#69 - Paid News, Burning Money & Solving Climate Change

Today's ep is possible because of Superside! Head to superside.com to hire a dedicated team of designers! Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) are back to talk about Burning money (0:36), Asia monetizing podcasts way better / paid news (3:23), Drudge report getting 1.1 billion visits a month?! (11:28), Neil Patel and where most enterprise revenue coming from maintenance (20:59), Book a YC team (29:17), Remote.com raising $11M seed (33:19), Attrition projection/modelling (37:52) and Yishan Wong solving climate change (41:08). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  This episode is brought to you by Superside. So superside.com. If you need something designed quickly, go to superside.com, give them a try.

• 0:11Sam Parr?

  Humble and smart man can admit when things have changed and is wrong. So I am humble and smart.

• 0:20Shaan Puri?

  What up Sam? How are you doing?

• 0:22Sam Parr?

  Hi.

• 0:23Shaan Puri?

  You got a sweatshirt on that says, "It's only money."

• 0:27Shaan Puri?

  What are you trying to say?

• 0:29Sam Parr?

  I'm trying to say that, um, when I look at my portfolio and look at my losses, it's only money.

• 0:36Shaan Puri?

  It's only money. Uh, you know, I met this guy once and he was like, he, I don't know, doesn't matter. Uh, I met a guy and we were talking and I'm easily excitable. So if you start talking to me and you start talking a little bit of sense, I get really excited and I will triple down and make some kind of commitment that I don't want to make. But I did that with this guy where we were both talking about money and we were like, you know what? Fuck money, right? Like, we need to fuck money. Um, and we agreed to do a money burn in San Francisco. We were like, okay, a thousand dollars. You bring a thousand dollars and we're just gonna burn it. And...

• 1:10Sam Parr?

  God, that's so stupid.

• 1:11Shaan Puri?

  And of course, exactly.

• 1:13Sam Parr?

  Does money burn?

• 1:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's paper, right?

• 1:16Sam Parr?

  It's not paper. It's cotton.

• 1:18Shaan Puri?

  What?

• 1:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So there's a, it's like a riddle. What weighs more? Uh, all the money printed in a year? Or all the trains that have ever passed through, uh, Grand Central Station? And the answer is, they weigh the same, which is they're both weightless because trains don't pass through Grand Central Station and money isn't made from paper.

• 1:40Shaan Puri?

  Ah, okay, good. I love riddles. Um, thank you for that.

• 1:44Sam Parr?

  It's made out of cotton. So in fact, it does grow on trees.

• 1:48Shaan Puri?

  But I'm pretty sure money burns. I think I've seen this in movies unless they're using fake, fake paper there. Um, but anyways, we didn't end up doing it because I pushed out because I was like, do I really want to burn a thousand dollars? I don't think I do. And also I was like, this is gonna get so much blowback and no one's gonna care about the intentions behind it. It's just gonna come across as a douchey thing to do. So I didn't do it. So I'm sorry to my friend. I backed out of it. But I do like the idea of sort of letting go of the attachment to money. But, um, anyhow, it's only money.

• 2:16Sam Parr?

  It's only money, and I paid fifty dollars for this hoodie, eighty dollars or something. I bought it because Dave Portnoy, have you seen what he's done?

• 2:26Shaan Puri?

  Uh, what do you mean, which part of?

• 2:27Sam Parr?

  The founder of, uh...

• 2:30Shaan Puri?

  Barstool.

• 2:31Sam Parr?

  Founder of Barstool is trading, he put three or four million dollars into an account and has been day trading and filming the whole thing. I think he's down six hundred K right now.

• 2:40Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:41Sam Parr?

  Um, and it's awesome, it's so good, it's really exciting to watch, and he wore one of these, so I bought it.

• 2:47Shaan Puri?

  Nice.

• 2:48Sam Parr?

  Uh, are you...

• 2:48Shaan Puri?

  His plan is going according to plan, I think.

• 2:51Sam Parr?

  I love it, uh, it is, he's losing a lot of money, um, you wanna get into this?

• 2:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 2:57Sam Parr?

  Okay, I think I have two or three interesting things, um, have you read what I wrote?

• 3:02Shaan Puri?

  I've, I'm looking at it right now, so are we talking, okay, we talk about three things on this podcast, right? Ideas, so like, kind of, you know, interesting ideas based off of trans observations, etc. We talk about people that are doing interesting things or living interesting lives, and then the last one is that we talk about, you know, just cool stuff we saw or stuff we're trying ourselves, and so which one, uh, this first one, which one is this?

• 3:24Sam Parr?

  One, I have, I have number one and I have number two, so the, the, there's two of them. The first is, let's do the Japanese one, okay, so, one of my favorite things to do, and it's kind of a nerdy thing, is I love looking at, and I've told you this, I love looking at what other countries do and figuring out why it's interesting and why we don't have it in America, or the other way around.

• 3:48Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 3:48Sam Parr?

  Um, and the, the Japanese and Chinese cultures, which I know close to nothing about, um, I don't entirely understand if they have anything in common, like, I don't know if like, the similarities between Japan and China is the same as America to China, like, so I don't know, but what I've noticed that both the Chinese and the Japanese are wonderful at monetizing news apps, and one, there's a few reasons. The first reason is, in Japan, I don't know if this is true in China, but in Japan, it's still quite common to buy newspapers and to subscribe to news. That's still common, um, in China... I don't know why it's so much popular, but for example, in China,

• 4:31Sam Parr?

  the people who have podcasts like this, they monetize significantly better with subscriptions. So like there's, like for example, Serial was one of the most popular podcasts whenever it came out. It had, I think 56 million listens or something crazy like that. And it only made like a million dollars in ad revenue. It was shit. Whereas multiple creators in China will make five, 10 million dollars a year and with significantly smaller audience. So anyway, I got really interested in these businesses. And the one that I think is most interesting is called Userbase. Have I ever told you about Userbase?

• 5:08Shaan Puri?

  Nope.

• 5:09Sam Parr?

  Okay, so the only way you will likely know about them is because they bought Quartz in 2018 for about a hundred million dollars. So the interesting thing about Userbase is they're public in China. So I went and found a lot of the reports, which I love doing. And I looked at their decks and I also learned all about them. So long story-

• 5:27Shaan Puri?

  Japan, right?

• 5:28Sam Parr?

  Sorry, Japan. Userbase is Japanese. Long story short, Userbase is, before the Corona thing happened, they were publicly traded at 826 million dollars market cap. And they only raised five million dollars to start and they're about 10 years old. So they raised a significantly, a very small amount of money for how big they got. And the way that they make money is they own a handful of products, but three of them make the most money. The first is Quartz. That actually doesn't make a significant amount of money. And that was a stupid company to buy. I don't think they ever should have done it. The second thing is Spida, which from my understanding, it's all in Japanese when I go to the website. But from my understanding, it's kind of like Crunchbase. And then the next one is NewsPicks.

