#134 - Why the Collectables Market is Booming, Ecommerce 3.0, and "Time Billionaire" Explained

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) discuss: - Shaan and Sam catch up and talk about the interesting and strange ways that the podcast have affected their lives (3:00) - Sam breaks down interesting writing tools and questions why they are so successful (6:30) - Shaan explains why building businesses on the internet is a “winner-takes-all” game (9:55) - Shaan tells Sam about his new One Big Thing Chrome extension (18:00) - Sam learns from the AppSumo model (23:00) - Sam and Shaan talk about how certain financial situations are hard to digest mentally (27:10) - Shaan talks about being a “time billionaire” (33:05) - Shaan has an interesting revelation on what it’s like to be an angel investor (44:40) - Why Bitcoin is different this time (52:43) Thank you to Lemon.io for sponsoring today's episode! They are offering a 15% discount for the first 6 weeks of work for all MFM fans. Go to Lemon.io/mfm to claim the offer! Have you joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:19Shaan Puri?

  Sam, you've moved to Texas like, I don't know, how many weeks ago? Three weeks ago? And you look like a regular old Texas turkey right now. So let me describe. So Sam's wearing a camo hat that says Terry Black's Barbecue, Austin, Texas. And then he's got like a vest, like a hunter, like almost like a hunter's vest, I'll call it. Uh, he's got a wood background behind him and he's drinking a Topo Chico, whatever that is.

• 0:42Sam Parr?

  Topo Chico, okay. I am, that is a fair way to make fun of me. I do look very Texan right now. I would say I always probably look Texan, but, uh, Topo Chico, have you heard of this thing?

• 0:53Shaan Puri?

  No, what is it?

• 0:54Sam Parr?

  Oh my God. So I'm not a carbonated water guy. Someone gave this to me the other day. It's made out of, it's like in Texas, I think, maybe in Austin or all of Texas. It's like considered, it's very, very, very popular. Every restaurant and like food truck has it. It's this water that's carbonated, but it's carbonated in a different way to where the bubbles are the most aggressive bubbles. And it like, it hurts a little bit and I, it feel, it like hurts so good. You've never heard of Topo Chico?

• 1:20Shaan Puri?

  No. It's like, uh, You've tried this or no?

• 1:24Sam Parr?

  You guys have never heard of this? Okay, I, even I had heard of it. Ryan Holiday tweets about it and like it has a cult following and I'm one of the followers now. I get it. It's like, I didn't understand it for a long time, but it's so good. I've been drinking like 10 a day.

• 1:37Shaan Puri?

  Dude, you gotta get your random food thing that you always tweet about. I was like, what do you mean? He goes, he goes, look at all these Twitter personalities. They all have this like, you know, they talk about business all the time, but then they're really obsessed with one thing. He's like, you know, like Pops really obsessed with Domino's, always tweeting about Domino's pizza. Ryan Hoover was always talking about La Croix. And, uh, he's like, you gotta get your food thing. And I was like, oh, well, easy Chick-fil-A. Like I'm gonna talk about Chick-fil-A all the time. I already do, I really love it. And so Chick-fil-A is gonna be my thing. He's like, perfect. Cause you're gonna need some people who love it and some people who are like, nah, it's overrated, I hate it.

• 2:08Sam Parr?

  That's not a very controversial choice. Like, that's like you big,

• 2:12Shaan Puri?

  It doesn't have to be controversial, it just needs to be. Not talked about enough. Like, most people aren't talking about it. I think you just have to have a food thing. I don't know.

• 2:19Sam Parr?

  I agree with Ben's point, but your selection is so weak. Like, that's just like such an easy one.

• 2:27Shaan Puri?

  Tell me about my backup. My backup was Cinnabon.

• 2:29Sam Parr?

  That's way better. That's very controversial. I think Cinnabon is horrible. It's a New England. It's a New England thing, man. Like, the people in New York love eating that crap. I've gotten it at gas stations, like, from a Cinnabon store.

• 2:41Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no. Not like a cinnamon bun. A Cinnabon. It's like a different thing.

• 2:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like that brand.

• 2:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the brand.

• 2:48Sam Parr?

  I think it's horrible.

• 2:49Shaan Puri?

  Oh, dude, I will cut you with this box cutter I have on my desk right now for saying that.

• 2:53Sam Parr?

  Oh, no. I think that there, it's way too sweet. So, good, good choice.

• 2:57Shaan Puri?

  Looks like we found our thing. Okay, good.

• 2:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Oh, a couple of things. One, before this podcast, we tried using Riverside. Riverside CEO, I think he listens sometimes. Dude, great idea. It's still, we had issues.

• 3:09Shaan Puri?

  This segment is called Fix Yo' Shit. And you need to fix yo' shit, riverside.fm. We can't use it to record our podcast yet.

• 3:16Sam Parr?

  The way that we record this pod, it's overly complicated. So, we record locally on QuickTime, and then we have the video on Zoom. It's just a pain in the ass.

• 3:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And I feel like 10 companies have tried to fix this, and nobody really has. But we should do anti-sponsorship on every episode. Just a product that's driving us nuts right now. A product that's dropping the ball.

• 3:38Sam Parr?

  Which is cool for them, because, like, we want to use it. It's like, cool idea.

• 3:43Shaan Puri?

  Cool idea, poor execution right now. Don't even hit me up, because I've been false-promised five times by five different products about this.

• 3:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so that's not working out. And second of all, I looked at our numbers. First of all, numbers are going up, going up and up and up. I think yesterday's podcast, we recorded Monday, or sorry, yeah, Monday, it was Wednesday. I think that was one of the fastest ones to hit about 20,000 listens, like, organically.

• 4:05Shaan Puri?

  Right now, you know, Spotify put out that, like, year-end summary thing. How cool is that, that so many people are screenshotting us that their most listened-to thing on Spotify is our podcast? It'll be like, whatever, like, 4,000 hours listened. It's crazy.

• 4:18Sam Parr?

  Frankly, I find it uncomfortable. I find it weird. I think it's strange. It's really strange. I almost get a little nervous, because I have, like, business associates, like, customers or coworkers, and it's, like, Katie Huff, one of our coworkers, I was, like, in the top five of hers, a couple of people, and I'm like, don't you guys get enough of me? Why are you listening to this crap?

• 4:41Shaan Puri?

  So I told you, I work with this guy Ben, right? He's like, kind of like my right hand man on different content projects I do, different random ass like side projects, basically. So his wife was just like, who's this guy that just like came into your life and all of a sudden you guys are working together on stuff and like you're talking at late at night on Zoom calls or whatever. And then he was like, okay, yeah, I'm gonna go run this errand and he came back in the house and he was wearing his headphones. And then she was like, what are you listening to? And he's like, oh, like, you know, the podcast. She's like, wait, so when you're not talking to him, you're listening to his podcast? Like, no, no, no, this is too much. And he was like, okay, I understand, that sounds weird, but I'm not listening to him. I'm just listening to the ideas of the podcast. I just like the ideas.

• 5:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah. It's weird. It is weird. The other day, we have to have Jack Butcher come on here because he's one of the more interesting people I've hung out with lately. So I became friends with him in Nashville and it's one of those things, you know, like when your wife and you each like the couple, which is like rare because sometimes it's like.

• 5:37Shaan Puri?

  It's like a multiplier.

• 5:38Sam Parr?

  Right. And so that was one of those things where him and his wife and my wife, we all like each other. So we became friends very quickly and he drove down from Nashville to celebrate Thanksgiving with us. So we had like a foursome, but not in, I realized I was about to say that, that I was like, that sounds a lot weird. You know, like a four of us had Thanksgiving together.

