know, at its peak, it's worth eight figures. Do I sell now for seven figures and, and cash it in? That's always like a decision that plays on my mind.

• 33:13Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Otherwise, um, you know, they have plans to list and do an IPO and.

• 33:17Shaan Puri?

  What you told me at the time, because I was like, dude, this is insane. I was like, hey, man, listen.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:21Shaan Puri?

  As your pseudo father, father figure here, you should sell this. And you were like, I, I see what you mean, but you were like, well, I, what do I need $2 million for? You were like, I don't have something I'm gonna go do. I'm not gonna change. I don't want to change my lifestyle. Like, I like my lifestyle.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:37Shaan Puri?

  You were like, I'm just gonna look to invest it somewhere else. And if I think this is still the best place to invest it, I'm just gonna do that. And like, you know, if I lose it, I'm so young that like, whatever, I get the story and I'll just keep going. Like, and I'm not, and the way you said it, like, the, my meter went from, oh my God, this guy's insane to like, honestly, I see his perspective, which is that 2 million bucks changes most people's lives. But you were like, I don't think that, that doesn't get me where I'm trying to go.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:07Shaan Puri?

  And in fact, uh, you know, if I still believe in this, I just want to see where this goes in for, you know, for a while as crypto can, as NFTs, you were right, like became the thing that year.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:17Shaan Puri?

  Uh, you know, there was sort of like a peak moment in that where it became worth more than $10 million, right? So it was like, would have played out very well. Timing is always very, very tricky. Do you look at this as I was trying to try it? I was trying to time a, a bubble? Or do you look at this as?

• 34:33Speaker 01

  I believe in this company and I still believe in this company and that's why I have the stock. Believe in the company and also I was kind of seeing this as like, there's, there's like a few people that have like these life holds. It's like, uh, you know, you hold these, like, this is a lifetime hold. This isn't like you buy in, you sell out, whatever. And I was convincing myself of that. It's like, I will, I'll buy this and, you know, when this becomes like the next 10 cent, I'll have a couple hundred million dollar stake and that's how, and I didn't have to do it. This was like the only investment I had to do. I didn't have to make all these other investments. There's still some like part of me that believes in that. It's like, I, I still see a pathway where like in the next 20, 20, 30 years, whatever, this is like

• 35:14Speaker 01

  a hundred, 200, 300 billion dollar company or whatever. And it's like, I have, I've got a pretty decent, you know, stake in that. And so, yeah, that, that's what I was like convincing myself of. That is a bit less now during times like this, but I still have some thing here where I'm like, okay.

• 35:32Shaan Puri?

  Is it hard to not just get attached like identity wise to like, I don't want to be wrong?

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:38Shaan Puri?

  I've made that mistake before. Like, I think, you know, especially this is such an extreme case. It's one specific thing. You were so right. You were boy genius. Then it crashes, but you're like, am I now boy idiot or am I boy genius? Is this the moment where I held through the tough times or?

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:53Shaan Puri?

  Did I just fuck up and I need to learn that lesson? Like?

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:57Shaan Puri?

  Really hard.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:58Shaan Puri?

  How do you deal with that?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Well, I think, um, well, I went into, let me just like do something. Um, so I was like, I was still investing some money on behalf of other people and I was going around and meeting, meeting founders and stuff like that. And that's why I'm like, I'm doing something else right now. So.

• 36:14Shaan Puri?

  Well, okay. Yeah. You have other bets.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've got other bets. So that's what got me through it. I was like, if this goes away, I need to make sure that this is the next big bet. I don't need to be, I like, I don't need to be right on this one. Um, like, look, you know, if it ends up the way it's going, I could, I've got time to make more bets and be really right on something else. Yeah. And also you had done so much degenerate trading that like you don't emotionally mood swing like most.

• 36:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the money all actually becomes play money in a way.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Well, aside from Anamaka, I had a bunch of other token investments, especially when when Facebook renamed to Meta. Remember, I was buying up all the Metaverse coins, Decentraland, Axie, Sandbox. And so I experienced, you know, making millions of dollars, like liquid cash. I also I learned a lot of lessons that I also lost a lot of that money when I didn't manage my risk posts. But I I experienced like the numbers just became like you're looking at the screen. I have no attachment to it. There'll be like those days where I'd be up a couple hundred thousand dollars. I'm like, holy, obviously I spent a lot of it. I was, you know, all my boys were treated well.

• 37:21Shaan Puri?

  When I eat, we all eat.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like, I was a pretty shy, nerdy, nerdy guy, right? So I didn't really know how to talk to girls, but if you want to learn how to talk to girls, get rich. I had, it's like a, it was like a huge confidence boost. I was, yeah, I was.

• 37:35Shaan Puri?

  It was just gives you the confidence, it's just the confidence for you, which.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was a confidence. It was like.

• 37:40Shaan Puri?

  Even if she rejects me, I'm still, I can go look at my Meta Bass later and feel good of always.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it was more like, yeah. And also for me, like having two million dollars in a bank felt like a billion dollars to me.

• 37:50Shaan Puri?

  Of course, yeah.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  I'm like, I'm spending a lot and it's just like, it's not going down because I'm like, I don't have kids and I have family. I don't have any, I have no obligations whatsoever. So even a lot didn't put a big debt. What'd you, what did you do anything stupid? So yeah, I got an apartment. I got a, I got a Tesla. I spent like, there'll be weekends where I'd get like limos out for me. My boy would get like, like I remember like my birthday. We got like three limos. We drove down to the Gold Coast, which is like, you know, what Gold Coast is in Australia.

• 38:19Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I'm so happy to hear this because when I, like, I don't know what I was paying you back then. It wasn't much.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  The very first thing was, it was 30K a year. I think it was.

• 38:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we started 30K. I think it went up after that.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:30Shaan Puri?

  To maybe like 80 to 100.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:32Shaan Puri?

  Like that. That's what I was paying you then. And I remember at the time being like, oh, this is not going to work. This guy's getting like super rich, doing these like crazy investments on the side. Like, yeah, it's not going to make sense for him to have a job at some point, which is great. Like, my goal wasn't to have you work for me for 20 years. It was like, here's a young entrepreneurial guy. Come get some reps with me. Come like, just get you off the traditional path.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:55Shaan Puri?

  And then like, I hope you go do big shit and like, you know, I could be your biggest fan and all that. That's kind of what's after and I'm, yeah, I've had my popcorn, you know, watching, watching you do this stuff. And it's being totally entertained the whole way. Yeah. Cause you definitely like, had like a roller coaster.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  You're kind of like those like Wall Street Bets kids, basically like, yeah, I was on Wall Street Bets like since I was in like high school. Like I was, yeah, I was always on that forum. There's the equivalent in Australia. There's a thing called hot copper, which is like the equivalent of Wall Street Bets. And on that, I was like the most active person. I've got, and my nickname was Mr. Silicon Valley because I was just investing in tech stocks.

• 39:29Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  And I'm like, if you go on like, everyone can look at my profile. It's like, I'm, oh, I'm tweeting about Adam Oka. I'm like talking about Adam Oka on that platform. And there's another company called Brainship that ended up becoming like a multi billionaire because of AI craze and stuff like that. I was constantly looking at anything to do with what is like the next 100x stock. Cause for me, it's stocks, right? I kind of invested.

• 39:49Shaan Puri?

  You told us some story, a billionaire takes you out to lunch and it's like, what's the next Adam Oka? He reads the article and he's like, I gotta meet this whiz kid. Takes you out, he's like, what's the next one?

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:01Shaan Puri?

  You shit your pants immediately. You're like, I don't fucking know.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause during that time, like I'm, I mean, this was Zerth era, right? So I'm like, everything I'm telling people to invest in, it's going up and up and up. And, um, you know, I'm a genius. Yeah, I'm a genius. And so I was like, oh shit. But I truly believed, I was like, Adam Oka just raised a billion dollars. I was like, uh, you should, you should invest in Adam Oka. Adam Oka is the thing. That's, that is the next thing. And he was like, okay, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And in the next few days.

• 40:28Shaan Puri?

  But inside he's like, goddamn, I love that confidence.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And next few days he ended up becoming like the top 10 shareholder in the company. Bought out tens of millions of dollars of stuff. And then obviously, you know, Adam Oka didn't stop at a billion. Yeah. So he made, you know, over nine figures in that.

• 40:43Shaan Puri?

  So then that. He tipped you a little bit on the, on the way out or tipped the dealer?

• 40:46Speaker 01

  And there's that comment.