• 6:11Sam Parr?

  Now here's where, I'm being long-winded, but have you heard of NewsPicks?

• 6:15Shaan Puri?

  Tell me, tell me why I care about this. Tell me about these apps.

• 6:17Sam Parr?

  I will. Have you heard of NewsPicks?

• 6:20Shaan Puri?

  I have not heard of it.

• 6:22Sam Parr?

  Okay, they only have 150,000 subscribers, but they do something like 50 million dollars in revenue. And here's where the opportunities are, is you know Pocket, you know Flipboard?

• 6:32Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 6:33Sam Parr?

  They have something like 50 million dollars or 50 million users. They don't make shit. They lose money. They don't make shit. And so what I want to ask to you is, why, how do you think you would monetize Flipboard and Pocket and these things better? Because we, like now's the golden opportunity for new stuff. And- I guess I'm just excited because I'm a news junkie, but these companies are significantly better. They make something like a hundred dollars per user in revenue versus Pocket, which is probably like 50 cents.

• 7:03Shaan Puri?

  Right. You know, I think one way to think about this is who is successfully replicating that model here, right? So you have The Athletic, which has built a pretty large revenue business off of subscriptions. And then I think one of the legacy, I don't know, New York Times, whoever is doing really well, right? Isn't that the case in New York Times or Wall Street Journal? One of them is like

• 7:22Sam Parr?

  No, these aren't the same. These aren't the same because user base isn't a publisher, it's an aggregator.

• 7:26Shaan Puri?

  Sure.

• 7:27Sam Parr?

  Which is a wonderful company.

• 7:28Shaan Puri?

  More like Flipboard.

• 7:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, which is wonderful because you don't need a significant amount of people and the market size is like everyone in the country.

• 7:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so I'm not sure why people would, uh, why people would pay for that. Um, I don't know what the cultural difference is. I've heard the same things about podcasting as you have, which is that the podcasting industry in China is like worth multiple billions, uh, whereas, you know, in the US, it's, uh, you know, hundreds of millions type of thing. And, um, so I'm not sure what the cultural differences are. In fact, some of these things are pretty nuanced. So for example, live streaming, the same thing happened where in China, live streaming is like so crazy huge. So I'm at Twitch now. Twitch is a big network, but we're just in gaming and, you know, average American doesn't use Twitch. But in China, the live streaming apps are on par in popularity with like a Twitter, an Instagram, a Facebook. It's like part of the mainstream culture and people wondered why.

• 8:19Shaan Puri?

  My theory on why for live streaming at least was that in China, um, a lot of, there's sort of a sort of suppressed, um, I don't know, sexuality or something like that where porn porn sites are often blocked or firewalled out. And, um, there's just a crazy ratio of men to women where there's way more men than there are women because of the sort of one child policy, I believe, um, that was in effect for many years. And so people valued boys and so they, uh, had more boys. And so. I think what the reason live streaming is super popular in China and not in the same way in the US is because of those cultural factors. So people will watch live streams because it's sort of like this weird flirting softcore porn thing where you're watching a cute girl

• 9:01Shaan Puri?

  from a distance and you're able to chat with her and off, you know, send her tips and get virtual gifts. And so a lot of people in the US just look to China and they're like, how do we just, oh, it's happening in China, it's gonna happen here. But they missed that the underlying reason it worked in China and why there was demand for it in China, where there's less demand for it here. So that's what happened in live streaming. I wonder if the same thing is happening in podcasting where, why is it so much more popular there than it is here? Uh, and then the same thing maybe in, in the news apps. What is it culturally? And I don't know. What is it culturally that makes people either value this more or pay for this more? Um, like for example, in India, we've talked about Indian education apps and how valuable they are. So an app like Bijou or, you know, there's a bunch of different Indian apps that uh, are, are very big subscription businesses

• 9:46Shaan Puri?

  for education, you know, multi-billion dollar companies. And you don't really have the equivalent here in the US.

• 9:50Sam Parr?

  I, I know you don't. And, and I think they're, they're, all the creators out there, I think they can do this. And can I explain to you how I would do this?

• 9:57Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 9:57Sam Parr?

  And, and this is interesting because it's, it, this involves news, but involves all types of paid information. I think paid information is, can be, should be significantly larger than it, than it is. And I think it's going to get more popular, actually. I think that uh, anyone who's doing paid stuff that is normally free, um, it's going to be much larger. And so here's why I think, here, here's how I would do it. If I was starting from scratch, which I kind of am, I am in this business is the first thing is you'd be surprised that shit that's free or is mostly free, if you package it slightly differently, um, people will pay for it and they will like it more. And so what I've seen with our MPS for trends versus the hustle, which is free,

• 10:38Sam Parr?

  the trends MPS is significantly higher. It's like fucking 90, which is crazy high. And it, I, I believe that the content is great, but also people enjoy it more because they pay for it. So I think people builders out there need to think to themselves, man, there's this weird mind fucker that I can just literally charge for something that normally is free and people will like it more. The second thing is I think people need to Charge upfront, no freemium. I think if you charge upfront and don't do any freemium, you're gonna get significantly better results. The third thing is, I, I, things that, uh, a lot of times, companies like doing this low density with a lot of white space on their, um, pages. Nope. Fill it with information.

• 11:22Sam Parr?

  Get rid of that beautiful, beautiful stuff. That's not right. Have you been to drudge report.com?

• 11:27Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 11:28Sam Parr?

  You don't know what drudge is?

• 11:29Shaan Puri?

  I've heard of it, but I've never gone.

• 11:30Sam Parr?

  Okay, so it's like, yeah, it's, it's, it's his name, Matt Drudge. I, I could be saying it wrong. Drudge, it's a hard word to say. It's just like one guy and he's just like pretty right winged guy.

• 11:43Shaan Puri?

  And I went to the website just now and I was like, oh, I must have typed it in wrong because the website looks like, you know, it's Craigslist garbage.

• 11:50Sam Parr?

  Dude, that website gets a billion, uh, views a month.

• 11:53Shaan Puri?

  That's because, is this conspiracies? Is that what this is?

• 11:56Sam Parr?

  Uh, I would say it, it depends who you ask. I don't think it's conspiracy, but it is for, it's for sure biased and right winged. Just like, like, um, the founder of HuffPo.

• 12:09Shaan Puri?

  This literally gets a billion. Are you joking or is it literally?

• 12:12Sam Parr?

  I swear to God, like literally one billion. It could have declined recently. Dude, fucking, do you know Drudge was the one who broke the story about the Clinton?

