#204 - Behind-the-Scenes of Shaan's Power Writing Course

In this episode Shaan (@ShaanVP) breaks down all the numbers behind his Power Writing course (course link --> https://hi.switchy.io/5Cir) and gives Sam (@theSamParr) a walkthrough on how short squeezes work. The two of them later discuss the unbundling of YC, on-demand rental companies, and the future of gas stations. --------- * 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: * (:47) Intro * (1:49) Sam's bullish on America * (5:52) A beginner's guide to short squeezes * (8:35) The programming language behind Ethereum smart contracts * (16:09) Meet Greg16676935420 * (19:27) The unbundling of YC * (22:37) A breakdown of Shaan's Power Writing course * (32:55) Swimply and other rent-on-demand companies * (43:17) The future of gas stations

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  I think when you, once you treat your hobby like a job, uh, that's like a recipe for failure. And that's what happens to a lot of people.

• 0:18Sam Parr?

  All right. What's going on?

• 0:19Shaan Puri?

  What's up, man?

• 0:21Sam Parr?

  So we're going to get into some ideas, but let me tell you something that I did this week and I cannot give deep, I actually got in trouble three different times where someone was like, hey, we had this conversation and you just talked to me. Well, I'm like, well, I don't, I just, when you and I, the way that you and I talk now is how we talk all the time.

• 0:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 0:42Sam Parr?

  And yeah, and so they're right. So I'm going to try to keep this one vague. I had this dinner and I was with a guy who has 8,000 employees in China as well as many thousand in America.

• 0:55Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 0:55Sam Parr?

  And yeah, impressive person.

• 0:57Shaan Puri?

  Like a factory or something else in China?

• 1:00Sam Parr?

  Tech, tech related, just like, just some huge company. You, if I gave you a hundred guesses, you likely wouldn't guess it. It's just some big company that exists and in the tech world.

• 1:09Shaan Puri?

  Fair enough.

• 1:09Sam Parr?

  And, um, it's impressive, but it's not like a mainstream thing.

• 1:13Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 1:13Sam Parr?

  And there was this other guy there who made a comment where he was like, China's going to crush us in the next five years or something. And then a couple of other people.

• 1:23Shaan Puri?

  People love to say that, by the way. Don't people love saying how China's passed up America?

• 1:27Sam Parr?

  A bunch of other people pounced on that. And then this guy, it was this guy, he lives in China. I believe he, he, I don't know what ethnicity he was, but he looked like, I mean, he's probably maybe born and raised in China. And then there was this other woman there who actually was born and raised in China. And this guy with the 6,000 Chinese employees goes, a lot of people say that. I do not think that's true and I don't think any of you should ever think that. He was just saying, he was like, Americans actually work maybe as hard or harder than a lot of other countries.

• 2:00Shaan Puri?

  Interesting.

• 2:00Sam Parr?

  And also you talk about this like artificial intelligence and this, um, It's mostly AI that people, I mean, they talk about China crushing America and a bunch of stuff, but AI is like a hot thing. And this guy was like, I don't think that would happen. And if, and what I think you should do is invest all, most of your money into American equities. I think he goes like, I'm just so bullish on America. And this, so it was like an interesting perspective. Have you ever heard that?

• 2:25Shaan Puri?

  It's like the one person who probably knows what they're talking about at the table and everybody else who just reads shit on Twitter and like regurgitates it. All right, I'm gonna go with the guy who's got 6,000 employees in China. That, that makes more sense to me.

• 2:38Sam Parr?

  That's, you know, and, and that was good. I felt great about that. And so, uh, it was just an interesting perspective, but we have-

• 2:45Shaan Puri?

  You love you some pro-America news.

• 2:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Well, so I'm also just finished reading this really great book. Uh, do you know who John Steinbeck is?

• 2:54Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 2:55Sam Parr?

  Of course you do. Grapes of Wrath.

• 2:57Shaan Puri?

  No. What is that?

• 3:00Sam Parr?

  Are you serious?

• 3:02Shaan Puri?

  I got a blank here.

• 3:03Sam Parr?

  Wow. Uh, have you heard of To Kill a Mockingbird?

• 3:06Shaan Puri?

  I have heard of To Kill a Mockingbird. That's the author?

• 3:07Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God. Like John Steinbeck, I mean, uh, people are gonna make fun of you, by the way. Anyway.

• 3:12Shaan Puri?

  I mostly just read Harry Potter. Okay. Like, let's clear.

• 3:16Sam Parr?

  This guy, he was born in 1902, so he's dead. He's died, probably died in the seventies. But anyway, I'm reading this great book about his memoir from driving across the country for three months in America and getting to know America. And it's really funny. In 1965, when he was doing this trip, he was complaining about how Americans are getting out of touch with, and are getting too focused on technology and how there's refrigerators everywhere and there's TVs everywhere and how there's artificial food everywhere. It's very funny. We've always complained about this stuff, but I do love learning about America. I think America's special. I think we have this resilience. And I think the, yeah, anyway, I'm, I'm very pro-America. So yes, I did like hearing it. But you want to talk about some ideas?

• 3:54Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah. By the way, Dan corrected us. I don't think he wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, but-

• 3:58Sam Parr?

  No.

• 3:59Shaan Puri?

  Of mice and men or something.

• 4:00Sam Parr?

  He, he, he didn't write To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm saying his work is like-

• 4:05Shaan Puri?

  It's like-

• 4:05Sam Parr?

  It's, it's like, did he write Of Mice and Men? I know he wrote like Grapes of Wrath. It's just like a famous, like, American classic. I'm just shocked. The fact that you don't know that, he wrote Of Mice and Men. So you know that. So the fact that you, you didn't know-

• 4:18Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I know that as in I've heard those words before. That's all I know about that. Anyways, let's, let's go into the stuff I do know about, because I feel a lot better about that. And also- Bitcoin rally. Thank you. I've been waiting for this Bitcoin pump and here we are. We're back up. Life is good because Bitcoin is now What's the price? It spiked up to almost 40,000 over the last 24 hours, 48 hours. There was a bit of a short squeeze. About a billion dollars of short positions got liquidated and that caused the price to run up because, are you familiar with how that works by the way? Like what a short squeeze is? No. So here's the like non-technical, non-super, super nuanced version of it. Basically, when you have a short, you're betting against something.

• 5:01Shaan Puri?

  And if it goes up, you are on the hook to pay the sort of the price for being wrong. And so if you think something's going to keep going up, you're better out just closing down your short position, just taking the L and saying, okay, I'll pay, I will, I will go buy the shares now because I'm, you know, let's say I was, it's at 30,000. I think it's going down. It goes to 32. You know what? To close out my position, I'll go buy the asset at 32 and I'll eat the loss. Right?

• 5:30Shaan Puri?

  But what happens is because all the shorts start worrying that the price is going to run up, they all start trying to close out their positions at the same time. So they all start buying. So the people who are betting against it, all of a sudden add all this buying pressure where they have to, to close out their position, they have to buy Bitcoin, which causes the price to go up and up and up and up. And so what happened is as it started running up, all the shorts had to cover their positions because they were massively leveraged, right? They're not putting in their own money. They're putting in like 5 to 10% down and they're taking, they're taking 10x or 20x leverage on their position. So as the price goes up, they're very sensitive to it. And so I think that's what happened to cause the price to go up about $10,000 in the last two days is those shorts had to cover their position.

