#193 - How a $25 Million a Year Sweepstakes Business Works and Shaan Predicts the Future

Shaan (@ShaanVP) and Sam (@TheSamParr) go in depth on how the Sweepstakes industry works, and Sam shares how they would use sweepstakes to grow the Hustle. The guys also discuss a business friendly take on deep fakes, a no-chicken chicken nugget, and how options contacts could work for startup founders. They end the episode with a long segment where Shaan predicts what the next version of today's big companies will look like. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (1:20) Recap of episode * (6:36) Brick and mortar businesses * (10:45) Losing millions with shipping delays * (14:26) Oasis - a positive spin on deep fakes * (23:23) Multi-million dollar sweepstakes businesses * (36:39) How the Hustle thought about user acquisition * (41:12) The chicken-free chicken nugget * (44:09) Options contracts for startups * (50:16) The Future: Shaan gazes into a crystal ball * (51:13) The Future: Apple * (51:56) The Future: Facebook * (53:23) The Future: Amazon * (54:31) The Future: 7/11 * (55:28) The Future: Netflix * (56:55) The Future: Pornhub * (57:53) The Future: Domino's * (59:30) Episode close

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  And you're like, dude, I believe in you. If you were just gonna start a new startup, I'm in for 25K. Like, no questions asked.

• 0:18Sam Parr?

  All right, everyone. We have a new episode. This one is pretty good. So we talked about a couple of things. The first thing we talked about was Oasis, which is this interesting new product that kind of, uh, it's like a deep fake, but for Zoom. That's not the best description, but check it out. Sean says it's one of the biggest ideas that he's ever heard of. Second, we break down the sweepstake business. If you want to make a company that makes like half a million dollars a month in profit, and you want to have it start and launch inside the next probably two years, like, uh, or sorry, two months, and then grow in the next one, two, three years to half a million dollars a month in profit. I think this is an interesting idea. We break it down. And then we talk about Sean's prediction. So he predicts what's gonna be the next Apple, Facebook, Amazon,

• 1:00Sam Parr?

  7-Eleven, Netflix, Pornhub, Domino's. Those are all separate predictions. Not one company can do all of them, but that would be cool. And, uh, it's a great episode. Give it a listen. And by the way, have you clicked subscribe yet on YouTube? And have you clicked subscribe on iTunes? A lot of people say like, hey, you guys are awesome. Thank you for doing all that work. Then pay me back. I don't want money, though. All I, all I want is for you to hit subscribe on iTunes, hit follow on Spotify, hit subscribe on our YouTube page. That's all I want. And we're gonna keep doing it for free. All right, let's get to the episode. Um, what's going on?

• 1:33Shaan Puri?

  I am, uh, look at me now. I'm in my, I'm in a chick palace here.

• 1:38Sam Parr?

  What's a chick palace?

• 1:39Shaan Puri?

  I mean, like, I went from like a manly industrial look to like, everything is glitter and gold now.

• 1:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that doesn't look like your style. That doesn't even look like it's your wife's style.

• 1:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know whose style this is, but that's the style we got today.

• 1:52Sam Parr?

  Have you ever thought about creating a, uh, brick and mortar business, by the way? Oh, wait, actually, first, two things. Two things before we get into anything.

• 2:01Shaan Puri?

  Everybody like and subscribe and tell a friend. Tell five friends.

• 2:04Sam Parr?

  Yes, but, um, Wednesday, do we have a guest on Wednesday?

• 2:09Shaan Puri?

  I don't think so.

• 2:10Sam Parr?

  Okay. Yes, we do. Oh, okay. Damn it. Okay, not this Wednesday. On Monday after that, let's do the investor episode. We have another guest. We have a guest on Monday, too? Yeah, Dan Hald is coming on Monday.

• 2:22Shaan Puri?

  All right, so we got two guests.

• 2:23Sam Parr?

  Okay, nevermind. Fine, then forget that. Second thing.

• 2:27Sam Parr?

  I have this episode coming out. You know how they're doing these Monday things?

• 2:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 2:30Sam Parr?

  So what I'm doing is I'm splicing together clips. I'm going to splice together like five to 10, and I'm going to talk in between each one. And each clip is going to be from a YouTube video or from a podcast. And the topic is, I'm obsessed with time right now because I'm quite impatient, and I'm trying to work on it. And the topic is on actually patience and how like great things that I admire actually took much longer than I thought.

• 2:53Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so you so what is, okay, so if I listen to this episode, what am I going to get? I'm going to get Sam talking about time?

• 2:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and you got to turn your mic down a little bit. No, so what you're going to get is you're going to get me. So you're all right. So Travis Kalanick, before he started Uber, he had this thing called Red Swoosh. You know what that was?

• 3:12Shaan Puri?

  I don't even know what it did, but I've heard the story.

• 3:14Sam Parr?

  I don't even know what it did either, to be honest. It was a peer to peer. It was like, it's not relevant anymore because

• 3:19Shaan Puri?

  It was like Napster, but

• 3:20Sam Parr?

  It was like Napster, but different. And he sold it for like $20 million, but it took like eight years or something like that, like crazy. And I, and I found that I have this amazing YouTube video of him giving a talk, like a 40 minute talk, but like the first like three minutes is about Red Swoosh. And it's like, he explains how hard it was. I'm like, oh, my God, that took forever. And I've got like eight or nine of those clips that I've saved of people admire saying they're going to take a lot. It's taking a long time. And I'm putting them together. So it's a however long the podcast is going to be with like two to three minute clips with me like making you giving the background of each story.

• 3:52Shaan Puri?

  Right. Okay, I like it. So

• 3:55Sam Parr?

  We'll see if it's interesting.

• 3:56Shaan Puri?

  So have you ever seen the Joe Rogan thing where it's like Joe, Joe Rogan watches the internet or something like that? Have you ever seen these YouTube videos?

• 4:02Sam Parr?

  No, but is it good?

• 4:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they're funny. It's like, it's a compilation of basically Joe watching YouTube videos and just reacting to them. But all the videos are really interesting, kind of like random ass stuff from the internet. And then his reaction is like, good, he's not trying to be like super over the top. It's like his genuine, genuine reaction to it. So I kind of see this as like the business version of that, where you're taking one theme, and then you see what a bunch of different interesting people have said about that theme. And it's sort of like Sam surfs the internet where you're going to like, kind of go into and out of each of those clips and just be talking.

• 4:34Sam Parr?

  We'll see if it's any good. So in, in over the next couple of days, if you have an example of a talk that you've listened to, or a story that amazed you, send it to me.

• 4:44Shaan Puri?

  Okay, sounds good. By the way, you said something about Travis Kalanick. Have you ever read this blog post he did called like, how to do South by Southwest on a budget or something like that? Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 4:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so he had this old blog.

• 4:56Shaan Puri?

  Or CES, maybe.

• 4:57Sam Parr?

  Which I, which I don't even think you could find a blog anymore. And he basically wrote like, you know, if you show up at this time, you can get free this. You can get a discounted cab if you do X, Y, and Z.

• 5:09Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 5:09Sam Parr?

  Like he was like being pretty scrappy and like saving, like pitching pennies, right?

• 5:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. It was, I think it was like CES or South by Southwest. And he was basically like, yo, if you're going to these things, here's how to do it. Like here's how to ball out on a budget. And then he had all those little like tips and tricks of like, you don't need to get VIP pass to go here. Just wear like an orange vest and then you could walk through, you know, that type of thing.

• 5:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he was like scrappy.

• 5:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 5:34Sam Parr?

  So I was just listening to this podcast, Theo Von, the Theo Von podcast. I don't even know what it's called. And he had the founder of Raising Canes on there. Do you know what Raising Canes is?

• 5:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, dude, I've met the founder of Raising Canes at a random, I was at a table, I was eating lunch one day and the founder was, was right next to me.

• 5:51Sam Parr?

  And you just said, uh, what's up? Or I mean,

• 5:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I was like, hey, well, you know, this is kind of like this old, it was a, it was a restaurant conference. So it wasn't like super random. But there's just kind of this nice, nice, you know, like slightly older southern guy. I think he was the owner, the CEO.

• 6:07Sam Parr?

  Well, there's two guys who started it. One of them is about 50, but he looks quite young. Maybe it's the other guy. And I was listening to this podcast with them. He's southern, lives in Louisiana. And they have hundreds of restaurants at this point and north of a billion dollars in sales. And he, the way that he makes, makes it sound, he's like, I just loved running the fryer. I loved being at the place. It sounds so much, and the grass is always greener. It sounds so much more fun than sitting behind a computer. Have you ever thought about doing?