• 12:23Sam Parr?

  Uh, when he slept with Monica Lewinsky, like he called it. So anyway, he, it's really just an aggregator of other links and every once in a while he'll do something original.

• 12:32Shaan Puri?

  And does he retitle the, the headlines or?

• 12:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, dude, it's just, it's literally just a page that you click off. And every once in a while he does, yes, that page was designed in 1996 and it's never changed.

• 12:43Shaan Puri?

  If you haven't gone to this, go to it right now, drudge report.com. This is so weird. This doesn't even like literally, there's like.

• 12:51Sam Parr?

  Or, or if you go to drudge.com, I think.

• 12:53Shaan Puri?

  There's like 20 links that are, it's a black and white page, 20 black links. And then there's just a giant picture of an astronaut. Uh, because it's like related to one story with a huge headline. And then there's again 1,000 links below that.

• 13:05Sam Parr?

  According, yeah, it, I, a report was done in like ninety, uh, in like two, okay, so according to SimilarWeb, it gets close to a hundred million unique visitors, so ten page views a month, yeah, uh, probably a billion. It's very influential, this site, uh, and it's interesting, and I think that if you just like paywalled this, he would crush it.

• 13:25Shaan Puri?

  So who's this guy, Matt, Matt Drudge? What's his story?

• 13:28Sam Parr?

  He's a former journalist, he, um, he's just a guy, I don't know, he's just a, he's just a guy who created a cult following, and people love it, and when Ken Lear started HuffPo, he said, "I'm gonna make the left-wing version of, of Drudge Report." And so if you go to this, this website, it does a really good job of big, bold headlines, that's like, uh, yellow journalism that was invented by Hearst in the, um,

• 13:51Shaan Puri?

  What does that mean, yellow journalism?

• 13:54Sam Parr?

  Uh, basically, this has been around forever, people think clickbait is new, it ain't, um, Hearst was a pioneer of this, so, uh, he would have these huge headlines, um, and it would, it would always, it was always, it was mostly about like blood and scandal, and, uh, you know, if it bleeds, it leads, type of thing, and then Rupert Murdoch also did it with his newspapers, and that's how they got popular. So if you go to HuffPo.com, it's, it's very similar to this, it's a huge headline right in your face, and that kinda, what that does is in your brain is it triggers a little bit of addictiveness, Business Insider's just like this too, if you go to Business Insider, big ass headlines.

• 14:28Shaan Puri?

  So they put their stats on the site, it says, "Visits to Drudge today, thirty-four million in the past twenty-four hours, one point one billion in the past month, ten billion in the past year."

• 14:39Sam Parr?

  Dude, I'm telling you, it's fucking crazy, this is like,

• 14:43Shaan Puri?

  What is happening?

• 14:44Sam Parr?

  This website is like the Craigslist of, of, of news, like, it's a tiny ass staff, it literally could be five people, and it could make fifty million dollars a year.

• 14:55Shaan Puri?

  And he monetizes anything? He has any ads, or what does he do?

• 14:58Sam Parr?

  Um, so he monetizes it with a couple ads and I knew guys who were the ad sellers like he uses a third party. So it's probably has Google, Google AdSense and things like that in there, but he also uses um, like some uh, like a third party direct seller. Like a company that sells ads on it and they said that it was like the best, the best uh, like the biggest site ever.

• 15:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, dude, I'm, I'm on their site right now. I'm asking to advertise because I want to get their info. Great hack for anybody who wants to know how many, how much traffic does something have, how many users does it have, how many listeners does this podcast have? Go to advertise, you inquire, they'll tell you the info and you'll get a sense of it. So I'm gonna.

• 15:37Sam Parr?

  Or you hit reply to their marketing emails and there's typically a marketing manager on the other end who will tell you the answer.

• 15:42Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:43Sam Parr?

  Um, so anyway, is this not like fucking fascinating?

• 15:46Shaan Puri?

  It is and uh, maybe I'm just an idiot and everybody out there is like, dude, of course I know Drudge. I'm one of the 10 billion visitors.

• 15:53Sam Parr?

  No, young, young people don't know this.

• 15:55Shaan Puri?

  I've literally, I've heard the name, I never even looked at it.

• 15:58Sam Parr?

  Alan and Abra, have you heard of this?

• 16:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, give us a F in the chat. If you know it, if you don't know it, give us something else. Oh, okay. He knows.

• 16:07Shaan Puri?

  He knows about it now because we're talking about it. All right. One said yes, one said no.

• 16:10Sam Parr?

  Gosh.

• 16:13Shaan Puri?

  He says y'all sheltered. Uh, nice. Okay. Good. Good comedy.

• 16:17Sam Parr?

  Super interesting shit, man. And um.

• 16:19Shaan Puri?

  So why doesn't the hustle have more visitors, dude? Look at this guy. This guy's, you know, killing it.

• 16:24Sam Parr?

  Well, a few reasons. One, it's, it was definitely easier to, to build a cult following in 1998 when he la- or sorry, he launched in a. I don't know when he launched. It could have been 98. I mean, it's like, why, why doesn't let go be Craigslist? It's like, well, because Craigslist has been around since 96 and they just gained market share real fast.

• 16:42Shaan Puri?

  Dude, there's a part of me that wants to just like create some alter ego that just does some Sean Hannity, Milo Yiannopoulos. Style character that just says outlandish shit. I just want to see, could I do it? Could I, could I, you know, um.

• 16:56Sam Parr?

  The answer is yes, by the way.

• 16:57Shaan Puri?

  Market my way to the top through.

• 16:59Sam Parr?

  The answer is yes. I, one of our friends did this and he got a lot of traffic and then he uh, canceled it. And uh, like he like ended the site because he's like, I just can't do this. This is the second my soul, but it worked really well.

• 17:12Shaan Puri?

  Got it. Okay.

• 17:13Sam Parr?

  Typically, and by the way, typically conservative websites get way more page views and traffic than non-conservative.

• 17:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this is now a conservative podcast, just so you know, we don't talk about politics, but if that helps the downloads go up, we're conservative and we appreciate your support.

• 17:29Sam Parr?

  So my point in all this was, I think news apps actually, if you charge money and you offer a similar offering as freed one, free ones, you can do, uh, it's like, you can actually make way more money than, uh, not.

• 17:42Shaan Puri?

  And to your thing earlier, um, so this also happens in China, like you said, so I think, I don't know how you say the name exactly, but it's like two Tiao or something like that. It's the, so ByteDance, which owns TikTok.

• 17:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's another example of, that's just like user base in Japan.

• 17:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they own, it's T O U T I A O. I don't know how you say it, but, um, and it's the same thing. It's this giant news app with like 20 million DAU or whatever. I don't know. It's like some like, uh, like it's, it's just like very big for a news app, right? Like there's not, the US doesn't have, I don't feel like news apps that are doing those types of numbers. Um, and I, I actually, I'm gonna look up their.