• 6:15Shaan Puri?

  This is what happened with Tesla. Tesla was the most shorted stock in the stock exchange. And then as the price started to go up, those shorts You know, they're basically are paying a huge price for every, every dollar it goes up. So they start to close out their positions, which puts, which puts a bunch of buying pressure, which is why it becomes a squeeze because the shorts themselves cause the other shorts to like have to cover and it just causes the price to shoot up way above what its earnings is and anything else.

• 6:43Sam Parr?

  Dude, this is funny. It's funny because like when you, you, so we're in this chat group, Sean and me and a bunch of other like successful young guys and they talk about like alpha, like crushing alpha. And I'm like, I don't know what that means. I got no idea what that means. We talk about short squeeze. I'm like this, these words don't mean anything to me. I don't even know what they mean. You, you, you guys feel like so sophisticated to me.

• 7:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 7:05Sam Parr?

  All right. Let's talk about some ideas, can we?

• 7:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's do it. You want to go or you want me to go?

• 7:11Sam Parr?

  You go first.

• 7:12Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I have one. Okay, here's another one that's crypto related and you're going to be like, what? Uh, but I'm telling you, this is a good idea. This is actually Ben's idea. So first of all, Ben is visiting me. So I'm getting to see Ben in person. He's sitting five feet away from me. I wanted him to join this, but and so many goddamn technical difficulties setting up that like, I don't know how I could get it to be where it works. But maybe Wednesday, we'll take an extra hour beforehand and just get it set up for a two-person setup.

• 7:38Shaan Puri?

  But anyways, Ben, we and Ben were talking last night and he's like, you know, one, we're talking about courses, right? Because, and I could share kind of like how, what the numbers, like I just finished my course. I can share what the numbers were on that. But we're talking about other few, other potential courses we could do. Like what would be fun? And he's like, I don't know. He's like, we're not the right people to teach this, but I think this course would crush right now. So Sam, tell me, do you know what solidity is? If I say, oh, solidity.

• 8:02Sam Parr?

  No, when I saw you writing, I thought, I thought it was a type over solidarity.

• 8:08Shaan Puri?

  Solidarity is what we call it. So solidity is the programming language that you use to write smart contracts for Ethereum. So let's say like one of the most promising things about crypto is that you can write a smart contract. So think like a basic escrow contract. I buy a house. You're going to give me the title. I'm going to give you the money. I don't want to give you the money first. You don't want to give me the title first. So we use this third party, this escrow agent. We pay them $5,000. Basically, you hand them the title. I hand them the money. They say, yep, they're both here. And then they give it to each other. Right? So in the real world, we pay these exorbitant middleman fees. I don't know what you paid for your house when you when you bought it. You just did another real estate transaction. I don't know what you're paying for escrow.

• 8:48Sam Parr?

  I don't even I didn't even look at it.

• 8:49Shaan Puri?

  For me, it was like four grand to do an escrow transaction, which sucked. I was like, this is just $4,000 for nothing.

• 8:55Sam Parr?

  When I sold my business, I think the escrow was $50,000.

• 8:58Shaan Puri?

  Right. Crazy. They think this is crazy. So and they literally do like one ounce of work. They literally just, oh, you hand me the title and you hand me the money. Great. I'm going to just turn one hand over here and I'll give you that you'll give you this. I'll give them that. So a smart contract basically says, look, we don't need this like person in the middle and we don't need to pay them $4,000. Let's just make a contract with some rules and we'll just, instead of writing it like a lawyer contract, we'll write it like a programmer contract. The programmer contract says, hey, when this wallet has this much money in it, person A has fulfilled their obligation. And when this wallet has this asset in it, person B has fulfilled their obligation and then release the assets to each other. And so and instead of paying $4,000, you can pay $4

• 9:40Shaan Puri?

  or $40, whatever the gas fees are at the time. So that's smart contracts. So what that means is a lot of jobs today that go to lawyers are going to go to programmers because you're not going to want a lawyer to write a contract for something. You're going to want a programmer to write it down, but you need that contract to like work. It needs to be like solid, bug proof, hack proof. And like, I needed to do the many things that I need my transactions to do. So there is an extreme shortage right now of smart contract developers, of developers who know how to write in this new programming language and write these types of contracts. But it's clearly like a big part of the future, in my opinion. And so one idea here is to create. Basically a bootcamp that takes an existing engineer and says, hey, cool.

• 10:24Shaan Puri?

  Oh, you write JavaScript or like, you know, you're a backend engineer. You're one of like 10 million. Why don't you come over here where there's this high demand, high shortage of engineers that know how to do this thing? I could train you in six weeks to learn how to write like smart contracts and solidity. And then go to all the companies that are trying to hire this and basically do a Lambda School. I think you can do Lambda School that's really niche, really focused. And if I'm an engineer that like, I'm a crypto nerd. This is a business that I think you could do. You could just train other engineers to like, learn how to write smart contracts and then get hired and placed in these jobs that you take the placement fee. What do you think of that?

• 11:00Sam Parr?

  So I'm doing research while you're talking. All right.

• 11:04Sam Parr?

  Wow. Okay. No, I, I agree with the lot that you said, except for the last part. So there's this company called Coursera. Have you heard of Coursera?

• 11:12Shaan Puri?

  Of course.

• 11:14Sam Parr?

  So they were started in 2012 and I believe that they were started because the two guys, I think they worked at Google. And they're noticing that we are struggling to hire a particular type of engineer. I'm just, this is just off memory, so I might be a little bit off here about some of the stuff. But anyway, they, and so they built like these courses and they built it so people can get jobs at Google.

• 11:35Shaan Puri?

  Let's say data science or machine learning or something.

• 11:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it was some type of data science or machine learning. I forget exactly what it was. And they, they came out of the gate and they crushed it. And then like over the last five years, they kind of like went nowhere and kind of like, it's like, what the hell happened to that company? And they're not really doing that well anymore. Well, over the last year and a half, two years with COVID and a bunch of other stuff, they started crushing it. Do you know what Coursera's revenue is now?

• 11:59Shaan Puri?

  No idea.

• 12:01Sam Parr?

  So they, they went public. Did you know that?

• 12:03Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 12:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah, a lot of people didn't know it.

• 12:05Shaan Puri?

  I kind of thought they had like stagnated and like wasn't going anywhere.

• 12:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's what everyone thought. So in 2020, they did about $300 million or sorry, my bad, $400 million in revenue. And they're currently publicly traded at a five and a half billion dollar valuation.

• 12:20Shaan Puri?

  Wow, hot damn.

• 12:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Crazy, right? Totally forgot about it. And what you did with your course, well, I don't know if you did this, but what a lot of people in like you and me will do courses and we'll kind of do these kind of like bootleg things. Not bootleg, but like.