• 6:34Shaan Puri?

  In what way? Well, how is that more fun sitting? Have you ever been at a restaurant back, you know, like the back, back kitchen of a restaurant? Next to the fires?

• 6:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I was, I was like,

• 6:43Shaan Puri?

  Hot and shitty?

• 6:44Sam Parr?

  I was a busboy. I was a busboy and I, I was never old enough to be a waiter. But yeah, I, I worked in the service industry. It is fun, just like being in the, being in, being in the action. It just sounded cool. Would you ever do a brick and mortar or like a?

• 6:57Shaan Puri?

  I did, and I regret it every second of it. Um, you know, the, the part that is fun actually is the camaraderie because

• 7:05Sam Parr?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 7:05Shaan Puri?

  The kitchen crew, this, you know, the bond is different than like just your normal friends or like your coworkers. Like if you go to your office today and you have a coworker who sits, you know, three desks down and both of you have your headphones on and you're typing on your Mac, you know, you have a, and you go to, you go get your free lunch together at the cafeteria. Like this is the tech industry, right? It's like totally different vibe than you're in the restaurant. It's Friday night, the restaurant's rocking, you're banging out orders as fast as you can. And you, um, you know, it's 1:00 AM when you're finally done cleaning up and it's like, all right, now let's go eat. And then, you know, you go to some restaurant and, and the restaurant's closed, but they let you in because you're from the restaurant industry and you get to go eat with them. Like that's just a different level of camaraderie.

• 7:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's exciting. It's fun. You're in the thick of it. I love it.

• 7:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but I would never want to do it again. Uh, it's like, it's like, you know, when people are like, yeah, going to the army was one of my most, uh, you know, formidable times. It's like, would you ever want to go back again through that boot camp through hell week again?

• 8:01Sam Parr?

  Just so you know, I, I read this book called Tribe and it's all up, because I was curious about what type of neighborhood would be best to live in and like what makes, what makes you happy when finding a place to live. And it's a, it's, you know, I don't know this. I've never been in the military, but so I know it from like an academic story point of view that when you're in the military, a lot of guys, a huge amount of the guys, when they get out, they miss it like crazy because they're like, all right, it was hard. I was risking my life. Yeah, that's true. But I felt like I had a crew of guys. We were always doing something. I had a mission and I, and I, and life is so lame and boring without it.

• 8:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I, I could see that, but, um, also there's a lot of people, when you talk to them, it's like, man, that was the best and hardest time of my life. Would I go back and do it again? No, I don't want to do it again, but it was an amazing time at that time. And, uh, you know, the sort of like when astronauts come back from space is what you're describing. It's like, yeah, they're kind of like, well, now what? I, you know, I fricking went to the moon. That was my life mission. And now every day seems quite boring and like, you know, uneventful and not, not really having a purpose as I did before. Um, but anyways, I guess like brick and mortar. So what, you know, what would you want to do if you were doing brick and mortar?

• 9:13Sam Parr?

  I think I could crush a, I think I could, I could, I could operate a hotel or a restaurant really well.

• 9:19Shaan Puri?

  Hospitality.

• 9:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think I could crush that and I, and I maybe I will want to do that one day, but I think I can kill it. I'm looking at buying another house and turning it into a rental. Cause I'm, I already did it with this one and I'm seeing one later today, but I think I could crush it.

• 9:34Shaan Puri?

  And what, okay, okay. So I was gonna say, what was Theo Von talking about? So Theo Von was just.

• 9:38Sam Parr?

  He just interviewed the guy.

• 9:40Shaan Puri?

  Okay, gotcha. All right. Yeah, I wouldn't, I'm, I'm more like, even with e-commerce, I'm like, ah, this business is great, except for all the physical products. Like, you know, right now there's a situation going on where I think, I forgot what the exact tweet is, but it was sort of like the, there's boats are, you know, everyone saw that, that one boat got stuck in the canal.

• 10:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah. What are you like feeling? You're like feeling the, the pain now?

• 10:08Shaan Puri?

  Well, it's not really that. There's just like another situation where the biggest port in China is backed up. And they're just like, they, there was a COVID outbreak and so for a week they were operating at 30% capacity. And this is like the biggest throughput, like logistics place in, in the world. And so the knock on effects of that are gonna like last, I don't know, like months, basically. And so basically what you're seeing now is that boats couldn't get out on time. They were just idling in the water. And Ryan Peterson, who we're gonna have on the pod, because he tweeted this out, he goes, you know, it's crazy, the average, you know, wait time now, or the average number of boats that's waiting is blah, blah, blah. And I asked him, I go, I tweeted back, I said, what's the cost per day of that boat just sitting idle, right?

• 10:52Shaan Puri?

  With all this cargo on, on top and just sitting in the water, not being unloaded. And he did the math. He's like, it's about a million dollars a day that, that the shipping company is losing just by being stuck. And then for all the downstream people, like, you know, if I have my goods on a ship, on a boat that's not here, well, now I'm delayed. Now I'm out of inventory and because I'm out of inventory, I'm out of sales. And there's just one after another, sort of like knock on effects of this. And so for me, even e-commerce, which is pretty, pretty like internet-y is like, the, you know, the only bad part about it is all these physical goods, like, oh, you had a product, but then the wheels are broken or the zipper's.

• 11:29Sam Parr?

  Our customers understanding of that at all, like, like when I, like, I'm so, now I do Amazon, you know, two day delivery, one day delivery, whatever it is. But if something comes like in seven or 10 days, I think I'm mostly cool with it, right?

• 11:42Shaan Puri?

  Um, maybe during COVID, people were understanding because it was just like, dude, it's COVID, like everything is backed up. And if this is not like a mission critical thing, then, uh, you know, then I understand. But like people's kind of COVID patients wore off, I think. And, um, and also if not, everything is backed up, it's just your stuff, then you look really bad. And, you know, business, even if it's not, even if they understand, like you lose sales and losing like two weeks of sales is a pretty devastating for your month's revenue, which is like, you know, uh, pretty bad for your, your annual revenue when you're operating on like 10, 15% EBITDA. And so, so yeah, by the way, the, the tweet was five and a half percent of the world's container fleet is waiting

• 12:24Shaan Puri?

  outside of a port. And then he said, I asked, what is the cost per day to be waiting idle? He goes, one trip, round trip from Asia on a, on one of these shipping boats is 50 million of profit. So every, every day that they're sitting out, you know, sitting, sitting idle, and it's a 30 day trip. And so, you know, so that's about a million dollars per day, per ship that's idle. And then I was like, holy shit, these ships make 50 million in profit for a single round trip from Asia. And, uh, and then, you know, people were replying, people who know about the shipping industry, they're like, yeah, it's crazy. Like, the top, um, the top 10 shipping companies will make like 100 billion in profit this year. Um, but like in the last 10 years, they've lost 100 billion in profit. Like, it's, it's a very

• 13:10Sam Parr?

  Volatile.

• 13:11Shaan Puri?

  volatile, volatile space based on, you know, volumes and costs and all this stuff. Like right now, shipping containers twice as much as it was last year, just because supply and demand is so out of whack.

• 13:20Sam Parr?

  That's crazy. I'm excited to have him on.

• 13:22Shaan Puri?

  And so we'll nerd out with him about that.

• 13:24Sam Parr?

  So you want to talk about some ideas? We have a bunch here. We, where, where do you want to start?

• 13:28Shaan Puri?

  So some of the, some of the ideas that I, I wrote down, so I wrote down two, I think I said, I have, or I have three. One is Oasis, which I think is one of the biggest startup ideas, most, most interesting startup ideas out there. Uh, nugs, which isn't the fake chicken nugget market, and I have some thoughts around that. And then I have a prediction section where I'm going to predict what the next Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Netflix will look like. And so, uh, those are my, uh, actually I have another one, but maybe we'll save that one for the next pod. So those are my three we could do today.

• 13:56Sam Parr?

  Let's do Oasis, car, uh, uh, Oasis giveaway business, nugs and predictions.

• 14:03Shaan Puri?