• 18:16Sam Parr?

  I think it, and I think it went public for like $20 billion.

• 18:20Shaan Puri?

  Um, so, okay, I was way under DAU 700 million, MAU 1.5 billion. I knew I was under because I said 20 million DAU and that's not that much. 700 million DAU, which is just insane.

• 18:34Shaan Puri?

  So, yeah, and they bought TikTok for, for kicks and giggles.

• 18:37Sam Parr?

  What? Yeah. And I think that, that they spun that news app, um, they spun that news app off. So opportunity here is I think that news apps in America are way, way, way under monetized and right now we're, the demand in news is crazy high with Trump being elected. Every, uh, everyone experienced what was called the Trump bump, which, uh, which.

• 19:00Shaan Puri?

  And what, doesn't Trump have his own news network or what is this thing that he promotes? This, uh, oh, oh, have you seen this thing? Is this news network he promotes instead of Fox now?

• 19:09Sam Parr?

  No, it isn't.

• 19:10Shaan Puri?

  He has this, um.

• 19:13Shaan Puri?

  So, so somebody back in the day had said like, one of the sort of, one theory was that the reason he wanted to run was because

• 19:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I thought that was a rumor.

• 19:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that was a rumor, but he promotes this thing instead of, um, Fox News, I have to find it, it's like, oh, something, it starts with an O. It's a four-letter domain for the news and he like promotes this, it's like, yeah, this is the good news or whatever. I had never heard of this network before. It's probably one of those right-wing uh, news networks that's like massive and I've never heard of it and no, nobody in my Twitter timeline talks about it. So I just never see it, but there's something like that.

• 19:45Sam Parr?

  So a lot of, a lot of people have tried this. Um, it really hasn't worked that well. Um, Ashton Kutcher did it with, um, it's called A plus, I believe it's called, and A, is it A plus? It's, it's something involving his initials.

• 19:59Shaan Puri?

  A plus K.

• 20:00Sam Parr?

  A plus K, is that what it is?

• 20:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 20:02Sam Parr?

  And they, and they got to like forty or fifty million monthly uniques, but then like Facebook and Twitter said, all right, we're gonna, um, if you post links, we're actually not going to show you to a lot of users. And so it basically crashed. Lil Wayne tried to do the same thing. And then that, this is actually how BJ Penn dot com, which is something you and I probably both read, uh, started.

• 20:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, okay, Alan just posted in the chat. So, uh, it's called One America News Network, O, OAN. And, uh, I've seen Trump posting about this. I had never heard of this before. Had you ever heard of this thing?

• 20:33Sam Parr?

  No, but it looks like, uh, it's owned by a larger company.

• 20:37Shaan Puri?

  A hundred to two hundred fifty employees. Yeah. I don't know who owns this thing, but anyways, it's something there to dig into, but okay, news apps, we like it. Um, I, I'm personally more interested in this like drudge thing than the Japanese aggregators, uh, because the drudge thing blew my mind, but.

• 20:52Sam Parr?

  But it's the same, it's, it's the same thing. This is my point. It's quite similar.

• 20:56Shaan Puri?

  Right. Um, okay, cool. What else you got?

• 20:59Sam Parr?

  You want to talk about neilpatel.com?

• 21:01Shaan Puri?

  Okay, let's do it. So Neil Patel's this marketer guy, right?

• 21:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he's been around forever. He's only thirty-five. He's been kind of a kind of crushing it since two thousand and two, or he was twenty-two. He started Quicksprout. It was a really cool blog. And one of the ways that Quicksprout made money is they would Google, or they would write about SEO best practices and things like that. And then send leads to consultant, consultancies who would then help you with your SEO. So he eventually sold Quicksprout and then he started neilpatel.com and neilpateldigital.com and he kept blogging about the same shit. And then he goes, you know what? Fuck it. I'm gonna, well, first of all, he tried to launch his own software thing that did something similar called Kissmetrics. It didn't work out. And then he said, fuck it, I'm just gonna do my own consultancy.

• 21:46Sam Parr?

  I think it's pretty fucking huge. And all it is is an SEO consultancy. And I was doing research on it. And the way that he made this, and this is why it's interesting to people, is everyone has ideas for agencies. And they're actually relatively simple businesses to start. You're just offering a service, but they're real shit to run. And they're hard to make a profit if you do incorrectly. And what he did that was interesting is, A, he opened up offices in Utah and San Diego, which are relatively cheapest, cheap places to live. And second, he hired a CEO right off the bat. And all he does is he Google blogs in order to get, get leads. And he, it took like a million bucks to start the thing. So he definitely had money upfront, but it's really interesting.

• 22:24Sam Parr?

  And the way that he's doing it, and his insight was, he read Slack's S1. So that's the document that they, that they published when they go public. And his whole shtick was, he goes, man, Slack's S1, the majority of revenue, it came from bigger companies. So the majority of revenue came from like six hundred companies that were huge. And also, the margins on maintenance and service revenue were significantly larger than the actual software. So you, are you familiar, familiar with this?

• 22:55Shaan Puri?

  You mean the enterprise contracts where they say, okay, yeah, you know, there's a services, a professional services component to it?

• 23:01Sam Parr?

  Yes. And so a lot of people, including myself, because I'm not in enterprise software, don't know this. But like at Atlassian, which is a large company, half the revenue is from maintenance and service.

• 23:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's

• 23:14Sam Parr?

  Is that crazy?

• 23:15Shaan Puri?

  It's crazy. AWS does this too. You, you spend whatever 30 grand a month and they're like, oh, you need priority support. You need enterprise support just in case, you know, you have, you have a good business. So you, you don't want to ruin this. And so you're paying 5K a month, 6K a month and just, uh, just to have the ability to ask questions if you need to ask questions.

• 23:32Sam Parr?

  It's mind boggling. And so what Neil appears he has done is he goes, "Yeah, like, we're not actually going to sell the software because maybe one day we'll build something. We're actually only gonna like, but we're gonna like, kind of run it a little bit like a software company. But we're going to make all of our money from that, those service, that service fee." And so they do a little bit of work, but in, in reality, they actually have software on the backend.

• 23:54Shaan Puri?

  But they're doing SEO work. So he's not selling leads. He's actually doing the SEO work.

• 23:58Sam Parr?