• 40:49Shaan Puri?

  Fair enough. Yeah. So, um, all right. So you go through that crazy journey. One of the things that comes out of that was. You were then on behalf of this guy, plus other people, you were doing other investments.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:01Shaan Puri?

  One of them is Shuffle. Let's talk about Shuffle. So you had flagged me a while back and you were like, hey, crazy story. I think on the pod, I was like, can't say who told me this.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 41:12Shaan Puri?

  Now it's all, now it's like way more public. At the time, you were like, hey, there's a company called Stake.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:19Shaan Puri?

  That is making unbelievable amounts of money. You were like, they had like a whatever, eight hundred million dollar dividend last year. Like, that's just, that's the profits they took out. You're like, this guy, one of the owners, I don't know, how old were they? They're like,

• 41:31Speaker 01

  they're in their like late twenties, mid twenties.

• 41:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like twenty seven years old, bought a fifty million dollar house in Australia.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:36Shaan Puri?

  And then another guy bought like a whatever, a hundred million dollar house. And it's like,

• 41:39Speaker 01

  that's how you know someone's like rich, by the way, when they're, yeah, buying like,

• 41:43Shaan Puri?

  oh, look at the real estate.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is like, you know, that when they're buying an asset like that, like,

• 41:46Shaan Puri?

  because people didn't know it. The articles are basically like, mystery, you know, mega millionaire buys fifty million dollar home. And then it was like, they had two companies, they had like a software company that makes like,

• 42:00Speaker 01

  gambling sultan for, yeah.

• 42:02Shaan Puri?

  It's like, makes like the gaming software to go play like the games. And then they have Stake, which is the casino, the like basically crypto casino. And they're like, you know, intertwined companies or whatever.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:13Shaan Puri?

  Little Alameda, you know, FTX, you know, I'm getting some vibes here as I describe it all out. But either way, like Stake has been, you know, it's become like huge. You know, they have Drake playing and then whatever gambling and shit like that. So you meet these guys who are doing a competitor to that in a way.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:29Shaan Puri?

  Um, how do you describe Shuffle and tell us about like, this crazy space? Cause I only know what you told me about the steak thing at the time.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:36Shaan Puri?

  And then since a bunch of news has come out, like kind of validating what you said, um, tell me about the space and tell me.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  At the time, so I was, so I was traveling around just Australia, meeting other founders and I was at this dinner. And at that dinner, the guy, there was a guy that was like pretty good friends with the Stake co-founders. And he would like say these numbers, this is before the articles and stuff like that. So he would say some insane, batshit crazy numbers. And I'm like, if these numbers are true, this is the fastest growing tech startup in Australia in history. Like, this is like, maybe in the world, like this is like very, I mean, they were founded in twenty seventeen and they're going to do a couple billion dollars in revenue. This is like some kids in their twenties, right? So. Initially heard of that, I was like, okay. And then already at that time, I remember messaging you about, I wanted to start like a crypto trading, like let people do, like, I want to start a, I titled the document, I want to build like the world's largest casino. Right.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  And I remember this doc. Yeah.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  And the way that that product is actually like a huge product now. Um, I don't know if you've heard of Rollbit, but yeah, they have like a crypto's trading thing. I was looking to do that, but that's like regulatory, just like a nightmare. Um, it's like an unlicensed thing. And, and so I was like, okay, but I see this gambling stuff. It's, it's huge. Stake is, you know, they just did a billion dollars in net profit, um, in a, in a single year. How do I get some exposure to that? Um, and this, going back to like how I find these opportunities, I just remembered there was another like kid in uni that lived in a whole different city to me in Australia that posted his research on Afterpay. And this was like a couple of years ago. And I don't know why he popped up in my mind again. So I went looking for that article. I found his name and I, uh, hit him a message on LinkedIn, like, hey, like, you know, what are you doing these days?

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Um, let's catch up or whatever. And yeah, we caught up. And then that's when he started telling me about like these other crypto kids in Australia that have like made it pretty big, doing all this degenerate stuff. And they're starting a crypto casino and it's going to be a competitor to, not to stake, but this, like, that's the thing. The market is so huge. There's, I could, you know, there's, there's a few other competitors that are also doing a billion dollars. Um, and it's just not really reported on, right? Cause it's kind of like a, uh, yeah, kind of shady industry. So I was like, okay. Uh, for me, you know, coming from pretty small town in Australia, when, when you meet other people that are kind of like you, and we all had a like success in our own domain. I'm like, if we just come together, we're going to hit something big. Um, and I just wanted to be around those people.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Right. And so it was more like a bet on this like team. Yeah. Just like also ambitious, smart, slightly degenerate or very degenerate. Autistic. Yeah. Like, uh, 20, young, 20 year olds, basically. Yeah. And these old people, and we've all, we've all kind of been through the same thing of making a lot of money, losing a lot of money. So we can kind of like lean on each other in that way. Like they, we are. Understand each other in that. So.

• 45:26Shaan Puri?

  By the way, this happens in like, it's happened in online poker. I remember like the rise of online poker and the kind of poker kids who all made it and they all kind of lived at houses together and yeah, figured out how to like each like beat the game together, basically. Uh, same thing happened with social media. So like the Tik Tokers or the viners who all went and lived in the same building in Los Angeles.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 45:46Shaan Puri?

  Collabed with each other, plus traded tips, plus like got brand deals for each other and they all like rose up way faster than the people who were on their own or didn't have the kind of connect.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Just was my Juntaug.

• 45:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Uh, so, um, yeah, so that's how I met them. But I was like, we all kind of agreed, a lot of the background of the shuffle team, they come from like the big exchanges. FTX is one of them, Bitmex, Crypto.com, that's all their backgrounds. So we all had.

• 46:14Shaan Puri?

  The hard heard, uh, Stan heard of the, uh, of the sketch world.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  This sounds like we, we all, and yeah, obviously I've traded on all of them and we all just had like, we all agreed on this macro thesis of every single cycle, there is like this one clear big widow, which is the exchanges, right? They, their business model is every bet, every degenerate bet you take, they have a little fee.

• 46:37Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  It's called transaction fee for them. For us, it's called hazard, but it's the same exact thing.

• 46:41Shaan Puri?

  Same model.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  The same model, uh, struck, the legal structure is actually really similar as well. They will like get a license out in Seychelles or, or, you know, FTX was Bahamas. Crypto casinos out in the Dutch Caribbean and Curacao. So it was like, there's all these similar.

• 46:54Shaan Puri?

  What is that? There's like some place that's like, they just made it their business some, some country.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Right? That's it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Curacao. Yeah, that's the, that's.

• 47:01Shaan Puri?

  Where the hell is Curacao? What is?

• 47:03Speaker 01

  That's true. It's just a place, uh, where you can, I mean, anyone, if you want to get a license to do like an online crypto casino, um, you could probably spin one up in like six weeks.

• 47:13Shaan Puri?

  And it's very, and that's their model. They are, they're like, we're open for business for casino, for online casinos, basically.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:19Shaan Puri?

  And like, that's where everybody goes to get their.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, like we, we're like in the same structure as Steak and, you know, all the other guys, um, we're all under the same license and there's some risks to that, obviously.

• 47:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  What happens to our license? How long can you sort of play this game? And you have to, uh, you sort of calculate what, what amount of risk you want to take there. But yeah, that's, that's, it's exactly the same as these exchanges that were out, out, out, um, you know, in the Seychelles or, or Bahamas. And so. We saw that and we're like, okay, here's a clear difference between exchanges and casinos, though. Exchanges are raising at tens of billions of dollars and that they've got all the fame. Whereas, you know, in, if people just understood, if this was more public on how profitable these casinos are and how they're very similar businesses to exchanges, then, you know, there would be some rerating of valuation for these casinos. And so that was like, that's the-

• 48:11Shaan Puri?

  But a lot of these investors and funds, they have like a no vice clause, right?

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:15Shaan Puri?

  They just can't invest in weed, they can't invest in gambling or porn or whatever.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:19Shaan Puri?

  Even though there's money to be made there. So I think like, that's one of the other reasons is like,

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:23Shaan Puri?

  Some people just either themselves individually morally say that, or their fund charter basically prohibits them from doing those things. So they're just like out on it.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:31Shaan Puri?

  Even if they know it's a great business. I mean, who doesn't think a casino is an amazing business?

• 48:34Speaker 01

  We raised a seed round and that was like the hottest.