• 12:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And you'll charge like. Three hundred dollars or something like that, which I've done before. And that makes things a little bit, and you want like a person to buy it. And that makes things a little bit challenging. What I would do is I would take the thing that you're describing. And with this, with Bitcoin, there's like all these crazy new things that you've got to learn really quickly. I would just copy the Coursera model and just churn these fuckers out and charge like eight thousand dollars. And it's like, we're gonna, like, a company needs to buy it in order to train their people.

• 13:05Shaan Puri?

  So I think that's one.

• 13:07Sam Parr?

  Lambda for X, I would do Coursera for X.

• 13:09Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I think that's fair. The thing with the Lambda side, which is basically, I think every time you place one of these engineers, that's like a twenty to twenty-five thousand dollar fee that you get. And so it doesn't take much to be, I don't, I wouldn't do this as like a venture scale business, not, not at all. This is basically, I'm a developer who, you have to be the right mold. It's like, I've been tinkering with smart contracts for the last two years anyways. I've actually kind of like gotten up to speed myself. I'm a converted backend engineer who now does smart contracts. And I could go, I, I work at like a Fang company today, I make four hundred thousand dollars. But like, wouldn't it be great to make like four million dollars a year? And I think this is a way to make four million dollars a year as like a two-person company, basically.

• 13:52Sam Parr?

  I agree, but I would never do it in a Lambda. So when Sean says Lambda School, he's referring to it's free and you make money by getting like a twenty-five thousand dollar referral placement or a percentage of their salary. I have, I know nothing about Lambda, other than we had Austin on this show, and I think he's amazing and I love him. And you're an investor, that's really all I know about it. I think my prediction, if I had to bet money on it, is that it won't work.

• 14:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think that's a, I mean, I think that's a fair prediction about most startups, I think that's true.

• 14:21Sam Parr?

  Well, yeah, but they're not most startups. They've raised like a hundred million dollars, probably. They're not like an early-stage startup, they're like in the thick of it. I think that if they're out of business in two years, I wouldn't be surprised.

• 14:30Shaan Puri?

  Right, and I would agree with that, even as a fan and an investor, I would agree with that. I think that, okay, so here's, okay, let me do two things. First, let me share with you a really hilarious story. Do you know this Twitter account, Greg? It's like Greg nine five five three, don't you do like three, two, six, seven, eight, nine, ten?

• 14:47Sam Parr?

  A white guy, like a white old guy?

• 14:49Shaan Puri?

  It's a white, no, not old guy, it's a white, like nerdy dork guy.

• 14:53Sam Parr?

  No, I don't know it.

• 14:55Shaan Puri?

  You haven't seen this, just Google search Greg meme, Greg meme account. You'll see it, and I bet you've seen this guy. So you know, like, these meme accounts, so there's like Dr. Park Patel. By the way, big fan of him. I think he's a big fan of us.

• 15:10Sam Parr?

  He works for the Hustle. You know that, right?

• 15:11Shaan Puri?

  Dr. Park Patel works at the Hustle?

• 15:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 15:14Shaan Puri?

  Oh, my God, you just outed Dr. Park Patel. Amazing.

• 15:17Sam Parr?

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. He, like him, he's a contractor for us. He writes for us sometimes.

• 15:22Shaan Puri?

  Oh, my God, I love it. Wow. No, I did not know that.

• 15:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:27Shaan Puri?

  My brain is racing to figure it out who it is now. Okay.

• 15:30Sam Parr?

  No, he's not like, like I was a fan of his and I DM'd him and I was like, hey, you want to write?

• 15:35Shaan Puri?

  So you don't know the real identity?

• 15:37Sam Parr?

  Uh, I do.

• 15:38Shaan Puri?

  Okay, you do.

• 15:39Sam Parr?

  But it's, yeah.

• 15:40Shaan Puri?

  So you're saying after you saw Dark Park Patel, then you contracted? Okay, gotcha. Makes way more sense. So anyways, what he, one thing he does is like every time Chamath tweets, he's like the first reply and he's like, just says it like, like, I'm proud of you, son. Or something like that, like something like totally non-standard. So Greg does that with like Kylie Jenner and like other people like that, where every time she posts something, he'll be like, babe, why did you, like, you didn't call me? Or like, it's be like, be like, I'm so proud of you, babe. So it's like as if they're dating. And so he's this like dorky looking white guy account. And uh, so the other day, do you know who Jose Canseco is?

• 16:19Sam Parr?

  Of course.

• 16:19Shaan Puri?

  Ben told me the story. So, so Jose Canseco, the base former baseball player tweets out, I need a, I need a smart contract developer for a new token, a token developer for a new token I'm gonna launch. It's just like the classic thing for like Paris Hilton and Jose Canseco.

• 16:35Sam Parr?

  These like, do they want to know any good designers?

• 16:37Shaan Puri?

  Has been, has been celebrities that are like ready to launch their own crypto token. Here we go. That, what could go wrong? So, so Greg replies and Greg's like, uh, like whatever, like me. Ben, what did he say? What did he, what was his reply? Was it just like, pick me, something like that?

• 16:54Shaan Puri?

  Oh, yeah. He goes, hey, it's Greg. DM me. How can I help? And Jose replies and goes, um, he goes, awesome. Like, are you a token developer? And then are you, are you a developer or a smart, do you know how to do token development? And then Greg just replies, no way, Jose. 200,000 likes on that tweet. It's just like one of the most liked tweets on Twitter. Stupid shit ever. This is like so good, so dumb. But anyways, this guy's like crushing it right now. Like he's got like, I don't know, 100 and something, 130. What's his handle? Well, it's the funny thing is, you know, when you sign up for Twitter, let's say you type Sam, it'd be like Sam's not available. Would you like Sam 800,006? Cause that's like the next

• 17:35Shaan Puri?

  one available. So his is Greg and then it's like 12 numbers that are like the whatever the default thing would be. So it's like, you would never think it's going to go viral. But yeah, it's Greg 16676, whatever, like, you know, like 10 numbers long. So what does this have to do though with? Okay. So that was just my smart contract token developer tangent. My next idea, if you're ready to transition. I am. Is, is unbundling a piece of YC. So YC does a few things for founders. YC puts a stamp on you. It says, this is a YC startup. So all of a sudden your valuation is going to go up, blah, blah, blah. They kind of coach you. So they say, oh, you know, come in for

• 18:17Shaan Puri?

  office hours, tell us about your idea. Maybe we help you pivot your idea. Maybe we help you stay focused on growth or, you know, how to like tweak it. So you grow faster and they do that for three months and then, then they start working on your pitch. And then there's demo day, which is like, you're going to get to stand in front of investors. You're going to give a one minute pitch. You're going to raise money. And that works. So they have like whatever 120 startups a year now or something doing that. But another, another kind of like course, quote unquote, I'm very, I was brainstorming, I was like very interested in working backwards from what's a course where the person gets a clear outcome. So this is part of my learnings of like doing a course, which is people don't buy a course for learning. They buy some change. They buy a transformation for themselves.

• 19:01Shaan Puri?