• 5:56Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 5:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, sorry, I didn't, I came off wrong. And then a dinner, like the four of us celebrated together. And they told me that they listened to the podcast on the way down and on the way up. And I was like, that's really like, that's so strange. Why are you, you don't need, you need less of me probably, not more.

• 6:16Shaan Puri?

  Well, I think the only thing that can take away our fame is us just talking about how it's cool, all these things are happening. That's probably making for the most boring podcast, unless you have something to spin off that, otherwise we should just switch topics.

• 6:27Sam Parr?

  Let's switch topics. I'll go first. Okay. So we'll do mine and then we're gonna do a segment called Time Billionaires because I saw that title last time and it's very interesting. Something that I've been thinking about is writing tools. And the reason I've been thinking about them is, so there's this company called Rome, Rome Research, they don't call themselves a writing tool, they call themselves like a way to map out your brain, I think, which is probably true, but like in essence, it's a glorified to do list. And then there's Notion, which is, I'm being overs, I'm oversimplifying it, but it is a writing tool. It is a, it is a note-taking app. And when I say writing tool, I mean note-taking app. There's a lot to it. So Notion raised money at nearly a $1 billion valuation. They

• 7:12Sam Parr?

  probably only had 10 million in revenue. Rome raised money at a quarter of a billion-dollar valuation. I bet you they only had 1 or 2 million in revenue. So these apps, or these like web apps, these to-do lists are getting stupid valuations. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Maybe it won't be stupid, but stupid in terms of extreme.

• 7:30Shaan Puri?

  Not a to-do list, right? They are more, more general-purpose than a to-do list.

• 7:34Sam Parr?

  Well, but here's my gripe, or at least not gripe, but thing I want to bring up, which is, there's a lot of things that do stuff just like them. Maybe not as good, but very similar. And so I went and found like a whole bunch of to-do writing-ish apps, and they're kind of shocking to me how many there are out there. And some of them are, can be okay businesses for small groups. And I wanted to hear about why, or for like a niche type of person, why do you think that these two are, get valued so high? And I have a list of a few others that are incredibly interesting, and I think that there's some opportunity here. So first, let me tell you about one of them real quick, and then I want you to jump in with your opinion, which is Scrivener. Have you heard of Scrivener? I don't know if it's Scrivener or Scrivener. Have you heard of it?

• 8:17Shaan Puri?

  I've heard the name. I've never used it, though. Is it similar to a Notion, or is it different?

• 8:21Sam Parr?

  It's similar to a Notion. I bought it. It's pretty cool. A lot of people swear by it. But I want to tell you a stat that's pretty crazy, and I'm pulling up my Evernote to read this. So there's another one. So there's this guy named Joseph, I think his name is Joseph Michael. He made half a million dollars a year selling a course on how to use Scrivener. Is that crazy?

• 8:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's a guy doing that on Rome right now. I don't know how much he's making, but we've talked about him before. He's got a how-to-use-Rome research course, and I think he's crushing it.

• 8:49Sam Parr?

  Scrivener, it's created by this guy, I think it's a one-person show. I think he lives in Washington. He's an engineer. And you pay a one-time fee of like $20 to download the software, and then it's a desktop thing. Crazy simple, very effective, cult-following. I think there's a big, like, someone should actually just buy that business and make it better. Just barely better.

• 9:10Shaan Puri?

  So I see that there's a About page. So there's Keith, who's the founder. He's the one who made the Mac app and the iOS app. There's one person who's Lee, he's a Windows developer, uh, two people, sorry, window, uh, two Windows developers. And then there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven customer support people and one sales director. So I think it's probably evolved a little bit, but

• 9:33Sam Parr?

  Barely.

• 9:34Shaan Puri?

  Probably for many years it was, yeah, just, just this one or two people.

• 9:37Sam Parr?

  And it is still only two engineers, right?

• 9:39Shaan Puri?

  Uh, three engineers total, yeah.

• 9:41Sam Parr?

  Pretty crazy. I found this thing, this guy made a list of like 67 of these and he like tried to list out their revenue and stuff. There's so many of them. It's kind of wild to me.

• 9:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So, okay. So what do you want to talk about? More of the independent kind of builder thing. I think we talked about that. I think let's, let's talk about the writing side of things.

• 9:57Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 9:57Shaan Puri?

  So first, why the hell did Notion and Rome like take off like this? I would say if I was going to boil it down, I'd boil it down to two factors. The first is like the general rule of the internet, which is that to the victor goes all the spoils. So most people have a hard time wrapping their head around this because in the real world, you know, you make the best restaurant in town. You're going to win just your town and really not even your whole town. You're going to win just dinner. Just in this like, kind of just in this one, you know, strip of, of restaurants really is where you're going to, you're going to win the most. And on the internet, there's no like geographic boundary. So the best person of any one thing, the best tool, the best teacher, the best whatever.

• 10:40Shaan Puri?

  Is going to get everybody. They're going to get the majority of the market to use them. Because if I'm going to pick, I might as well pick the best one. Uh, I might as well pick the best, most well-known one, or I might as well, you know, if it's a course, I might as well learn from the most well-known, the best course rather than, than the second place. So because there's no geography on the internet. If you're the best in the world, you get to accrue almost all of the value and you get to sell everywhere. So, so that's why these tools in general get quite big, quite quickly. Uh, like why would, why would Notion get so big? Well, if everybody's using a note taking app and Notion becomes the best one, it's going to win. Now what makes it the best one? I think what they did well. It was the same thing we talked about last time, which is social software or multiplayer software, where basically Notion was good because it wasn't just your notes app like

• 11:24Shaan Puri?

  the one that comes stock on your computer because it was like a Word doc, it was like a Google Doc, sorry, you could share it just with a link to anybody else. So sharing became easy. And then not just sharing, we can both actually write on the same thing. So collaborating became easy. And then Notion goes even further, like for a while, our podcast website, actually even now, maybe the podcast website was just a Notion doc that I turned into a website. Because I was like, I don't want to learn how to build a website. Let me just type on this document and then push like publish. And now that's now if you go to, you know, myfirstmillionpodcast.com, I think it probably still is just a Notion doc that's up there. That's kind of the the main thing that they got right. And then the thing you said about Rome, I think is an important point, which is like, it's not

• 12:08Shaan Puri?

  just a to do list app, or it's not just a note taking app. It's meant to be like your brain, you know, put it onto a computer, your brain put onto the internet. So it's like, the key with Rome is that you link ideas together. So all the other note taking apps were just, you write a note, that's just a note on its own. But in Rome, it's like Wikipedia. When you write a note, you can reference a different note. And so it creates this web. So all your ideas, which your ideas in your brain are connected. So Rome lets you connect your ideas in your notes as well. That's the sales pitch at least.

• 12:39Sam Parr?

  So I disagree with the point you made about the, what did you say, the spoil on the internet, the spoils go to the

• 12:46Shaan Puri?

  To the victor goes the spoils, yeah.

• 12:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So there's actually, I'm gonna steal this from a great blog. Have you ever read Joel on software?

• 12:54Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 12:54Sam Parr?

  Okay, so Joel on software is written by this guy named Joel, what's his last name, Spolsky?

• 12:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Spolsky.

• 13:00Sam Parr?

  Okay, so this guy is so interesting to me because, so he started this agency that built websites for people in the early 2000s, maybe in the late 90s, I don't know exactly, but when the internet was getting going. And from that agency, he spun off many different things, including some bug tracking software that probably made him quite wealthy, that I don't even remember the name of it. The other one that became popular was Trello, which ended up selling for $600 million. The other one was Stack Exchange, right?

• 13:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Stack Overflow.

• 13:29Sam Parr?

  Stack Overflow.