• 48:38Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. My biggest regrets was not investing. I tried to invest and then it goes like, oh, it's like one entity here, here. And I was like, oh God, like if I have other people's money, if it's my own money, fine. But when I have other people's money, I have to like, you know, think twice. And just in that time, they like closed or whatever.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. But anyway, like that's, we all agree that in this like next cycle, whenever it is, it could be five years down the line, who knows? But in the next cycle for crypto, we believe that there will be one, two or three casinos in the top 20 of all the coins. And that's billions of dollars of value that we think that, you know, we could, we could do. And a big difference with us is like, like I'm on this podcast right now, like, we're not anonymous, like, we're not like, these people that, like, all these crypto casinos, usually they're like very anonymous people. And, I mean, if you're putting your money into a platform, you want to know who's behind it, right? You want to know who these guys are.

• 49:28Shaan Puri?

  How do you, like, all the, if, how do you follow all the FTX stuff going on right now? I'm like really into this trial. It's like my soap opera right now that I'm paying attention to.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  It's your Roman Empire. That's-

• 49:39Shaan Puri?

  It's my Roman Empire. Exactly. Do you, have you been following it? And also like- How do you feel about that? How do you think like, because it seems like crypto casino is like risk times risk in that sense of like, I don't know, something between malpractice to like, you know, the craziness that comes with with just that amount of money flowing through something?

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:01Shaan Puri?

  And you said you have people that worked in some of those places. What did they, I guess, what stories have you heard? And I guess, I don't know, like, not like the Sean spokesman, you know, like, not you professionally, if we can't, just like, my friend, like, how do you think about that stuff?

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, it's, I mean, being in crypto already, you already, you have like an appetite for speculation. And so anyone that's already in the industry, it's like, you're, you're taking some, you're taking some risk on, okay, there is some like regulatory risk already that one day this license might close down and your business is like, you know, screwed up like, and so you have to be kind of smart and calculated about that. It's like, okay, what are the other licenses? Can we start building it up? Like, we had to build our entire platform like in a modular way. So if something happens to one license, we can split off, let's say our casino and then put a license to a sports book and offer it in the different regions. So it's just like.

• 50:53Shaan Puri?

  Lost. It's like we had to move the island.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:55Shaan Puri?

  We lost it. He's like, we moved it.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so some regulatory risk, there's some like.

• 51:00Shaan Puri?

  It's funny, like, products have, most startups have product market fit risk. Like, we don't know if anybody wants what we have to offer.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:08Shaan Puri?

  Because you have no market risk. Then the second tier is technical risk. It's like, if we can make a, whatever, self-driving car, people are going to want it. There's no market risk, but there's technical risk. Can you even build a self-driving car?

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:22Shaan Puri?

  But there's no technical risk either, right? It's like, I mean, obviously you have to do technical work, but it's not, that's not the risk in the business. It's all regulatory, it's all regulatory risk in this. It's just so different than like 99% of the other startups I look at.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:36Shaan Puri?

  Very few times do you just get regulatory.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  There's also just like actual risk that you have to manage of your book, like limits that you, like, we will sweat sometimes like when we, because we had to start up in the limits, you know, there's some high rules that come and go like, I want to do a 10K blackjack hand, I want to do a 25K blackjack hand. And you're just like, okay, holy shit, we have to, you know, if they have a few good runs, it could be all of a sudden down a couple hundred thousand dollars. And I see your revenue is not always guaranteed. That's also like the biggest difference in this, in the.

• 52:05Shaan Puri?

  It talks about the traction. So you guys launched, I don't know when.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  In February of this year.

• 52:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. What's the, what can you share traction wise?

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Uh, so you know, we're probably going to do a half a billion in volume like this month. Um, and you know, this is generating a few million in revenue a month. Uh, and hopefully this month will be a few million in profit a month. And you know, we, this is also another thing that like, these businesses are built to strip out the cash flow. It's like you, you, you build the business and then you have, you pay this out. This is not like, you're not praying for some exit. We all went into it knowing that no one's going to buy a crypto casino. You build it to make a lot of money and then, you know, trip, trip the, trip the money out. And pay it out to all the holders of the business. So, um, that's also like, yeah, it's a very like, yeah, it's great. Yeah, it's a good problem.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  So yeah, we've, it's only been a couple of months, but, um, you know, it's, yeah, probably 50 million run rates. Probably where we're at right now. Super impressive, crazy. Um, any good stories about like, I don't know. How did you bootstrap it? Where'd you go get your first customers? How did you, because that was your job. Yeah. Yeah. So you'd be like, I'm in fucking Asia right now, uh, you know, meeting people. I'm like, what are you doing in Asia? You're like, I'm, I'm building the brand. I'm figuring out how to get this thing out the ground. Well, this is like a really, and the, the first thing that I, I don't know why I didn't really know this, but the people that come and play on your site, if they like to gamble, you know, they probably also have some other vices. And like, they're probably not, some of them are probably, you know, can get very angry, very easy.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  The whole thing is about either you make money or lose money. So when they make money, obviously they're happy. When they lose money, you know, right? This place sucks. Especially this, beyond like, I'm going to find out where you live and I'm going to find out like, so that was like the, when you talk about your first time customers, like your first time customers are a pretty rough people that you have to do. So, um, I mean, the first thing we went to was we're all a bunch of crypto kids that made a bunch of money and then we gambled it ourselves. So like, we already had a lot of other crypto kids that made a bunch of money and, you know, like to gamble. So we went to those guys first and like, hey, come, come, you know, plan our website and, and test it out. And we would, you know, there's little tricks and stuff of like, stuff with like deposit bonuses and like, yeah. Kind of your standard like sports play motions and stuff like that.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  One thing that I think we did that was, oh, that that's pretty interesting that we found out was, okay, we should stop spending so much time trying to get thousands of people who will deposit like ten, twenty dollars or whatever. Cause they'll come on, they'll come on your side and it's good for them to, you know, play, but they will lose five dollars and then, you know, spend forty eight hours in your support, you know, I'm going to kill you. Where, where do you guys live? I need my five dollars back versus like, okay, let's, let's maybe try and find customers that, you know, not like that. And we got pretty lucky in some parts of Asia, especially Japan, right? Like they are, they are people who bet really big and they're very respectful. And they're very like, they don't waste any of that time. Like they will lose money and play with honor.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's like, okay, these are the customers we want. Now we know the customers that we want and it's good for the business. And yeah, we started making some pushes there and, and trying to find, uh, yeah, this is a pretty heavy like affiliate business. You want to find, you want other people to go out and do the work because you can't do Facebook. We can't do Facebook. Guys were prohibited from doing Google, so you can't do PPC. So you have, you have to find really creative ways of trying to acquire customers. And yeah, that was, yeah.

• 55:37Shaan Puri?

  Well, this is why like steak, I think, bought or they created K.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:41Shaan Puri?

  And they're basically like paying Twitch streamers, you know, gobs of money reportedly like fifty million, hundred million dollar contracts to come play. Cause they're like, oh, these are popular people. One of the things they'll play is we'll give them money to gamble on our platform. They gave Drake like tens of millions of dollars of like, go play, show people that you're doing a twenty million dollar bet.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:02Shaan Puri?

  And are you gambling twenty million dollars one night? It makes you look like a baller. It creates great content that's going to go viral and get you likes. And all those people are going to see that gambling on steak is fun and Drake does it, right? Like that's like their, yeah, that accurate. That's my perspective.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  So steak pioneered that, like they'll like, uh, we can't bid on these other channels with all these other, like other casinos. Um, and so let's try and find other ways and the streaming model like they pioneered that, they worked easily. The thing that's genius about it also is that instead. Of like an influencer posting a picture saying, hey, come play on steak. They're playing the product. They're showing you how it works.

• 56:37Shaan Puri?

  They're seeing their reaction.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're seeing the reaction in picture with the whole thing. So it's not only are you educating people about how to play it and how to like this like next level in terms of, I guess, like player value as well, like, like they will deposit and, you know, they'll play, they'll lose. And then one, they're watching the favorite streamer play again. They're like, all right, time for me to also deposit again. So we found out like the affiliates or the influencers that are really like to have a Discord channel. They, yeah, they have a, you know, they're constantly live streaming.

• 57:05Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Those people make the most money.

• 57:06Shaan Puri?

  Something you said like, uh, we would not like, rather than have you have a million followers. We want you to have, you know, 2,000 people like active in a Discord that you talk to all the time. That's more valuable, right? Like.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  And I, I think this doesn't just, this isn't just for like casinos. I think like for e-comm and they're like, there's people that do Facebook groups and.