  And so like, you know, for a startup going from unfunded to funded, or like, you know, no name to like, oh, stamp of approval. That's like actually a big change. And so one, one transformation and one change that people would buy is getting their first round of funding. It's like, I'm not just going to teach you knowledge that you can may or may not use. It's like, I'm going to help you get funded. And so I was thinking, could you like, I've raised probably $20 million in my life and I've helped a bunch of founders raise money. And I think I'm pretty good at storytelling. So I was like, I think I could help. A founder who's got no, no funding today, get funding in like a one month period. And I think I could basically just sit you down with the deck with your story and then basically say,

• 19:43Shaan Puri?

  cool, like there's a pretty intense workshopping of your deck and your story to get that to be as good as it's gonna be. And then there's like a bunch of angel like introductions and like teaching you how to manage your pipelines that you run this like a process, like a bidding war, unlike what most people do, which is they kind of try to date one investor at a time and they go kind of slow and they fear rejection and they don't know how to reach out and all this stuff. I could teach you the kind of like the sales process of investing. And I was thinking, I was like, oh, you could do this like on a success basis. So again, like Lambda, which you don't like, but you could align your incentives, which says-

• 20:16Sam Parr?

  By the way, I like Lambda. I just think the business model is silly. I think because the thing with education is that most people will never benefit from what you're telling them.

• 20:26Shaan Puri?

  Right. Well, that's the, in some ways, that's the beauty of Lambda, but it's also the bad side of Lambda, right? The beauty of Lambda is their incentive is aligned. So let's say most courses, like let's say for my writing course, I don't care if you're good at writing, bad at writing, and I really don't truly care if you're gonna do it or not because I get paid either way, right? Like, I'd love for you to take the course and have a big benefit, but the reality is like my financial incentive is not such that if you don't, if you, if you don't hit your goals, it doesn't really make a financial difference to me. Whereas for Lambda, it does. They have to select people who are gonna be able to succeed and then they only make money when somebody gets what they want, which is a high paying job. So that's the beauty of Lambda, but it's also the hard part of scaling Lambda.

• 21:05Sam Parr?

  What, what were, what were the results from your course, though? Like, did that go well?

• 21:11Shaan Puri?

  Uh, it went well. So basically, okay, so here's the kind of like the learnings from my course. All right. So-

• 21:16Sam Parr?

  Can I guess? Can I guess?

• 21:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah. We'll do it on each category. So first is, let's just start with the most interesting one, money. How much money do you think I made doing this course?

• 21:27Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, to give the context, I taught a course on power writing, which is basically writing to get a result. So like the writing I do, which is like, if I'm writing an email, it's because I want somebody to reply. If I'm writing a landing page, because I want somebody to click buy button. If I'm writing a tweet storm, it's because I want people to share it. And like, the stuff you learn in school is not the stuff that that actually works in the real world. And so it's like copywriting, plus plus. That's the, that's the course. All right. So I do this.

• 21:53Sam Parr?

  Hundred fifty is my guess.

• 21:54Shaan Puri?

  Hundred fifty thousand, very close. So I did a hundred and twenty seven thousand of top line sales. And then let's just break down the P and L. So, so then there's my cost of making the course. So I basically had a guy do like custom illustrations and graphics and things like that.

• 22:08Sam Parr?

  That'd probably be eight to 10,000.

• 22:11Shaan Puri?

  Seventy five hundred. And he was amazing. And he was really good. And so I'm like, I love that. That was, that was worth it. Then there's Maven's fee. So Maven's fee is on the top number. So I should take that.

• 22:21Sam Parr?

  Like 10%?

• 22:22Shaan Puri?

  10%, right. So, so take out 12 grand roughly from 127, then you take out 7,500 of cost production, then everything else. Then there's payment processing fees. That was another four, three or four grand. And so my net was like 100, I'm doing the math bad here, but I think it was like 105 roughly. And then, okay, so, so that's kind of like, that's the, the money in. And so that was off of 320 students. I charged, the first batch I did at half price. So I charged, I think, $450 or something like that. $400 maybe it was for the, for the course.

• 22:56Sam Parr?

  And if I had to bet, did you do like an MPS?

• 23:00Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 23:01Sam Parr?

  I would bet it was like, out of 10?

• 23:04Shaan Puri?

  Out of 10. So for those who don't know, net promoter score, basically you ask one question to your audience, which is, how likely are you to refer this to a friend on a scale of one to 10, 10 being, I, you know, I absolutely will refer, I would absolutely refer a friend to this, one being no way.

• 23:18Sam Parr?

  7.3.

• 23:20Shaan Puri?

  9.1.

• 23:22Sam Parr?

  That's amazing. Most, everything is in the sevens.

• 23:25Shaan Puri?

  But it's a little biased, right? Because some people didn't reply to the survey. So I'm assuming the people who really didn't give a shit also didn't reply to the survey. So I gave myself a true MPS of probably eight, but it was a 9.1 on the, the stats.

• 23:37Sam Parr?

  So do you think people loved it?

• 23:39Shaan Puri?

  I think people loved it. The feedback was kind of amazing. And then I did a survey of like, what did you like about it? And basically, it broke into three categories. It was like, look, I can't, you know, the first one was, dude, two of those sessions were like, like, game changers for me. It's like, oh, you're cold emailing one? Like, that was great. I immediately implemented this and I got, you know, meetings that I wanted. I booked more sales. Like, that one, I just, I used right away. Or like, the second one would be like, you have one about writing inside of a big company? How to like, stand out with your writing inside of a big company? That was, I didn't even know I wanted that. That was a great one. And so everybody kind of had two of this. I did seven sessions. Everybody had like, two sessions that they were like, that was the one, and the rest was fine. You know, like, the rest was good, but like, didn't really like,

• 24:24Shaan Puri?

  those two, I got my money's worth. The rest was gravy. And then I asked people, the other question I asked people was, on average, how much value did you get? Like, you know, $0, the price of admission, like a 1X return, 3X, 5X, 10X, whatever it was? And then the average per, the average answer to that was 10X my money. I got 10X my value back out of it. And I was like, okay, for what? I don't know if that's like a scientific question, because how the hell are they measuring that? I don't really know. But, okay. Downsides. Guess what the biggest downside was? Because you've done a course before. So, tell me, what do you predict was my biggest,

• 25:00Shaan Puri?

  the biggest downside of it?

• 25:02Sam Parr?

  Uh, well, does that include logistics? Like, quality?

• 25:05Shaan Puri?

  Including that, yeah.

• 25:06Sam Parr?

  So I think they'll probably complain about your camera, or your sound, or the time.

• 25:11Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, timing was the biggest one, because I taught it live. Um, and so a lot of people, you know, were like, oh, you know, I could, I either, the time worked great for me, it worked okay for me, or it was horrible for me, because I'm in Australia and that time zone was awful. Uh, so I only watched the recordings. The, I meant, the biggest complaint I had in doing the course, what was the biggest downside of doing the course?

• 25:31Sam Parr?

  Talk too fast?

• 25:33Shaan Puri?

  No, no, I mean, like, why, what was a pain in the ass for me?

• 25:36Sam Parr?

  Well, it's probably just way too much work.

• 25:38Shaan Puri?

  Yes. Complete underestimation of the work.

• 25:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's so much work.

• 25:44Shaan Puri?

  I spent probably...

• 25:47Shaan Puri?