• 13:30Shaan Puri?

  Which became Stack Exchange, yep.

• 13:30Sam Parr?

  Which is huge. And then I also think, I always get these confused, Discord or Discourse?

• 13:34Shaan Puri?

  Not Discord. Must be Discourse.

• 13:37Sam Parr?

  Okay, right? I think. There was like three other things spun off of it, like billions of dollars with the value created off of it. Anyway, he's got this great blog and he's a very good writer. He's very to the point and I like him a lot. And he's got this blog, this post that always stuck with me and it was called Strategy Letter One: Ben & Jerry's Versus Amazon. And he basically says, if you're building a company, you've got a very important decision to make because it affects everything else you do. You have to figure out which camp you're in. You have to decide, are you in the Ben & Jerry's model or the Amazon model? And the Ben & Jerry's model is basically, or the Amazon model is basically, you have to get big fast because you're using some type of new competition or new technology where there's very little competition at first and the winner takes all type of market. But then there's the other Ben

• 14:21Sam Parr?

  & Jerry's model where there's a market that already has a whole lot of competition and customers can pick more than one. There's very little network effect. There's very weak customer lock-in. Whereas with Amazon, it's a much stronger network effect. Customers get locked in. Anyway, things like that. And so for Ben & Jerry's, very little capital required. You can break even pretty quickly. With Amazon, you need to spend a shit ton of money in order to get big, yada, yada, yada. And so with these note-taking apps, I actually think that they are in the Ben & Jerry's model, not the Amazon model, where you have to get huge fast and once you take the market, you have everyone. Because Evernote was like this and Evernote ended up being a horrible company, I think.

• 15:00Shaan Puri?

  I guess what I'm saying is like, Evernote reached the billion-dollar-plus, you know, value mark. Notion is going to reach that. Rome is probably going to reach that. And if you compare that to the Scrivners and the Hemmingways and the other kind of like indie kind of apps, they won't amount for 1% of the total market cap of this industry, of the total market size of that industry. And so I think while it's true that you can go the sort of simple, independent, profitable, don't chase, kind of like this growth dragon path, in reality, if you just looked, if you zoomed out and you looked at, okay, where'd all the money, oh, in this note-taking or this like, kind of like, this writing software market, where'd all the money go? It's going to look like 99% to one or two players and then everything, you know, 1% shared by 100 players.

• 15:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Probably, although I was still very shocked at how many there were. So I found like a few that were interesting, which is agenda.com badass domain name. The great domain name. It seems like they might be huge. I found this other one called Campfire Tech. Have you heard of this?

• 16:02Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 16:03Sam Parr?

  Look it up. It's pretty interesting. Oh, sorry. I got the wrong one. Campfire Tech is another one that has thirty thousand users and does a million in revenue. Sorry, this is a different one. It's called seventy, seven hundred fifty words. So Google seven hundred fifty words. Tell me what you see.

• 16:16Shaan Puri?

  I see seven hundred fifty words dot com. Write every day. It says, join, whoa, five hundred thousand other writers by signing up right now. I kind of believe that actually, because sometimes people just bullshit that number, but let's believe it. So what is this all about? It's about developing the habit of writing every day.

• 16:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so I think it's just a prompt that says, write seven hundred fifty words a day. He said something like, he has thousands of people who have done it every single day for like five years. It's pretty incredible.

• 16:40Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna build a tool like this someday. I know this is like in my future. Like I just built this Chrome extension and I didn't do it. My friend Jake did it. And I love it. And a whole bunch of people who like subscribe to my newsletter are using it and they love it too. And it's such, it's like the most dead simple thing. There's no money involved. It's a free, free thing, but I want to build more soft. I want to build more little mini tools that just are like extensions of my life or my philosophy. It's a Chrome extension called Focus and my to do list philosophy is called one big thing. It's like I do one big thing every day. The beginning of the day, I figure out what's the one big thing. If I did just that one thing, my day is a win. And if I do that for three hundred sixty five days in a year, I'll, you know, it's like tortoise and the hare. I'll outpace all these like

• 17:26Shaan Puri?

  ultra productivity nerds who are trying to like do these complex systems and have these long to do lists and like they're trying, they're using Pomodoro timers to like optimize all their time. Mine is real simple. Figure out the one highest impact thing I can get done today. Do that one thing. Anything else I do is gravy. If I don't get that one done, I failed. And that system works for me. So this is a, it's a Chrome extension that basically every time you open a new tab, it's just a beautiful photo and it says, good morning, Sean, your one big thing for today is, and it lets you type it in. And then every time you open a new tab, it'll just show you that one thing. And then if you're done with it, you hit done and it like celebrates. And then there's one line at the bottom that'll just like ran, all these like random little phrases I wrote that were like, you know, get it done like a nun on Sunday, or like, you know, make it happen, Captain, or whatever, just like

• 18:09Shaan Puri?

  a little line. That's it. This is so simple. But for people who want to adopt my system, I made software, basically that helps them use my system. And I made it for myself.

• 18:18Sam Parr?

  Do you have Google Analytics installed on it?

• 18:20Shaan Puri?

  No, we have nothing installed on it.

• 18:21Sam Parr?

  Okay, so.

• 18:22Shaan Puri?

  We made the most, even if you search the Chrome, the Chrome extension store, you probably won't even find it yet. It's just called Focus.

• 18:27Sam Parr?

  Did I tell you, have we, I don't, I think I did it here. Did I pull up the analytics on our little Chrome thing?

• 18:33Shaan Puri?

  You did. I remember you, it was crazy. It was like, I don't know, quarter million page views per month, something like that.

• 18:38Sam Parr?

  No, I think it's more. It's gotten 60 million page views in the last two years. So however many like that. So like with your thing, if you get, that was, we only had at most 8,000 users. So like with just a couple thousand users, you can get stupid amounts of page views on these Chrome extensions. So.

• 18:55Shaan Puri?

  What I'm gonna do is I'm trying to make these tools that I like, give them away for, to other people, either for free or for a small amount. This one's for free. And then just like, think about how I could add more value. So for example, like, we're gonna add a thing that like, in the middle of the day, it'll pop, almost like calm. It'd be like, here's a two minute, just break, just a relaxation break. Just put your headphones in, it's just relaxing sounds. Even if you don't know how to meditate, just take two minutes to like, rest and recharge for a second here, while you're in the middle of your workday. And so we're gonna add these little, just little droplets into the Chrome extension. Or like, if I write a new blog post, I'll be able to promote it through this. And the good thing is the only people using this already like my content anyway. So it's not like I'm forcing it on people who don't really know about this. It's like for the community to be able to access stuff easier.

• 19:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I've said this for a while. I think that like these Chrome extensions are some of the more stickier products that you could possibly make. And I also think that they cost a way little money compared to building just a normal software thing or a normal app. So I'm, I think that these Chrome extensions are great ideas.

• 19:58Shaan Puri?

  There's a great Chrome extension idea in the Trends Group yesterday or the day before. I don't know if you saw it, but Bray, you tried to pull this guy's name up. This guy was like, hey, I'm gonna build Honey for saving you money on SaaS software. So what does that mean? Alright, so Honey is this Chrome extension, you install it, and then as you shop online, it like goes and looks for like discounts or cheaper prices of the same product. And it's like, wait, you know, before you buy it, here's a 10% off coupon, or go here and it's cheaper, or something like that. I don't really use Honey, but that's my understanding of it. And Honey was like a billion dollar outcome, three, four billion dollar outcome, right? Like, how much is it?

• 20:29Sam Parr?

  Four billion. I thought it was four.

• 20:32Shaan Puri?