• 57:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  Anywhere there's like a concentrated, like you have like those thousand, you know, loyal fans, whatever. Those customers are worth, yeah, all the money.

• 57:35Shaan Puri?

  We did a influencer campaign. We spent a hundred thousand dollars on influencers. Probably the first like paid influence campaign we'd done.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:42Shaan Puri?

  So we put, I was like, let's try it. Hundred thousand dollars and we're going to spread that across these like, I think we did, seven influencers, I think.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:51Shaan Puri?

  And so these people who have like, you know, let's call it 250,000 to like three or four million followers on Instagram.

• 58:00Shaan Puri?

  And I shit you not, some people, some of those people who have a lot of followers literally had zero conversion. Zero. Like dude, I could post on Facebook, you get one conversion. Like it's crazy. Some people kicked ass and it's like, what's the difference? I've noticed that, you know, the Instagram has this one feature, which is like, when, um, not everybody has it, but like you can broadcast. So like, I don't know if you've seen this, but like Instagram has this like, almost like one to many group chat.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:26Shaan Puri?

  You can send a message and they can only emoji react. They can't like, it's not like your fans can chat back, but it looks like a chat. Right. And I noticed that the people who have active versions of those where they'll just be like, oh, you know, my favorite mug.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:38Shaan Puri?

  It'll get like 3,000 like lights there.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:42Shaan Puri?

  That's a way better signal for who actually converts versus like just a generic post or story or follower count.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:49Shaan Puri?

  Which is like, you know, neither here or there. And I think for that really move product, you can tell like the difference in it.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  It's also just about them being like very high intent. And so I think about the people that would go into that broadcast channel in the first place, it'd be like a small percentage of like that person's like most loyal like fans or whatever that are active and you know, right? Yeah. So I think for like that, that could be applied everywhere. Uh, wherever you can get like, who cares about trying to get, you know, four million impressions? I just want to get, I want my product in front of like the thousand most, I keep using the word degenerate, but not degenerate, but like, you know, whatever the thousand people that are.

• 59:25Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I use degenerate positively too. When we were hiring, we used to, you know, companies have like corporate values.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:31Shaan Puri?

  And it's like integrity.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:33Shaan Puri?

  And honesty and like, everybody has the same values. It's like, don't kill somebody or something. I don't know. Ours was degeneracy.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:41Shaan Puri?

  And people were like, why does it say you should be a degenerate to work here? And we were like,

• 59:47Shaan Puri?

  what it is. Like, that's what we want. We want people who were, who like, when they work on something, like there's just two types of people. There's some people that like, you know, they work to live and some people live to work, right? Like, right. We are the types that when we do a project, we go all in. We love doing it.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:02Shaan Puri?

  We obsess over making something fucking awesome. That's going to take a lot of work. And late nights, we don't want to feel like we're like asking for a favor every time we try to go above and beyond to do something cool like.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:13Shaan Puri?

  And but it wasn't about working hours only. That was just one aspect. The other thing we used to say is like, we noticed that the people who were the best earlier in their life had a degenerate like obsession with something that wasn't like. The thing your parents would reward you for, or the school would reward you for. Right. So for a lot of people, it was gaming. It's like, oh yeah, I just spent like an ungodly amount of hours in, in Ultima 4, or like in a RuneScape or something like that. That was such a strong signal to us that like, this person is going to be great now with us because they have that switch where once they get really into something, they practice to like, to master it and they get obsessed. They want to beat the game. And like, they're not doing it for the, because people told them to do this. They're, they're doing it because they can't not do it. Yeah.

• 1:00:57Shaan Puri?

  And so we found that people who had early obsessions in life were the best people that we wanted to work with. You also want that in customers or an influencer who's got people that are diehard fans. Like, why do people love Taylor Swift? Like, Swifties, they just, they identify in that tribe is what you want. Yeah. And I think that like, whether people like the idea of a crypto casino, or that makes them feel like really crazy or whatever. I think that the marketing lesson about how these guys market themselves is like, one of the best, like, marketing hacks that created a multi-billion dollar outcome was this one realization that, hey, let's pay these influencers and celebrities to specifically do live streaming on Twitch, which is not the main marketing channel, for 99% of other brands.

• 1:01:40Shaan Puri?

  And let's give them money to gamble so that people can watch the, the sort of thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Yeah. Live in real time. And that is the best marketing for our product. I respect that.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  I also think for those guys, I think they're really, they're like, one of the most like fascinating entrepreneurs to come out of Australia because I, I think for Kick, it's not, it's actually, I think the goal here is, all right, they've now, you know, made this five to 10 billion dollar, like crypto casino. It's like, where's this, they want to go more now. They, you know, Twitch was valued at 40, 50 billion. I think these guys legitimately just want to go in and, you know, although.

• 1:02:13Shaan Puri?

  They want to use the money to beat Twitch.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  They want to, yeah, they want to use money to like, this is their next thing to get them to like, I think they want to leverage, they were already working with all these streamers, paying them, you know, millions of dollars to gamble. It's like, well, let's actually just also pay you guys a billion dollars to stream, but on our platform, it's like, I think they saw a, a sort of gap here. They, they came at the right time. Um, but I, I, yeah, I don't think it's just for gambling. I think these guys truly, um, you know, love.

• 1:02:38Shaan Puri?

  There's no way that works because streaming doesn't make that much money. Yeah, yeah. There is no way that that works in the sense that, uh, you know, that they would really have to be betting that they could, and, you know, okay, so I don't think it could work, but here's the case where it maybe could. So I remember TikTok now is obviously massive.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Shaan Puri?

  Do you remember when TikTok came out? So like.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was Musically and then they did like.

• 1:03:04Shaan Puri?

  Musically and Musically was doing good, but didn't like. Make it to like the full mainstream and it was kind of still seen as this like. Kitty lip syncing kind of it wasn't like TikTok today. You can go learn shit.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:15Shaan Puri?

  You can people make you laugh. You can promote your business. You can sell products. You could do anything. But then Musically was literally like tween girls lip syncing, right? That's like all it was, right? There's like more of what the more of what the product was. So then they rebranded. It's like they get bought. They rebranded TikTok. Which I remember laughing about the name, like, what is that name? And they literally spent a billion dollars. Marketing that app to make sure every teenager has it installed on their phone.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Shaan Puri?

  And like I, we had a kid who was working for us at the time that was in high school, but he would come and work at our office. I was like, dude, what do your friends think of TikTok? He's like, oh, it's like the joke. He's like, you gotta say like. Everybody knows TikTok. He's like, there's not one person in my school that doesn't know TikTok. He's like, we don't think it's cool yet. But like, I gotta give him to him like 100% of every kid in my school. Is aware that there's a TikTok app. That they want you to download.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:08Shaan Puri?

  And like they actually brute force like created the network effect. I guess there's a world where kid could do that.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  But it's also I think you're banking on maybe they do something where the friction to buy something on live streaming. Is lowered and it, yeah, that's a whole new like avenue. I think this, I think they know that. The traditional model is not going to ever work and that. Let's just get all the eyeballs and then maybe they can flick some switch somewhere. And you know, like Instagram reels makes like 10 billion dollars a year. I don't know how.

• 1:04:38Shaan Puri?

  Like you. Cause it's plugged into the world's greatest ad engine in the world. Facebook's ad engine is the greatest ad engine. Maybe Google's. One or two, but like it's the reels based that much money because it's plugged into one of the greatest moneymakers ever.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  And live streaming is live streaming commerce is like a pretty huge thing in Asia. And so if it can, if it can somehow work in Western markets, I think like. There's something I think there where they could. Click the switch and then, you know, this is, this is how they go from, we're already worth a couple billion dollars. How do we get to 10, 20, 50? And maybe they don't care about how much they're worth, but what's like the biggest. Yeah. What's like the next? They've already won one game. It's like, how do we, how do we get to the next? So I think, um, yeah, that that's super like, I think more people should probably know about those guys.

• 1:05:21Shaan Puri?

  And are you like, I'm going to be a degenerate forever or do you like? You know, I'm just gonna do this for this period and then I'm gonna do something else.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Well, I'm, I'm just, I really wanted to be a part of something that could be huge and that could grow really fast. Um, and so I, I want to do that with shuffle and yeah, ride this wave. Um, like, will I do another thing in sports betting or gambling, whatever? I don't know, you know, maybe not, but, um, I like, like I mentioned to you earlier before, it's like you make your nut and go to your noble mission. I, I think, I think I might.

• 1:05:55Shaan Puri?