  Fifty to a hundred hours like making the content, which was way more than I thought I would do. I thought it would take me like

• 25:54Sam Parr?

  It's so much work.

• 25:54Shaan Puri?

  An hour or two per session. All right. So let's say two hours per session. That's like 15 hours of work. It was like a full day. It was like an eight hour day per, per session I made plus like the actual teaching of it. And then afterwards, what I would do is, so I structured my, the one, the best thing I did, by the way, was I think, I don't think I invented this. I'm sure other people do this, but I didn't really know what it's called. But I basically structured the session like this. It was like, all right, you show up. So it's like, hey, we're going to be here for an hour. The very first thing I do is I say, all right, the promise is this, by the end of this hour, you're going to be able to do this. All right. So that's my problem. That's the magic trick I'm going to show you. Today you can't do that or you're bad at it. You're going to be good at it by the end of this hour. And then I basically would do, I'd say, all right, let's say it's a cold email. I'm not going to tell you anything about cold email. Write a cold email right now.

• 26:39Shaan Puri?

  And they would all have to sit there while I'm sitting there watching them 10, 15 minutes, write the thing. So it was called do learn redo. So I'd have them do it. I got that gives the baseline. They would all share it in the Slack channel. Then I would teach them like not everything about cold email. I'd be like, hey, here's the three biggest things you could do to improve your, improve cold emails. I'd do some examples. I'd teach them the theory and then I'd be like, all right, last 15 minutes, you're going to redo it. And then they would redo it and then they would just have a before and after of their one hour session where it's like a really shitty first attempt. And then like a pretty good second attempt. And then after the course, I would take one hour and I would just go through as many examples as I could of students. And just give them like feedback through Loom. So that was like, that worked pretty well, but it was like kind of intense for me because I'm

• 27:23Shaan Puri?

  basically performing a magic trick live. I don't know what they're going to do. And so it was kind of high risk. It wasn't like, like it could, anything could have happened.

• 27:33Sam Parr?

  My wife did it, by the way, Sarah, my wife did it and she sold out. She made 10,000 and like. Two weeks, maybe?

• 27:40Shaan Puri?

  And why did she cap it? Because they told me to cap it and I didn't cap mine.

• 27:44Sam Parr?

  She's not like you and me. This is her first time doing like a public facing thing.

• 27:48Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:49Sam Parr?

  You know, you and I have, you know, tens of thousands of hours of like riffing under our belt and like, we know how to perform. She, she's just learning and trying to figure out how to do it.

• 27:59Shaan Puri?

  By the way, one thing you should tell her, the best thing I did was I did rehearsals. So for each session, I would invite four kids who were like, kind of like 25 and under usually, who can't afford the course. And I would just say, hey, you want the course for free in a personal session? I need to do a dry run with you. And so I did a dry run for each of the sessions. And in doing that, I would realize five minutes in like, oh, this is all fucked up. Like, I gotta change this. Or like, wow, this is way too hard. When I just asked them to answer, they're confused. Like, they don't know where to start.

• 28:28Sam Parr?

  Like doing comedy.

• 28:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So I needed to do those open mics, basically, to make it work.

• 28:32Sam Parr?

  Will you do this? Do you think this will be a significant income source for you in the future? Or are you gonna quit doing it?

• 28:38Shaan Puri?

  So I'm doing it one more time and we're gonna see how that goes. My, my goal was basically, I put the price back where the original price, so 950. So I'm like, all right, let's see if there's enough demand there at that point, price point. Because below that, it's not really worth it for me, I don't think. Because you need a lot of students and it's a lot of work. So I'm doing it one more time in August. We'll see if it's like, good again. I had a lot of fun doing it. So we'll see if it's fun again, or if it gets like, old for me. But then I also have a bunch of other ideas for other courses that I want to do. So I think I'm gonna teach different courses, which is more work, but I think more fun for me.

• 29:11Sam Parr?

  Can I tell you? Okay. So now, by the way, we're talking about maven.com, which, uh, this is, here's your disclosure. We both have incredibly invested interest in this and I want them to make money.

• 29:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 29:21Sam Parr?

  Because we invested in them.

• 29:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 29:24Sam Parr?

  But I do think they're gonna have to change. I don't think it's gonna work to do live courses. I don't think are gonna have, it can't be their bread and butter. It's just gotta be how they get into the market. That's, that's my prediction, but we'll see.

• 29:33Shaan Puri?

  Well, I started off being like, I'm gonna do it recorded. And I started recording the content and I bounced off a few people and I was like, oh, first of all, recording good content takes a lot of time, too. So it's not like it was gonna save, it saves you time when I, you know, it's scalable later, but it takes a lot more time upfront. The second thing was, people were way less excited about me recorded. And I was like, no, no, look, I'm like, it's me. I'm like, planning this out. It's gonna be like as good as I can get it. It's gonna be edited. It's gonna be tight versus me live. And they're like, no, we'd rather just to be you live off the cuff and like, not so tight. Like, the perceived value of live is way higher. And so I was like, okay, if it's easier for me to do, and it's higher perceived value, like, that was one pivot I had to make halfway through of like, switching to live.

• 30:19Sam Parr?

  All right, let me, let me pivot to a different topic.

• 30:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 30:22Sam Parr?

  You maybe told me about this, but I had Jake research it. I think you, did you tell me about Swimply?

• 30:28Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 30:29Sam Parr?

  Okay, so, I like to keep a list of things that I thought are horrible ideas, and ended up doing like amazingly well. I definitely would put Bitcoin in that category. Like, you've told me, I'm like, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. Ryan Hoover told me about Product Hunt, the day he was launching it, and I was like, just quit.

• 30:46Shaan Puri?

  I also thought it was stupid, yeah.

• 30:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah, if you

• 30:49Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I have an easy hack to do this. Whenever, I just have a bookmark thing on my Chrome. So whenever I see a startup website that I'm like, oh, that's interesting, I bookmark it either into, I think it's gonna work, or I think it's not gonna work. So I have this like, then I can go back like, a year later, I could just go click and see how many of those websites are still like, up, and like, doing something, you know, and I

• 31:09Sam Parr?

  That's actually more I could do that.

• 31:10Shaan Puri?

  I've had this for like, five years.

• 31:12Sam Parr?

  So if I saw this next company that I'm about to tell you about, and this next idea, if I saw that five years ago, or a year ago, I would be like, well, like, just quit. Why, why are you even doing these stupid games? Like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. So

• 31:25Shaan Puri?

  Let's explain it.

• 31:26Sam Parr?

  The name's even stupid. It's called Swimply. Is that P supposed to be there? Is that a typo?

• 31:32Shaan Puri?

  Uh,

• 31:32Sam Parr?

  Swimply?

• 31:34Shaan Puri?

  Let me see. Is it Swimply? It might be Swimply. No, it is Swimply.

• 31:40Sam Parr?

  It's Swimply. That's, okay, so, we're looking at a Google Doc. That's, that's crazy. I thought that, I wasn't sure if that was a typo, but he wrote Swimply in like, everything.

• 31:49Shaan Puri?

  The way I found this, I was just driving and I saw a billboard, and it just said, Swimply, rent a swimming pool near you. And I was like, what?