  All right. Sounds good. So Oasis. So you know what this is, but I think most, almost everybody, 99% of people listening to this have no idea what this is. So let me explain the, the concept. I, um, or I'll, I'll tell the story of how I bumped into this guy. I was on Twitter and I saw this guy, Matt. And he was teasing, kind of like, you know, people do this on Twitter where they have like, my stealth thing is kind of coming, or they post a screenshot or like a gif. It's kind of ambiguous, but it looks interesting. It looks provocative. Or they're just retweeting people. I think this is what I saw. He retweeted our mutual friend, Siki, who was like, dude, just got an Oasis demo. Mind blown. This is the future. And so he retweeted that and I'm like, okay, hook, line and sinker. Like, tell me about, like, how do I get that demo?

• 14:45Shaan Puri?

  I also would like my mind blown. And he's like, all right, yeah, hop into Zoom. So I hopped into a Zoom and he showed me something that was honestly pretty mind blowing. And what it was, was he was like, okay, so I'm talking to you on Zoom right now. Here's my face. And, um, but you know, the problem with Zoom is that you always got to look good. Uh, and people get, you know, people get, um, nervous about that. And so, you know, over 60% of people don't actually turn their camera on in, in North America because they're self-conscious of how they look. And, um, that kind of sucks. And now we're video calling without the video, right? And he's like, so what if instead you could have a representation of you? That wasn't like cartoony. It's not like an emoji or an emoji or whatever the Apple thing is.

• 15:30Shaan Puri?

  It literally looks like you and we'll show a screenshot of this, um, on the screen. If you're watching on our YouTube channel, which is just youtube.com/hustlecon, uh, you'll see the video of this. It's kind of amazing. So the video, the gif that I want to show is, it says, never worry about how you look on camera again. And it's a video of the founder, Matt. He's in the shower, holding up his phone. And on the left side is what he actually looks like. It's a dude in the shower. Um, and on the right side is like the digital representation of it. It's him, but he doesn't look like he's in the shower. It looks like him, like in front of a perfect backdrop, just talking and it's tracking his mouth perfectly. And, um, So I thought, oh, this is kind of amazing. Like if I could be on video without actually having to be on video,

• 16:11Shaan Puri?

  if I could kind of like a filter, but if I could just automatically have the best looking version of myself on camera. God, that would save me a lot of time and energy and thought around how I look. And he's like, it gets even better. So not only does it let you do that, you could also show up as a different person. So say you're, you know, a minority, you don't want to be discriminated against. You could, you could show yourself as a, you know, a tall white male and nobody would ever know what you actually look like. So this empowers like working pseudonymously, which is something we've talked about. The last thing is, is like, here's the best bit. This works on like the worst connections, uh, worst connection phones in the world. I said, well, how do you do that? This seems like pretty high powered. He goes, there's no video being transferred. I said, what? He goes, yeah, it's like a video game.

• 16:56Shaan Puri?

  The screen on my side is tracking my face, every pixel of my face, how my lips are moving, my nose, my eyes, et cetera. And then instead of sending my video across the internet, it just sends how those pixels are moving like a video game. And so then on the other side, it recreates the video just using those pixel coordinates. And so the idea here is that even on really shitty internet, low bandwidth scenarios, you could have awesome looking video and without you having to like, you could be rolling out of bed and you look like a million bucks. So what do you think of this idea? I think it's pretty big.

• 17:28Sam Parr?

  I was pitched this as well and I passed. Did you, did you pass or no?

• 17:35Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I didn't even really get to, I'm, I have a call scheduled with the guy. I just saw the demo. This was months and months ago. It wasn't like in an investable spot at that moment. Um, or like they weren't raising or something like that. But I'm looking at it now, you know, it, it does have a high evaluation and you know, it's pretty.

• 17:50Sam Parr?

  It's got a very high valuation. I, I don't, are we, is, I don't.

• 17:54Shaan Puri?

  Let's not say, yeah, let's not say.

• 17:56Sam Parr?

  Um, it's got a high valuation. Um, and it's like six guys working on this. It's pretty wild. And I, so here's what, here's what I think about this. I think the way, the way that it's set up now is not the way that it could be a huge thing.

• 18:14Shaan Puri?

  Okay, tell me what you mean.

• 18:15Sam Parr?

  So a lot of times when I either invest in stuff or I want to get involved in a project, whether I'm starting it or not, I'm very comfortable taking the leap of faith of saying, this is just how I'm gonna start. And I'm very comfortable in saying one of two things. I know how it's going to end, or rather like, I want to create a massive media company that covers this, this, and this. I'm gonna start with an email. I don't know the middle ground, but I'm, I'm pretty confident I'm gonna figure it out. Or I'm also okay with not even having an ending point of like, I created something cool. It feels powerful and strong. I think I could figure it out where to go. And this business, I think, was that second one. So I saw the technology. I played with it. I got the demo. And he basically

• 18:59Sam Parr?

  was talking to me and I, I got it. I was like, oh, okay. So like, to me, this is like, pretty like, unlimited, unlimited on what the options are. And so the bet I'm having to make is, is this founder great? And can they figure out exactly how to deploy this technology? And I wasn't sure if, I, I wasn't sure if it was worth trying to figure out if they could get it.

• 19:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, well, also the price matters, right? So like,

• 19:23Sam Parr?

  That's why I'm saying,

• 19:24Shaan Puri?

  You don't want to pay a, I figured it out price when they haven't figured it out yet, right? You want to pay the, oh, this is cool and promising price, which should be like 10 times lower. But I get why this has a high valuation, because to me, you see something like Zoom. Zoom is a hundred billion dollar company. Zoom is letting you call, you know, do, do video calls with people all around the internet for business purposes. I think that the future Zoom, like the leapfrog of Zoom is not Zoom with slightly better features, or the recording is better, the audio quality is a little better. It's, this is a video call where I don't actually have to be on video, but it looks like I'm on video. Everybody looks great. Everybody's presenting their professional self, regardless of how they

• 20:05Shaan Puri?

  actually look at home. And secondly, this works on extremely low bandwidth shitty internet circumstances, because it's not even transferring video. It's just transferring pixel coordinates. That to me is like a leapfrog. And that means, what does, if Zoom's 100 billion today, and somebody built, what I believe if you did this, it would be a better Zoom. Obviously doesn't have the network effects, doesn't have the brand, doesn't have many things that you need to do to get it big, but it has the magic trick. And I think when you have a magic trick, you can get a lot of users pretty quickly. And the magic trick here is pretty impressive. We were both pretty impressed with the magic.

• 20:37Sam Parr?

  But it sounds like we're saying the same thing.

• 20:39Shaan Puri?

  But I guess my difference would be, I think I know what the endpoint looks like. The endpoint looks like this is how business calls are done. You have your.

• 20:45Sam Parr?

  Dude, that's not that big. Is that that big of a market? I don't, I disagree with you. I don't know, man. If I was this, I'd be using this for movies or for, you know, I actually don't even know what I would use it for, but I can't imagine business calls would be the number one thing.

• 20:59Shaan Puri?

  Dude, Zoom is massive. Zoom is like humongous, right? A hundred billion dollar company. How much bigger do you want, right? One trillion? Okay, you can get to a trillion, but.

• 21:08Sam Parr?

  But this, you're not making Zoom. This is a plugin for Zoom.

• 21:11Shaan Puri?

  I think you could make the new Zoom using this, right? Why would I use Zoom when instead I could use this where I always look like a million bucks? And already it's better than Zoom. And the second thing is it works better on any internet conditions because it's not transferring heavy video across the wire.

• 21:25Sam Parr?

  Regardless, I'm into this. I'm into this. I just was unwilling to bet my own money at that high of evaluation.

• 21:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think that's totally fair. The reason this stuck out to me was I was like, I had this doc I've talked about before, which is called the biggest idea in my head right now, which is basically if I was totally free, I could drop everything I was doing and I was going to work on the biggest startup idea in my head at any given month. What is it? And I just keep track month by month. And sometimes it's the same for two months straight, three months straight. And sometimes it changes. This became the biggest startup idea in my head because I think it's basically taking novel technology, going after a really big market. And it's doing it in a way that is like complete, like the incumbents would have to sort of re-architect their whole shit to be able to do this, I think. I don't think you could just make a plugin to do this. And so, so anyways, I thought this was like one of the bigger ideas. So I just wanted to bring it up.

• 22:16Shaan Puri?

  I don't really have any more besides that.

• 22:18Sam Parr?

  All right, let's move on then. You want to talk about something that's way less of a big idea, but a surefire way to make a lot of money?