  Justin Mayer's quote, uh, love that, love that quote. Um, I love that quote, not because I think it's right, but because so many people, when they hear that, they're like, that's what I'm doing. Cause it's such an easy out to like justify anything that you're doing in the moment. Cause you're like, I'm gonna do the noble mission later. And so I love it cause it's hilarious how much people love that quote. I don't know if it's good wisdom or bad, but I can tell, but, uh, what, by the way, what, uh, ideas do you have? So, yeah, if you know MFM, you know, that's what we do here.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna get out my notes app really quick. Okay. And we might've already talked about some, just, uh, really quickly, there was, um, before we talking about kids that were playing RuneScape and stuff like that. I literally have already one in here. I had incubator around kids who are building businesses within games.

• 1:06:39Shaan Puri?

  I like that.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Cause I think everything.

• 1:06:40Shaan Puri?

  Awesome.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Every, so I guess during my era, like I'm, I'm a bit older now, during my era, it was kids that were building Minecraft servers. Or, um, I know for the guys that did steak, they were RuneScape kids. They, they built a casino in RuneScape first and then they did, they're anything. So it's like RuneScape, Minecraft. I think now it's like Roblox or like maybe, um, like Fortnite creator maps and stuff like that. Like if you're building businesses within games, um, every single person I've met that's done that, they're all like super successful millionaires.

• 1:07:09Shaan Puri?

  I a hundred percent agree. I, I think I tweeted this out. I go, what people think, uh, six, uh, like winners backgrounds looks like.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Shaan Puri?

  Uh, you know, what the world tells you, it's like, you know, good grades, he goes to a good school. Yeah. Has good internships and like, you know, uh, after school activities, runs for student council, but it's like, what I've seen is like what the real winners are, are like the kid, the guy who's running his own gaming server when he's 14.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:36Shaan Puri?

  Kinda, cause he just wants to be able to buy games. It's not like even running it as a business, right? Like the sneaker head, like sneaker flippers, basically, um, you know, people that are like hardcore gamers that are like. Become best in the world at a video game that's like super competitive.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:51Shaan Puri?

  That type and like, you know, which requires skills, strategy, communication, like ton, like obsession. Those are pretty translatable skills.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00Shaan Puri?

  Uh, you know, speech and debate is another one. Like there's these like unorthodox backgrounds. RuneScape is one that's crazy. The RuneScape mafia.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Shaan Puri?

  A number of this rich, young people I've met that the common denominator is, yeah, we used to be like, I didn't, I didn't play RuneScape, but they're like, yeah, RuneScape has like the marketplace or the plaza or something.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:19Shaan Puri?

  And they were like, yeah, we used to roll, we used to run the plaza or the marketplace. And I was like, geez, this is something. I have an idea around that, which is, uh, I was like, I want to create kind of like the OutKast conference. So basically what I want to do is be like, these are actual hotbeds of talent that nobody's really talking about. I want to invite like the people who do that. It's like your point of entry is like you, you need to hit one of those criteria. You run in gaming server or like,

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:43Shaan Puri?

  You're like elite at this, like, you know, I found this one thing called Minesport. It's like someplace you go that you pull, it's like Olympics, but for nerds. So you don't do, you don't run, you play chess and then you play backgammon and then you play like,

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:57Shaan Puri?

  You play like this, like advanced version of chess. Like, you know, you play Go, you play like all these games. And whoever's like the best across these like 10 really hard strategy games is like the Minesport champion.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you know, that guy's a freak.

• 1:09:10Shaan Puri?

  You know, they're all gonna be amazing. As soon as they decide like, oh, okay, it's time for me to have a career now.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:16Shaan Puri?

  As long as they just get to like funneling in the right place and don't just go be a, a McKinsey drone, like,

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:21Shaan Puri?

  You know, those people are gonna kick ass. So I'm like, oh, I want, I want to make a thing where it's free for them to attend, but you gotta be the best of the best. And I want to just be able to like curate that talent and be like, I'm going to place my bets on these people now. Like, hey, if any of you ever started a company, just remember this goodwill.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:37Shaan Puri?

  Of me bringing you here, paying for all of this because I want to be your first investor. Like I genuinely think that's going to be like one of the highest ROI things that I could do.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Well, I think a lot of them, so a lot of them get lost to like banking or something like that. And then, um, there's a lot of them as well that they just don't have guidance coming out of the first thing that they do. And so they fuck around for maybe like a few years and then like,

• 1:09:58Shaan Puri?

  That's why I'm going to OutKast cause like they probably feel like, oh, kind of like. A little bit. I wasn't doing all the shit that the other like achiever kids were doing. But say, no, no, trust me. Let me show you 10 other people that are like you. And then they're like, oh, I see myself in them. Like, I can do it too. This is the basis of like a lot of sports. Like, you see a guy that's from your hometown, and now you start to believe you can do it too. Why do you like Australian entrepreneurs so much? Like, what do you care? It's like, because they're from Australia, I'm from Australia. If they made it, I can make it.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:28Shaan Puri?

  That's cool, but had you never heard of any?

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  You would probably also be banking somewhere, you know, on that. And also, like, I think a lot of them, when you spend your time, well, your childhood, whatever, like, in a room, doing all this stuff, you're, whatever, you're making money, or like you're learning business skills, but then you start lacking in other areas. Maybe, so then like, that's setting up, setting yourself up for failure to waste some time, whether it's, then afterwards, you know, you have some girl troubles, or afterwards, you don't know how to do something with family, or whatever, blah, blah, blah, that. Yeah, I think that, that's why.

• 1:11:01Shaan Puri?

  Oh, that's a great idea. I'm just gonna have a kissing. I'm not gonna have a hot girl. It's like, yo, if you haven't had your first kiss, just let's just do it now. And we're gonna get that all out of the way. We're gonna kill, we're gonna crush these like lingering.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  But yeah, that was one of them.

• 1:11:18Shaan Puri?

  I mean, but what was your idea?

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  It was, I, I thought, the idea was like, just like a, like a, like a, you know, giving these kids like mentorship and like just incubator game. Okay, just like a little Y Combinator thing for, for these weirdos. What I see, yeah, there's a, I was just at a conference, I was just really surprised. I mean, something within conferences where I think maybe more people should make conferences for like cashed up niches. Because, especially if you do like the exhibitor model, where it's like, oh my God, like that, you know, and some of these people are, the one I just went to, they're paying a couple hundred thousand dollars for, for a booth. So maybe that starts off as you do your newsletter, whatever, you do like the, the low effort thing first, the low price, low effort thing of newsletters, whatever, build that audience, and then just immediately go into, like, I'm surprised you guys haven't done a conference yet.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Cause I feel like that would, that would make.

• 1:12:06Shaan Puri?

  Like an MFM one?

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, like an MFM.

• 1:12:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, just lazy.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Another one that actually kind of related, I think is kind of boring, but like a CRM for again like cashed up niches. So we're right now looking for like a new CRM platform and you know, everyone goes to like Salesforce, whatever. But they operate in like a hundred different verticals, right? And so who's going to get our 10K a month? It's going to be the one that is still, yeah, built specifically for iGaming, which is our niche, whatever. So right now, like we're making a decision and we're going to go with some other smaller company. We're not going with Salesforce, we're going with this other one. They're going to get out, you know, 10 grand a month, whatever. Because they're specifically, that's specifically for iGaming, right? So that's like another one that's a little bit boring, but it's like, if you could just find like some niche that.

• 1:12:50Shaan Puri?

  What are these other cash up niche? So like one, for example, I think is like farming.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:55Shaan Puri?

  I know, I mean, any real estate is another one, right?

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:59Shaan Puri?

  Within that, you could even be like senior living or.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:02Shaan Puri?

  HVAC, you know, like things like that where you know that everybody there can spell EBITDA.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  Well, it's like, it's, I think for anything that where the interactions or the behaviors of your customer is.

• 1:13:14Shaan Puri?

  I very, it's very high value, but it's also, it's very different to like, maybe like an e-comm or whatever, like, or like just a transaction.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  Like on our one, it's like you, you have a bunch of games that you like and you spend, you know, we want to know exactly if you've lost this amount of money. In the next few hours, we want to like make some contact with you and stuff like that. We can't really do custom behaviors like that with like a Salesforce or whatever, because or, or like whatever else CRM platform. Cause it's, it's very tailored to a very broad niche. So anything that has like.

• 1:13:45Shaan Puri?

  If you're saying high value customers and then basically figure out like first principles, what should this look like for this niche?

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think something like that.

