#140 - How Much Do VCs Make?, A Booming Startup Replacing Fridges, and A Board Game Making $5m A Month

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) discuss: - 06:05 A booming grocery delivery startup, Fridge No More - 12:00 The "Ukranian Tik-Tok", Coub - 13:01 The $4b startup you haven't heard of: GoPuff - 21:09 A board game doing $5m a month: Hunt A Killer - 23:20 The booming audience for “true crime” content - 25:48 Shaan went on Wheel of Fortune? - 30:08 Converting old shows into podcasts - 30:30 Multi-platform shows - 31:11 Shaan’s most interesting angel investments - 32:40 “The JIO effect” - 44:15 How much angels and VCs make Have you joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:21Shaan Puri?

  We're live. Sam. It's almost Christmas. Are you a big gifter?

• 0:25Sam Parr?

  Hmm, I do everything last minute as expected. And I overspend.

• 0:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 0:33Sam Parr?

  On my close family. So, um, kinda.

• 0:39Sam Parr?

  Are you?

• 0:40Shaan Puri?

  Um, I'm a gifter. I'm also a last minute, in fact, usually so last minute that they get a photo of something that's

• 0:47Sam Parr?

  Same.

• 0:48Shaan Puri?

  And, uh, I'm famous in my family for like, oh, remember that time I got a photo from Sean of a stroller, but the stroller never came? Or like, I got this photo of a, of a bag that I never got. I'm the famous, kinda like photo only gifter.

• 1:01Sam Parr?

  It's just like, it's not, well, you know, your love language?

• 1:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:06Sam Parr?

  You know what I'm talking about?

• 1:07Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 1:07Sam Parr?

  It's like touch, service.

• 1:10Shaan Puri?

  Words of affirmation.

• 1:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Yeah, gifting. And gifting is not mine. So I just like, forget that a lot of people really care about it. I'm like, uh, when I actually get gifts, it's like, you know, I'm, uh, doing Christmas in Austin. My mother sent me a book and it was a lovely book and I like it. And then someone else, but someone else sent me something else. I'm like, uh, more packages. I don't wanna get rid of all this cardboard. It's like stressful more than it is good.

• 1:34Shaan Puri?

  That's good. And one of my, my goals this year was to become a good person like Ramon, who's our, our good friend, who is the best guy now, I would say.

• 1:42Sam Parr?

  He's like the best gift giver too. That's his thing.

• 1:44Shaan Puri?

  And he's the best gift giver and super thoughtful. So I was like, I'm gonna out gift Ramon this year. And so I, uh, have created a system where I'm giving gifts like at scale. I'm gifting like to 30, 40 people who I think are amazing and I care about, even if we don't like talk all the time or whatever. I've made a list of the 30 or 40 people who I, I think are awesome and I wanna invest in. Like I want to give them gifts. I've just been too busy slash lazy. Not thoughtful to do it. And then you gave me the great idea for the perfect gift for for this month. So I sent out a high quality pair of Christmas socks from Stance to everybody on that list. And Stance was like, oh, this is great. Cool. We'll take care, you know, just upload a CSV of their their addresses and we'll we'll send it all out.

• 2:29Shaan Puri?

  And we'll get you a bunch of credits and all this stuff. And I was like, this is amazing. This is

• 2:33Sam Parr?

  Wait, you, that's awesome. You emailed them?

• 2:36Shaan Puri?

  So Ben actually took care of this whole thing for me. So I was like, I told Ben, here's what I'm trying to do. He's like, I got you. Just get the addresses for me. I put all the addresses in a spreadsheet. He's like, all right, I talked to Stance and they said they're gonna do this. And I was like, Ben, I love you. I love Stance. I love that this is actually happening now. And so what I'm gonna try to do is every month, I'm gonna try to send them a little something. Maybe it's just socks that I

• 2:56Sam Parr?

  God, that's great.

• 2:57Shaan Puri?

  Or a little, just something small that I think is cool. And Ramon had this thing he said once, which was like, from now on, I buy two. I buy anything I like. I buy two. I buy one for me, I buy one for you. And I was like, he wouldn't even say this to me, but I heard it. And I was like, wow, that is like the ultimate Ramon friend philosophy, because he means it. He's not like a bullshitter and he's not schmoozing anybody. He's just does it because he

• 3:20Sam Parr?

  He's bought me. So Ramon is our mutual friend. He was the first or top five or one of the first episodes Sean did.

• 3:28Shaan Puri?

  He sold the Yeah, number two, I think.

• 3:29Sam Parr?

  Soap hub, Soap Barber website for 10 million bucks almost. He's given me a $500 helicopter ride. Like me and Sarah went on a helicopter ride. He's given me an Apple Watch. He's given me a sauna for my wedding.

• 3:43Shaan Puri?

  He's amazing.

• 3:44Sam Parr?

  Um, what else did he give me?

• 3:46Shaan Puri?

  I was in Las Vegas and I just told him, hey, I'm in Las Vegas. And he goes, oh, that's great. Have a good time, blah, blah, blah. The next day, he's like, hey, at 6:00 PM today, you need to go to T-Mobile Arena, you and your friends. And he cooked us up with like a VIP pass to the UFC event. Like, we got to meet some UFC, he arranged for UFC fighters to

• 4:04Sam Parr?

  Like Forrest Griffin came and like met you.

• 4:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he came to our seat and was like, hey, are you Sean? And I was like, oh, my God, Ramon, he wrote gifts you to the point where you feel uncomfortable. You're like, I'll never live up to this.

• 4:14Sam Parr?

  He does that to me all the time. And to the point where I actually had to tell him, I go, dude, you're making me feel Making me feel bad. Like, please, like, if you're gonna give me something, keep it under 50 bucks. Like, you go too hard. He's so generous.

• 4:27Shaan Puri?

  It's like M and Ms. Like, there's a, there's a point where too much of good equals bad at some point. And so he is that, that much of a giver that you'll feel guilty and bad about yourself by the end of being his friend.

• 4:38Sam Parr?

  He's coming over to my house for Christmas tomorrow.

• 4:41Shaan Puri?

  Dude, you better have a gift ready. I bet you he's coming with the heat.

• 4:43Sam Parr?

  No, we do. So this is the second Christmas we spent together. We hooked him up last year and we're gonna get off some good stuff this year. He doesn't listen to this, so I can tell you. We got him some clothes because Ramon is from, he's got this Eastern European vibe. And so he sometimes, he hasn't fully acclimate, and he's a single dad. So he hasn't like fully acclimated to like, American, like, hip fashion, even though he like wants to go out and date. And so sometimes he'll wear like two religion jeans. And so last year, we bought him Luda Lemon because he had never, he didn't know what Luda Lemon was. I was like, Ramon, this is like what, like yuppie fancy people wear. Like, instead of, like, affliction hoodies. So we got him that. And then this year, we're getting him a fancy cashmere sweater so he could wear on dates. So we're trying to step up his fashion a little bit.

• 5:27Shaan Puri?

  I like it. He's gonna wear the cashmere sweater with affliction hoodie on top.

• 5:32Sam Parr?

  That's what he does. He like wears like, he has like an affliction hoodie. He wears like, just stuff that like was cool like 10 years ago.

• 5:38Shaan Puri?

  And we should say, so the next episode we're gonna do is our Big Bang end of year, end of 2020 finale. It's gonna be fun. We're gonna prep for it. It's got a bunch of kind of like year end type of things. So I think that one's gonna be good. For today, we have a bunch of little things. Where do you want to start? I have a cool idea I want to tell you about. That's this company I saw that is in Brooklyn. So it's a company called Fridge No More. Have you ever heard of this company?

• 6:04Sam Parr?

  No, but I'm gonna Google it.

• 6:05Shaan Puri?

  Just go to fridgenomore.com.

• 6:07Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 6:08Shaan Puri?

  And it's called Fridge No More because their idea is like, if you use our service, you don't even need to have a fridge. So what they do is they take grocery delivery, that's like Instacart or whatever, that are, you know, have gotten super popular during COVID. And they actually just shrink it down into the most sort of simple delivery service that you can get. It's 15 minute delivery. A corner store. It's like a cloud corner store. And so they have a one mile radius that they operate these out of. They have these like electric bike messengers.