• 22:25Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 22:26Sam Parr?

  Okay, let's talk about the giveaway business, also known as the sweepstake business. And I'm interested in this business because. Well, because I've used it a lot as

• 22:38Shaan Puri?

  Because it seems easy and awesome and you've done it, you've dabbled?

• 22:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so with the hustle, one way that we grew, we grew in a bunch of ways, but we did two things that are related to this. The first, we would pay companies, or no, I'll start with this one. The first, we would give stuff away. We would give a Tesla away. We would give a 3D printer away, which we're giving now. And if you share an email, or you get other people to join, like, and they use your unique URL, you get more entries. And if a car costs us $30,000, and we acquire 30,000 emails, that's a dollar to acquire an email, that's a really good deal for us. Because we make, let's say, $10 off every email. No brainer. The second thing that we did is we paid some of these companies, and I want to explain how they work. So do me a favor and go to bold.org. Can you do that right now?

• 23:25Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I'm on it.

• 23:26Sam Parr?

  What's it say?

• 23:27Shaan Puri?

  It says hiding student debt. That's it?

• 23:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and how's it say it does it?

• 23:33Shaan Puri?

  Um, let's see, so scholarships, philanthropy, I don't know, it just looks like donations or something like, right?

• 23:38Sam Parr?

  So what you do, and because they make it all, click, um, scholarships for nursing or something.

• 23:45Shaan Puri?

  Okay, scholarships for nursing students, I'm there. Five great scholarships for future nurses, great.

• 23:50Sam Parr?

  All right, so bold.org, what they do is they go and they get, they either create scholarships, or they find people who have scholarships, and they aggregate it into one area, into one platform. Not that hard to do in itself. Then, what they do is they go get loads of people to sign up for the scholarship. So they advertise to nurses and nursing Facebook groups on Google, and they get people to sign up and enter all this information. And here's how they make money. When you are a nurse, or let's say you're applying to get your MBA, if you have tens of thousands of people apply to get their MBA, an MBA scholarship, that's a pretty, pretty high qualified lead list, right?

• 24:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 24:33Sam Parr?

  Same with nurses, same with, I mean, pretty much any of these niches. And what they do is, as you sign up for this thing, at the end, they go, also, do you want to opt in for this, this, or this, or this? And companies like The Hustle, I would pay them money. I think at one point, we were paying them maybe 50 to 100 grand a month. And that's how many leads that they were getting us.

• 24:53Shaan Puri?

  That's amazing. So, so basically they go, they pay for people. So they, they go and they spend money to get people to apply for a scholarship and people are like, oh, fantastic. Thank you so much. And then when they're applying, they're basically like, hey, would you like to opt in? And why does the person want to opt in? Or is it like, hey, do this and you get some increased odds of the scholarship? Or how does it work?

• 25:12Sam Parr?

  I believe both. Yeah. So like, they just like show offers that are interesting. And also, I believe that it's just like, it's you're automatically in unless you opt out in the flow. And you get more likelihood if you opt into stuff.

• 25:24Shaan Puri?

  Dude, how did you even find this? How did you think, oh, you know what? I'm gonna go, like, when you, when you, you were trying to make the connection between sweepstakes and giveaways and you're like, go to bold.org, this like nonprofit looking, you know, scholarships for nurses in Africa. I was like, what does this have to do with? How did you even figure out this is how you grow an email?

• 25:41Sam Parr?

  So, there's a bunch of ways that I know how to do this. The first, there's this guy named Dennis Gross, who we're gonna have to get on this podcast. So Dennis started WiseGeek, which you and I are both probably too young to have used it, but it was like a web 1.0 thing. It made a lot of money. And then he started loads of other things, including investing into lots of different startups like Thumbtack. But then he started bestreviews.com. Do you remember that? Or do you know what bestreviews.com is? It sold for $160 million to Tribune like three or four years ago. So this guy named Dennis, he's very, very wealthy and he's started loads of companies and he stays way below the radar. And he created this thing called Mechanism, which is like an idea lab, except he's like an SEO guru and like a lead gen guru. So he's launched all these companies.

• 26:21Sam Parr?

  And the co-founder of Mechanism is Brendan, who's the founder of Top Towel. And I'm friends with both of those guys. And I saw what they're getting into. And he pitched me and sold me on using bold.org and it was pretty good.

• 26:32Shaan Puri?

  Random. First, I can't find this guy. Dennis Gross, is that his name?

• 26:37Sam Parr?

  Go to bold.org slash about. He spells his name D I N I S space G R O S Z.

• 26:45Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. Okay, so he's, oh, he actually did Bold. Okay, so that's how you found out.

• 26:49Sam Parr?

  So here's where, here's, here's what I'm getting at here. So this got me interested into giveaways. Actually, you have to call them sweepstakes. There's a lot of legality around this. And so what, what I learned was you, and we, when we did sweepstakes, we would have to call it sweepstakes. You have to have rules that are approved by your lawyer. And I got kind of interested.

• 27:07Shaan Puri?

  It's like, you could buy entries, or if you just mail us this form, we have to let you apply, we have to give you the equivalent entry, right? So it's like.

• 27:14Sam Parr?

  There's all types of technicalities.

• 27:16Shaan Puri?

  You can't make it pay to play, otherwise it's like a lottery or something.

• 27:19Sam Parr?

  And you can't, yeah, it can't be a lottery. You can't, now, I don't, this is just an example. I don't know if this is actually the rule. You can't use the word like free, or you can't do, like, there's a bunch of like technicality stuff that you have to follow. But I got very interested in giveaways. And so I did some research on a bunch of them. So there's loads of giveaway businesses. There's three ways that I've seen it work. The first, you buy entries. So I've seen, like, buythishouse.com, I believe it's called, or buy, buySanFranciscoHome.com, where a company buys a San Francisco house. Then they put ads all over the subway, they put ads all over the billboard, and they sell entries for a hundred dollars, and it's a raffle.

• 28:00Sam Parr?

  The second way that this business works is you do it Bold did, which is the audience is the product and you sell their information. You know those cars that are at malls?

• 28:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 28:12Sam Parr?

  Okay, so what happens at those businesses is they, they pay the mall, a, a, a marketing park company pays the mall a rental fee to use that real estate.

• 28:20Shaan Puri?

  Space, right?

• 28:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Then, loads of people enter their information to join and buy that car. They look at the, all the leads and names now that they have, the birth date, things like that, and they categorize them, and then they sell them to different companies. And those companies cold call those people to sell them X, Y, and Z.

• 28:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:36Sam Parr?

  Okay, so the third way that you make money off of this is you could sell merch. And when you sell merch, you get X more entries into the giveaway. And I found this one company that's doing car giveaways. And I got ahold of these financials. And if you're listening to this, actually, there's a, the takeaway here is that this, about this business. But the, the second takeaway is sign up for brokerage website that, that sell.

• 28:59Shaan Puri?

  Amazing way to learn.

• 29:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah, an amazing way to learn. You go to Quiet Light Brokerage, you go to, what's the name of this one?

• 29:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you go to Flipper, Empire Flippers, you've Quiet Light Brokerage. You can go to like one of many, uh, or you know, FE International or whatever. There's a whole bunch of places where you can go and you can basically look at internet businesses. The beauty of it is if you wanna, if you're on the outside, you're like, dude, I've never actually been inside of a successful business. Never run one, never owned one, never sold one. You can go on here and it's a great way to get business ideas because you're just gonna see a bunch of businesses you never thought about like, oh, these guys sell, you know, you know, it's a D to C diabetes brand. They sell, you know, products for diabetic, diabetic patients. And they're doing eight million a year of revenue, four million of profit. And here's their top three SKUs and here's how they grow. And here's their P and L because they're trying to sell their business.

• 29:49Shaan Puri?

  So they had to package everything up and make it a book that you can go look at as a buyer. The beauty of the online ones is they don't know if you're a serious buyer or if you're a 21 year old kid just trying to learn about business. And so I've looked through probably hundreds of these at this point, um, just to learn, right? So that's like how I feed my business brain is, is one of these, one of the tactics is to go look at businesses that are for sale and read their books.

• 30:11Sam Parr?

  So I was interested in sweepstakes and it just so happened I saw one for sale and I went and found this one. So here's a sweepstakes and what they do, if you Google car sweepstakes, I'm not gonna say the name of the company. Very likely they come up on the top 10 of Google on the front page. So I am just off that, I imagine they're one of the big dogs. Did you Google, uh, Google a car giveaway?