  Yes. But the interest, but why this is interesting to me is, um, if you look at like, I, I just, maybe this is not interesting to people who know what they're talking about, but I didn't. And I was like, wait, most of the margin is in the maintenance revenue. And so that's like where they're making all of their cash. Uh, this could, uh, it's a consultancy. And that's super interesting. And it got me wondering like, man, if you just sell like relatively cheap software and a lot of the software is not hard to get. And you just add on a layer of service and maintenance. It's like, holy fuck, that's the way you do it. All right. This episode is brought to you by Superside. So here's the deal. Um, I'm incredibly impatient, like horribly impatient. I get in a diet, an idea at midnight and on 8 AM the next day, I want it done. And unfortunately hiring people to get that stuff done is really time consuming. It takes forever. So,

• 24:43Sam Parr?

  superside.com, here's what it does. You go to superside.com. They already have a team of designers ready to go. You tell them what you want and they get it done. It's 20 times faster than traditional hiring and 50% more affordable than agencies. If you need something designed and need it done well and fast, try them out. Superside.com. I've used them before. Love them.

• 25:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's one way. I, I first heard this because there's this guy on Twitter. I think I've shattered him out before. Um, I grabbed dinner with this guy once, but his name's, uh, Chaythan. Chaythan P is his, uh, his Twitter. So C H E T A N P. I think something like that. And he's a, he's an investor at Benchmark, which is probably, you know, one of the top five venture funds in, in the country. And, um, He does enterprise, he specializes in enterprise. He just made the Midas list, which is like the, you know, VC, uh, like whatever, thirty for thirty or thirty under thirty list, basically. And, um, so anyways, he tweets out these little summaries about enterprise companies where it's like seven bullet points and you understand how this company makes their money and how fast they're growing and like,

• 25:42Sam Parr?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:43Shaan Puri?

  What he highlights-

• 25:44Sam Parr?

  Only thirty?

• 25:45Shaan Puri?

  Uh, no, no, I'm saying the Midas list is like a bullshit list like the Forbes thirty under thirty.

• 25:49Sam Parr?

  Oh, oh.

• 25:50Shaan Puri?

  Um, but anyways, he, he often posts these like, hey, counterintuitive. People think it's all about software. Look how much more, look how much of their contribution comes from services. Hey, you know, everybody thinks you should be adopted bottoms up. Look at this company. They do the complete opposite. So he's very good at pointing out the like many ways to win. And, uh, that goes against sort of the conventional Silicon Valley wisdom, which is like Silicon Valley wisdom is like, oh, technology gets adopted bottoms up now. You don't have to sell. Um, you know, you, you sell in later.

• 26:19Sam Parr?

  No, that's bullshit. Look at Oracle.

• 26:21Shaan Puri?

  It should be a software play. You don't want to have, you know, this heavy OpEx component. And it's like, you know, and so he just walks through a bunch of different examples of companies that are doing it very differently, like Pivotal and other companies like that.

• 26:31Sam Parr?

  By the way, I bet most are doing it that way. Even if you look at Slack, they've got a fucking sales team.

• 26:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, of course they have a sales team, but like, you know, they're, they're the example where it's like they grew like crazy from this bottoms up thing and then they hired a sales team, but like many companies do the exact opposite and succeed.

• 26:46Sam Parr?

  I don't think that that's true. I bet if you learn about Slack, I bet you most of the revenue came from sales team people.

• 26:52Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I don't think so early on. I mean, they didn't have any salespeople early on, so it couldn't have, couldn't have been that way, right? But I think the, the revenue then pales in comparison to where they are now. So, you know, whatever, who cares? Um, okay. So this Neil Patel guy, you think he's interesting because what? Because, okay, so you, you thought the interesting part was that, uh, surprise, surprise. These software companies actually have a significant amount of, of money that's coming from this, um, client services. Uh, that's interesting. The, uh, is there anything else about this Neil Patel guy that you think is interesting or that could be sort of replicated in some way?

• 27:24Sam Parr?

  No.

• 27:25Shaan Puri?

  Okay, cool. Well, you know. Shout out to the Indian.

• 27:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, there is one thing, which is um, his business, the way that he came to discover this business is really interesting. Whenever people ask me what company they should start if they don't.

• 27:38Shaan Puri?

  Like they're like, I'm not sure what to start. I always say.

• 27:40Sam Parr?

  Start a blog. And the reason why is his insight, he's probably, I bet you he's made a hundred million dollars, this Neil Patel guy in profit over the last 10 years. I bet, I bet he's rolling in it.

• 27:50Shaan Puri?

  I'll take the under, but okay.

• 27:51Sam Parr?

  Um, dude, I'm almost positive, like.

• 27:55Shaan Puri?

  Neil, clear the air. Neil, you hear this, clear the air. So Neil's, uh, I think he's cousins with this guy Heat and Shaw. I think that's why they started Kissmetrics together.

• 28:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they're cousins. Um, I bet you that he's probably done, anyway, I bet it's quite large. And anyway, the way that he did this was he created Quicksprout and then he looked at what sold well. And um, just launched it. And there's two companies that have done this really well. The first is WP, I mean, there's probably a ton. The first one that I can name is WP Beginner. It's wpbeginner.com. It just blogs about interesting WordPress stuff. Uh, his name's Syed. I bet you Syed, um, I bet, and so what he did was he looked at which WordPress plugins did best. And then he just launched his own and then put his links in there. And I bet, I bet you he's got a little empire that does 40 million in recurring revenue.

• 28:43Sam Parr?

  Um, I've talked to like people who claim they know and it's around, it's like in that ballpark. And then the second one who's, who did the same strategy, which I am emulating is SoftBank. You know SoftBank started this way?

• 28:53Shaan Puri?

  Yep, that's right. The news, sorry, information, then conferences, then.

• 28:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so they just started a magazine and they looked at which ads did best and then they started or invested in those companies.

• 29:05Shaan Puri?

  I like it. Um, okay, cool.

• 29:06Sam Parr?

  So interesting to me.

• 29:08Shaan Puri?

  I got a couple of topics for you. Um, tell me if these are interesting. So, um, there's this thing called, your mouse is hovering on this, I'm gonna talk about it.

• 29:16Sam Parr?

  I clicked it.

• 29:17Shaan Puri?

  Book a YC team. Uh, so what this is, is there's two guys who were in the Y C batch and they weren't able to raise money. Their startup didn't work out. And so they created this website called book a Y C teams like, hey, you want to hire like a product and engineer from Y C, like two founders were badass. We got into Y C. That's like Harvard. Um, you can just hire us and we'll just be like a little two man demolition crew for you for some price for some period of time. And so it's like the

• 29:42Sam Parr?

  It's just an agency.

• 29:43Shaan Puri?

  It's the extreme high end of like the gigster up work fiver, like right? Like that's the low end of like hire a remote, like just hire a developer to build your thing. And this is the extreme like top end. It's like, uh, and so I actually think there's a better product idea than their, their product was in, in Y C. If they can get more failed Y C startups to do this as an interim thing of like, hey, yeah, I do this while I'm in between figuring out what my next startup is. I think that's a very smart idea. So, uh, I thought that was cool. Any thoughts on that?