• 6:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm looking at it.

• 6:39Shaan Puri?

  Soon as you place the order, they're gone and 15 minutes, you have your thing and you could just order like a pint of Ben and Jerry's and that's it. You can order like, you know, six bottles of water. You can order fruits and vegetables. You can order whatever the hell you want. It's a really cool concept and the guys who started it. So I get on this call because I'm thinking about investing, right? I love the idea. It's like Postmates, but even simpler and more lightweight because you get it even faster. And the, the trick is they're not going to. So unlike Postmates, unlike DoorDash, unlike Instacart. It's not like a shopper goes to a normal shop and buys it at the retail price and then kind of upsells it to you and, and, and they charge a delivery fee and it gets really expensive. Fridge No More themselves is the grocery store. So they go buy wholesale snacks and all the shit.

• 7:23Shaan Puri?

  They create a small, tiny cloud in a corner store. And then they sell it to you at the normal retail price. That's how they make their markup is just because they buy wholesale, they sell retail. So unlike Instacart, Instacart goes to a normal grocery store. They buy retail and sell at double retail, right? So that's the kind of business model here is to be an actual grocery store.

• 7:41Sam Parr?

  And I don't know the answer to this, but have you asked yourself why Instacart doesn't do that?

• 7:45Shaan Puri?

  Uh, so it's a different model. This requires like CapEx. So basically they have to open, they have to open up locations, right? So they have to like, get a space, buy the inventory, hold the inventory and then like do the delivery themselves. Whereas Instacart was like, cool, we'll just get a network of delivery people and they'll just go to the existing grocery stores. It'll be fine. It does work. Instacart clearly works, right? It's a multi-billion dollar company, but this is a little bit different because if you either are more price sensitive or time sensitive, you want it faster. This is the way to go because Instacart and stuff, they deliver everywhere. They deliver to the suburbs, all this stuff. So they'll take like, At the minimum, two hours to deliver your stuff. These guys are 15 minutes.

• 8:25Sam Parr?

  I'm looking up the founders. They seem very accomplished. They've got some hardcore Russian names, it looks like.

• 8:30Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So that's what I was gonna tell you. I get on this call and I'm a little bit skeptical because I'm like, Ben, I don't know. I feel like Instacart already won. There's Farmstead, which is a great company that my friend started that is this model, but a little bit different. And I said, I don't know. I feel like these guys are five years late to this party. But I get on the call. First thing I see is these two hardcore Russian dudes. I'm like, all right. Already I sit up straight in my chair because I've learned one thing in business is that the Russians, when they get into business, they win. These guys are incredible class of entrepreneurs.

• 9:00Sam Parr?

  It's like Anton and what's the other guy's name?

• 9:04Shaan Puri?

  Pavel.

• 9:05Sam Parr?

  Anton and Pavel. Yeah, I mean, they sound like, like their last names. They're like 007 GoldenEye villains.

• 9:11Shaan Puri?

  Right. If you ever are competing, you know, you're doing a startup and people are like, oh, don't worry about competition. Unless your competition is named Anton and Pavel, then you better fucking watch your back.

• 9:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah, or like Suri from Israel.

• 9:21Shaan Puri?

  Right, exactly. You just don't want to mess with like Israelis or Russians.

• 9:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they've all served like three years in the military and they're here to kick ass and yeah.

• 9:30Shaan Puri?

  So I start talking to these guys and I'm like, okay. Tell me about your background first because I'm intrigued by the Russian thing first. So the first guy's like, you know, I'm Pavel. I spent the last 10 years actually at finance, working for a Russian billionaire. And I was like, which one? His name's Mikhail Brokhorov. And I don't know if you've heard of this guy, but he was the owner of the Brooklyn Nets.

• 9:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, the tall guy.

• 9:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 9:51Sam Parr?

  Uh, mining. He did mining. Now, those guys are all rich because when the Soviet Union collapsed, they gave, they like allocated like parts of the government.

• 10:01Shaan Puri?

  Billionaires, basically.

• 10:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, to like young people and they're like, hey, man, here's your cut. You gotta give it to us. And he goes, yes, yes, sir, I'll do it. And then now they all made billions.

• 10:10Shaan Puri?

  And so I'm talking to him and he's like, he's like, yeah, that was a funny time. Like, because he doesn't own the Nets now, but he owned it then. He's like, you know, what a business to own. Like you look at the fixed cost, the salary commitment was like a hundred million dollars a year for the players. He's like, that's just your salary commitment. And he's like, that was a crazy business. So he's telling me about that business. And the other guy, I'm like, what about you? What's your story? And I thought, okay, maybe this guy has a lame background. And he goes, oh, you know, I started this company called Coob. And I was like, Coob, that sounds, Coob, holy shit. Do you remember this company called Coob, C O U B? I don't know if you ever heard of this.

• 10:41Sam Parr?

  No.

• 10:41Shaan Puri?

  This was basically TikTok before TikTok. And it's still the TikTok of Russia. So I remember once upon a time, I used to do these things where every Friday, once a month, I would have a random day. I would invite random people, either speakers or just guests to come over to the office. And I just want to expose my worldview to new things. One of those random days, I invited a group of students who was entrepreneurs traveling around from the Ukraine, I think. And they came and they talked and they're like, oh, tell us about Silicon Valley. If you remember, I always felt weird because I was like, I really haven't done shit. I don't really want to tell you anything. But my office was so legit back then, like our office like looked like I was a billionaire myself. And so it was always this weird thing where they would come and they would come and ask me to speak and I would be like, I don't really know anything.

• 11:24Shaan Puri?

  I can tell you what we're doing, but like, and I used to ask them, tell me what you know. What do you know that I don't know? And I said, what's the hottest shit in Ukraine? I asked it kind of as a joke. And they go, oh, Coob. And everyone's like, Coob, Coob, Coob. And I was like, what the fuck is Coob? And I go to the website and it's basically TikTok. It's these short videos with audio that's like mashed together that doesn't fit the video. And they were funny as hell. And I was like, oh my God, this is great. I was like, is this like a startup? They're like, yeah, it's new, but it has like 10 million users already.

• 11:51Sam Parr?

  Oh, wow.

• 11:52Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, what? And they're like, yeah, 10 million, I was like, registered users? Like no daily users. And I was like, whoa. So they ended up getting recruited into Y Combinator. They just didn't make it into America. Like they didn't make the crossover, the content didn't have the same humor that like would have fit America. And then like, you know, five, seven years later, TikTok comes out, does the same concept, but better and wins, you know, like in America. So, so that was Coob. So this guy's like, I invented Coob. And I was like, holy shit, you're amazing. You guys are both amazing. Tell me more about this concept. So they're telling me about this concept and they're basically like, look, we're going to open up a hundred of these in New York. And each one's just gonna deliver in a one mile radius. This only works in dense areas like cities or college campuses,

• 12:34Shaan Puri?

  which is where another concept that's like this called GoPuff is like a massive winner. GoPuff is a company that was started by guys outside of Silicon Valley. They basically did this for college campuses where it's like, it's kind of like the vibe is like, you know, like a stoner just pushes a button and wants his Cheetos delivered. That's what they did. They basically just created like-

• 12:53Sam Parr?

  They've already raised 380, 380 million out of $4 billion valuation. So it's a huge thing and I think they're cash flow positive.

• 13:00Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. Our friend Siava told me about this because he had a college-based startup years ago. He goes, you've got to check out this thing called GoPuff. At that time, I think they were raising it like a, I don't know what they're raising up. I think he said, he told me, I was like, I was like, oh, it's a cool concept. I just thought it was like an idea. He's like, yeah, they're going to do like 100 million in revenue this year. I was like, what? And I had never heard anybody in Silicon Valley talking about this thing. And still I feel like nobody in Silicon Valley really talks about GoPuff.

• 13:24Sam Parr?

  I think this was startup. These guys sound Russian too. Are they?

• 13:28Shaan Puri?

  They are Russian.

• 13:29Sam Parr?

  Are they Russian?

• 13:30Shaan Puri?

  I believe so. Yeah. Eastern European or Russian and uh-

• 13:33Sam Parr?

  They must be Penn folks.