• 30:30Shaan Puri?

  Right now. Yep, I see him.

• 30:32Sam Parr?

  Okay, um, and the last 12 months revenue was 26 million, $700,000. The last 12 months of net profit was $5.8 million. And in this document that I have. There's like a Q and A where someone's just asking them questions and they explain how it works. And what it works is they have a warehouse and they have like 30 employees, all warehouse workers mostly. And you, they run ads on, let's just say, um, we'll say this is for a car one. They run ads and sponsored videos on YouTube, car chan, car YouTube channels. And before the guy shows off his car, he goes, by the way, this one is sponsored by blank company. They're giving away a car. If you want the car, click the link below.

• 31:15Sam Parr?

  You go to that link and it says, great, you're gonna uh, be entered at win this car. By the way, if you buy this sweatshirt for $40, you're gonna get 10 more entries. If you buy this hat, you're gonna get X amount more entries. And so they make a profit off of, it's just an e-commerce store, basically.

• 31:32Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 31:33Sam Parr?

  And it's amazing. I mean, I don't, I don't think it's actually sketchy. I think that it's a, you're kind of preying on vulnerable people a bit. And they said that in this document, that the person one time, or first of all, the repeat customer rate is 50%. So 50% of people who sign up for one, eventually do another. And they have guys that will spend $8,000 on merch in order to get more entries into these cars.

• 31:56Shaan Puri?

  Wow. Yeah, it's, it's, this is definitely one of those where it's pretty polarizing. You know, some people will say, this is, this is shady, this is messed up. I find it fascinating that a business like this even exists, 25 million a year in revenue, 5 million a year in profit. And uh, very, very simple business, you know what I mean? Like, and if this is what I call like, you gotta know how internet plumbing works. They're like, oh, okay, I can plug a pipe into YouTube. And uh, that gives me a lead and then with the lead, I plugged that into an e-commerce store. And that gives me this and then I'll plug into this like sweepstakes law that will allow me to do this legally. And uh, I've seen the same thing, by the way, in the gun space. So people do this for guns.

• 32:37Sam Parr?

  Giveaway?

• 32:38Shaan Puri?

  Giveaway for guns. There's a lot of people who are like really passionate about guns and ammunition and things like that. There's also ones that are, so cars probably the biggest one. There's houses. When I was going to sell my house, it was right when COVID hit and it was like the worst time to sell a house. And so I looked into, could I raffle my house off? And actually, could I get a better price raffling my house? And then there's all these rules against it. Like you gotta like, basically like churches can do it and not a lot of other people are allowed to do this. Um, so yeah. So basically there's, there's a lot of these that you wouldn't otherwise expect. And, uh, yeah, I've seen, I've seen somebody doing this with cars at a pretty big scale.

• 33:14Sam Parr?

  And I'm looking at this company now and just-

• 33:17Shaan Puri?

  I should say, by the way, I have a friend or a friend of a friend who's doing this with cars. And like, there was three months where they were just like, oh my God, this is printing money. This is the best business in the world. And then we checked back in six months later and they're like, this is such a hard business, dude. It's like, you know, and so I think that it's not, it's like many things where it's not as easy as it sounds. And there's also like a thin line of like, at some point you, you can fatigue out your customers, right? You can fatigue out the buyers who get disillusioned that they're not going to win. Or you, um, the ad costs go up and then the business all of a sudden went from working beautifully to kind of upside down.

• 33:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Okay. So this business, they're doing five, sorry, six million nearly in profit and they're only selling, the asking price was $24 million.

• 34:02Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 34:02Sam Parr?

  So there's, they're asking five times profit, one times revenue. And there's a reason for that. Five times profit to me is actually quite good for this kind of business. I would think they would want to get way less. And it looks like the only true asset they have is the website, which anyone could copy probably with 10 grand, maybe 40 grand. Then they have a 300,000 person email list, and then they have 300,000 SMS subscribers.

• 34:27Shaan Puri?

  Which is baller.

• 34:29Sam Parr?

  So is that good?

• 34:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's huge. And I bet that works extremely well for this. Cause if it's like, basically, hey, look at this amazing car. Do you want it? And you're just sitting there on the bus. It's like, well, I'm not doing anything else right now. Click and you go enter the, enter the giveaway each time. I could see how that hook would work because SMS, you know, SMS gets like an 80% open rate and email gets like an eight percent open rate. So it's like, it's, you know, 10 times better.

• 34:53Sam Parr?

  So I, similar to your thing, I don't really have any ideas for this because I think they're kind of limitless, but I thought it was interesting and I wanted to bring it up because I think this is like a little bit on like the dark side of the internet that not a lot of people know about. And I thought it was crazy fascinating. I don't think it has to be like bold.org. Incredibly ethical, straightforward. There's no tricks. I know the guys who run it. It's I'm a customer there. It's

• 35:17Shaan Puri?

  How was the like, okay, so somebody's there for bold. They're trying to get a scholarship, right? They're not thinking about the hustle. Maybe the hustle's like auto-checked in something which is like, share, share your information with our marketing partners who make this possible, you know? And you're like, great. Now you got their email on a, on a list. Did you see that they performed?

• 35:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they were okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, so let's do the math here. So let's just say that, and all these numbers are, I'm making up.

• 35:41Shaan Puri?

  Hypothetical.

• 35:42Sam Parr?

  Let's just say that I acquire a user from Facebook for $2,000 or $2, and they have a 50% open rate. That means I'm spending $4, $4 for a 50% open rate, or sorry, for a

• 35:55Shaan Puri?

  For a reader, yeah.

• 35:56Sam Parr?

  For a reader. And, and let's just say that like, the way that we use to track it is that we, we knew right away if they read the first five, the likelihood that they're going to stay for 18 months or whatever it is, was very high.

• 36:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 36:06Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I paid $4 for that 50% person. We'll call it, we call it, we have a gold, silver, bronze. That's like, we, we internally, so a gold user just costs us $4.

• 36:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:17Sam Parr?

  Okay. Now, let's just say that on bold.org, I've got to get 10 people, but I get those 10 people for a dollar. And one of them becomes a gold reader. So I just paid $1 for a gold reader. So you get a lot of volume, but you make up for it because it's cheap.

• 36:35Shaan Puri?

  Right, right. And, and you basically just set your rate with them, or they, they just have a rate and you have to figure it out? Like, do you say, I'll pay this much per lead, or how does it work?

• 36:45Sam Parr?

  A lot of these companies, the smart guys, they don't have a set rate. They give you a ballpark, and then they, but they first want to hear, what's it worth to you?

• 36:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, of course.

• 36:54Sam Parr?

  And then they try to sell you, they're like, oh, okay, these are worth this to you? Okay, we're going to set it at this budget. And then what you do is you go out and do it for a month, and then you renegotiate.

• 37:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think this is a fascinating business. I also think that giveaways and sweepstakes are just a useful marketing tool. So even if this is not your business.

• 37:11Sam Parr?

  Oh, by the way, I just went, I just went through it. I just went through the funnel while we were talking.

• 37:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 37:15Sam Parr?

  So by getting halfway through the scholarship flow, I earned 50 bold points. And then you can get five more bold points for signing up for this. You can get 10 more bold points for doing this.

• 37:27Shaan Puri?

  And how big is this bold thing?

• 37:29Sam Parr?

  Bold.org, like the

• 37:30Shaan Puri?

  Like, how big is this business?

• 37:32Sam Parr?

  Well, I don't know. I mean, they never told me the revenue.

• 37:35Shaan Puri?

  Seems like a pretty baller business.

• 37:37Sam Parr?

  I imagine it's very, very, very proud. If you told me it made half a million to a million a month in profit, I wouldn't be surprised.

• 37:43Shaan Puri?

  This is like somebody who has a black belt in the internet. They're like, ah, here's what we'll do.

• 37:46Sam Parr?

  That's this guy Dennis, man. This guy Dennis.

• 37:48Shaan Puri?

  Feel good, feel good story on the front end, dope lucrative business model on the backend, right? I love, I love this. This is clear. This is the internet black belt.

• 37:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's, it's amazing. This is, it's an amazing thing and I wanted to, I just had to bring this up because this is one that like, this doesn't sound sexy, right? This doesn't sound like, like, oh, I want to do this when I get older, but it just makes loads and loads of money. Another one is Omaze, O M A Z E. Have you heard of that?