• 30:13Sam Parr?

  Uh, amazing. I want to, well, our team joiners. I want to sign up for this. My, my concern is that if they're from Y, I'm just going to be a hater. If they're from Y C, it means that they're soft and care about the wrong stuff and don't move fast and they're just weak. Um, but great idea. I like it.

• 30:33Shaan Puri?

  Okay. I don't agree with that at all, but all right. Um, neither of us would really know. That's just like funny. Um, okay.

• 30:38Sam Parr?

  Dude, I just, my point is just like silicon, a lot of Silicon Valley people who make shit. They just launch slow. They do all this user testing versus just like fucking do it.

• 30:46Shaan Puri?

  So my favorite thing is actually, um, is it Y C is funny that way. The people who go into Y C, they're often extremely scrappy, you know, whatever, hardworking. They're just one or two people who are building a whole thing on their own and ambitious. Then they get into Y C and then they drink the Y C Kool-Aid and it's like, oh, now by the way, um, oh, you were helping me before? Fuck you. I'm in Y C. I don't need you anymore. Uh, oh, you want to raise, you want to invest in my company? It's a $15 million valuation.

• 31:11Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 31:12Shaan Puri?

  It's like, what do you have? It's like, well, we haven't launched yet or like, we have like two customers and, um, you know, it's like the minimum buy-in is $10 million valuation. And easily we can get to 15 or 20. It's crazy. And so then they get really like, uh, you know, high and mighty. And then my favorite thing to do, and, and also all the investors are talking to them around that same time. And it's definitely decreased because of this problem, but like still there's a lot of demand. The absolute best strategy I have is, I shouldn't even say this. I shouldn't even give this away because it's such a good, it's such a good system. Give it three months after YC. So I don't care about Demo Day. I wait three months after YC and then I go talk to all those founders. At this point, nobody else is talking to them.

• 31:52Shaan Puri?

  They've either already raised a round or they failed to raise a round and they're like humble, but they're they they're and now reality has hit. Where they're like trying to actually grow their business and the YC hype is off and like the YC short term gains that they were getting where they were like just trying to make a nice chart for Demo Day. It's over. And so when you meet them in the reality zone that they hit three or four months later, it's such a different conversation. And so you can invest on way better terms. You have way more real data to use because you're not just in the YC hype engine where you have one minute to hear about the business.

• 32:22Sam Parr?

  This is this is my point. And so this whole like YC book a team thing, they could, it could be cool because those people are generally very smart and a lot of their designs great. But like if they're like soft and Madonna's then.

• 32:34Shaan Puri?

  Well, I think what will happen is these are the YC teams that have gone through it and failed. And you know, by then they are are at a very different like, I don't think they're soft. I think they are, you know, hardened by the opportunity by by by the experience and I would bet that they are some of the best talent you can pick up at that point in time. So.

• 32:54Sam Parr?

  I like this. I think this is cool. If I were these guys, I would not raise any money and this would I would just make just fuck loads of cash off this.

• 33:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. I I agree. You're just farming the YC talent pipeline. Okay.

• 33:07Sam Parr?

  Start an agency just for YC companies. Be like, guys, we'll build this shit for you.

• 33:10Shaan Puri?

  Right, exactly.

• 33:11Sam Parr?

  Love this.

• 33:12Shaan Puri?

  Um, okay. So another cool thing. Okay. So this one's super quick. I just, I don't even know why I wrote this down. So there's this company called Remote, Remote.com.

• 33:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they just raised a lot of money.

• 33:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's raised 11 million bucks, I think. And they they're doing something really smart, which is if you've ever tried to expand internationally, one of the biggest pain points is starting your own entity in the region. So like, we have this problem at Twitch all the time. It's like, hey, we're interested in this country. It takes like a year to spin up a legal entity in the country. Now you have to maintain that. There's a whole bunch of costs, a whole bunch of red tape. And you need it to be able to do, like some countries, you need it to operate. Some countries, you need it to be able to do ad sales, for example, in that region. So there's all these reasons why you need a local entity, but having a local entity is really hard. And so to employ people and whatnot. So what remote's doing is they're doing the hard work of opening up legal entities everywhere.

• 34:01Shaan Puri?

  And then they are figuring out ways for you to use that entity to hire your remote staff as employees on the ground in that country.

• 34:09Sam Parr?

  Okay, let's riff on that because I have a few cool insights. The first, well, this is everyone probably has this. You know, it's still hard to hire state over like over state line, like state to state, it's hard. And I've got, I've had to pay hundreds of dollars in penalties because I didn't, I wasn't, I have people now who handle this, but when I first started, I handled it. You have to like, keep track of like, all your licenses for Texas and like, I had one remote employee in Washington, I had to like, register there and shit and I just didn't do it and I didn't do it the right way. I had to pay hundreds of dollars in fees for penalties. It's quite hard to do that state to state. Um, have you done that? Have you hired?

• 34:44Shaan Puri?

  I've hired across states and I'm like most people where you don't even realize there's other shit you need to think about and.

• 34:50Sam Parr?

  Right, I didn't know until I got like a little from the, yeah, I just got like, and then I'm like, where do I organize all this? So yeah, that's interesting. Another thing that's kind of cool is, I wonder if, so there's a whole bunch of companies or industries where you have to have a license to, uh, practice, but if you only have one person who works at your company who's licensed, then you're okay. So for example, if you sell health insurance, if you sell like, so if you sell any type of benefits, you have to be, I believe you have to be a broker. If you want to sell certain types of real estate, you have to have a broker's license. And oftentimes getting those licenses in every state can be challenging. So for example, HIMSS, uh, did I actually tell you about this? HIMSS, when they want to sell their Viagra state to state, they have to have a registered,

• 35:32Sam Parr?

  you can't like, yeah, you can't like, uh, ship medicine across state lines, but that, uh, this is a totally different topic, but that law actually has been suspended currently. So doctors can prescribe, yeah. That, and so that, that's an interesting opportunity. That loophole might be closed, but that just happened a few weeks ago. But, uh, I guess what I mean is if you're saying that they like are a registered agent in a certain state to practice a certain type of business, that's kind of interesting. You could do that for loads of different things.

• 35:58Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so I think what these guys are doing is cool. The reason I initially liked it was because the founder's name is Job. And I was like, what? Your name is Job and this is what you do? He's like, yeah. I was like, whoa, this is great. This is like, you know, a small little glint in my eyes when the fastest man on earth is named Usain Bolt. And I'm like, oh, wow, that's, that's how the world is. It's amazing. The world is amazing.