• 13:35Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. And so they, they do it on college campuses. They're on like 500 campuses or something. They're doing hundreds of millions a year. They were profitable, then SoftBank backed up the truck and invested like 200, 300 million into the company. So I don't know if they're still profitable because usually when that happens, it's like, here's the truckload of money, go grow like crazy, burn this money to get all the market share.

• 13:54Sam Parr?

  Dude, this is so funny. I'm looking up this GoPuff thing. They're Israeli.

• 13:58Shaan Puri?

  We called it.

• 13:58Sam Parr?

  We've called it entirely and this type of company is like heavy on logistics and you could pull it off, but it's a really hard business. You probably have to be incredibly aggressive and very precise. This is a very uh, like I think these, if they're from, if they're Israel, Israeli, they definitely have a military background. This is totally like what you need for this type of company.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  It's funny because one co-founder has on his LinkedIn Hebrew as a language and the other has Russian.

• 14:25Sam Parr?

  That's so funny. I love when we get this stuff right.

• 14:29Shaan Puri?

  I love when our things that are like, you know, you say it'll probably get you fired if you if you say it like, you know, in a normal context and sounds like a total like bro assumption, but there are these patterns you notice that like, you know, you can't help but notice the more companies you see like this. And so, you know, I'm sorry.

• 14:47Sam Parr?

  Well, have you ever?

• 14:48Shaan Puri?

  My bias.

• 14:49Sam Parr?

  I'm in the advertising world and a handful of my buddies who run these huge companies, like, how many people you think live in Israel with 10 million or 20 million?

• 14:57Shaan Puri?

  Dude, it's tiny. It's like 6 million people or something tiny. It's something small. I'll bring it. Check it out.

• 15:02Sam Parr?

  It's nothing. And yet, the amount of successful people in ad tech who are Israeli, it's astronomical. It's like Samoans who play football.

• 15:10Shaan Puri?

  Yes, it's like you were saying, it's basically like, if you see a Samoan, they're strong. If you see a Mormon, like, it's like the Mormon religion, small number of people growing like crazy. Israelis, like tiny population, 8.8 million people, they probably own like, like, half the world's net worth. It's crazy. They're so successful with business.

• 15:24Sam Parr?

  Yes, the and particularly in ad tech. So like Tabula, Outbrain, everything like that. I've got a friend, Nadav, who has a, he changed the name of his company. I forget what it's called now, actually. But huge ad tech. It says ad tech. And then my friend, Joe Spicer, who have you met Joe Spicer?

• 15:38Shaan Puri?

  Yes, he's an investor in my fund.

• 15:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he, oh, yeah, he told me he did that. He's a great friend of mine. He, all of his friends are Israeli, all in ad tech. It's crazy.

• 15:46Shaan Puri?

  I think this is a cool concept. I'm curious to see if it can work. So I'll tell you why I think it can work. I'll tell you why I think it can't. So why I think it can work is, it's pretty clear at this point that like, the phone is a magic wand, and you just say the magic word, and then shit magically appears at your house, right? Like e-commerce, you know, buy a, buy an item, you just buy it on your phone, push a button, it arrives. Food delivery, same thing, push a button, food derives from DoorDash or whoever. Grocery delivery, same thing. I think this is a subset of grocery delivery. For people who care about speed and convenience, it's the equivalent of the convenience store instead of the grocery store, but it's in the cloud. So I do think inevitably, this is going to exist. And I have some numbers behind it, if you're curious about anything.

• 16:28Shaan Puri?

  So like, just for example, they need 100. So basically, they're going to do 200 stores just for two cities. So that's how many locations they need. That's a lot of like, locations you got to pop up and you got to be very efficient.

• 16:39Sam Parr?

  What's a rent on a store, three grand a month?

• 16:41Shaan Puri?

  Very low. Yeah, it's gonna be like three grand a month. And the footprint's also very small. So it's not like a huge warehouse they need, because they're just storing small, like, kind of packaged goods and things like that.

• 16:50Sam Parr?

  How many, 100 or 200?

• 16:51Shaan Puri?

  They're gonna do 100 per city.

• 16:53Sam Parr?

  So you're talking close to half a maybe a half a million a month in rent in one city. I mean, I guess that's not like the end of the world.

• 16:59Shaan Puri?

  What's it called? So, so basically they're doing like one store per zip code. They guarantee the 15 minute delivery. It's all through bike messengers. The average order is like 35 bucks. So it's not like a grocery delivery where you're like $200 for groceries or whatever. It's $35. So it's small things, but they buy really frequently. So what they're seeing, they were showing me some of the data is like, somebody buys once on the first day. They have a super high repeat rate the second day, like kind of shockingly high, almost like a social network app, which is not normally like for e-commerce or, you know, buying something you usually don't buy the second day. And then they're, they have this set of users where once you buy a certain number of times, it's like, they basically buy like three or four times a week. And they're just like, they just like to click the button and get their stuff.

• 17:41Sam Parr?

  Are they raising an eight figure valuation or a typical seed round of like three or five million?

• 17:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, more like a seed round.

• 17:47Sam Parr?

  Wow. If they're listening, I want to join. That sounds cool.

• 17:50Shaan Puri?

  Okay, cool. I'll email in to you. Yeah, I think these guys are cool. Okay. So here's why I think it might fail. And I told them this, you know, customer acquisition is really hard in general. It gets way harder for things that have a specific geographic like restriction. Because to make the one store work, they need like 2,000 households in that zip code, right? So the zip code will have 20,000. They need like 2,000 of those households to be using them for them to be like profitable on that location.

• 18:16Sam Parr?

  Let's put our optimistic hat on, which is it's probably not that hard in a city like New York. I mean, you probably could just pay hourly workers to hand out.

• 18:24Shaan Puri?

  So I was like, what are you doing now? They're like, I don't know. We try a bunch of shit. We try some ads. We do direct mail. Direct mail seems to work really well, but like you can't do it that often, you know, can't keep sending letters.

• 18:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I wouldn't do any online ads. I would just have young men and women out there handing out shit.

• 18:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I was like, yeah, hand it out at the church, like whatever. He's like, yeah, we're basically doing all that shit right now. We don't really know like what's the scalable thing, but right now we've got two locations in New York. We're just going to keep filling them up and we'll figure it out, which I like that answer. But like GoPuff, for example, I think they have one advantage, which is on campus shit spreads like, like literally like herpes. You know, like there's, if you get something on campus, it's going to spread throughout that dorm. Then it's going to spread to the next dorm. Whereas in New York, people are in apartment. Complexes.

• 19:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but can they do that with apartments? Like if you leave someone outside of it, like I had never heard of Good Egg until walking around my neighborhood and I see Good Egg boxes.

• 19:11Shaan Puri?

  Right. So I think it does work, but less so than a college campus, right? Cause you, I mean, I don't know my neighbor. I didn't know my neighbors really when I, when I lived in my apartment. I knew like, let's say one out of five. And we didn't talk that much, whereas on a campus, you just see way more and you talk way more. So I think campus is easier. And I think that's the one variable would, which is like, this is GoPuff in cities. Is either A, GoPuff just gonna beat them or B, is campus is just a magical thing that works way better than cities? And so that's the big bang.

• 19:38Sam Parr?

  Maybe I'm wrong, but I wouldn't really care if Go, like GoPuff could beat them or not, because it's like, it has to be one of the biggest markets out there.

• 19:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. It's like a trillion dollar plus market.

• 19:48Sam Parr?

  And so I wouldn't frankly worry too much about competition, would you?

• 19:53Shaan Puri?

  I wouldn't worry about competition. It's the really that customer acquisition thing I was talking about, like, is it gonna be really hard and expensive for them to acquire customers in that little one mile radius? Or are they gonna figure out some really simple tactics that like, let them scale up and do it? If they do it, it's gonna be a big winner, you know? So.

• 20:08Sam Parr?

  They, they got a cute little landing page as the app good.

• 20:11Shaan Puri?

  I haven't used it cause it's not in my area. I'm in California.

• 20:13Sam Parr?

  It's only has 26 ratings for four and a half out of five stars.

• 20:16Shaan Puri?

  It's small. Yeah.

• 20:17Sam Parr?

  Uh, the reviews are great. People are saying it works. Seems good. The, one of the first one, it seems too good to be true, but it's true.