  I think it's three, four billion by PayPal, I believe. So this is smart, because what he's doing is saying, oh, you're going to MailChimp, or you're going to whatever the SaaS tool you're using is that has some monthly fee. And he's gonna try to save you money. And so he goes, my marketing pitch is, okay, so Bray found the guy's name. So his name is Sean McClellan. And I love this idea. Like, I would invest in this idea if he's like actually gonna build this. So he's calling it Loot. And it's Honey for buying software, and it helps you find discounts or credits on top of all the popular software tools you use, like AWS, Slack, HubSpot, and more. And his pitch was like, instantly save 10,000 a year on software tools. Stop overpaying. Loot will find you discounts on the stuff you already use.

• 21:09Sam Parr?

  So where does he get the discounts?

• 21:11Shaan Puri?

  So I think what he's gonna do, I don't know, I haven't like looked into it, but either there already are discounts available, if you like go search, you know, sort of like coupons that are out there for the public, or first time customer discounts or whatever. Or there's affiliate deals already in place, and he's just gonna be like, wait, don't sign up. Use my affiliate deal, which saves you money, and I get, or I get a kickback and I'll save you the money according to it. So I don't know exactly how he's gonna get the discounts, but I think it's a great, uh, this is a great, great concept.

• 21:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, uh, it's quite interesting. I know a little bit about the space because we looked into doing like a buyer's club for software. We were gonna monetize off the subscription, but obviously if you can get affiliate, it'd make, it'd be far better to have millions of users or hundreds of thousands of users, you know, sort of like Honey or something like that. It's quite interesting. Another person doing this, and he's a good friend of mine, but what I'm saying, I've just learned by going on their website, AppSumo. The AppSumo business model was basically they got hundreds of thousands of people's email address, or they got them to sign up to the email, and the idea was Groupon for geeks. So basically, we're gonna give you discounts on software.

• 22:13Sam Parr?

  And they would negotiate these deals with vendors, and they sent it out to their list, and then AppSumo would keep 50 or 60 or 70% of the gross revenue that they drove to that software provider.

• 22:23Shaan Puri?

  How big of a business is AppSumo?

• 22:25Sam Parr?

  Well, on a recent podcast, he said it was 30 million in sales. But I don't know if that means gross or net. If I had to imagine, if I had to guess, I would guess that means gross sales and they keep probably 65 to 70% of it. So what's 70% of 30 million? Is that a, then I would imagine that they're in the range of 15 to 20 million in actual sales.

• 22:45Shaan Puri?

  I like the Chrome extension approach for this because I think you don't have to remember to go do anything. It's just going to pop up and say, hey, by the way, do you want to save on this site you're on? And, uh, yeah, I'm into saving in general. There's a, there's a trend towards some cool saving products. So one is do not pay. We've talked about that by that guy Joshua.

• 23:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I used it, tried to get out of some tickets. It's okay.

• 23:05Shaan Puri?

  I like the concept, though, and I think they've done well with traction so far of like, hey, we'll unsubscribe you from things. We'll help you get out of parking tickets. They just released one, like a really niche one that I need, which is like 83B filings.

• 23:17Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 23:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So you, you know, cause it's such a pain in the ass. You have to print it out, you have to mail it to the IRS, so they'll just do it for you. Do not pay is one saving thing. Main Street is killing it. So I looked at investing in them, ended up passing, but I really like Doug and I like what they're doing, which is like, they connect to your, kind of your books, your QuickBooks, your payroll software. And then they, they go and they like, there's all these government R and D credits. Like, there's all these different tax credits that you can go get. You know, if you took the time, you did the paperwork, all that stuff. So they just know what all those are. Then they look at your payroll and your QuickBooks and they say, oh, you're eligible for this because you have one developer working out of Idaho. Did you know that there's Idaho state credit for engineers that are hired in Idaho? And they'll just do it for you. And now they're even doing it even better, which is like, they just look at your stuff and they just give you like an instant money.

• 24:02Shaan Puri?

  They'll just be like, hey, here's 10 grand now. And they might make 20 grand off of it, but like, here's 10 grand for you right now, instantly without doing any work. And so I think that's a model that's designed to grow very, very fast. I will probably regret not investing in that one. Honey is a money saver.

• 24:17Sam Parr?

  That was Main Street, you said?

• 24:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's Main Street.

• 24:19Sam Parr?

  I'm on their website right now. It looks pretty slick. It looks good. They've advertised with us and like Doug's in the trends group. You think this is going to be huge?

• 24:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I initially was like, I think this is going to be, I was like, I think this is worth a bet. But then the valuation kept going up, like just in our back and forth of our emails. I was a little slow, he was a little slow. So valuation kept going up and for better or for worse, there's this like fucked up psychology where if you thought you were getting it at $10 and now you're getting it for $25. You're just like anchored to the 10. Even if 25 is a fair price now, it feels like a massive overpay to me now because I know a month ago, I could have got this at 10. And so even if I think it's going to be worth 75, it's just hard to buy it at 25 even then, which is weird.

• 24:58Sam Parr?

  Let's actually talk about that. Yeah. Let's talk about that and then time billionaires. So that's an interesting topic. So I remember when our company just got started and I remember the first year in business, we made close to half a million dollars in revenue. I don't remember what our expenses were, but soon after that, our expenses raised to like, I remember 38 grand one month. And I was like, oh my God, $38,000. And then soon after the second year in revenue, we did two and a half million. And so it was good growth and we were profitable, but I remember like going from 38,000 a month in burn or in expenses to 80,000. And I went to NerdWatt, NerdWatt, the founder is one of our investors. I went to his office and I go, hey, and his office is the former Twitter office and NerdWatt

• 25:42Sam Parr?

  makes so much money and they had this like big cafeteria and it was lovely and they like built out, they probably spent $2 million, I don't even know, millions of dollars building up this cafeteria. And I go, Tim, like it's crazy. We went from 37,000 to 80,000. Like that's so much money. He humored me and acted all like shocked. He's like, oh my God, that's so much money. But he was like, look, at the end of the day, like stop thinking that's like your, like, don't think of it as like, that's how much you spend in your personal life or, and that was a really hard concept for me to understand because I remember thinking like, I've never bought myself a new computer in my life. I've always bought used shit and I would like tweet out like, hey, who's got a used laptop I could buy? And I was doing this for the business like 30 times. Anyway, that idea of getting over like certain numbers was a huge barrier to me. Have you had that same thing?

• 26:27Sam Parr?

  By the way, particularly now, when we're talking about our company, we're like doing like, all right, our revenues, we're going to try to do this and then this, or we're going to try and sell eventually for this much money. Like that's really hard to. Overcome some of those like mental barriers around money.

• 26:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's, there's a whole bunch of them. Mine haven't been those exact ones, but they're more like the one I was talking about, which is like the cheap Indian person in me wants everything at a deal. And so as soon as something gets either fairly priced or overpriced, even if it's still going to be a good net investment, I find it super hard to pull the trigger. Actually, in fact, just now I've been accumulating a very, for me, large position in Bitcoin. And I'm basically buying like, you know, last five days in a row, I bought $25,000 worth of Bitcoin. Just every morning I just wake up and I buy 25,000. I hit my limit on Coinbase of how much I can buy a Bitcoin. For a long time, it was really hard for me to buy Bitcoin, even though I believe in Bitcoin.

• 27:22Shaan Puri?