• 38:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's like, it's like a platform to do raffles and whatnot, right?

• 38:18Sam Parr?

  Yes, but they act like it's a charity thing. So it's like, like Snoop Dogg's going to give away a car and all the money or like some of the money goes to charity or something like that. In reality, Omaze gets their cut in the same way that I've just outlined the three business models.

• 38:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's fascinating. I feel like we could do an even deeper dive on this because I feel like you just touched on like 10 interesting things that, uh, that we should probably like. I feel like we should do a separate episode, like kind of like the deep dive into this sweepstakes giveaways thing. I bet that would go pretty viral, honestly.

• 38:48Sam Parr?

  And I'm going through the, the, the bold flow. They ask so many questions, like what's your estimated current annual income? What's your dream? Like what job do you want to have? How much money do you want to make? Uh, how many, how, I mean, they asked so many questions.

• 39:03Shaan Puri?

  If I asked you for money right now, would you say yes? Yes. Okay, great.

• 39:06Sam Parr?

  So like basically what they're doing is they're getting like crazy amounts of qual, it's all about.

• 39:11Shaan Puri?

  Enriched, enriched lists, basically.

• 39:13Sam Parr?

  Yes, and this is crazy.

• 39:16Shaan Puri?

  All right, I got another one. Have you seen this company, Nugs?

• 39:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they changed their name though.

• 39:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they, well, I think they have like a parent company and then the product is called Nugs. So the product, the parent company is called Simulate, I think. Um, and that's because they're basically simulating real meat. And so Nugs is one, it fits into this category of like alt, alt meats or fake meats. So you have Beyond Meat, you have the Impossible Burger, and what Nugs is doing is Nugs is chicken duck.

• 39:43Sam Parr?

  No, by the way, they changed the, the product's name is different. What's it called now?

• 39:47Shaan Puri?

  Oh, really? It's not called?

• 39:48Sam Parr?

  I just Googled Nugs. I can't even find it.

• 39:51Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I think it's still called that. It's nugs with two G's. No, dude. If you go to simulate.com, you'll see the, uh, the product and it basically it says the Tesla of chicken. Oh, my God. And so, so you can see that the, like, if you go to their, go to simulate.com slash nugs. So it says the original nugs, $45 for a box and there's 50 for, for two boxes and there's 50 pieces per box. So basically 45 bucks for a hundred nuggets and they have two flavors. There's original and spicy and, um, and their landing page is like, kind of like cheeky, like the, the, instead of saying it's good for you. It says kills you slower. This is higher in protein and lower in fat than animal based nuggets.

• 40:34Shaan Puri?

  You know, you can get this fast. Here you go. So they started as a kind of like a D to C brand type of thing. But I think either during COVID or before, right before COVID, they switched to basically just selling through retail. And so I saw them because they raised $50 million recently, like a month ago or something like that. And, um, the guy who's behind this is this guy, uh, he's a young guy, Ben Pasternak. And, um, this guy's pretty clever. So he's, he was really young. He, I think when he was 18 or 19, he had built this app called Monkey. I don't know if you ever saw it. It like, it was kind of chat roulette, but for your iPhone. So you would get on there, you'd randomly match you in a video chat with somebody else. And then you could like skip to, to somebody else. And, um, I saw this because I was like, oh, that's kind of clever.

• 41:18Shaan Puri?

  Like, I don't think it's going to work, but like, I like the branding. I like that this guy was able to like, kind of game the app store charts. So he was climbing the charts, but you could tell this wasn't a sticky product. So I, you know, reached out to him, had a, had a chat, seemed super smart guy. How long ago was this? Maybe five, six years ago. Wow. So he might be 20s. I don't know. He might be 21, 22 now. He was like 17 at the time, something like that. I don't know. Somewhere around that range. He was like 17 or 18. And, um, I remember just thinking, wow, this kid's like a superstar, the future superstar. I, I gave him the highest compliment I could give him, which is I didn't even recruit him. I was like, you know what? You're better than me. You're ready to just do this on your own. Like, don't, don't even waste the time coming and working inside my thing.

• 42:01Shaan Puri?

  Like if we work together, we build one company. If we're apart, you're going to build two companies. But I really liked the guy and it reminded me this question. So I actually don't even really want to talk about the fake chicken nuggets thing, although good market to be in, I would say. The part that I think was interesting is like, I meet a lot of people like this who are like clearly special, gonna do big things. It's probably not their first app, like it's probably not Monkey, but it's probably Nugs. It's probably their second or third attempt that's gonna hit. And it got me thinking like, could you basically as a founder?

• 42:35Sam Parr?

  Like buy an option?

• 42:37Shaan Puri?

  Could you buy options? Could you buy future contracts on founders? And what does this mean? So, most people, when they think of this, they think ISAs, oh, it's an income share agreement. I'm not even saying that. I'm saying there's a, it's, it's that juicy of a market of founders like this that you could actually just sell the right to invest in my next thing.

• 42:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 42:55Shaan Puri?

  Because, because otherwise it's hard to even just keep tabs on people. You don't know when they're pivoting, you don't know when they have a new idea, you don't know when they're launching. And you're like, dude, I believe in you. If you were just gonna start a new startup, I'm in for 25K. Like, no questions asked, just put me in the pre-seed round. So it's like the lower valuation of the, of the others. So I think I would have paid 10 grand just for the option to invest in this guy's next company over the next five years. Right? So I think, you know, 10 grand, 25 grand. I think you could sell to investors. I think you could sell to investors just the, write a first refusal, basically, to invest in my future company. It's not equity, it's not an income share agreement. I don't even have to start another company. But I think, I think real investors would basically have a budget of maybe single digit millions of dollars

• 43:39Shaan Puri?

  where they're just placing options, they're just buying option contracts on like high performers they see in, in the tech industry to say, hey, next time you start your thing, I get the first dips at investing.

• 43:48Sam Parr?

  So this is something, I'm, I'm looking this up. So I, I think it was, it was either Jerry Seinfeld or Joe Rogan was talking about the nineties in TV. And I believe they were telling a story about Roseanne. And how basically they're like, it was the golden age of TV. Because even though the content nowadays is probably better, but basically if you wrote like an okay script or just a pilot or a screenplay, a, a company would pay you a quarter of a million dollars a year. And the only thing that you had to do was not. Do it like they bought the option and they'd be like, yeah, sometimes we would, they would just buy the option and we would never even do it. So I was just getting like a quarter of a million dollar a year salary for three years. And I know the rules just don't do anything.

• 44:31Shaan Puri?

  Right. It's like a retainer or like, kind of like a, it's like a, it's almost like an advance on a book deal in a way.

• 44:37Sam Parr?

  And I don't actually know, I know nothing about Hollywood and I don't know if that still exists. Of course it does, but I think it was more common then when cable company or when cable is crushing. But I think this is actually a fantastic idea. And basically it would be like, I have the option. Let's see, how would it work? Anytime you raise money or anytime you own more than 50% of a entity, I get, I get the, I get first right refusal. I think it's a really, really great idea.

• 45:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like, I don't know how the math works exactly, but I can sort of see like it turns entrepreneurship into a job. And it gives you a floor. So let's say, like, I think if I did this, I think if I went and I said, hey,

• 45:20Shaan Puri?

  you know, hey, I left my job at Twitch, by the way, I, as of today, officially am no longer, no longer employed. I'm a free, free man.

• 45:28Sam Parr?

  Congratulations. I wasn't sure when we were going to bring that up.

• 45:30Shaan Puri?

  Thank you. Yeah, yeah. So if I was basically like, hey, I don't know when I'm going to start my next company, but you know, if anybody's interested, here's a place where you could go, here's a website you can go to, and you can basically buy a future option on being in the pre-seed round. So let's say I'm selling slots for,

• 45:50Shaan Puri?

  I don't know, 15K a pop. So 15K for your right to invest in my next round. And I basically sent that to every VC or every seed fund I know. I think I could probably get 10 people to opt into that. They say, cool, I'll give you 10K right, I'll give you 15K right now.

• 46:05Sam Parr?

  Easy.

• 46:06Shaan Puri?