• 20:23Shaan Puri?

  It's reviews also, which also who knows if they're ever true.

• 20:27Sam Parr?

  Right. They probably aren't, but it looks great. So cool.

• 20:31Shaan Puri?

  Okay, cool. So that's original more, uh, kind of went along on that one, but I liked that, that concept.

• 20:35Sam Parr?

  Okay. I'll bring up one. I was fooling around. I go to this website called Starter Story. You know what that is?

• 20:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. What is that? That's like a startup, kind of like how, how they made it.

• 20:43Sam Parr?

  Guy named Pat, and I think what he does is he just has a form and he emails people, form questions, like how'd you get started? What's your revenue? Things like that. And they answer, and then auto populates to his website. It's pretty neat. And I found a game called, uh, Hunt a Killer. So it's a game called Hunt a Killer and it's 25, it ranges from 25 to add-ons of maybe $30 a month. You can go to the landing page and see, it's a board game and you sign up and you get your first pack and then they send you new, and you're like, I think you're trying to find a killer. And they send you new clues every month. So somehow like ongoing. This game does $5 million a month in recurring revenue.

• 21:19Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 21:20Sam Parr?

  And it's just a game. It's crazy. I started fooling around on this or looking around on it. And I was like, is this real? It's only five years old. It was in the Inc. 5000. It was the sixth fastest growing private company in America, or at least who submitted themselves to Inc. And I think it's bootstrapped. I imagine the margins I have to, if they weren't making 30% profit on this, I would be a little bit surprised. It's pretty wild. Have you, I guess you've never heard of this.

• 21:47Shaan Puri?

  I've never heard of this game. Actually, I think I've literally just in passing had heard of it once, but I didn't know about this business. And the 5 million a month is honestly very impressive.

• 21:57Sam Parr?

  Incredibly impressive. What's 5 million divided by 25 bucks? If that's their average subscription, I'll do it.

• 22:02Shaan Puri?

  200,000.

• 22:02Sam Parr?

  It's a huge market. It's 200,000 customers is a lot, but it's not like, I mean, it's a big market. And here's, let me tell you why this is interesting to me. I listen to probably two to three hours a day of crime podcasts.

• 22:18Shaan Puri?

  Such an insane amount of time.

• 22:20Sam Parr?

  So it's usually three episodes, an episode.

• 22:23Shaan Puri?

  If Sam ever tells him, if ever, Sam ever tells anyone he's busy, now you could be like bullshit. You listen to fucking three hours of true crime a day.

• 22:30Sam Parr?

  Well, I do it while exercising, or I do it while I'm just sitting working, or I just like while I'm cooking. I just, I love it. There's a few that I really like. I love anything mob related. And there's a

• 22:39Shaan Puri?

  What is the best one? Like if somebody doesn't listen to any, what's the best one they should just go listen to?

• 22:44Sam Parr?

  Dateline. So I like Dateline and I like Serial Killers. Serial Killers is produced oddly by this company called Parcast. And they have all types of stuff on crime. And I like Serial Killers is what it's called. But Dateline, do you know about Dateline? You know what Dateline is?

• 22:58Shaan Puri?

  The TV show?

• 22:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it came out in 1980 something.

• 23:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 23:01Sam Parr?

  It's 30 plus years old. They launched a podcast a year ago, and it's already gotten like 150 million downloads. It's all, if you look, if you go to podcast top charts, Dateline is always in the top. And it's a 30 year old program. And I listened to so many episodes. It is so awesome. And just the appetite for anything crime or mystery related is just massive, massive, massive, massive.

• 23:28Shaan Puri?

  So it is the number 21. Podcast in America of all podcasts right now.

• 23:34Sam Parr?

  It is, and it's always in the top.

• 23:36Shaan Puri?

  Goes between 15 to 20. Yeah.

• 23:38Sam Parr?

  And they produce, they might do one every day.

• 23:40Shaan Puri?

  Are they just taking the TV show and then just like being like, that's just taking the audio and that's the podcast?

• 23:45Sam Parr?

  I don't watch the show anymore, but I think so. It seems like it. Maybe they do a little special stuff, but yeah, it's nothing. And they have a 30 year library. So like, I'll listen, like, an episode came out yesterday and it was from 2014. And all they're doing is repurposing this, which I actually think that every TV show should do this, like even.

• 24:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 24:03Sam Parr?

  Even a Family Guy or Jeopardy. I don't know why every Jeopardy is not.

• 24:07Shaan Puri?

  A pod, yeah.

• 24:09Sam Parr?

  Cause I do that all the time. I turn Jeopardy on my YouTube and I put the phone in my pocket and I just listen and play in my head.

• 24:15Shaan Puri?

  I have this question. I have this get to know you question that I use that you have like 10 of the best answers for, which is like, the first one, the question is, what's something if, if people knew that you do, they'd laugh. And I feel like you just spout out like 10 of these per episode.

• 24:30Sam Parr?

  Wait, you think that's weird? Let's see the Jeopardy episodes. Dude, they're on YouTube. Like, they're great. I listen to them all the time. Ken Jennings is the new Jeopardy host starting tomorrow.

• 24:38Shaan Puri?

  Aubrey, is that weird or is that normal? Do you do that, Aubrey? Have you ever thought about it?

• 24:42Sam Parr?

  I've never heard of anyone. Dude, I'm telling you, these episodes get tens of thousands of views. More people are doing it. I like, listen to them all the time. Or if I'm on a long drive, me and Sarah, that's what we do. We'll play Jeopardy. I love it.

• 24:54Shaan Puri?

  Are you good at Jeopardy? I'm awful. I can't watch the show because I'm just like, dude, I didn't know any of these.

• 24:58Sam Parr?

  Like if it's college Jeopardy, I would win. If it's normal Jeopardy, I'm hit or miss. But like college Jeopardy, I crush. So I always watch the university ones because I know I'll kick those Cornell kids asses. It's Jeopardy.

• 25:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, fifth grade Jeopardy, I'm a winner. Did I ever tell you when I auditioned for Wheel of Fortune and I got on?

• 25:16Sam Parr?

  No, you really got on.

• 25:17Shaan Puri?

  All right. So story time. It's kind of a lame story because I didn't end up going on the show, but I got cast. Which is, I was doing my first startup, which was like, I've talked about a little bit before. It's a sushi restaurant chain. They have a cloud kitchen for sushi, basically, that we started. And me and my buddy Dan are in the kitchen. And Dan is the type of guy that always applied for any contest. And we always used to call him like the sucker at first until we realized. realized he wins a lot of these because nobody actually applies. He would open up a pack of gum and they would be like, oh, create a 30 second jingle for our, uh, our gum and you could win a lifetime supply of gum. So he, he won a lifetime supply of stride gum.

• 25:55Sam Parr?

  That's hilarious.

• 25:55Shaan Puri?

  Then there's this sandwich chain called like something like pickle, pick some pickle sandwich chain or whatever. He named their mascot. He won that contest and he got taken into the headquarters and like they gave him a big like round of applause awkwardly in front of the whole company. It was very weird. It was like, is this a penalty or a victory? And so the last thing he did was he was like, yo, I'm gonna try out. He's like, I gotta go for a minute. He's like, I gotta go for like an hour. Can you cover me? I was like, where the fuck are you going? And at this point, I'm like beaten down from the startup. I hate the restaurant. I hate the kitchen. I hate the food industry. And so I'm like, no, you're not leaving. Don't leave. I don't want to do this shit. You don't want to do this shit. That doesn't mean you could just make some lame excuse to leave. He's like, no, no, it's not a lame excuse. Like, I gotta go do something. I'm like, why? If he was something

• 26:37Shaan Puri?

  legit, you'd tell me what it was. He goes, all right, I'm, I'm auditioning for Wheel of Fortune. I was like, what? He's like, yeah, they're in town. It's 10 minutes away. I'm auditioning for Wheel of Fortune and I want to go do it. And I was like, okay, well shit, I'm coming with you then. So we both just left the kitchen, closed down the, you know, you can just take a cloud kitchen offline, just push a button. It's, we're not taking orders. And it's so weird how they do these things. So I'll tell you what happens in a TV show audition for a game show. I didn't know this. By the way, I didn't actually plan to audition. I just wanted to go see it, but they said if you're in this room, you have to audition. So I said, okay, sure. I'll audition then. So there's probably like 80 people in the room and there's a woman up front. She's the casting director and she goes, okay. And by the way, am I saying Wheel Fortune's the one where?