  But it's like when I first bought Bitcoin, it was like in the 300, 400 dollar range. You know, now it's $19,000 per coin, right? So I'm spending 25K, I'm getting 1.16 Bitcoin or whatever, like some tiny amount of coin for it. But for a long time I just held back because I was like, well, I bought in at the 400 dollar mark. And instead of increasing my position as I got more bullish, I was like, dude, it's $9,000 per coin right now. I'm not gonna, it seems weird to spend 9,000 when I got all these other ones for 400. Like a stupid decision when in reality like, it's progressed, it's actually, I have higher conviction now, there's more proof points now, there's more adoption now, it's worth more. I found it really, really hard to do. And in fact, I was telling Ben, I was like, hey Ben, I'm making a very big bet on Bitcoin. I'm either gonna look like a total fool

• 28:06Shaan Puri?

  or I'm gonna get rich off this bet in the next three years. And I said, I was like, here's the reason why I'm into it and you know, why I'm doing it if you want to do it too. And he was basically like, oh, it sucks to buy like, if I put $10,000 into Bitcoin right now, I'm getting half a Bitcoin. He's like, maybe I'd rather buy Ethereum because at least with Ethereum, I'm getting 10 of them. And I'm like, well, it doesn't matter.

• 28:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it doesn't matter.

• 28:28Shaan Puri?

  He's like, but it's just like, he's like, he's like, I wonder how many people are gonna have this same weird psychology, which is why, for example, stocks do stock splits. Because like now you can do fractional share buying now on almost every platform. But still Tesla doesn't want to be a $2,000, $3,000 stock. It wants to be a $300 stock. Because more people will want to buy $300 a share and buy 10 shares rather than one share for $3,000. And so there's this weird psychology around that that I've run into a whole bunch and has ended up costing me a lot of money. Because I've passed on investments either in startups or Bitcoin. Or Ethereum, where I should have been increasing my position, but I was too tied to the original price that I could have got it at.

• 29:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and that's something that I've been struggling to get over, the same exact thing that you're talking about, where it's like, why is that emotion tied to that thing if the math makes sense? So another example is I just bought a house and I paid nine, let's say a million dollars for it, nine eighty, I think, I forget exactly, but something like that. And I was looking at the trailing fifteen years of annual growth rate, and then I was looking at how much I think I could rent it out for. And I was looking at the IRR, I'm like, okay, that's fascinating. And then I was like, making another like, kind of a risky bet, that it doesn't matter if it happens or not, but I'm like, I think this house in ten years or so could maybe sell for one point six. And I told that to my Austin friends, and they're like, there's no way anyone was gonna

• 29:51Sam Parr?

  pay one point six for a home in that neighborhood in Austin. And I was like, well, why not? Would we, like, if the math, the trailing fifteen years says this, why wouldn't it? And also, do you think that people thirty years ago would have said, there's no one, someone's gonna pay a million dollars?

• 30:06Shaan Puri?

  A million dollars, right?

• 30:07Sam Parr?

  Which is probably true, right? Like, if you like, if you like, look at like, and then I told my broker that, he goes, yeah, that's always true. He goes, for example, my dad a place in New York for eighty thousand, it's now worth over a million. People always think that, and it's really hard to understand compound growth. And I thought, that is totally true, it's hard for me as well.

• 30:22Shaan Puri?

  By the way, if in ten years, something you're saying essentially goes up like sixty percent, that's actually quite bad.

• 30:28Sam Parr?

  Well, for, for a residential property, I think that.

• 30:31Shaan Puri?

  Well, it's fine for, it's fine for, it might just be what a residential property does, but I'm saying, the way to look at it is, alternatively, if I just rent this place now, at the market rates, and I, that goes up by this much per year, and I just invest this in the stock market at the sort of average seven or eight percent return, my money will double in, right, so I think at ten percent a year, in seven years, it doubles.

• 30:53Sam Parr?

  But the market's right, around the six and a half mark over the trailing hundred years, so it doubles about every ten or eleven years.

• 30:59Shaan Puri?

  Right, I think it's, I thought it was eight percent when I last looked, maybe, maybe like since, since the gold standard or whatever, something like that.

• 31:06Sam Parr?

  There's a fairly big difference if I say all time versus trailing thirty years. So it's like, which segment of time do you wanna look at? But it's in the range of, let's say, let's say, six to eight, which is. A ballpark.

• 31:17Shaan Puri?

  So basically it's 10 years, 10 years to double, right? And so if you're going up 60% in 10 years with your house, you could have doubled your money, you could have gone up 100% if you had just done the, the nothing, you know, path of like, put it in the market, don't have to do maintenance, don't have to deal with anything.

• 31:30Sam Parr?

  Right. Which is why I think unless you're going to rent it out and make income from it, buying a home is typically a bad investment.

• 31:35Shaan Puri?

  Right. But you did it anyways because you just wanted to.

• 31:37Sam Parr?

  And I'm renting it out, but.

• 31:39Shaan Puri?

  Oh, you're renting it out. Okay, gotcha.

• 31:40Sam Parr?

  I'm renting it out and also I wanted to, like, if it doesn't make money, I don't give a shit. And I want Texas residency, you know, all types of stuff.

• 31:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that, that makes sense. Okay, cool. I like that.

• 31:49Sam Parr?

  You want to talk about being a time billionaire?

• 31:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Have you seen this? Do you know what I'm going to talk about here?

• 31:54Sam Parr?

  No, I don't, but it's a really good headline.

• 31:56Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so I kind of love this concept, kind of hate it, kind of love it. It's corny, but I love it. That's the disclaimer. So I was scrolling on Twitter and there's this guy Blake Robbins, I don't know if you follow him. And he tweeted out this thing I thought was pretty interesting. So he was, he had grabbed a screenshot of a Tim Ferriss podcast where Tim Ferriss talking to this guy Graham Duncan. And he's like, he goes, Tim Ferriss is like, time billionaire, like, what do you mean by that? He's like, well, I was thinking about this concept. This guy was pointing out the difference between a million and a billion. And he's like, a million seconds is 11 days, right? Not very long. A million seconds is 11 days, but a billion seconds is 31 years. Which is like, kind of like, that's the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire. It's like, there's this huge factor difference, right? So, okay, so a million and a billion are different. What's the big deal?

• 32:40Shaan Puri?

  He's like, well, I think about that when I, you know, when I see billionaires or I see a 20 year old. And he goes, here's the thought experiment, right? You could take like Warren Buffett or Rupert Murdoch, these like dinosaurs who are 80 to 89, 90 years old. And they're like, you know, have like a hundred billion dollars. If you ask them, hey, would you give up everything, give up all your money? But you get to be a broke 20 year old, would you do it? And like, absolutely, they would instantaneously do it. And if you asked a broke 20 year old, would you switch spots with Warren Buffett? You could have everything Warren Buffett has, but you're going to be, you're going to, you're going to be his age. You're going to, you're going to be Warren Buffett. And you can have his fame, you can have his fortune, but you're 80 year, I don't know how old Warren Buffett is, like 94, something like that.

• 33:20Sam Parr?

  Close to dying.

• 33:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you could be that old. And like, the 20 year old would be absolutely foolish to take it, right? And it just really points out that like, although we kind of like glorify the billion dollars and all that stuff, like, clearly, youth and time is the asset, right? To the point where a broke 20 year old, a broke 30 year old even, would never trade spots with Warren Buffett. And Warren Buffett would instantly trade spots with a 20 year old or a 30 year old, or even a 40 year old, probably. So I think that's a kind of fascinating, but to me, it brought up two things. So that's just kind of like the, oh, wow, you know, time is the real asset, you know, like, youth is the real asset. It brought up to me like this idea that I had heard from somebody else, which is that there's, there's many kinds of billionaires. And so this guy calls them dollar billionaires, right? So there's a dollar billionaire, which means you have a billion dollars.

• 34:07Shaan Puri?

  This guy Tyler Cohen has a thing called cultural billionaires, which is basically like, I believe, I haven't looked too far into it, but let's just assume it is what it sounds like, which is that like, you have an influence, your cultural impact.