• 1:13:52Shaan Puri?

  That's pretty good. I like that.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  That'd be a good idea.

• 1:13:54Shaan Puri?

  I think that's a very like, that's a very good sandbox for somebody that wanted to explore.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  And we, we just worked out this for, uh, it could be someone that does like. So in the gaming biz, there's, you know, VIP, like VIPs make up your whole entire business. If we're talking about, there's actually other verticals as well where VIPs is like your thing. Actually, every single business probably has VIPs that they're just like not interacting with. So maybe like VIP management software for e-comm.

• 1:14:21Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  For whatever, you know, even for like retail businesses or whatever, like you probably have, yeah, you probably have like customers that will come in. Let's say I started getting into like the hot, cold exposure therapy stuff.

• 1:14:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, nice.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  I started going like, how tech bro of you. I started going into these places like, you know, three, four times a week. But, um, you know, if these guys just would have know that like, I'm paying this much amount of money.

• 1:14:44Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Come up, sell me on something else or do something else. Like, I think that even like retail businesses, like just if you were to focus less of your time on trying to, you know, broaden and like getting, you know, paying on these Facebook ads to get the next thousand customers. What about the 10 that's going to spend like, you know, you know, whatever, five, 10 times more on the business. So that's probably, I think some VIP management software for.

• 1:15:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  That's guys, that would be.

• 1:15:08Shaan Puri?

  They could sit on top of whatever, whatever niche you choose. It could just sit on top of the current software and just be like.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:14Shaan Puri?

  But this one is all about your VIPs and we're just going to extract the data that we need. And then give you the actions or the recommendations or the triggers in order for you to like.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  When should, when should we reach out? What should we give them? What do they like?

• 1:15:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  That could, that could be one. This is probably not so unique, but I think, I don't know if you've used these, used people like this, but like, agencies for content that do, it's like full service of like thumbnails and editors. And I like, I don't know how hard that is to find, like people that really know their shit about, you know, creating online content. Cause it seems like every single person wants to like, you know, be a personality or brand right now. And so people that, I mean, a lot of these are like uni kids that know how to do this. But it's like exactly how to connect those middle. Yeah, they'd be the middlemen for the uni kids.

• 1:16:03Shaan Puri?

  Which is like done for you. So D F Y.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:06Shaan Puri?

  So like people who do this e-comm now, honestly, I think they're pretty scammy, but they're like, hey, we will just hand you an e-commerce business that makes cash flow.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16:14Shaan Puri?

  It's like. Anytime someone promises you passive income just run away.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:18Shaan Puri?

  But like, um, that's what they're promising. And a lot of people, I mean, these companies that are promising this are making a ton of money. And one of the reasons why is it's tempting to, instead of just saying, here, we'll teach you Facebook ads. But now you gotta go figure out the rest. What product? What's the supply chain? What's, what's Google ads? They're like, we're just gonna give you the whole thing.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:35Shaan Puri?

  Uh, Turkey. And so, you know, there's a version of that, like, there's video editors and content. There, there's, you know, copywriters. But like, you kind of want the whole thing, the sort of like done for you package.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think like a full service, uh, agency for all that sort of stuff might, might work out. Um, trying to think of what else? Uh, let's see.

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  Uh, this one's kind of related to like, maybe, uh, what you did with Shepard, but, um, so recently we, like, we, we had to expand to Japan, right? Um, and that is like, none of us speak Japanese. It's like, we don't know how to scale i- in that country. And so, well, what we had to do was like, first, let me research what other companies have done. And I remember reading, I think maybe it was like a Chamath video when he was at Facebook. And he was like, uh, we hired some MBAs and they flew over to Japan. They came back and, you know, a few months went by, we weren't growing. We're like, what's going on? We fired those MBAs. We got this like young woman from that was actually living in Japan. And within the first month, we're seeing growth. And we're like, wait, what? Okay. What are you doing that these MBA people haven't done? And she's like,

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  well, you know, on, on the Facebook profile, like, we don't care about your relationship status. We care about your blood type. And it's just like stuff like that, that you would only know.

• 1:17:51Shaan Puri?

  Localization, not translation.

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  And to find those people was like, it, yeah, it's, it's pretty hard to, to do that. So maybe if there's some like, agency where, um, like, so we hired uni kids that are, that speak native, like fluent English, so we can communicate with them. But also they're fluent in, you know, in Japanese and doing that, like, you know, our growth is being like TEDx or just like, they know the market in terms of, they think that, but none of them knew anything about like gambling. They don't need to know that. We can teach them that, right? They seem to know like, what are the people like? How do you communicate with them? How do we, uh, yeah, localize all that content? Do every?

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  Thing um to to cater to this market where and it's it's in certain markets very important that you are respectful and you appear like you're not you appear like you're not a foreign company that's trying to attract the customers you appear like you're born out of that country right um so so doing that whole process for me was very hard to find like the right people that spoke English that also was native in Japanese and and knew all that so uh maybe if there was some like shepherd like uh agency to help you okay you're expanding into this country here's like your you know growth assistants that are native that language and can do all these things um

• 1:19:02Shaan Puri?

  That's cool. I like that. Um yeah, there's two crazy things on that. One, if you look at the Facebook growth chart, like one of the key things for Facebook was getting the site translated and localized across like and they did a they had to do some crazy Wikipedia like shit to get the whole site translated because there's so many different I mean the Facebook site was kind of complex at the time and so um I remember seeing that that was very impressive to me. Second is there's a sub version of this, which is just to do business in certain places. You have to establish an office.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:30Shaan Puri?

  Uh like China, you can't do business there unless you have a local office. You can't do business certain places, can't pay you can't pay local people unless you have a thing or whatever. And just that can take like a year.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42Shaan Puri?

  And so like I remember with Twit when we're at Twitch, it's like, oh yeah, we're trying to put our servers here. We're trying to do this here. Um we're using that. We had to use Amazon's people to do international expansion because like Twitch even as a multi-billion dollar company didn't have like that expertise at house.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:57Shaan Puri?

  And they would be like, yeah, it's gonna be 12 months. And they'd be like, we're finally live in whatever so and so country with our office. I'm like, what? And like, and they're like, that this has been a year of effort. I mean, that's insane. Like, that seems like, can we turn that to software somehow? Like the way that Stripe Atlas did for company corporation? Like, is there a Stripe Atlas for the world in that way?

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  I've got a little funny story about the localization stuff. So like everyone probably listening is probably thinking like, oh, but why don't you just get AI to translate your stuff? And it's, it's not there to the point because we were using just chat GPT, a bunch of guys that were non-Japanese speakers in chat GPT. And, you know, we're talking to like very high value customers, right? And, you know, the AI hasn't really caught up in like tone or like certain like nuances. And so apparently like, you know, we were talking to a VIP like they were a kid, like we're saying, good boy. And like, and yeah, it was, yeah. I'm not sure if people are into that shit. Yeah, these people like, and then, you know, yeah, definitely, these people definitely were, they were like, they stopped playing with us. Yeah, yeah, like disrespecting people

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  a lot. So, um, yeah. So getting like native, yeah, getting like, especially languages like that, like getting like native people to know how to speak. Um, yeah, no way.

• 1:21:07Shaan Puri?

  So what one of the, one of the projects I worked on when I was at Twitch was like, we were trying to grow like crazy in Brazil. And so I was like, all right. Luckily, we had a group of people, like, there's four people in an office in Brazil that like, no one was even talking to really. They were like, they were so at arms length from me at headquarters. And I was like, hey, I'm here and you guys are like, my key people. They're like, oh, awesome. We have so many ideas. Like, can you help us do them? Well, yeah. I was like, what sorts of ideas? And they were like, well, you know, our, uh, everybody here uses YouTube. And so subscribe is like how you follow people on YouTube. But on Twitch, subscribe is you cost money. So everybody here, they open the Twitch app and they click subscribe to follow the someone they find interesting. It says pay $5. Right. They're like, dollars? First of all, five? That's a week of groceries. Yeah. And secondly, this

• 1:21:52Shaan Puri?

  slide you have to pay to watch people? Screw this. They don't even know that it's free to watch. Right. It's like, can you just change the text on that button? And I was like, oh damn, how many more of those are there inside this app? And another one was like, we were like trying to come up with like this marketing campaign. We were like marketing, like our marketing experts are coming up with these ideas. I asked the local team, they're like, hey, can you buy the, can you just give me your credit card? I want to buy five iPhones. I was like, iPhones? Why? He's like, in Brazil, an iPhone is like a gold bar. This is like, he's like, we're just going to give these away? Trust me, you'll get like 20,000 people watching the stream. I'm like, what? And he's like, this is a gold bar. Imagine somebody just giving out like golden bars. He just kept saying that and he did it and it was just exactly that. It was like, all of a sudden was just

• 1:22:34Shaan Puri?

  number one most watched guy on Twitch that day was the guy giving away one iPhone. And he he milked it for like four hours. He's like, I'm not giving it away until we get like 30,000 people in here. And he's like, and it worked. It was insane.