• 27:20Sam Parr?

  You spin the wheel and you guess the letters.

• 27:22Shaan Puri?

  Spin the wheel, guess the letter. Exactly. That's the show. So she's like, you know, at the beginning, what's his name? I don't know what his name is, like Pat or whatever his name is. He's gonna ask you, or no, sorry. So before that was round two. Round one was, we're just gonna have you stand up and say a letter. Cause if you ever watched the show, they don't just say like, I think maybe like a D.

• 27:38Sam Parr?

  They go R.

• 27:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like give me a D. So they're like, stand up and say a letter. And you're like, well, what's the puzzle? They're like, no, there's no puzzle. Just say a letter with energy. And so there was, let's say 80 people in this room. They go through, everybody stands up, says their letter, and then they immediately dismissed half of the room. So they were just like, you guys didn't have the energy.

• 27:58Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 27:59Shaan Puri?

  Second thing was a written quiz, like puzzles. And then the third one was, so that eliminated another half. So now we're down to like 20 people left. And they're like, okay, you gotta have a story. You gotta be a character. Like, this is not really about like, how good you are at this game, but like, Pat's gonna interview at the beginning, and you need to either be like, a stay at home mom who watches every episode, or like, a businessman who like, you know, is a, you know, owns this company, or you need to be like, whatever, you need to have your shtick. So we were like, whatever, we're starting a sushi restaurant. And so they have everybody, you say your name, and you say your one line, kind of thing about you, and then they call you back a week later, or two weeks later, and tell you if you got it or not. And so both me and Dan got casted on it. He actually went on, I had moved to Australia in that

• 28:40Sam Parr?

  You couldn't make it.

• 28:40Shaan Puri?

  three weeks later, or whatever. Yeah. And so I was like, I was in Australia when they called me, and I was like, I'm not gonna fly back for Wheel of Fortune. But Dan went on and, and had an epic joke on the show.

• 28:50Sam Parr?

  That's crazy. Well, too bad you didn't make it. A friend of mine was on it, actually, very coincidentally, Facebook friend of mine, who I went to school with, was on it, and he won 50 grand last night.

• 28:59Shaan Puri?

  Last night?

• 28:59Sam Parr?

  Uh, two nights ago, or, yeah, this week.

• 29:02Shaan Puri?

  That's amazing.

• 29:03Sam Parr?

  Well, he was on it, I guess, weeks ago, but he posted that he's like, yeah, I, you know, I won 50, like, he posted the photo of him winning 50 grand.

• 29:10Shaan Puri?

  I've also auditioned for Survivor twice and not gone on, but I will keep trying. Anyways, I don't know why I went on this huge tangent, but you were saying, TV shows, you're saying they should turn them into this, a podcast. And I think, like, you know how we had Ty Lopez on, and he was telling us, like, oh, I'm buying up the e-commerce rights of these brick and mortar brands, like Dress Barn and whatever. I wonder if an entrepreneur could basically go buy the podcast rights to certain shows, game shows, or whatever that's out of date.

• 29:38Sam Parr?

  Like, Hey Arnold, or something?

• 29:39Shaan Puri?

  Right. And just convert it into a pod.

• 29:41Sam Parr?

  Or, like, would you listen to that? I would listen to, like, some of these TV shows. I, like, I used to listen to Family Guy when I was like, I don't even remember what I was doing, but like, I would put it in my ears. It was just funny, background noise.

• 29:54Shaan Puri?

  And the other one that's the other idea that's sort of like this, my friend Jason was bringing this up the other day. He goes, you know, TV shows, what they should do is they need to go like multi-platform. So basically, let's say you have friends, you have this hit TV show Friends, people get invested in the characters, right? It's like, would you listen to a podcast of Chandler and Joey doing like sports betting? Or like talking about dating? If they stayed in character, but they off the show, they could probably make a fuck ton of money just being the character in more places now and more mediums. And podcasting, I think is a really good one for that, where you could take these characters and you could take them off platform if people really love, love these characters.

• 30:32Sam Parr?

  I'm down. I think that's a fantastic idea. I think that there'd be a lot of, a lot of contracts around syndication, which would be a pain in the ass. Can we talk about this thing you tweeted about angel investing?

• 30:44Shaan Puri?

  Sure.

• 30:45Sam Parr?

  So you wrote, I doubled down angel investing over the past six months. I've invested $600,000 into eight startups, a few standouts. And do you want to talk about the standouts?

• 30:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So I was just kind of doing an end of year review, seeing, you know, okay, I've ramped up my investing. Let's see kind of like what I'm excited about, what I think I could be doing better next year, et cetera. Okay. So, so standouts, I said, there's some themes here. So first is like India, I think I've talked about this before, but I invested two Indian companies, which is always hard to do if you're not on the ground. It's hard, you're not meeting the people face to face and stuff like that. You don't know the market as well. But these companies were just great ideas that were growing really fast that I could just see like already had great adoption. And what I'm seeing is that in India, there's this thing happened called, have you ever heard of Jio? J I O.

• 31:30Sam Parr?

  He's a billionaire guy in India who people kind of hate because he has, he owns a skyscraper.

• 31:35Shaan Puri?

  Well, it's not his name, but yeah, the Ambani family, basically they owned a company called Reliance. Reliance is like, I don't know, like Exxon Mobil of India, they have like a big energy company, but they're not just Exxon. They're also like AT&T and they're also like Verizon and everybody else.

• 31:48Sam Parr?

  It's like Berkshire Hathaway or something.

• 31:49Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So India was kind of behind infrastructure wise, internet infrastructure wise. So they released Jio, which is basically like a cell service, like AT&T or T-Mobile or whatever. But it brought people up to kind of like 4G connection for really cheap. They like subs- And just kind of gave it away at cost or below cost. And they call this the Jio effect in India because so many hundreds of millions of people now are online that just weren't online before this. And this one company kind of like took the whole country and moved them forward seven years by doing this. And because of that, there's this crazy opportunity for tech startups right now in India where like if you have product market fit, if you have a good product, you're going to grow at this insane pace. So I was just talking about two of the companies, one company invested in called Dukhan.

• 32:33Shaan Puri?

  The Khan means store in Hindi and it's basically Shopify for shopkeepers of India. So if you owned a little shop that like sold scarves or shoes or food or sweets or whatever. COVID killed your business, killed foot traffic, killed brick and mortar stores. And so Dukhan basically is this little Android app that's kind of like Shopify that just lets that shopkeeper put their whole store online. And anybody can order from their phone and then it gets delivered locally like to wherever, based on where you are. Who found this? I found this one. How? I was just lurking on Twitter and I had been following this guy. I think I've talked about it once before, so I won't go into too much in depth, but I found the founder named Sumit. And he had built something called Ranks, which is an SEO tool.

• 33:16Shaan Puri?

  And so I wanted an SEO tool to grow my website. So I was looking at them and I saw ranks. I was like, oh, that's actually a well-made site. Anytime I see something well-made, I go find out who made it. I want to be friends with them. That's like how I built my network. And so I go and I find this guy and I'm like, yo, you built this thing. This thing's fucking cool. Like, let's talk. And he's like, okay. And I called him and literally on the, and I just did a zoom call with him right there on the spot, no scheduling. I was like, are you free right now to talk? He's like, yeah, sure. It's like 8 a.m. in India, but all right, no problem. And I call him and I'm just zooming from my backyard and he's like, I'm like, what's your story? And he's like, I've been running growth for all these startups. He's like, I ran growth and you know, for all the startups, they wanted to grow through SEO. So I just made my own SEO tool. And then I thought, why am I growing all these other guys startups? Like I'm the one creating all the value for them. They're raising at these huge valuations.

• 34:01Shaan Puri?

  They pay me like dirt, you know, they get famous, but I'm the one driving the growth. So screw this. I'm going to do my own startup. I was like, what are your ideas? He told me about this idea and I was like, that's awesome. And I just gave him kind of my usual spiel, like I love to help you advise, invest at some point. And then the next day is like, yo, I got 300 stores on. I was like, what? And he's like, you know, and it just kept going. And so he's had three million merchants join the platform in under five months, which is just absurd numbers, growing like crazy.