  And in the next 18 months, I'm going to be thinking about a business. And then when I'm ready, you get the first dips and you know, the round might be like a $3 million round. And you get to invest in this. And so I get 150K floor to go do my search for my next business. And they get, they get, they get the guaranteed locked in deal flow. And I don't know, maybe I'm, maybe I'm underpricing it. Maybe it could be more, or maybe it's an annual thing. I'm not sure, but like, I'm pretty sure out of a fund, you know, they would allocate a few hundred thousand dollars to placing bets on 25 founders that they're like, yeah, I'll, I'll be in your next round.

• 46:42Sam Parr?

  Can you also do this? So, uh, did you pay attention to what happened with the NCAA today?

• 46:47Shaan Puri?

  No, what happened?

• 46:48Sam Parr?

  So I, I wish that you would have because I don't actually know the full details. But

• 46:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, me neither.

• 46:58Sam Parr?

  The, the Supreme Court, basically, well, I know what happened. So the Supreme Court, here's the headline. The Supreme Court unanimously sides with former college players in dispute with NCAA about compensation. So basically, I, I don't know if there was any firm rules, but basically, um, the doors now open for how NCAA athletes can make money. And when I think of options, I mean, I definitely think, uh, athletes are the best.

• 47:22Shaan Puri?

  Yes, definitely. So, yeah. So, so basically the thing, here's, here's what I'm reading here. It says, the unanimously ruled that the current cap on education-related benefits such as scholarships, graduate school, musical instruments, tutoring, violates federal antitrust laws and must be lifted. So that means that this is just for,

• 47:42Shaan Puri?

  there was limits on how much you can be compensated for, you know, tuition, room and board, stuff like that.

• 47:48Shaan Puri?

  So that's lifted, but it's not yet salaries for athletes, but that's coming because they've also passed, there's also been a rule passed around the athlete themselves being able to monetize their name and likeness. You know, like, I'm in a, I'm in a college town in North Carolina. Well, the local car dealership can like, use my name and face on their ads and I can make money from it. You know, things like that. That's, that's what's coming. So I think there's definitely a big opportunity there, uh, just in general. Yeah.

• 48:12Sam Parr?

  So here we are, future contracts. Yeah, I'm on board. I think it's great.

• 48:17Shaan Puri?

  Okay, cool.

• 48:18Sam Parr?

  I don't have anything else to say, except great.

• 48:19Shaan Puri?

  Last topic. I want to give you some predictions. Um, so I've been thinking about this and

• 48:26Sam Parr?

  I think you're bold for doing this, by the way. You're making it very easy to look stupid.

• 48:30Shaan Puri?

  Well, that's the beauty of predictions. It's like, uh, uh, you know, the best predictions, I think most predictions, even when you're wrong, people forget, unless you're Scott Galloway, uh, you know, when you're small, when you're small, you should make predictions because, uh, the cost of being wrong is very low, but the cost of being right, all of a sudden you're the guy who called it.

• 48:48Shaan Puri?

  You know, like, it's like my clubhouse thread, like, As that gets proven right, then it'll be like, oh, he called it. But if I was already big, then if I was wrong, it would be like, kind of like, everybody would be waiting to rub it in my face. Okay, so let me get, let me run you through what I think the next.

• 49:03Sam Parr?

  When did you come up with these? Is this like some Twitter thread you're gonna do?

• 49:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm gonna do it as a thread, but I was just one day, so I could see the timestamp on this, 11:27 PM. So this is the type of shit I think about at midnight. And I started typing on my phone and I said, I said, okay, what's Apple becoming? Because I see Apple, Apple shifting into like, health in a pretty big way with these wearable devices. And so let's just say, Apple, which today, the core benefit is they give you this ultra personal device. Your little personal supercomputer that's going to help you with life. So I don't think the next Apple is a phone company. I think the next Apple, the next Apple, which is gonna be a trillion dollar company that has, that gives you kind of like a consumer device. I think it's gonna be a healthcare monitor. I think it's gonna be something that is

• 49:49Shaan Puri?

  gonna be measuring what's going on inside your body and feeding that data back to you. And so that's my, that's my prediction. The next, what the next Apple looks like, not a phone company, healthcare monitoring device. Next, Facebook. Okay, Facebook today, people think Facebook is an app, it's a social network, it's where you go right on a newsfeed or you post photos. I think Facebook, the core of Facebook, the guts of Facebook, is basically cameras, it's content sharing. So it's basically photo taking or video taking and sharing with people who you care, who you want to share that stuff with. And that's why Instagram is something they own, WhatsApp, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think the next Facebook is not gonna be an app, it's not gonna be another social network. It's gonna be some kind of hands-free, always on camera.

• 50:33Shaan Puri?

  So it's gonna be something you wear, either glasses or a lapel or something, a fucking drone that's floating above you at all times. I don't know what it is. Probably glasses, because it's at your eye level. And it's going to be basically like a super memory. So it's going to let you capture photos and videos of whatever you're looking at hands free and instantaneously. And then, once you've captured it, be able to share that or save that as like a super memory for yourself or with any friends. And so I think anybody's trying to create the next Facebook, you're not creating an app where you add friends. You should be creating a hands-free camera that makes it way easier to capture content and you'll bypass Facebook altogether. Because that place where you capture content will just be for sharing. Similar to the way Snapchat attacked Facebook. Snapchat made an app that when you open it, the camera's on right away.

• 51:18Shaan Puri?

  And you take the photo first and then you just share that photo with somebody. So they skipped the whole Facebook process. So I think that's what the next Facebook is a hands-free, always-on-camera. Next, Amazon. This one's stolen from Mark Lorrie. Next, Amazon. So Amazon, a place to shop. It's not going to be a website where you type in a word and then you get 5,000 images as a result, and then you got to sort through them. The next Amazon is conversational shopping in your house. It's just saying what you need and having something go get it for you. So basically, it's just saying, hey, we need more pee pads for the dog. And it says, you want the same ones as last time? I say, yes. And then it's boom, it's ordered. Right? I didn't have to type anything in, didn't have to enter a credit card. It's all on file. And it's just a hands-free voice assistant that helps me shop for things.

• 52:02Shaan Puri?

  And when I don't know what it is, I could say, hey, I need the best camera for my webcam. And it could say something like, do you want the ones that most of the YouTubers use? Do you want the ones your friends bought the most? Or do you want the one that's the best value or the highest price? And I'm like, ah, what do my friends have? Sam has this one. Would you like to ask him how it is? Yes. It asks Sam, and then Sam says, it's amazing. And then I buy the thing. Right? Conversational commerce, something like that. That's the future. That's the next Amazon. Next, Netflix. Okay.

• 52:32Sam Parr?

  Wait, you skipped over 7-Eleven.

• 52:35Shaan Puri?

  Oh, I'm gonna do 711 too. Okay, 711, the next 711, what is 711? It's a corner store that has like, it's a little local convenience store. This one's easy. This one is, it's a cloud corner store, so you don't need a real location. It's just gonna be 500 square feet. That's within one mile of you. It might be in this back alley place. It doesn't need a good location and it's gonna deliver to you with small lightweight drones. So, small little pass, a small little carrier drone gonna bring you something within 15 minutes of ordering. No human being involved and the whole, the whole 500 square foot place doesn't need good real estate and is gonna be automated so that, you know, when I push the button to order it, there's no human being in the place. It just pops out like a vending machine. The drone takes it straight to me and it lands on a little landing pad that I have in my front lawn for drone deliveries.

• 53:20Shaan Puri?

  And as soon as it's there, I go outside, I pick it up.

• 53:22Sam Parr?

  Okay, and then, uh, keep going. I'm just listening. I think this is fascinating. I'm, I'm gonna, I'm taking notes. I'm gonna tweet this just like as you're talking.

• 53:30Shaan Puri?

  You're stealing my thread. Okay, great. Alright, the next Netflix, net, net, next Netflix, I think is gonna be one of two things. One is it's either in VR and it's more like it's a hybrid. It feels like a game. So you put the headset on, you enter the world and then you walk around and you sort of experience a movie. So it's either VR or, or, cause I think, I'm not sure about that one, or it's machine generated movies, which is basically something personalized to you. So right now, a movie is like a really specific story that gets filmed, edited, produced, has actors, blah, blah, blah. I think you might be able to just sit down and be like, I want something that's like Breaking Bad, but with casinos. And then it just generates, it just

• 54:12Shaan Puri?

  machine generates a movie for you, uh, based off of, basically it's like a mashup and you've seen this with music. So Google releases thing called Composer or whatever. It's like this AI that basically writes classical music that sounds like it's made by Bach and Mozart. And, um, and it's basically just, it's just taking all the stuff that exists out there. It studies it. And then it creates remixes and mashups of all those things in a way that's, maybe it could be one time. It's like, I get this thing and it's like a one time movie for me. That could be kinda crazy.