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's stuff like that that we find out like every week of like, oh shit, you guys actually do it this way and by us.

• 1:22:54Shaan Puri?

  Have you heard about what Mr. Beast does with this?

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  Uh, is it like the dubbing videos?

• 1:22:59Shaan Puri?

  So first, he exploded his growth by just being the one of the few American YouTubers to like create his Brazil page, create his Philippines page, create his Indonesia page. He created separate accounts for all those, localized them, hired somebody who speaks the language and like, yo, like when we were over hanging out with a some lady watching him speak in Portuguese and I was like, like, yeah, what the hell's going on? And he's like, oh yeah, she manages like my whole page for Brazil. Uh, you know, like you have to have somebody who speaks the language and knows it. And then what they did was, I was like, so do you dub it? He's like, yeah, we dub it, but we hire like voice actors. I'm like, why don't you, you can use AI. I'm like excited to be like, you can use AI. He goes, yeah, yeah, I'm sure you can. But like, he's like, what we do is we go and we find the guy who did the Spider-Man voice in Brazil.

• 1:23:45Shaan Puri?

  And he does my dub for like pretty cheap. And then every comment is, holy shit, it's Spider-Man.

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:51Shaan Puri?

  And like, he's getting crazy engagement because they're like, that's Spider-Man. And he's like, yeah, it cost me like an extra five grand, but like, look at what it did to my page.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  I think they turned that into like a agency where they like, they like, they do it for other people as well. Like it's,

• 1:24:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they do the done for you thing. They're like, yeah, if we did this for growth, we should do this for 20 other YouTubers. And I was like, dude, of all your businesses, like Beastables or whatever.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:11Shaan Puri?

  This is like the most underrated one because I'm like, this is genius. It's selling your sawdust, your byproduct. Yeah. Stuff you already built in-house. You're just making it available for others. Like, that's a no, and you're Mr. Beast. If you just said, hey, every YouTuber, like, you can use what I use, they'll all sign up, right? So it's like instant customer acquisition, paying and they take like, they're like, dude, you don't even have a page in the Philippines. We're gonna run, we're gonna create it, we're gonna run it for you, we get half or whatever, we get thirty to fifty percent.

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:40Shaan Puri?

  So it's like, they don't just take like a monthly fee. They own like, you know, the majority, you know, like a huge chunk of that channel. I'm like, that's a really good model.

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wonder if anyone's done like a roll up of YouTube channels and brands or whatever, like that seems like, seems like every niche ends up being like, you get rolled up, you get rolled up and do that. So I don't know.

• 1:25:00Shaan Puri?

  I don't know.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  Spotter? No, I haven't noticed.

• 1:25:02Shaan Puri?

  So they're kind of doing it. What they're doing is they go to the creators and they say, we'll buy your back catalog.

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:06Shaan Puri?

  So they say, we'll give you two million dollars today. You can invest that in your videos now to make better videos. And they're like, we can just see with AdSense, we'll make our money back in two years. And then after that, like forever, we profit off your back catalog.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  That's like the equivalent of like Taylor Swift selling exact masks or whatever.

• 1:25:23Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So they, this company is like, I don't know, raised a lot of money. I don't know. The key is underwriting. It's like, I don't know if they correctly underwrite these deals or not.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:32Shaan Puri?

  But like Mr. B sold a bunch of his back channel of that catalog, a bunch of other people have. So I think they've like, either raised at a billion dollar valuation or we're close to doing that for YouTube.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  I have a friend that I work with who manages speeds. I, you know, you speed the kit. He manages his IP. I don't know what to call it, like, whenever there's a video of speed go viral on YouTube or TikTok, whatever, they will claim it and then they make revenue off. They'll, they'll, they'll run ads on it. And I think, I think very quickly, like just speed alone, that's generated like a million dollars so far. And he's like, we should just be doing this for like, not just speed, like all these different creators.

• 1:26:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  They'll probably down as a, yeah, create like a big business that, that might be also like another like within.

• 1:26:12Shaan Puri?

  Because the way that works is if your video, if your IP is being played by somebody else, you can claim it and either they take it down.

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  They done, yeah.

• 1:26:20Shaan Puri?

  Or you get all the ad revenue.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think you should just do, yeah, do a lot of like, do that. So, because they found like, they're like. Just like, well, people created like speed, like a lot of the eyeballs that is on him is not on his videos. It's on the millions of compilations and stuff that are, that's going unclaimed. Like you're just like easy money that you could be claiming and getting. So, um, yeah, that's probably another thing that people should, you know, look into and.

• 1:26:50Shaan Puri?

  This is so good. Uh, this is great. These are some, some, these are fun ideas. Um, I'm glad we did this, man. This is awesome. And, uh, yeah.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Sean, uh, where should I follow you or go, what can they do? Uh, yeah, you can follow me. It's like Twitter, um, Sean, uh, Sean Hark, but the last two letters of my name is cut off. So it's H A Q. So you're S H A A N. I'm I S H A N H A Q. That's, that's my Twitter.

• 1:27:16Shaan Puri?

  Nobody knows what H is in America.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  Uh, H.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  Uh, but yeah, follow me on Twitter if you're on LinkedIn or it's look me up.

• 1:27:24Shaan Puri?

  Put it in the, in the description. Uh, dude, amazing. I'm proud of you. Um, you know, this has been so amazing to.

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  I'm done the validation.

• 1:27:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, I'll say it. I, I am super impressed. I just, I'm so glad you kind of. You've, you've taken, you know, the ball, you just run with it and you're taking just such interesting shots on goal. And like whether any of these work or not right now is pretty secondary. Like, yeah, by the time you're 30, your scoreboard is going to be filled up. You're going to have made all the successes you, whether it was this or that, I don't know which one.

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:55Shaan Puri?

  By the time you're 30, you're going to have it all done in terms of like, you know, the achievement side, but you're also just going to have had so much fun. And like, you know, these lessons you're learning about like hiring these kids in Japan because of this.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:06Shaan Puri?

  Those are the real lessons of business. And so I'm so glad you're, you're getting them, man. This is so cool to see.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  Thanks. I appreciate it. I've got one last question for you. I read you said, so you, I felt like your one life goal was like, I think it was like, you want to educate with a one percent of the world or whatever.

• 1:28:22Shaan Puri?

  And what I said, what I'd said at the time was I want to be like, for 1% of the world, I want to be their favorite teacher. Yeah. Like, you know, which was at the time, I think like 60 million people or something like that. I was like, if, if 60 million people thought like, cause like for me, I'm like, oh, like I learned so much from.

• 1:28:39Shaan Puri?

  Tony Robbins, or Tim Ferriss, or Neville, or these people like, I'd love to just be that for, for people. I think that's like, I know what they kind of have done for me. That'd be so cool if I was that for other people. That would, I think that would be like, the highest calling for me. Yeah.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And do you think, so is that, A, is that still the case? And then B, like, do you still want to do that? And B, like, what do you think will be the, what do you think will be like, the avenue that way you're achieved? Like, is it, because you're already in the ears of, you know, all these people, whatever those stats are now. Yeah. A very different sort of stats. Yeah. But, um, do you think you'll be podcasting?

• 1:29:13Shaan Puri?