• 34:17Sam Parr?

  Like Mother Teresa.

• 34:19Shaan Puri?

  It's like a billion people, right? Well, Teresa is actually a different one, which is like, could you be a helpful billionaire, right? Could you help a billion people, impact a billion people that way, an impact billionaire? And then there's others, which is just like, sort of like a time billionaire. And so I like this concept, and it's interesting when you put it that way, because you're like, well, which one do I really want to be? And what am I optimizing for, like, right? Like, I have a friend, we have a friend, Suli, who said, you know, I heard this guy say this once, and I thought, oh, this is true. This guy goes, a billionaire to me is not a, not somebody who has a billion dollars, but somebody who helps a billion people. And I think I told you the story, but our friend Vishal, who's all about making a billion dollars was there, and just, he just goes, that's fucking stupid. It was just like, cut it down, which I thought was hilarious, because who's going to argue against that?

• 35:04Shaan Puri?

  But he was like, that's the fucking stupidest thing I've ever heard. And so, you know, different people value this stuff differently. Anyways, I thought it was a cool concept. What do you think of this?

• 35:11Sam Parr?

  I think it's a great concept. It's timely because. So there is something I've been thinking about. So I'm 31 years old. I'm married. I don't have kids, but I'm getting to the point where I'm considering having children and doing that. I'm slowly, but not yet, considering like, what do I want my life to be? You know, like when you're young, it's like, I'm happy to grind. That's all good. But it's like, all right, well, how would I want to set up my life? And how would I want to prepare my future non-existent family yet? And you know, you start some of these existential questions that you probably are a few years ahead of me with asking because you have a kid, have kids. Anyway, I'm asking myself that now as well. And it's an interesting question. And basically like, could you work really hard to get a quick win early on in your life?

• 35:55Sam Parr?

  But then that slowly is going to be a risk of you working hard your entire life and slaving away. And is slaving away worth it or not? The answer is sometimes it is, but also the answer is a lot of times it's not. And it's the ego that is likely like, would you rather have a job that pays you a really good salary of like hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and you have to work very little? Or start or work at a place that has potentially huge impact on the world, makes you famous, inflates your ego, but you gotta, it's your life's purpose and there is nothing out of it. That's a really hard thing to ask yourself and I frankly, I'm not sure where I stand.

• 36:32Shaan Puri?

  I think it's hard, right? Like, because it comes down to this question of like, what are you optimizing for? Right? So it's like one hard question to answer it, you actually have to make, ask a different hard question, even harder question, which is kind of like, what's the purpose of life? If it's just to be happy, then you know, doing all like, basically going and starting a company and trying to, you know, become super wealthy is probably not the best way to be happy. You know, like the things that make people happy tend to be these like sort of other five things, including like sort of family, friends, blah, blah, blah. And so like, why would you ever sacrifice your health, sacrifice your time with your family in order to get money? And this is sort of like pointed out by like, there's this whatever famous quote by the Dalai Lama, which is like, man is, man is so, so interesting, right? Like,

• 37:12Shaan Puri?

  He sacrifices his time, money and health, or sorry, his time and his health to get money so that he can, you know, wish that he had the time back and buy back his health. And it's like, you know, I butchered the quote, but there's like a Dalai Lama quote that's that's exactly like that. Or there's this other quote that's like, youth is wasted on the young type of thing, which is like, we piss away time when we have it. And when you're young, you don't realize how valuable it is to be young. You only realize it when you get old, which is unfortunate.

• 37:37Sam Parr?

  Do you follow Nick Baer on Instagram or YouTube at all?

• 37:40Shaan Puri?

  I do after, I follow him on Instagram after we, but I don't use Instagram much, but I follow him after we did the pod with him.

• 37:45Sam Parr?

  So he was on this pod. He has a fitness program or a fitness nutritional company, whatever. It probably does great. But his whole shtick is he started the company and he's also like the main content guy. So he probably spends a lot of his time doing content and his content is all about being fit. So right now he's training for an Iron Man. So he probably spends four hours a day working out, which is his job technically. He looks like shredded. He's like, looks like a model, like he's got huge muscles and it just fitness freak. And I see him and I'm like, man, that would be badass to be able to exercise five hours a day and just like, that would be my job. But then the other time I'm like, do you really want that? Like, would you be, so I don't know. It's a really challenging question.

• 38:25Shaan Puri?

  So there's this other quote that I like, which is Tim Ferriss said this one thing, or I heard it from Tim Ferriss. I don't know who he got it from, but it was, "A great decision saves you a thousand more, thousand future decisions." This is always like, let's say you, let's say you decide I don't drink, then you don't have to decide every time, am I going to drink at this bar? What am I going to drink? Like, no, like you've already made the one decision that saves you a thousand future decisions. And this is why like having values in general for yourself or for your company is so important because like Whole Foods doesn't need to decide, should we carry M&Ms or whatever? Because it's like, no, we made one decision early on, which is we only serve, we only are going to sell this type of food. We're going to stand for this. And so then they don't have to make certain decisions later. If eco-friendly matters to you, then

• 39:09Shaan Puri?

  there's only one type of packaging that you should be using. You don't have to go through the thousand, a thousand other options that are non-eco-friendly. It saves you that time and mental bandwidth. And so to me, the decision that saves you all the future decisions, right? Of how do I spend my time? What should I do? Should I take this job? Should I take that job? Should I sell my company? Should I start a company? Like, the way to save yourself all those decisions is to figure out, what am I optimizing for? If I think about these different types of billionaires that we talked about, mine would be like, I'm going to be a joy billionaire. Like I'm gonna optimize for joy and I'm gonna just write down the things that give me joy and bring joy. You know, when I'm joyous, I'm kind of, that brings joy to the people around me. So what are all the things that give me joy and I'm gonna design my life to do those as much as possible. And I'm gonna design my life to avoid all the things that suck my joy away. And so I've

• 39:52Sam Parr?

  But that's the easy part. That's the easy part. The easy part is setting your life up that way. The hard part is figuring it out what you want, because most people, myself included, are very influenceable. And so you see, this is why I don't watch Wolf of Wall Street, like that movie. Cause I see, I see like a good looking actor who's having a blast and makes it look fun to screw people and to do drugs. And I'm like, oh, that's so fun. Let's do it. You know what I mean?

• 40:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I know. I know what you mean.

• 40:21Sam Parr?

  So I don't watch that shit or I don't watch, um, you know, billions.

• 40:24Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 40:24Sam Parr?

  I was getting too influenced by, I'm like, oh no, this guy's actually a bad person, but they make it look awesome. And I can, I'm very easily influenced. And so I'm like, I gotta, I'm gonna avoid that. So the problem is actually not doing it. It's deciding what it is you want.

• 40:39Shaan Puri?

  What would you say? What are you maxing? What is, I think in engineering terms is like a maximizing function. Like what, what are you maximizing for in your life? What do you, which attribute are you trying to maximize for in your life?

• 40:48Sam Parr?

  Personally, I haven't made that decision yet. I don't know.

• 40:50Shaan Puri?

  On autopilot, what do you think that ends up being or what two or three does it end up switching between? Definitely money was one for me for a long time, maybe even now.

• 40:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, money, money, I would say making money and everything career driven is what I'm maxing.

• 41:03Shaan Puri?

  Achieving.

• 41:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah, achieving is 100% that. I sacrificed a lot of stuff in order to do that. And it's so funny because I don't always have to do that and yet I still make the decision to do it. I think that I imagine, the way I was raised, I imagine is similar to a lot of immigrants where it's just like, what do you mean you're not gonna work? Like when someone messages me saying like, hey, do you wanna get lunch on Thursday? I'm like, no dude, I have a job. And they're like, but you're the boss. And I'm like, I don't understand what that means. Like I have to go to work. It's like a really hard thing to break.