• 31:57Sam Parr?

  And that's what it is. So, uh, you know, with everything going on, people are desperate to get out of their homes and they're working from their house and they want to get out. And so they go and they can rent someone else's pool, Airbnb for pools. If you told me about this four years ago, I'd be like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever done. This is right next to like, go out and rent a dog for an hour.

• 32:17Shaan Puri?

  But you're a believer?

• 32:19Sam Parr?

  I'm not a believer yet, but the numbers definitely show that I'm wrong. So they've grown 2,000% since summertime and roughly fourth that what's so if you grow for they've grown 4,000% in a year. What's that mean? 40x?

• 32:33Shaan Puri?

  4,000 is 40x. Yeah.

• 32:35Sam Parr?

  Okay. They just raised the series.

• 32:37Shaan Puri?

  Beyond anything, right? I could start with one and get to 40.

• 32:39Sam Parr?

  That's true, but they raised a series A, which I'm shocked and who's their, their, their.

• 32:44Shaan Puri?

  They raised like, they raised 11 or 12 million dollars. So, so the idea is like, I have a pool in my backyard. I can set like a $50 an hour rate. And somebody who doesn't have a swimming pool in their backyard, because that's a big expense can say, say, cool, we'll rent your private, we'll rent your pool. We're going to come swim for two hours, a hundred bucks. There's four of us. It's worth it. Like we were going to have fun doing that. And you like, kind of clean up your backyard later. Um, that's the idea.

• 33:08Sam Parr?

  They raised the money, they raised their money from like some ballers, like people who like, I think I respect as knowing what they're doing. So I definitely think I was wrong.

• 33:16Shaan Puri?

  Who?

• 33:16Sam Parr?

  Uh, Northwest, Northwest Ventures, they're, I mean, they're like a huge, um, a huge thing, right? Northwest?

• 33:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Generic name. Come on. If you're going to, if you're going to.

• 33:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but they're like a multi-billion dollar. They're big enough that I assume that they have employees who like vet.

• 33:32Shaan Puri?

  Well, yeah, of course. Uh, okay. So their traffic, like if you look at their similar web thing, it's pretty nuts. So like January, it's, uh, you know, 50,000 visitors and by June, it's like hockey sticking to 400,000 monthly visitors, uh, according to similar web. So similar webs, the exact numbers are not right, but the direction is correct usually. And so this thing is like doubling. It's like doubled last month, doubled the month before that, doubled the month before that. So four doubles in a row.

• 33:58Sam Parr?

  And so I got, I was, I was interested in the space because I found a company that was raising money. And what they were doing, and the reason I got interested in this company was we had this guy who I talked about this guy named Preston on the podcast. His name was, I don't even remember his last name, but Preston, I think the company he started was called spacious, where they would do short-term retail space and rent it out for coworking.

• 34:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 34:19Sam Parr?

  There's this other company that I'll find, I'll say the name in a second. And what they're doing is you can rent people's homes just during the day for coworking.

• 34:28Shaan Puri?

  I've heard of that.

• 34:29Sam Parr?

  And it starts with a C. What's it called?

• 34:32Shaan Puri?

  Cozy or some, I don't know what it is. Yeah, chill. I'm just making up names.

• 34:36Sam Parr?

  And again, that idea I thought was the stupidest thing. And then I talked to Preston and he's like, no, these could be legit. These could be huge companies. It's astounding. And so here's a few more companies that, that are interesting. So Neighbor is a storage marketplace. And by the way, almost all of these I would bet against, and I am being proven wrong consistently. Neighbor is a storage marketplace. They just raised a $53 million Series B. iMove is an electric vehicle subscription service. So you can, they just raised a bunch of money. I'm actually on board with that. It's just like leasing. Kazoo, subscribe your next car online. Picasso, buy and own a second home with eight others. That's just a timeshare, isn't it?

• 35:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 35:13Sam Parr?

  And then Resort, Resort Pass, you can share day passes to resorts, pools and hotels. So anyway, kind of interesting. The space has always interested me because I've been the one saying how I think it's really stupid and it's not going to work. But these things are actually, are beating my, are proving me wrong.

• 35:32Shaan Puri?

  Right. By the way, you just said something like share a thing. We were talking about courses. We had this idea a long time ago. I still think this is a good idea. If somebody wants to do this, I'll be, you know, first customer slash your minority business partner who does nothing besides give you the idea, which is ClassPass for online courses. So I right now would pay, like, if you said, hey, I can bring you a student, but you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to give it to him for 50% off, but I can get you volume of students and you don't have to worry about getting students. I'd take that. And if you basically, I think you can work out the math where you can basically get. Let's call it a hundred dollars a month from somebody and then they get access to like

• 36:13Shaan Puri?

  your course, my course, Sarah's course, you know, like 10 other courses right now. And get all of them basically like and all you can eat pass. So I think there's a class pass for courses that could work for online courses.

• 36:24Sam Parr?

  Let me um.

• 36:26Shaan Puri?

  Could exist.

• 36:27Sam Parr?

  Let me keep being a hater, but there's this company called um every every dot. What is it called?

• 36:33Shaan Puri?

  Two every dot. So or every dot two?

• 36:36Sam Parr?

  I think every dot two.

• 36:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 36:38Sam Parr?

  There's guys doing that for newsletters and the guys running it are great. His name is Nathan, really cool, wonderful guy. I know Nat is a writer there. I like his work. There's a bunch of like interesting, great writers on there. But I think this business model is horrible because dealing with how you're going to pay the each writer seems like a huge pain in the ass, doesn't it? And if I'm like, if I'm like a big shot.

• 37:02Shaan Puri?

  Based on who brings in subs. So if your stuff brings in a sub, you get the bounty of that. You give some to the pool.

• 37:07Sam Parr?

  If I'm bringing in subs, like go F yourself. I want to own all of it.

• 37:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but you get it. So you get the majority bounty on yours. So let's say you get 50% of the subs you bring in. But you're going to put 50% in the pool. So you're going to get 50% from everybody else. And so it's a but the beauty of it is when you do in paid newsletter, there's this obligation like shit, I gotta write this thing. I can't write one a week. I gotta write two a week. It's gotta be good. It can't just be like off the cuff, you know, random stuff. They're paying for this. It's gotta be better than normal blog content. So what they what every does is say, look, you just gotta write one good thing a week, let's say, because the consumer is going to get value from eight other writers in the bundle. And so that's the that's why this works is for each person, they don't have to carry the whole subscription value themselves. They have eight other people contributing to that subscriptions value and in return they just give away some.

• 37:55Sam Parr?

  You think this is going to work?

• 37:57Shaan Puri?

  I don't know if it's going to work. I think.

• 37:59Sam Parr?

  Or the concept at least. You're.

• 38:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think it can. I think it can work. I think so. Basically, I think I'm kind of a believer in that that the Mark Andreessen thing that he stole from whoever, which was basically like most businesses just bundling and unbundling. And so I think that right now newsletters are all unbundled and somebody creating a bundle of newsletters, it'll be like the cable package and like you'll, somebody will say, ah, why am I paying for? I don't want to pay for 10 individual subscriptions and some of them are good, some are bad. And instead, if I could just pay a flat $15 a month and get access to my 10 favorite writers, like, great. So I think I think it can work.