• 34:27Sam Parr?

  Seems like it might be a hit. And so you were the first money in?

• 34:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we're in the, we're the first round in the company. And so, um, and there's only like three or four of us from the US who invested in this thing. So it's me, it's Ryan Hoover, and my friend Kumar, who also knew, also is an internet lurker and had found this guy in the same way I did and was like, yeah, sure, I'm in. And so, and then the rest are the big VCs of India, like whoever, Lightspeed or Matrix or whoever, whoever they have. So this, this company, I mean, it's either going to explode, like it's going to grow so fast that it kills the company. Or like expectations get too high, they get taken too much money. It's like, it's one of those companies. It's like, it's going to die of excess. Or it's going to be like a multi-billion dollar company. It's going to be crazy.

• 35:07Sam Parr?

  So this fund that you have, it's going to be, it seems like, cause every company you're naming, I'm like, you know, who knows if it's going to work, but they all seem legitimate and like promising.

• 35:16Shaan Puri?

  They're definitely promising. So this one, by the way, the con I did before I started my angel funds, this is my personal money before that, but all the others in the thread are from the rolling fund itself. And yeah, I think they're all promising. Like I obviously feel good about them, but I'm sure every investor feels fucking good about their companies. Maybe I just sell them better than other, other people. Like, I don't know.

• 35:34Sam Parr?

  Definitely, probably. But you sell them better, but maybe they are better.

• 35:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like, I mean, I wouldn't have invested, like, I wouldn't have invested in them if I didn't. But these ones I'm talking about right now, like, I legit think are going to win. Of course, that the giant caveat is, you know, almost all startups fail and blah, blah, blah, normal disclaimers. But like, what I mean is, within the basket of startups, these are relatively at the top. These, I think, are very, very good startups amongst startups. Now, of course, all startups could fail and blah, blah, blah.

• 36:04Sam Parr?

  So let's talk about, you did fitness AI. I was a customer there.

• 36:08Shaan Puri?

  You said was past tense. You churned out?

• 36:10Sam Parr?

  I churned out. I signed up right when they launched and it was clear that they were just getting started. So, but I could see, I can see why it's great.

• 36:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So there's two fitness companies that I invested in. One, uh, they're both like of the kind of core mindset, which is.

• 36:23Sam Parr?

  No, sorry. Is this fitness AI? Is this the one where they send you an Apple watch?

• 36:27Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 36:27Sam Parr?

  Oh, never mind. I didn't use this one. You told me about this one though, and I would love to use this. I'm almost about to buy, what's that thing called? Tonal? You know, tonal?

• 36:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 36:35Sam Parr?

  I wanted to buy one, but this company fitness AI might, I may not even need it because of this.

• 36:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So this guy, basically his dad was a bodybuilder and he also like lifts weights, but like his dad was like a kind of like a did competitions and shit like that. And so he was like, I'm doing this fitness app. And I was like, aren't there kind of a lot of these like personal trainer in your pocket? He's like, yeah, I'm being the best one for building muscle. He's like, if you break it down, he's like, there's one for cardio. It's called sweat and it's all about like kind of a high intensity interval training. Those are some for running and that's like my run keeper. It's sold to Under Armour for 500 million. And then there's things like Peloton, that's for biking. He's like, the way that digital fitness is playing out is like, people don't just like workout generically. They do a specific type of workout with a specific kind of like body they want to do. They either want to lose fat. They want to build muscle. They want to like be active or whatever it is. So I invested in two. I did my yoga teacher, which is yoga based one.

• 37:25Shaan Puri?

  And so what they're doing is they have yogis in India who are, you know, yogos have invented in India. So they have like experts in India that teach you over Zoom, a one-on-one yoga instruction where they're like, oh, move your foot to the right and like do this, do that. And so it's a Zoom yoga class that's can be one-on-one or group. And it's great because it's way cheaper than a traditional yoga class in the, in the States. So for, for in the States, if you go to a yoga studio here, you're going to pay 30 bucks for that class. This, you'll pay 30 bucks like for the month. You know what I mean? Uh, like, you know, you can get one-on-one training for $19 on this app. Versus like a group class of 40 people where you don't get any attention.

• 38:02Sam Parr?

  You know what I would do? I think this yoga, my yoga teacher is interesting. Indian company as well. It looks like, yeah, you said that.

• 38:08Shaan Puri?

  They're based in the US, but they just leverage the like labor arbitrage. So there's a lot of businesses that, that make money, like Design Pickle, for example. They make money because it's a US company paying US dollar rates and the designers are in the Philippines.

• 38:19Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 38:19Shaan Puri?

  But for most things you can't, it's like a worse quality experience when you get somebody overseas for the service. With yoga, these yogis in India are actually like expert yoga teachers. And so you don't have that same drop off you normally get with outsourcing. So they get the cost savings without the quality drop off.

• 38:36Sam Parr?

  The following that a lot of these yoga folks have, because I follow a lot of them on Instagram and on YouTube. And like, there's this one called Yoga with Adrian. Do you know her?

• 38:45Shaan Puri?

  I've, I've seen it. Yeah.

• 38:45Sam Parr?

  Oh, I love Yoga with Adrian. This woman, she's got like this girl next door look. She's very endearing, very cute. Um, she has a. Let's see how many followers she has. She lives-

• 38:56Shaan Puri?

  A lot. I think it's, I think she's big, right?

• 38:57Sam Parr?

  Like 10 million, maybe. 8.8 million. She's huge. And so I used to, during COVID, when I, I don't even know. I mean, I still do it all the time. It wasn't just COVID, but I was using her like crazy and she has like a 30 day thing. And it's awesome. It is so cool. She's so, just got a good brand, good personality. She's just soothing.

• 39:18Shaan Puri?

  And those are recorded, right?

• 39:19Sam Parr?

  It's YouTube, yeah.

• 39:20Shaan Puri?

  So I think that there's, again, if you segment these markets, it's like, some people want the recorded, but it's a better experience when it's a live instructor. Peloton is that way, right?

• 39:27Sam Parr?

  Well, I agree, but here's what I would do is I wouldn't, I would do what these makeup guys like Ypsy did with that Michelle fan, or what was her name? Or what Brian Lee at Honest did with Jessica Alba. To get distribution and get users like overnight, I would call Adrian or the 150 people, very similar to her, that are slightly smaller and being like, hey, I'm gonna give you equity in the business and you're gonna be a brand partner. You in? And it would crush. I think it's a great idea, but getting customers for this yoga thing would be very, very hard, I think.

• 40:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And so I, I remember when I was kind of researching the deal, I was like, okay, so you have this subscription. So I was like, so what's the churn like? You know, like all your numbers sound good, but like churn is always the scary thing with any subscription business. And he's like, well, our quarterly churn is negative 3%. I was like, what do you mean negative? I was like, you have negative net churn? He's like, yeah, we have negative net churn. Like more people increase their membership value than we lose in dollars every quarter. And he's like, that's been the case for the last three quarters. We hope it continues, but like three quarters is kind of like almost the whole year. And I was like, okay, I'm in, like,

• 40:33Shaan Puri?

  you know, like, because it's a marketplace, right? On one side, he's got instructors and the other side, he's got students. And the more instructors and students he gets, the more valuable his marketplace is gonna be. It's a paid marketplace around subscription and the subscription to churn is negative churn every quarter. I was like, okay, those are enough. At the seed stage, you really can't get more signals than that. You know, you can't be asking for more validation than that.

• 40:53Sam Parr?

  And how'd you find yoga one?

• 40:55Shaan Puri?

  Dude, this one's funny. Some famous person, either Gary Vee or Jason Calacanis had tweeted out like, What's a cool startup I should be featuring? Or what's a fast growing startup? And this founder had tweeted back at him and said, you know, we're my yoga teacher, we're a marketplace for yoga and we're doing seven figures in revenue already. And we're growing this percent per month. And I was like, normally those threads are like trash. It's just like, yo, I got this idea. Like, you know, you go to their landing page, it's awful. And I was like, that tweet alone, I was like, this is good. I looked into his background. He had built a startup already. His previous startup is currently worth about 300, 400 million dollars as a private startup. And so I was like, okay, it's like a credible guy who's had success before.