• 54:43Sam Parr?

  Remember that band, remember that band, Girl Talk?

• 54:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, mashups. Yeah.

• 54:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I used to love those things, man.

• 54:50Shaan Puri?

  I still work out to that. That's my go to for workouts.

• 54:52Sam Parr?

  Same. I love that, too. It was like Feed the Animal or something like that.

• 54:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's a great track.

• 54:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I love that shit. I'm on board.

• 55:00Shaan Puri?

  So similarly, the next Pornhub is not a website you go to and you see a bunch of like pre-made porn movies. I think it's all deep fakes. So I think you just go in there and you just have a fantasy. So you put on your VR device and you just think of something you want to see. You think, oh, Mila Kunis, she's my waitress. Go. And like it basically deep fakes a porno for you with Mila Kunis's face on it. If you don't know what a deep fake is, it's a, it's a computer generated movie where the like the actor on the screen was never there. Like it'll make Obama look like Obama's, you can make Obama go to a baseball game and pee in the crowd, right? Because it could just take any video like that and put Obama's head on it and it looks real.

• 55:42Sam Parr?

  That, that's why it's scary.

• 55:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, deep fakes are scary for many reasons. You're not going to be able to trust video anymore because

• 55:49Sam Parr?

  I agree.

• 55:50Shaan Puri?

  Video can be faked, just like any photo can be photoshopped. Any video can be video shopped now. All right, last one, the next Domino's. So the next pizza company is going to be a fleet of self-driving cars that are just going around that have an oven baked in the, in the trunk. So your food is going to be baked fresh. It's going to arrive to you with a driverless car and you're going to hop out. You're going to come out to the front, you're going to meet the car and the, it's going to pop up at the trunk. And there's going to be a pizza that was baked during the drive time for you.

• 56:21Sam Parr?

  Basically like a, like a, like a mobile food truck type or like a food truck that, which by the way, when our friend Goggins, our, our friend Goggins launched this company called Sprig. I think it was only in San Francisco or maybe San Francisco and Chicago. And he raised $60 million, all this money. He launched it early though, 2014. And that was what he goes, he goes, I want to have ovens in the car. That's the future. And I actually think he was right. I just think that it was a little early.

• 56:46Shaan Puri?

  Totally true. This guy, David Langer, he started Zesty. It was like a food catering company that was like super fast growing at a time. And I asked him, I go, oh yeah. What do you think of, what do you think of food delivery? It seems hot. He goes, he just jumped straight to the end. He goes, yeah, the, the end answer is cars with ovens in the trunk. Um, it's really the only solution that's going to work like at mass. That will replace like, kind of like the whole, uh, infrastructure that exists today is when you can get the food to be baked in the car and kept hot in the car and ready hot coming out of the car. And, uh, when you do that, there's, it also reduces the delivery time because you're not going to a brick and mortar place, loading the food into the car and then driving to a place. You're just constantly circling around an area. And as you get an order, you pop the thing into bake and then when it's ready, you're at the door. So there was zero lag time.

• 57:32Shaan Puri?

  So deliveries get faster and fresher. So this is my segment of basically Sean, time travels to the future. Because if you think about it, right? I'm born in 1988, not that long ago.

• 57:44Shaan Puri?

  Eighty-eight to like 96 or 97. Like I remember that time. Michael Jordan was like winning championships during that time. There was, for the average person, there was no internet or we were just doing, just getting like AOL chat rooms and shit like that. Right? I was putting AOL CDs into the computer that was in my computer room because the house had one computer, right?

• 58:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we all had computer rooms. Remember that?

• 58:08Shaan Puri?

  Computer rooms. Exactly. And so then like that sort of changed over time. It's like, oh, computer rooms become laptops, laptops become phones. Phones have frigging like HD video streaming live, you know, basketball games from the internet now to my phone. And I'm watching that while I'm in my car. Like that seemed absurd. I remember actually even the first time I saw someone reading on their phone and I used to have like a Nokia, you know, like the old phone that had snake on it. And I was just like, what? Reading on your phone? Who would want to do that? Like the text is so small and so shitty. Like who would ever watch a video on their phone?

• 58:39Sam Parr?

  Or who could type? Who could like, because this is when they just had nine or 10, 10, 10 buttons. And you had to like click three times to get the third letter.

• 58:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. What was that thing called? Or you had to like, uh, it's like smarter text or some shit like that?

• 58:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Yeah. And it would auto fill.

• 58:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I was like, but that seems so far fetched. And that was in, that was not that long ago. Like I was just like, that was like 20 years ago. And so in 20 years, like kind of some amazing things have happened. And so if I fast forward 20 years, these things that today sound far fetched, it's like, that's gonna happen because it's the consumer benefit is there. You know, if the delivery is faster and fresher, people are gonna do that, right? If if shopping gets easier and I don't have to search and read and be at a computer, I just say what I want, when I want it, and I get it like, you know, I get it in less than an hour. That was the part I forgot to say. It was that prime two day delivery is gonna seem like incredibly slow, like ordering everything from Amazon is gonna be just as fast today as today ordering DoorDash is gonna be. It'll be here in 45 minutes. Oh, you need an AC

• 59:37Shaan Puri?

  MI cable? Here, push this button. It's here in 40 minutes, delivered via drone. And so, yeah, I think that's what the future looks like. So that's my time traveler section. What do you think? Which one did you think I was most on or off about?

• 59:49Sam Parr?

  You're, I think you're most on about Apple. I think you're most off on.

• 59:55Shaan Puri?

  So I gave you Facebook, the hands free camera, always on camera.

• 59:57Sam Parr?

  I'm looking at it now. Yeah, I have all the notes. I think you're on about Apple. I think Amazon, you're not totally right. Facebook was, um, what was Facebook?

• 1:00:06Shaan Puri?

  The hands free, always on camera, instant capture of anything that's going on in your world. You don't need.

• 1:00:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think you're wrong, actually, about that. I think there's a world where we go in reverse and we get less tech driven and people want less contact with people. I think, I think it could go the other way. So I think you're wrong about that. I think you're totally right about Apple. 7-Eleven, I think you're right. Netflix, I actually think you're right. Pornhub, I think you're right. Domino's, I think you're right.

• 1:00:32Shaan Puri?

  I think I read on all of them, bro. I think I got them all right. It's just a question. The the great quote is, don't confuse a clear view for a short distance. I love that quote. That's like one of my.

• 1:00:41Sam Parr?

  What's that mean?

• 1:00:43Shaan Puri?

  Like, imagine you see something on the, you're driving, you see something on the horizon. It's like, oh, there it is. It's just because you see it doesn't mean you're near it, right? Objects in the front view are maybe further than they than they appear. And that's what often happens with the future is you can kind of see what the world's gonna do and what it's gonna look like, but you overestimate how soon it's gonna come. And then you get sort of disillusioned. And then eventually it does show up, you know?

• 1:01:06Sam Parr?

  I think I think it'll be capable of that. I think the thing is, is what I've learned reading history is that typically repeats itself. Or like what's, what's old becomes new and what's new becomes old and it goes back and forth. And when we were now that, you know, people our age and young, a little bit younger are always connected. I think it's going to go the opposite that they're going to be one, they're going to want to less connection. You know, that's why motels, like motels in America are booming right now because it's like nostalgia and it's interesting again.

• 1:01:37Shaan Puri?

  And so I, I do think that the pendulum does swing, but um, I don't know. I think both happen at the same time. I think that um, the world gets more on demand and more digital and then people crave physical experiences and both exist at the same time. Uh, it's sort of like the clear view, short distancing. A great example of this is like web van, you know, year 2000. It's like, oh, grocery delivery online. What if you could buy your groceries online instead of through a store? And then it like gets all this hype and then it crashes. And then for like 20 years, nobody, nobody really touches this. Nobody really tries this again. And then, um, and then here we are with Instacart is a multi-billion dollar company taking that same idea, but putting it in a fresh way with new tech tools and technology like mobile phones.

• 1:02:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I, I, I'm on board with a lot of that.

• 1:02:22Shaan Puri?

  All right. Um, we should call it here. And, uh, yeah. All right. That's the end of the episode.