• 38:36Sam Parr?

  Are you getting sick of newsletters?

• 38:39Shaan Puri?

  Uh, no, I have fun. I like writing my stuff, but I'm, I do it on my terms. So like, I'm not consistent. This thing I send out every Tuesday, but like, if you subscribe to it, you're like bullshit. You don't send it every Tuesday. You send it like every other Tuesday at best. And so, yeah, cause I just like, if I'm doing something else that's fun, I just don't send it. And like, you've experienced the pain of my like, my like inconsistencies or being late and things like that. Like, it's just kind of like the way I operate on all things and like, you know, the good, the good of it is like, when I do it, like I'm never just going through the motions. Like, I'm always trying to bring it, but if I don't have something to bring, I don't like do it. Or like, sometimes I'm, I don't send the thing because I'm doing something interesting, but that'll make the next week's letter more interesting because I was doing something interesting.

• 39:25Shaan Puri?

  So that's my only way of sustaining newsletter things. I think when you, once you treat your hobby like a job, that's like a recipe for failure. And that's what happens to a lot of people. They, they think it's fun to blog and then they want to make that their career. And then, you know, they make the grave, grave mistake of turning your hobby into a job. When it, when you weren't, you didn't want it as a job, really.

• 39:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's hard. It's fucking hard. As someone who is not, I haven't written them, but I have owned a newsletter company that has sent 365 newsletters times four years. It's very hard.

• 39:56Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I heard a, another newsletter company that shall not be named, say that, oh, you know, our subscriber base is like, you know, the third largest city in America. And I thought that was just a badass way of saying like, we have whatever, 2 billion subscribers, 3 million subscribers or whatever it is. Uh, and I think you should steal that and start saying things like that.

• 40:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I like that one. It's kind of like, I think the skim was the one who said, um, the skim said like, if we were a morning show, we would be the number one most popular morning show.

• 40:27Shaan Puri?

  Right. Um, another great way of framing. That's part of, that's part of the power line. It's just like, how do you frame it?

• 40:35Sam Parr?

  It's a bit bullshit, but it is. Yeah, it is useful.

• 40:39Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:40Sam Parr?

  Okay. Do we want to wrap here? Do we want to go to one more?

• 40:43Shaan Puri?

  Let's do one more fun thing. Do you have one? Otherwise, I can pick one.

• 40:46Sam Parr?

  You pick one.

• 40:48Shaan Puri?

  Do you want to pick one off your list, maybe? Do this Elon filing a patent thing? That sounds good.

• 40:52Sam Parr?

  Okay, so basically, I'm working with Jake, our researcher, to like, find different signals and figure out what do those signals mean? And so there's something interesting. I've always been, I've always been interested in gas stations. Because like I said, we said earlier, I'm like into this nerd about America. I love like nostalgia, middle America stuff. And gas stations are interesting to me because we spend a lot of time there. Like, I have fond memories of gas stations. And many of the biggest top 100 privately owned businesses in America, if you look at one of the biggest privately owned companies in America, most, not most, but a very large percentage are gas stations.

• 41:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 41:27Sam Parr?

  And so by revenue, gas makes up typically two thirds of sales for gas stations, but it only makes like one third or less of profit. The majority of profit comes from buying shit on the inside. And Elon Musk recently filed a trademark for different restaurant services aimed at

• 41:46Sam Parr?

  electric vehicles and things like that, and for food services, basically. And so I'm very eager to see what Tesla is going to do. And also, I'm very eager to see how the, the modern gas station is going to change. And so far, so what are the biggest ones? I think the biggest ones are are Casey's, QuickTrip. There's a few more that are the top ones. They're not doing shit. Because if you go to a gas station right now for Tesla, it's still a pain in the butt. The Tesla superchargers are way better. And so I'm very eager to see, and I wanted to know what you think, what is going to happen to gas stations? And how are they going to continue to make you money?

• 42:24Shaan Puri?

  Yes, I think there's two big changes that are happening. So cars go electric. Then what the hell happens to gas stations, right? Do they just convert into electric charging stations? Or is it going to be different because you're charging at home, right? Like, I can't fill up my tank overnight in my garage, but I can charge my electric vehicle that way. And so maybe those gas stations, they're just not needed anymore. They need to convert to some other use of real estate. You know, it's like Blockbuster on the corner store. Why would I need that when I could just push a button and stream Netflix to my TV? The second is self-driving cars, which is going to change the game for both gas stations and for parking garages. So you don't need as much parking when you have self-driving

• 43:07Shaan Puri?

  cars. Most of city real estate is parking, whether it's street parking or parking garages. There's a huge amount that's just parking and because cars are idle 90% of the time. When cars go self-driving, they're not going to be idle 90% of the time. So cities are going to have to like re-renovate basically the way they use their land because it's going to become totally obsolete. But let's do gas stations for a second. So one theory is gas stations become like entertainment hubs because actually charging a car takes a lot more time than filling up a gas tank. I think even supercharger takes like 30 minutes, right, to to to fill up, basically to recharge your Tesla while you're like on a road trip or whatever. And so, you know, what do you do to entertain people during that time? Maybe they're just sitting in their car using the in-car entertainment system,

• 43:52Shaan Puri?

  but maybe there's something else that you do with food and drink and TVs and maybe it's a sports bar essentially that you turn this into. The other thing that I think's interesting is like, so I'll give my cousin a shout out. So my cousin Rohan has a startup called stable dot auto. So check it out. You're not going to fully grok it from the from the landing page, but but I'll just tell you about it. So it says company stable. I spell it. Stable, like S T A B L E, like a like a stable of horses. And then dot what? Auto, A U T O. So so he started off, what he started off doing was he he was like a robotics guy from MIT. So he's like, look, how do I make it where a self-driving car, when it like self-driving cars are going to need, they're great because they're going

• 44:37Shaan Puri?

  to drive people around without a driver, but how are they going to charge? Like, they have to go to a charging station and then are you just going to have like attendance there plugging in cars and taking them out? Like, how's it going to do that? And so he was creating like, if you've ever seen Elon tweeted this out once, which is a robotic arm that would just find the charging thing and would like plug itself in. So it was like a self- A self Yeah. Like, imagine the gasoline pump could go into your car without you having to pick it up and put it in the hole. So he built a robotic arm that did that. So what my cousin was doing was basically, he was just saying, oh, if Tesla's doing that, but then there's all these companies trying to compete with Tesla, I'll make the robotic arm for all the other companies. So like, every other company has a different, like, charging, like, kind of like, location on the car.

• 45:21Shaan Puri?