• 41:36Sam Parr?

  What's his previous one?

• 41:37Shaan Puri?

  It's called Punch, Punch with I think two H's at the end.

• 41:40Sam Parr?

  What do they do?

• 41:41Shaan Puri?

  I don't remember. It's like some marketing thing or like, I don't know what it is. It's like, it's like seven, eight years old as the company is. It's done well, but I don't think it's like one of the super break companies that's like going to go public. So it's like somewhere in between, which who knows what that means. So I was like, this guy's credible, that tweet, those metrics sounded promising. I like the concept in general. Let me take a punt. So that's how I found him.

• 42:00Sam Parr?

  And then you have this other one called Bubbles, which I just installed. I installed it while I was talking to you. Bubbles is a Chrome extension that helps you capture screenshots and videos and you could collate, right?

• 42:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. So you take a screenshot or a screen, like a video screenshot is either a photo or a video screenshot. So you could just say, okay, here's what I'm seeing. And then on top of it, Bubbles is like, kind of like a chat bubble. Like you can annotate it so you can type. Like, for example, you could go to the Hustles website or Trends website. Let's say you want to tell your team how it can be better. So you go to the Hustle website, you screenshot it, you then just click and you like sort of add little annotations or comments about stuff that you think could be improved. And you just share that link with your team and then they can comment back and be like, oh yeah, I'm going to fix this one now. Or like, let me, do you have any suggestions on what we could change it to? And like they can just, you collaborate on top of a screenshot or on top of a screen cast. So for More and more companies working remote. You need a way to collaborate. I do this all the time.

• 42:56Shaan Puri?

  I take like a thousand screenshots a day and it's so janky. I like annotate it with a big red arrow.

• 43:01Sam Parr?

  They're not letting me capture part of a screen.

• 43:03Shaan Puri?

  You can. There you go. Maybe it's not fully assault or I don't know. It's me or it's not as obvious, but you can do a video. You could just full screen. One other thing I liked is you could do a long screenshot. So you know, it sucks when you're trying to screenshot a long page. This lets you just grab the full page instead of 10 screenshots that you then have to like paste together. And this is to me, a makeup of a company I should have invested in. I was friends with the founders of Loom early on, which has turned out to be a $300 million valued company now and growing. And, uh, you know, I could have invested that at probably like five million, six million bucks. And so that would have been a, been a, been a pretty big, you know, 60, 70x return before dilution. Loom did the same thing. They were like, oh, quickly record a screencast and share it with your coworkers.

• 43:44Sam Parr?

  What have you learned doing this? I mean, it seems like a pretty fun job. Is it going to be lucrative?

• 43:49Shaan Puri?

  I think so. The thing with startup investing though, is it's more like, what I'll call it is it's a fun retirement account. Why do I say that? Cause like, you know, when you've put your money in your 401k, it's like, cool. I'm investing, it's compounding, but it's like, I can't touch it till I'm 65.

• 44:04Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 44:04Shaan Puri?

  That's the thing with startups, right? It's illiquid for a long time and you don't get answers about whether these are going to be the big winners that they could be. And for a long time, it takes time for these things to grow. And even when they succeed, like right now, Airbnb went public, DoorDash went public. All these companies are going public, but they are like 10 plus years into their lifespan oftentimes. I think Airbnb is what 11, 12 years into its lifespan, something like that, maybe about that. And so it takes a long time. So it's like a mini retirement account, but that's like fun. And so it's like, this is something where you invest in it when you're 30, you get paid out when you're 40. And your money has been compounding at this very fast rate, but like you don't get to touch it until you're 40, 40 or 42, you know? So it's like, uh, you have to think about it that way.

• 44:45Sam Parr?

  Do you think it's easier? It seems way easier than starting a company.

• 44:47Shaan Puri?

  It's easier, but it's also less lucrative, I think overall, right? Like you start a company, you could become worth 10s of millions or a hundred million dollars. To do that with angel investing, you have to hit one of the giant winners, right? Like, so for example, I was doing some calculations of the returns of these companies. So for example, DoorDash, one of the early investors of DoorDash put in $200,000 into the early round and that appreciated like 700X. So they put in 200 grand and it, that stake is worth like $150 million right now in the public market. And so, you know, a 700X return is so crazy.

• 45:26Sam Parr?

  But doesn't the individual or the company only gets 30% of that then, right? Or 20?

• 45:31Shaan Puri?

  The investor, yeah. So basically, okay, so I was doing the math. So on, for example, Sequoia, Sequoia released, Sequoia is one of the big brand funds and they released their, what's it called, like their earnings and so, or their returns of their, the previous funds. And so one of their funds, they said, return to investors, an 11X, 11X return. So let me pull up my spreadsheet because I was doing some math and I was like, okay, how much do the individual partners at Sequoia make? How much do they make it off this thing? So let me just give you some numbers. So their fund was a $1.3 billion fund and it returned 11X, which is crazy, but it returned that because it had like WhatsApp and several other big winners in it. The total return on that was about $18 billion. The amount

• 46:14Shaan Puri?

  they gave to investors was 14 billion. So for the, for the fund managers themselves, the GPs.

• 46:19Sam Parr?

  Is the GP the boss?

• 46:21Shaan Puri?

  GP is general partner. That's the top level at a, at an investment fund. There, there might be like a managing director, but they don't get paid more. So GP is like the guys who actually get a share of the profits.

• 46:30Sam Parr?

  And they're putting up a little bit of their own money, but they're not always putting up their own money. They're putting up their share.

• 46:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, basically that's their, that's their, so they get paid in two ways. They take a 2% per year management fee. So just on the 1.3 billion, that's 260 million of just, what's it called?

• 46:43Sam Parr?

  No, no, that's 20, it's 20 million.

• 46:46Shaan Puri?

  No, no, because 1.3 billion.

• 46:48Sam Parr?

  2% of 1.3.

• 46:49Shaan Puri?

  Oh, sorry, sorry. But it's 10 year fund. So the, over the 10 years.

• 46:52Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God.

• 46:52Shaan Puri?

  They get $260 million. Now let's assume, I don't know exactly how many GPs Sequoia has, let's say they have eight. So those guys, they made about, let's say they had eight GPs, that's $32 million. Over the 10 years, it's $3 million a year of just their salary from the management fees. Now, of course, some of it's going to go to the office and other things. Let's just round down aggressively and say they're each pulling home $2.5 million a year just to write the checks, just to meet founders.

• 47:19Sam Parr?

  Do you really think so? Do you think that's the number? That seems awfully high.

• 47:22Shaan Puri?

  For Sequoia, because they're raising mega, mega funds, right? This is a billion dollar plus fund. Yes, I do think it's that high. And so, so that's the first thing. So they're, they're pulling in, let's call it $2 to $3 million a year salaries if there was eight partners. Then you had the carry on this fund, which their share of the carry was about $3.3 billion. And again, they had multiple winners in this thing. So this, I think this was a extremely high performing fund, but whatever. That's $400 million each that they get as their carry after the kind of 12 year.

• 47:55Sam Parr?

  Who is one of the current partners?

• 47:57Shaan Puri?

  Roll off both those is one of them.

• 47:58Sam Parr?

  I can't spell that. Tell me one more.

• 48:00Shaan Puri?

  Alfred Lin.

• 48:01Sam Parr?

  So Alfred Lin, he started the company with, um, he started Zappos with Tony Hsieh. So then this guy's got to be close to a billionaire, no?

• 48:10Shaan Puri?

  I believe so, yeah. And roll off the same thing. He was CFO, I think of PayPal with Peter Thiel and them. And so he was, I believe, the CFO during that time. So he obviously has done well before this, right? They didn't like make it rich with this, but I just wanted to know how much did the top GPs at the top funds make? And I'm pretty sure that if you annualize it out, these guys are bringing home somewhere between 30 and 40 million dollars a year.

• 48:33Sam Parr?

  Do you really think that? That is wild, wild, wild.

• 48:36Shaan Puri?

  Somebody can correct me. We have a bunch of people who are VCs who listen to this. You can correct me if I'm wrong. I'm doing my back to the napkin math. I'm not, I'm not from this job.