• 36:20Sam Parr?

  Are you sure it's not Job?

• 36:22Shaan Puri?

  It's spelled J O B. So it's job to me. Um, and I was like, dude, your name is Job and you're about hiring people remotely? Like, this is fantastic.

• 36:28Sam Parr?

  Dude, it's probably Job.

• 36:30Shaan Puri?

  Well, he's from, I think he's Dutch. I think he's from the Netherlands. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. Sorry. I talked to him before. I thought about investing in this company. And I liked everything. I talked to the guy, liked it, liked the premise. He had a, a win under his belt from GitLab before this. He was like, super early there, number four or something. And, uh, and then I didn't invest because I got busy.

• 36:49Sam Parr?

  You should have. You missed out. I'm looking at him now. He kinda looks like the terrorist from Air Force One, like the, like the, he looks like the Russian terrorist who wears like tracksuits.

• 37:01Shaan Puri?

  Alright, and move it on.

• 37:02Sam Parr?

  Or from, or no, from, uh, uh, uh, Die Hard with a Vengeance. He looks like one of those guys.

• 37:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, dude, he's not soft. This guy's hard, dude. He's hard as a Russian terrorist.

• 37:13Sam Parr?

  Dude, Google his name and look at his headshot. He looks, he looks like a terrorist in Call of Duty.

• 37:20Shaan Puri?

  I can't even Google. I just Googled job remote. I got a bunch of job boards, uh, to work remotely.

• 37:25Sam Parr?

  Job Vander Voort.

• 37:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's right. Uh, alright, let me take it. I've talked to this guy on video chat. Uh, he looks good. He's a handsome guy. What are you talking about?

• 37:34Sam Parr?

  I'm not, I didn't say he's ugly. I just looked like he'll, like he'll fucking kill you.

• 37:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he looks like he'll fuck you up.

• 37:40Shaan Puri?

  Which I think you need to do international business like this. So, okay.

• 37:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah, no, I'm not criticizing. It's a compliment, if you ask me. He just doesn't, he just looks like he's selling nuclear arms, not like, you know, recruiting services.

• 37:52Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I got an idea for you. Uh, this is a boring idea, so you're probably not gonna like it, or maybe you'll like it. I don't know. Um, so, right now, uh, one thing I'm learning, this is part of my export, uh, my import list from a big company, which is basically, uh, at a big company, one challenge is that you, like, headcount is like oil. And so you like, kind of, you're, oh, every division wants more headcount. Um, the company raises money so that they can, or, or, or, you know, decides every year how much headcount they have. It's like a magic number. And, um, And so, you know, but then the problem is that, you know, that's like, it tells you, hey, you're gonna hire twenty five new heads this year. That's your department. That's what you got. But the problem is, some people leave, right? So you have attrition.

• 38:33Shaan Puri?

  But the problem is, nobody knows how much attrition there's gonna be. And so, I'm learning right now how big of a problem this is, which is there's like HR people who are trying to model in Excel and trying to go back through this stuff and try to figure out, okay, year over year, what's our percent attrition? How many, how many people leave the job? Fifteen percent a year. How many are gonna leave this quarter? And you need this to do financial planning, so you know how much you're gonna spend. You also need it to figure out how much to hire, because you don't just think about, okay, if we're gonna do this amount of work, we need to hire this many more people. You have to take into account that you're gonna also lose people. And nobody knows how, how much you're gonna lose. So I think there's something around attrition for big companies, which is either A, a much better modeling system, an automatic projection system, forecast system for attrition. It takes your historical data.

• 39:17Shaan Puri?

  It can take the job, other companies' jobs, uh, other company attrition and tell you, hey, a lot of people are switching jobs right now. Or like, for COVID, we predict that a lot of people are not gonna switch jobs right now due to the uncertainty of the, of the economy and like.

• 39:30Sam Parr?

  How, isn't, isn't that, aren't these, isn't this a thing? Isn't this what PeopleSoft did?

• 39:36Shaan Puri?

  Uh, maybe, I don't know. I don't use PeopleSoft, but I know that like, we use Workday and other things like that, and this doesn't come baked in for that, or at least we don't use it.

• 39:43Sam Parr?

  Interesting. So, like, if I wanted to get rich and I liked software, I absolutely would do something in that field.

• 39:50Shaan Puri?

  There's another version of this, which is just, if you can help companies figure out who's gonna leave. So like, one, um, thing that happens when I open up my computer sometimes, uh, is Amazon has this internal what they call a pulse survey. It's a quick, one question that pops up, and you just answer it. And it's like very lightweight, and it helps them collect data about like, you know, how employees are feeling or whatever, right? And so, I think it'd be interesting if you could find a way to make it where employees would feel comfortable saying. If they're thinking about searching, if they are job searching and they they know it's totally anonymized and protected, but it helps the company figure out. Oh shit, you have this many, this percentage of your engineers that are thinking about leaving the company. So.

• 40:30Shaan Puri?

  Map that to potential attrition. Um, so, so I think there's something, there's something to solving this attrition problem for companies. Um, I think there's a business there. I don't know too much about it because.

• 40:40Sam Parr?

  I just, I just Google it. I just Google it and there's a few headlines. IBM's AI-backed employee retention software can predict within ninety-five percent accuracy. Which workers want to leave their job or are are going to leave their job. This is cool. This is a great idea. Um, algorithm um can tell you uh when they want to hear uh what's going well with employees, what isn't, and they will tell you uh within ninety-five percent certainty if they're gonna leave.

• 41:08Sam Parr?

  Hmm, that's pretty cool.

• 41:10Shaan Puri?

  Something to this. Um, okay. And then there's one other thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is. Um, do you know who this guy Yi Shang Wong is? Have you heard this name before?

• 41:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he was the CEO of Reddit.

• 41:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he's CEO of Reddit. Uh, in two thousand and five, he was at Facebook, so he's very early at Facebook. Um, seems like a super smart guy, to be honest. And uh, I've been reading his like blog for a while. I think this guy's smart, but I didn't know what he was doing. And I just heard he's up to like a new company. And so I was like, all right, anytime there's somebody who I think is really, really interesting and they're doing something, I want to know what it is. And it's pretty ambitious and I wanted to talk about it. So. He's literally trying to solve global warming by planting a bunch of trees. And um, okay, so what does that mean? You're you're really gonna solve climate change? And so he has this blog post called. A massive refore, a massive global reforestation project is how we fix climate change. And he walks through just sort of his logic one by one. And this reminds me of like.

• 42:02Sam Parr?

  I love this shit.

• 42:03Shaan Puri?