• 41:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm with you. I, I, I agree. It's really hard, but I think it's worth doing, right? I think it is, once you decide, I think it makes all your other decisions easier. Cause you just say, okay, cool. Does this increase, if I do this, does this increase the joy in my life for me, right? Does this increase the joy in my life? All right, cool. And not just like in the moment, but like, kind of like on a sustainable basis, right? Cause some things will give you joy in the moment. But we'll give you extreme, you know, whatever the opposite agony, suffering, you know, shortly after, right? I can drink a bunch. That's gonna give me joy right now, but I'm gonna have suffering on the hangover tomorrow. So net, it's negative. So I don't.

• 42:02Sam Parr?

  Did having, did having killed children, having a kid, did that change your, because I think that like when I got married, I was like, I feel a little bit more responsible for someone else. But in reality, like, I can kind of do anything I want. I don't really like it's, I'm still pretty hedonistic and pretty selfish.

• 42:17Shaan Puri?

  No, I think that didn't change me in that way. It changed me in other ways. But I would say for me, it was like selling my company. It was like, okay. All right. So I got some money, not all the money, got some money, you know, I've achieved something, didn't hit a home run, but I've, but I've achieved something. And I was sort of like, all right, well, that chapter is done now. So now I'm deciding what I'm gonna do next. And when you start to decide what you're gonna do next, that's when it becomes hard. Because while you're in the middle of something, it's very hard to like fucking reassess all your values and what you're optimizing for. Because then most of the time, the answer is stop doing what you're doing and go do something else, which is really hard to do. But when you have like a clean break, a transition time, that's the time to ask those questions. Because then it becomes very easy to like, sketch out a new picture for the next chapter.

• 43:01Shaan Puri?

  So it was more that it wasn't really having a kid made me think this way. It was like, I ended one chapter, I didn't rush in to start a new chapter yet. And in the meantime, I talked to a bunch of people who I think are interesting and wiser than me. And I read a bunch of stuff. And like, the thing I've come out with is that, you know, this is how I, this is how I want to think about things.

• 43:22Sam Parr?

  And it just so happens that your transition period is having like a two and a half million dollar angel investment fund. So that's a pretty good.

• 43:28Shaan Puri?

  Investing in companies is actually a very agonizing experience, but it's like first world problem. So you can't really complain. But like, somebody said this the other day, I heard it, it was like, everybody who invests before me is just a dart throwing monkey. And everybody who invests after me is just a spreadsheet, you know, just a spreadsheet monkey. That's just, you know, they took no gut risk or whatever. But it's very true. Like, whenever you invest in something, you, you never invest the right amount at the right time. You're always like, either fuck, I should have invested way more or way earlier. Or you're like, I should have never invested, or I should have invested way less or nothing. No matter what the outcome is, you've, you never get it right. Which is kind of a freeing feeling, because there is no like perfection that you can get there. The other thing that happens when you invest is like,

• 44:12Shaan Puri?

  You either invest in something because you're like, wow, you know, I think this could work. Or you're like, oh, my God, this is going to work. I should not invest. I should just compete with this person. Like, I should literally go start this company. I wish I was this founder. Oh, my God, they're about to like, go on this ride that I want to go on, which is like, they're going to crush this market. They're going to become rich and famous. They're going to build this amazing company, and I wish I was doing that right now. And I get that feeling all the time.

• 44:36Sam Parr?

  What's one company that you want to shout out that you get that feeling with?

• 44:39Shaan Puri?

  Um, okay, so which one?

• 44:41Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I invested in, uh, Levels, and everyone's talking to me about Levels. They have no idea that I am even remotely associated with it. I think that one might be that one.

• 44:50Shaan Puri?

  That could be one. Uh, I didn't invest in that one, but I'll tell you one that I'm seeing right now that I haven't invested in. I tried to invest. I couldn't get into one of the rounds, but this is kind of a good one. I was going to save this for the next episode, but we'll do it. So this is the reward for people who make it through the whole episode. You get probably one of the best ideas in a while.

• 45:05Sam Parr?

  And we can come back to it on Monday.

• 45:07Shaan Puri?

  So, okay, so I saw this company. I think I told you about this collectible trading card thing that we had this opportunity to buy like a $40 million trading card, like assets that, you know, some guy had collected for many, many, many, many, many years. And we had the opportunity to buy it for like 10 cents on the dollar. And that got me into this world of trading cards and collectibles. And I kind of knew about it before. Like, I knew that like eBay had gotten big very much on the back of collectibles. I knew that like StockX and Goat and these like sneaker marketplaces were doing really well because people collect sneakers and they trade at like $2,000 sneakers that people will buy because sneaker heads are like this like fandom. But now I'm like way deeper in it where I'm like, I'm seeing what's going on in this world of Pokemon and basketball cards and baseball cards.

• 45:51Shaan Puri?

  And like, it's crazy. So here's a trend I'm seeing that I'm looking at. So there's these companies. I'll give you two names. One is called Whatnot, and the other one is called Loop, L O U P E.

• 46:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we talked about you and me and one other person. Oh, Jack talked about Whatnot.

• 46:04Shaan Puri?

  Yes, uh, on the podcast or off?

• 46:07Sam Parr?

  Off.

• 46:07Shaan Puri?

  Okay, yeah, yeah. So, so Whatnot is basically, if you open the app, you're going to see live streams of people doing what they call card breaks, which is basically they take a pack of Pokemon cards. It's like, oh, guys, this is a Pokemon card pack. That's whatever, you know, like the base set, Rainbow Collection or whatever you want to call it. And then they're like, we're going to open, if you buy this pack, I'll open it live and let's see what you get. And there's all these people watching this happen. And so like, literally the screen is like, It's just like a table of a bunch of unopened packs. And then you go in and then on the, you're watching the video and you could just click buy. And that buys a certain pack. And then the guy opens it and he's like, oh shit, you got a Charizard. And then it's like, they'll mail you the pack. Or you could just be like, okay, I'll swap that in for like some credits and then like.

• 46:50Sam Parr?

  Oh, so the people, the people opening are employees?

• 46:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the people opening are the owner of the packs, which can sometimes be the platform itself. Or it can be just like another card seller who has a bunch of, bunch of stuff.

• 47:00Sam Parr?

  What a cool ass company to work for.

• 47:01Shaan Puri?

  So whatnot, I think is interesting. I tried to invest, didn't quite get into the round yet. Then there's Loop, which is doing this for sports cards. And so I was on there last night. This guy has this table and it's just full of sports card packs. And it's like the jankiest freaking app. And you like, you go and you hit like, I want to buy this Prism basketball card set. And I'm hoping that inside is like a Luka Doncic rookie card that's like in good condition. And he opens it up and it's like, oh, you didn't get the Luka, but you got this other thing. And it looks like it's, you know, maybe a nine out of 10. We'll, we'll send this off to get graded. And by the way, I don't know if you saw the grading company that just got bought. Did you see this?

• 47:38Sam Parr?

  Who? No, who?

• 47:39Shaan Puri?

  So there's two big grading companies, one of which is PSA. PSA just got bought yesterday for $700 million by a group led by this guy Nat Turner.

• 47:48Sam Parr?

  Oh, wait, the fucking Flatiron guy?

• 47:50Shaan Puri?

  Yes. So he's a huge, he's a huge collector, huge trading card guy.

• 47:55Sam Parr?

  By the way, I think we're getting our names wrong. Nat Turner is the slave who.

• 47:59Shaan Puri?

  We did this before, but I think this guy's name is also Nat Turner.