  How would I make machine learning that's gonna find the hole and stick that stick in the hole, uh, basically for for that? And he started doing that, but the problem was, and I told him this, which was like, look, self-driving cars are not here, so you're building for a future market, like, you don't know when it's gonna happen, like, we all know it's gonna happen eventually, like, that's a little bit difficult. And so, um, and so, and you're also building this robotic arm, it's really hard to hard to build. So he switched to, now he switched to something else, which is basically like software that basically will,

• 45:53Shaan Puri?

  it it it basically tells you when you need to, when you should go charge your, when you should go charge your electric car. For, so imagine like Uber and Lyft, they have these fleets of electric vehicles, uh, that are gonna be out in the roads, and that's for sure happening. And so when do you go charge? If you go wait till you're like almost out, you might miss like peak, peak, uh, traffic time where you're gonna like, get a bunch of rides and make a bunch of money. You also might go charge when it's really expensive to charge, because electricity costs fluctuate throughout the day. So what they're building is basically an app that you load into your, like, uh, this is at least the last I heard of it. It's like an app for any driver of Uber or Lyft that has an electric vehicle that will say, now is the optimal time to charge.

• 46:35Shaan Puri?

  Go over here, there's a charging station nearby, there's a little, there's not much traffic for Uber rides right now, and the price of electricity is low. And so it basically, that'll work while you have human drivers, and then when you have self-driving fleets, it'll do that whole thing automatically. It'll basically say, hey, let's send to this 10% of your fleet to go charge right now. Let's keep 90% on the road, and it'll optimize it so you're like saving the most money both ways.

• 47:01Sam Parr?

  But let's talk about what do you think is gonna happen? Where's the opportunity right now? I mean, his idea that maybe, I think it's far simpler. Have you ever heard of Buc-E's?

• 47:13Shaan Puri?

  Yes. Tell people about it.

• 47:15Sam Parr?

  Do you know what it is?

• 47:16Shaan Puri?

  Buc-E's is basically in Texas, there's like a gas station chain that like people love. They don't just like it, they love it. It's a tourist destination and it's destination for a couple of reasons, I think. I've never been to one, even though I lived in Texas. It has extremely clean bathrooms and they have a bunch of food that people are like obsessed with.

• 47:36Sam Parr?

  It's basically shitty sugary food, but it has a funny logo and they serve like brisket. It's just like low quality, but fun.

• 47:45Shaan Puri?

  It became a thing.

• 47:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but it's huge. So I think that it's gonna break down in two categories. The first category is just everyday use. I think people are gonna keep their shit at home, charge at home, or they're just gonna charge while they're in the grocery store. And that's how they, and that's, and Whole Foods is gonna be the winner. The second thing is traveling. And I think the way that that's gonna look is Buc-E's. It's gonna be just like, it's gonna be a Buc-E's meets Museum of Ice Cream. So when I go to Buc-E's, it's a spectacle. I stop there because I'm gonna get like a huge soda. I'm gonna get maybe something to eat, but I'm just gonna look at stupid shit like a Buc-E knife or a Buc-E bookbag, this dumb trinket.

• 48:24Shaan Puri?

  Like going into a Bass Pro shop, basically.

• 48:27Sam Parr?

  It's like going into a Bass Pro shop or just looking, walking around Ikea. It's just a spectacle. It's gonna be like that with a little bit of Museum of Ice Cream where there's gonna be a little bit even more spectacles that are fun to take pictures in front of. That is where, what's gonna happen, I think. And I think like the shelves of the world or whatever gas station, 7-Eleven. 7-Eleven, I actually think could become a Buc-E because 7-Eleven has a little bit of nostalgia. Like 7-Eleven, it's kinda, it could be cool. It's like Subway.

• 48:54Shaan Puri?

  It could be like vans.

• 48:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, Subway could be, could be the next version of vans.

• 49:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So I think there, there's definitely some people that are gonna go that route, right? They make it a tourist destination and they have a quirky brand and that works. I think some people are gonna go full automation. So like in San Francisco, we had that thing Cafe X. I don't know, did you ever buy coffee from that?

• 49:15Sam Parr?

  No, it took too long.

• 49:17Shaan Puri?

  I mean, it takes like a minute, right?

• 49:20Sam Parr?

  It's just stupid. I thought it was dumb. Cafe X is stupid.

• 49:23Shaan Puri?

  How do you think that's stupid? That's like, that's so good. So if nobody knows who, what Cafe X, describe it.

• 49:29Sam Parr?

  So it's basically, okay, but here's the thing. So like, it's basically a Keurig machine. Like, it's not that fancy, but it looks, it's usually like, it's in a building and it has like this glass around it. And it's a massive robot arm that's making a spectacle of like, moving the coffee cup around and then pouring the milk in it. In reality, it could like, you don't need that stupid fucking arm. It could just be like a coffee vending machine. Like, so that's why, whenever I saw that, I'm like, when I see these like in warehouses and stuff, it's just like you put two quarters in and you just get like, like at the hospital. You've never been to a hospital and used one of those like cappuccino machines? Like, I don't need this dumb fucking arm to trick me and act like it's doing something special.

• 50:11Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so that's definitely one way of seeing it. And I could see that point of view. I think, what's the difference between Starbucks and that vending machine? Is it the quality of the coffee? Or what's the difference?

• 50:21Sam Parr?

  Probably not the quality.

• 50:22Shaan Puri?

  So what is the difference?

• 50:24Sam Parr?

  One's a spectacle and one you talk to people.

• 50:28Shaan Puri?

  Uh, no, no, no. So I'm saying like, between the Keurig machine and Starbucks, like, why do you even need a Starbucks? Why couldn't Starbucks just be a Keurig machine?

• 50:34Sam Parr?

  I like getting out of the house and seeing people.

• 50:38Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so maybe, maybe it's that. If that's the case, then Starbucks is safe. The other case is basically that there's some middle ground of like, variety and quality. That's like above a coffee machine, but more like a Starbucks where you have like 40 drinks that you want. Cause you want your soy latte with, you know, you know, you want, you want almond milk and then you want two pumps of sugar and you want light ice or whatever. And like, that's how you like your drink. And so, you know, you can't get that out of a normal coffee machine. Either the coffee doesn't taste as good or the drink is not as elaborate. And Cafe X basically says, cool, what if we could serve coffee faster and cheaper than a Starbucks? What if we could serve Starbucks quality coffee, but faster and cheaper than a Starbucks?

• 51:21Shaan Puri?

  Why? Because we have a robot arm that could just like do the thing 24/7 and never call in sick and never be an employee, never need, never have any employee like issues. And by the way, I take up one tenth of the square footage of a Starbucks because it's like a, it's like a giant robot in a hamster ball. Uh, it's like, it has everything it needs right there. It takes up like 10 square feet.

• 51:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like 10 by 10.

• 51:43Shaan Puri?

  And so what they're doing with the idea with Cafe, I don't think Cafe X specifically is going to succeed, but I'd be shocked if there's not a Cafe X type winner down the road because you can shove these things anywhere. You can shove it inside of an apartment building and it can make sense in an apartment building, whereas like a full service Starbucks with staff wouldn't make sense in a, in an apartment building. And so I think that those are going to succeed. Um, and so I think there's a version of the gas stations that's like that. I think there's a version of the gas stations that basically is just all automation. The charging's automated and then you go and you push a button and it creates a giant slurpee for you like 7-Eleven, but it's just a robot arm doing it.

• 52:20Sam Parr?

  We'll see. We'll see if it works out, but I think it's going to be more like Buggies. At least I hope it will be. Um, all right. That's the episode. I gotta, I gotta go get a haircut.