  I remember reading, I remember reading Elon Musk's secret master plan that he published back before Tesla was famous. And I remember reading that and being like, wow, this is like really audacious. Who's this Elon Musk guy? Okay, he did this PayPal zip zip to, you know. He did this other company. I should pay attention to this because this guy, this sounds pretty audacious and uh. You know, I can't disagree with the logic here. And that's how I felt when I was reading this. Now, I think this is. Out of my depth scientifically, so I don't know if this is legit, but he's a legit guy. And so I respect that he's looking into this. So.

• 42:34Sam Parr?

  Is this a business?

• 42:36Shaan Puri?

  It's a business. So.

• 42:37Sam Parr?

  How's it make money?

• 42:38Shaan Puri?

  Um, I don't know yet, but he, cause he hasn't released too many details. In fact, he hasn't like announced that he was really doing this. He just posted one blog post about theoretically, how would you do it? So he just walks through, look, we produce, you know, forty five gigatons of carbon dioxide every year. And the best way to get rid of carbon dioxide is forests. To get rid of this amount of, we know how much one for, how much one acre. Uh, absorbs. So that means we need three billion acres of forest. Where are we going to get that? Well, turns out we know how to turn deserts into forests. And we've been doing this in, in China and Israel and other places. And so he's like, all right, there's four point seven billion acres of desert available. We need three billion to solve the climate change problem, to absorb all the CO2 we're emitting.

• 43:21Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, okay, so what's the problem there? Well, to turn a desert into a forest, you need irrigation. To do that, you need solar energy. To do that, you need this. And so he's literally walking through and now he bought a little. I think he bought a plot of land in Hawaii where he's doing a proof of concept for this.

• 43:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm reading about it in August seventeenth, two thousand nineteen, he launched this, or he, uh, announced this. So if you Google Yishan Wong, so Y I S H A N Wong, W O N G. Trees and then just the word trees, you'll see two posts on Medium. Dude, this is fascinating as shit. This is awesome. I don't know.

• 43:55Shaan Puri?

  Isn't this badass?

• 43:56Sam Parr?

  And like. I don't know how it makes money, but it's cool.

• 43:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I mean, if you say it's the world fantasy, I don't know if it makes money or not, but, um, you know, he, he talks about like, okay, the cost of this solar project, you know, obviously this is a lot. It's like, I don't know. X, it's like a single digit trillion. He's like, but the global GDP is this much that, you know, could we dedicate three percent of the global GDP to solving climate change? I think we're going to need to. And, um.

• 44:19Sam Parr?

  Amazing.

• 44:20Shaan Puri?

  So I think it's amazing. And I love that, like, you know, he didn't come out on TechCrunch, you know, you don't read about this on TechCrunch. The reason I found this was because. A local Hawaiian newspaper was talking about, hey, this guy's trying to plant this forest over here on this little area. And I was like, that's legit that he's like actually doing the work. So like respect for actually going and doing the work and working on one of the biggest, hardest problems to solve. So that's why I like this guy.

• 44:44Sam Parr?

  How, how rich do you think this guy is? And do you think he's able to do this because he's rich? Or is he, like, what do you think is going on here?

• 44:51Shaan Puri?

  I would guess, you know, if you're at Facebook two thousand and five.

• 44:54Sam Parr?

  I mean, it could be worth a hundred million dollars.

• 44:55Shaan Puri?

  Really early. Yeah, he could be easily be worth a hundred million dollars. I don't know what his role was there exactly.

• 45:00Sam Parr?

  He worked as a senior engineer at PayPal from two thousand and one to two thousand and five.

• 45:04Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 45:04Sam Parr?

  He joined Facebook as a.

• 45:06Shaan Puri?

  Single digit millions.

• 45:07Sam Parr?

  He joined Facebook as a senior director of enge- as a director of engineering in two thousand and five. So.

• 45:14Shaan Puri?

  That's at least tens of millions, I think, in the IPO.

• 45:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, if you said he has a hundred million dollars in the bank, I would not be surprised.

• 45:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Um, so anyways, I think this is, this is badass and, uh, I don't know, pretty inspiring. It's called.

• 45:27Sam Parr?

  I think it is inspiring and my takeaway from this is, um, yeah, the climate change, awesome. I'm not like crazy passionate about it, but I support it to- totally. I think it's neat. My big takeaway though is like the type of balls you have to have in order to have these ambitions and then to follow through with it. I find that to be the most inspiring.

• 45:46Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. Um, there's also this meme I saw, which was, and you know, great. I'm going to describe a meme on a podcast. It's hard to say, but like it's basically two scientists and they're looking at the coronavirus, two, two little humps, like one that's a, you know, we've all seen this diagram now of like one, uh, curve and then the flattened curve. And so they're looking at it and it's like the hi- height of their shins and they're like, they're looking at that. And then behind them is the climate change hump, which is like 10 times their height. And it's like, yeah, I hope we get through this. And it's like, because there's a much bigger problem coming. And I think, you know, I could have never imagined there's a world where, oh, all businesses shut down. Everybody has to stay in their home. Like, I thought that's a nuclear bomb. Like, I thought this is the only way that this is the case is like, there's a nuclear bomb or like, I don't know, some crazy terror shit.

• 46:31Shaan Puri?

  And, you know, coronavirus did this to us in like a month. Um, you know, when, when we hit the tipping point for climate change, you know, who knows what the world is going to look like and what's going to happen. Um, it's pretty, pretty scary.

• 46:44Sam Parr?

  Uh, do you think that you're going to go work from the office again?

• 46:49Shaan Puri?

  No, I, I actually told my company, I was like, I don't think I'll ever go commute to the office again.

• 46:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, our lease in the, our, our lease in San Francisco is like 14K a month and I think it ends in May and, uh, I don't know. I mean, e- everyone in their heads like, yeah, it's, it's like, there should be like a service where you can like rent it and like only go some of the time. And I'm like, uh, you mean WeWork? Like, yeah, that's a thing and it's great. I don't know why like everyone hated on it a few months ago. So I think we're, I imagine us doing a WeWork.

• 47:24Shaan Puri?

  Dude, that's interesting because at the beginning of this, you were like, dude, I hate remote. I hate this. I don't believe in this.

• 47:29Sam Parr?

  Yep. And my opinion changes. A humble and smart man can admit when he's changed and is wrong. So I am humble and smart.

• 47:42Shaan Puri?

  All right, we gotta end on that. That's great. You got anything else you want to shout out?

• 47:47Sam Parr?

  Hmm, no, maybe we will have things to shout out soon. We're gonna be, we're gonna, I want to work on some projects like

• 47:57Sam Parr?

  some private Q and As.

• 47:58Shaan Puri?

  Okay, nice.

• 48:00Sam Parr?

  But we'll shoot, we'll shoot those out, shout those out later.

• 48:04Shaan Puri?

  All right, sounds good. So yeah, thanks for listening.