• 48:01Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 48:02Shaan Puri?

  It is.

• 48:02Sam Parr?

  Oh, you're right.

• 48:03Shaan Puri?

  Remember we, we did that once before. We were like the slave. So it's like, no, uh, this Nat Turner. So he invested in all, like every one of these platforms I'm looking at, he's already in. He also has like multimillion dollar collection of collectibles himself. And so then he rounded up a group and they bought PSA for $700 million.

• 48:21Sam Parr?

  No shit.

• 48:22Shaan Puri?

  Which they bought Collector's Universe, which owns it. And I think this is an amazing buy. Like I was actually looking at buying some of these things. I was like, oh, if everybody want, remember we had talked about certification startups? If you're the SAT, if you're the certification everyone needs in order to like be valuable, then you have this power just in your name. And that's what PSA is. If PSA says this is a 10 out of 10. Then the cards are 10 out of 10 and it's worth more. And so everybody has to pay PSA and they they spend like $10 plus per card per grade that you get. So and it takes like months to turn around. There's like no technology involved. So I think it's really smart for a technologist to go buy this company because it already has the brand.

• 49:01Shaan Puri?

  Now he's going to be able to bring technology into if making this these operations way more efficient. It should drop the costs, increase the speed and branch out even further. And so I really like this, but um, so he bought uh, collector's universe. So anyways, I think there's a bunch of interesting stuff happening in collectibles. I'm digging in right now. I'm in trying to invest in a couple of different companies in this space. So if you're doing something, let me know. But I would say in general, there's what I'll call e-commerce 3.0. E-commerce 3.0 is like fuck your your store, your Shopify store. That's just like a grid of images. And I don't know, like every every one of these stores kind of looks the same. It's just these like perfect models. You don't know what the thing's actually going to look like. You can't ask questions. There's like this intercom bot that says they'll reply to you in six hours over email.

• 49:43Shaan Puri?

  And so instead, what I think the future looks like is what's going on in Asia, which is it's a live stream of video. So it's like TikTok. You swipe, you see a seller and they sell whatever the hell they sell. They sell socks. They sell trading cards. They sell whatever. You browse their catalog, you know, just at the bottom of the screen while they're on live and you could see it's like really authentic. You see the seller. You see the person behind the brand. You see the products and you they're not like photoshopped and all this stuff. It's like the actual products. And all they need is iPhone to like run their store, just streaming. And you can actually just click up product in the catalog. They'll hold it up to you and be like, oh yeah, I love this thing because it's great. Here's how the bottom of it looks. It comes in this packaging. You can ask a question through the chat and then you get hit by and they'll be like, great, it's yours.

• 50:25Shaan Puri?

  And you just check out through the app. That's what I think e-commerce is going to look like. And I think it's going to make Shopify look like a dinosaur in the past.

• 50:32Sam Parr?

  Let's uh, do an entire episode on Monday about this because this Nat Turner thing, I didn't know about it. I want to dive deep into this. This is so interesting that this guy did this. I think it's bold. I think it's cool. He's like a high-tech guy, so he started a ad network and he also started a health company that sold for two or three billion dollars. Now he's doing this. I find that to be so fascinating. This is like a rich nerd's playhouse.

• 50:57Shaan Puri?

  Yes, yes, I I would agree. That's exactly what it is. I want to see his collection too. I think he's got kind of an amazing collection himself. But I like this. I like the space and there's a lot of good stuff. There's a lot of stuff that's happening here that most people are not paying attention to unless you're in this world and then it feels like your whole world.

• 51:12Sam Parr?

  Well, I see Logan Paul doing it and I'm like, well, if he's doing it, it's like really big.

• 51:16Shaan Puri?

  Gary Vee's been pimping it. Logan Paul's been pimping it and that's why Pokemon price has been going up because those guys were actually sort of able to move the market in a way. Uh, like they actually had enough influence to move the market and they add more credibility and legitimacy to it in the same way, right? The reason I'm buying Bitcoin is like, well, you go look and you see that Raul Paul said, I'm moving 90% of my worth into Bitcoin, 90%. You see that Paul Tudor Jones, the billionaire hedge fund guy said he's, he's accumulated a 2% position in his portfolio of Bitcoin. 2% for Paul Tudor Jones is a, is a, is a massive amount of Bitcoin. You know, grayscale, they raised like a billion dollar plus fund and bought all Bitcoin. The, all they did was they called all the capital upfront and they bought Bitcoin.

• 51:55Sam Parr?

  Who's grayscale?

• 51:56Shaan Puri?

  Grayscale is a crypto fund that was started by these two kind of like well-known crypto guys. And you would think that they were going to invest in all these different crypto projects and all this stuff. And they raised like a big fund and they, they were, you know, most funds they called the capital over a period of five years or so. And these guys called all the capital upfront and when Bitcoin was at like between four and 8,000, they just put the whole fund into Bitcoin. And, uh, which is hilarious because all they did was buy Bitcoin and they're taking a 20% carry. It's like no, no genius involved, but it's already performing amazing, right? You know, since then.

• 52:25Sam Parr?

  There's so much going on in the world right now. This is so exciting. There's so many opportunities. I'm like, I want to know, is this normal? I can't imagine this is normal.

• 52:33Shaan Puri?

  It's, there's all this stuff happening. It's just, are you aware of it and are you looking in the places where the action is right? Square and PayPal, I think each said that they're putting something like $50 million. They're a whole, they're just going to hold $50 million of Bitcoin as part of their sort of treasury. There's another company that said they were going to do $450 million. And so there's all these people buying in that are institutions, not just like, you know, crypto nerds anymore. Now every investment firm has to have a Bitcoin strategy. It might be, we're not buying Bitcoin. It might be, we're buying a small amount. It might be, we're buying a big amount, but they all have to have a strategy now for Bitcoin. And I think that's a big, big change. That wasn't the case before. With Bitcoin specifically, one of the exciting things is that about 60% of the kind of supply that's out there is just not moving. It's people who are long-term holders. They're not selling.

• 53:18Shaan Puri?

  So really like there's, is this, there's a supply problem. There's only so much supply and there's a lot more demand and that drives up the price. And when the price goes up, it reinforces all the people who are holding to keep holding. The next wave are also going to hold because they just bought in. And so they're gonna want to hold too, and that's gonna cause the supply to keep shrinking and the demand to keep going up.

• 53:37Sam Parr?

  You'll put me in that category. I've never sold. I don't intend to either. I don't even have the log.

• 53:41Shaan Puri?

  I don't hold it either. I don't sell and I don't hold. I lose. I lose it. I don't know where it is.

• 53:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Um, well, what we'll do on Monday is let's talk about e-comm and trading cards only.

• 53:53Shaan Puri?

  All right. Sounds good.

• 53:54Sam Parr?

  Cause I'm into it. We're gonna talk about rally, which I love. I like rally. You know rally?

• 53:58Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 53:58Sam Parr?

  We'll talk about that. We'll talk about a bunch of shit.

• 54:00Shaan Puri?

  We should bring Jack on, by the way. Jack Smith.

• 54:02Sam Parr?

  All right. I'll set it up.

• 54:03Shaan Puri?

  He knows more about the space. He knows more about this than either of us.

• 54:06Sam Parr?

  What time is it in Hawaii right now? He, he lives. That's where he lives.

• 54:10Shaan Puri?

  We can adjust our time.

• 54:11Sam Parr?

  11 a.m. Okay. So he'll be up. He'll do it. I'll set it up. All right. We'll talk to you all soon. I have drank three Topo Chico's while I've been on the phone. So I, or been here. I've gotta go to the bathroom so bad. So I'm gonna log off. Sounds good. See y'all later.