  It's not actually that goal. That goal, I think, was arbitrary. Like, who cares if it's $16? Who cares if it's 1%? It was ambitious. Like, it sounded, yeah. It sounded good, but I'm like, I'm only need to say this to myself. Like, I don't, I need to believe it for myself, what this, what this actually means. And that's not something I like, needed to die to do. You know, like, I didn't like, feel like it was do or die to do, to be able to pull that off. It was something that, like, sounded better than what I really meant. It was also kind of virtue signaling, like, you know, um, I don't even know if like, teacher is the right word. But I guess the thing that I think about now is, uh, almost like the D, I, I stripped the ambition out of that and just made it really

• 1:29:56Shaan Puri?

  simple, but more true for me, which was, I want to be somebody that if I was 21, I would look up to this person. Like, I'd be like, that is what I want to be. That guy's awesome. And that's a combination of things. So for example, part of it is making content, being out there. Otherwise, I wouldn't have even known that this guy existed. Part of it is do cool shit. So that, like, stuff that, like, I respect, uh, or I think is cool in some way. Some of it is like, build a cool business. Some of it's like, uh, you know, this Outcast conference. Like, that's cool. I'm like, I like his reasoning behind that. I like that he went and did it. Or like, you know, You know, just giving somebody, you know, a bunch of money because you believe in them and like,

• 1:30:36Shaan Puri?

  my version of philanthropy. It's not like donating to the cause and going and sitting on the board of some nonprofit, but like, if you see somebody who's got a dream, like, fund it and like, make that happen. So I want to do cool shit that like, I would respect. And the last part is, the way you come across. Like, I, I know that my favorite people were charismatic storytellers. They were funny. They were likeable. They didn't feel like they were bullshitting you. They had moments where they were honest and like, they could have just not shared that, or they could have said a sanitized version, but they chose to just be real. So I'm like, those became my like scoreboard is like, would I at age 18 to 24, like, would I have thought this guy's the man? And like, I know even at that time, I was like, if I saw someone that was awesome, like Elon Musk, oh, he's amazing.

• 1:31:21Shaan Puri?

  I remember watching some documentary about him on the plane before he even started like Tesla, I think. It was like, a long time ago. And I remember thinking, this guy's awesome, but he had like, had four marriages at that point. I was like, that's not winning to me. Yeah. I like that he's an outlier in this one domain, but like, I didn't want to replicate these other three. So like, you know, to me, I'm like, the thing I would have respected is somebody who's like, just like, they're a really great dad. Like, for example, one of the things I want to do instead of, instead of doing another business or write a check, is like, I want to go coach like a high school basketball team, like Mighty Ducks style for a year, or two years, or something like that. Yeah.

• 1:32:01Shaan Puri?

  And I'm, if I, I remember if I had, if old me, if young me had heard that some guy was, some rich guy was doing that. Yeah. I would have been like, I don't care if he's not the richest or most successful. That guy's awesome and I bucks. And so I just kind of want to be the person, like, what's that called? Like, be who you needed when you were younger. Yeah. Not needed, but like, be who you would have admired when you were younger. Right. And, uh, That's the goal.

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:25Shaan Puri?

  Not the like, exact goal I had before, which I don't know if it's better or worse, but like it's more true for me.

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  So I know I think you'll say on some pod, you're like, you, I think you went to LA or something. You met a bunch of like rich people. And at this point now, I've met a bunch of billionaires and other cool people. And the most part, like a lot of rich people are like miserable and, um, and like we mentioned before about the kids that stay in their room and build these businesses. They lack other.

• 1:32:49Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  Components of life. And I see that reflected throughout all these people that are, yeah, they've, they've, they've made a bunch of money or they've done this one cool thing, but they've neglected every other part of their life. And it's like, okay, it's, there's, yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, you know, trade, I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to be in, in those shoes. Um, it's so much of what the, I forgot who it was, but some guy talked to the Instacart CEO and he was like, uh, are you, how old are you? And he was like, I'm 33 and he's like, I would be, and this guy's worth billions of dollars. Like I'll do anything to be 33 again. And like, he would trade, trade all this money. So it's like, I see that a lot more now and I, you know, I'm hopefully maturing. A lot of it was before I was like, yeah, I just want to get all this and get the money and stuff like that. Um, but yeah, I think that's something cool.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  And, uh, one thing that, one of probably the most important thing, not important, but like effective things that I learned working under you, um, was, I mean, maybe it was, maybe you're talking to Sully or Sully taught you this was like aggression. Like just being like aggressive in like getting, getting things done and what you want. Like I think most people don't, don't do that. Like they don't follow up or, you know, they don't, they don't be annoying. Like they don't, they don't try to be annoying. Um, when I, when I started applying that, I was like, okay, things are moving way, way, way faster.

• 1:34:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I remember probably like, cause I used to kind of, you were like my dear diary. It's like, I come home and I'd be like, I don't even know what time it was your time, you know?

• 1:34:12Speaker 01

  I'd be like 3am.

• 1:34:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. 3am and I'd be like, hey, I'm ready to work. And like, I'd be like, I met this guy or I noticed this thing. And I would like, kind of like use you as my sounding board to like play some of these lessons back.

• 1:34:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:24Shaan Puri?

  So it's cool to hear what like stuck. But yeah, that, that idea of like intensity is the strategy, meaning like.

• 1:34:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:29Shaan Puri?

  This guy's not smarter than me. He's not.

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:32Shaan Puri?

  More knowledgeable to me about this. He's not like, there's no special aura around this person. What is it that's made this person so successful? And what, what do I, what's the difference between me and them? And I just noticed, I was like, oh, he doesn't have these like imaginary walls where it's like you stop here. Right. He's just like, no, like, okay, we want to do this. Like, I remember one time we wanted to do a deal, the guy who, we want to invest in this company. And he was like, dude, I was kind of on the fence. And he was like, what if we just wire him the money? And I was like, $2 million? And he's like, he's like, yeah, like, well, so wire him the money. He's an honest guy. Like, we met the guy. He's like, not like a crook. Yeah. Um, he's like, let's just wire him the money. And then like, I feel like that'll tip the scale. Once the money's in his bank account, he's not gonna like, wanna like, wire it back.

• 1:35:14Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, this guy's insane. And like, we had another moment like that where we were working on a, one of the founders was like, oh, I really need to raise this round. And they're telling us this urgency. I really gotta do this. We're running out of money. Uh, the pitches are not going well. The first few pitches didn't go well. Can you guys help? We're like, yeah, we can help. We can help. Right now, sounded like an emergency. They're like, oh, well, we got a, a thing. And we're like, you got a thing? You just said this is like, so important. Okay, whenever you can. They get on, they get on a call with us. We go through the deck. Before we, we said, send the deck in advance. There's like 40 minutes before the call. What do most people do? 40 minutes before their call, this, we'll talk about it in 40 minutes. Yeah. No, no, no. So he was like, by the time the call happened, he'd already emailed back, like,

• 1:35:55Shaan Puri?

  slides nine through 13 suck, eliminate them. Slide four is backwards. Put it in slide one. Slide one needs to say this. Had already given him the full first round of feedback. Yeah. They were like, what the hell? So they were like, looking at it. And we're like, cool, let's just make these changes right now. And they're like, no, no, we don't want, we want to be respectful of your time. He's like, the thing that's respectful of my time is like showing that you're like, full force going for this, not that you're not gonna use my time. I'm here to help. But like, let's do the thing. Yeah. You want to make this awesome? Let's make it awesome. So they started working on it. And they're like, okay, we, we, we know what we need to do next, because we need to go pull some data, do whatever. And, um, so we'll check back in with you whenever. And he's like, uh, you know, it was like noon. He was like, cool, like, let's check in at 6:00 PM today.

• 1:36:39Shaan Puri?

  And they're like, two calls in a day? And even I was like, two calls in a day? I've never done that with somebody.

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:43Shaan Puri?

  Have you ever scheduled two calls in one day with somebody? Like, it never happens. It's not that it's so crazy. It's not like running into a burning building, but it's kind of the business equivalent of running into it. It's like, whoa, that's unusual. That's like a highly intense way to do this.

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:58Shaan Puri?

  And you could tell they were kind of shipped by it. And then they did it. And at 6:00 PM, it was like, still not, not like exactly where we needed it to be. Or we realized something. And we're like, cool, nine AM tomorrow, let's do it again. By the third day, we were like, this deck is in great shape, but these guys were like worn out.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:14Shaan Puri?

  And so he was like, dude, I'm just getting warmed up. This isn't great. This is like, what I live for is find the thing and laser in and to go for it. And like, who says we can't meet twice in a day? Who says that they said no to the first proposal? Well, let's, what if, you know, there is some number they'll do this at? What's that number? And like, you know, he'll just think about it differently.

• 1:37:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:36Shaan Puri?

  That stuck with me. I'm glad that, kind of that idea stuck with you. I say it out loud so that somebody out there listening will realize like, yo, my intensity knob is stuck at six.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:46Shaan Puri?

  Like 10 isn't more hours. It's just like more focus and it's more intensity at the main issue and not self-limiting and solved by, by fake imaginary walls that don't exist.

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, you gotta bring the energy, nice small boy stuff.

• 1:38:02Shaan Puri?

  That's what, there we go. All right, that's it. That's the pod.