• 48:44Sam Parr?

  I mean, Sequoia has, is the best.

• 48:46Shaan Puri?

  Top of the top.

• 48:47Sam Parr?

  The best ever, maybe.

• 48:48Shaan Puri?

  I think that the partners at smaller, kind of still reputable known funds, but they're not billion dollar funds. And they're not getting this type of crazy 11x on a $1.3 billion fund. I think they are bringing in a 10th of that. So I think where the top guys in the top years are bringing in 30 to 50 million dollars each. I think that three to five million is what the VC, uh, you know, normal, successful GP VCs are making.

• 49:11Sam Parr?

  I'm on Sequoia's website there.

• 49:12Shaan Puri?

  They don't tell you how many GPs they have.

• 49:14Sam Parr?

  Their website is slick.

• 49:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 49:17Sam Parr?

  Wow. It makes me want to like them. I mean, it makes me want to be part of whatever they're part of. Wow. Oh, wow. And Michael Morowitz. Okay. Yeah, he was the guy in charge. He's worth multiple billions. So should we wrap up there and next week we'll get to?

• 49:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we should wrap up. The last thing I would say on the investing front for me, what I've kind of like my takeaway at the end of this was like, this is cool. The financial way to think about this is like a mini retirement fund, meaning it's awesome that it's going to grow. And I think it's going to do well. I think it's going to compound at a fast rate, but it's illiquid for some period of time. Normal 401K is like 40 years. This is going to be illiquid for like 10 years. On the other side, the way I think about it is this is basically like getting paid to go to business school. It's like, I get to sit front row, learn about new businesses, learn about new technology, meet cool people. But instead of paying for it, you get to get paid by investing in startups.

• 50:10Sam Parr?

  Would you do this full time or would you start something?

• 50:13Shaan Puri?

  I wouldn't do it full time. I love it in the capacity that it is right now, which is I just keep doing my thing, you know, building cool shit, making content like this. And in doing so, I run into cool people. And when I run into them, cool people doing cool things, I say, can I invest? And then I put this at the bottom of the thread, which I think is really important, which is in most investments, right? If you're a real estate investor or you're a hedge fund guy, it's all about, you know, the investor picks the asset. That's it. Investor picks which asset to invest in. Startups are the only asset class where the investor picks the asset, but the asset also has to pick the investor. Most of these deals, it's not just me saying, here's a check. It's can I invest? And then they say yes or no, and for how much? And so this is the only industry, this only asset class where that happens, that match happens.

• 50:57Shaan Puri?

  And so the game theory of that means you have to be a desirable person for them to want on their cap table. In the meeting, you have to behave well. So that's good. That that game theory helps everybody behave better. You have to be helpful and have a reputation for being helpful. You also have to like build your brand as somebody who, if your name is on this company, it helps that company like legitimize itself for the next investor or the next customer that comes by. And so it's cool because the more successful you get, the better investment returns you get also.

• 51:25Sam Parr?

  Does having like a podcast help significantly?

• 51:27Shaan Puri?

  For sure. Yeah, there's several of these, like Bubbles is a great example. Their round is oversubscribed. They don't need me. I think a bunch of your audience would use a product like this and I think you guys are, you guys have a good platform. So like I want you in because you have a name or like invest in Guggins, like new ed tech thing, which is like a way for influencers to launch courses. And I was like, hey, I want to teach anyways. I'm going to launch my own course. He's like, perfect. Like, again, that guy's built to like kind of rocket ship companies already, one that's worth multiple billions of dollars in the ed tech space already. So he had every investor he wanted to invest, he could have had in. The only way I got access to that round was because I said, not only am I going to invest, I'll be a teacher on your platform and I have an audience that will come and it's that I'll make your platform

• 52:11Shaan Puri?

  more valuable. I'll give you feedback as a user.

• 52:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I, I missed out on that one just because I was, that was when I had Lyme and I just wasn't take, I wasn't talking to anyone. I don't, I won't regret it because.

• 52:21Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I think you still can because he's doing something cool, which is he carved out a very small part of the round. I think like quarter million dollars, $500,000, something like that to let any accredited investor from the public invest in it.

• 52:33Sam Parr?

  I know, but the valuation is way higher than when you.

• 52:36Shaan Puri?

  It's not the way higher, it's only $5 million higher. So I invested at 20 million. This is at 25 million. So it's not that much higher. That sounds $5 million sounds like a big number, but in valuation terms, it's just like, I put this in my mistakes part of the Twitter thread, which was, there was a bunch of companies where I was like, I was like, oh, this is interesting, but I'm not sure. Let's just wait and see. And like four months later, I wait and saw, and sure enough, they proved it out more and all of a sudden the price was three times higher.

• 53:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that happened with Aura Ring, I think. Were you part of that?

• 53:03Shaan Puri?

  I wasn't a part of that one. No.

• 53:04Sam Parr?

  A couple of our friends were and they were like Aura Ring, $100 million. That's a lot of money for valuation. And now it's 10 times that.

• 53:11Shaan Puri?

  Right. Exactly. And that happened to be with, with several of these. But the company we were talking about right before they launched was Pipe. And I was like, oh, this is genius idea. You realize this is a genius idea. We could have put some money in at that time at a lower valuation and now I'm talking to him now and you know, the valuation is much higher because he's proved it out a lot more.

• 53:28Sam Parr?

  That's that David Sacks business?

• 53:30Shaan Puri?

  He's one of the investors. I wouldn't give him the credit. Harry Hurst is the founder. Yeah.

• 53:34Sam Parr?

  He's pimping it out all the time?

• 53:35Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 53:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 53:36Shaan Puri?

  And he was the lead of their kind of like first round or whatever.

• 53:38Sam Parr?

  Right. We did miss that or I missed that one too.

• 53:41Shaan Puri?

  Okay. So I feel like I take this episode a bunch of different tangents.

• 53:43Sam Parr?

  Abrey, what do you think?

• 53:44Speaker 02

  It was pretty good. Better than the last couple for sure.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  I believe we do zero minutes of prep. We did like 10 here. So.

• 53:54Shaan Puri?

  I want people to let me know, like, because there's some stuff like this, like Angel investing. I don't know if that's interesting to people or if it's not.

• 54:00Sam Parr?

  I think it will be.

• 54:01Shaan Puri?

  You think so?

• 54:01Sam Parr?

  I do.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we should do like, I don't know, because people are kind of sensitive with salaries and stuff, but I find that stuff super interesting. And nobody talks about it. Like, how much do these guys actually make?

• 54:09Sam Parr?

  We should have one of these folks on.

• 54:11Shaan Puri?

  Only if they're just going to say how much they make.

• 54:13Sam Parr?

  Let's have Jason Calcanis come on because he's kind of a loose cannon. He'll, he'll talk.

• 54:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we should.

• 54:18Sam Parr?

  I was on his thing. He owes us. We'll get him one.

• 54:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, get him on. That'd be great.

• 54:22Sam Parr?

  I'm looking at the download numbers. People seem to be liking what we're doing.

• 54:25Shaan Puri?

  It's going up?

• 54:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah, surely slowly, but surely. Uh, we're in the, we are in the top 50 of all business podcasts today.

• 54:31Shaan Puri?

  Hell, yeah. Ahead of, who are we ahead of? Abra, you, that's what I care about. Top 50. All right. That sounds good. Who are we ahead of?

• 54:37Sam Parr?

  Next, uh, we're next to, um, Motley Fool.

• 54:40Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 54:41Sam Parr?

  Crush Morning Brew. Um, who else?

• 54:45Speaker 02

  We're beating all the big names, reading Pomp and the Vol, uh, Morning Brew's podcast. We're beating all the big guys.

• 54:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, those chumps.

• 54:52Sam Parr?

  Well, those aren't big guys, but a pop is, I guess.

• 54:55Shaan Puri?

  I mean, the Vol's got like a million plus followers on Twitter. He's, he's pretty good.

• 54:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but he doesn't actually do that podcast, does he?

• 55:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's him.

• 55:01Sam Parr?

  The Naval podcast isn't Naval, is it?

• 55:02Shaan Puri?

  No, it's him. Yeah, it's him.

• 55:03Sam Parr?

  Oh, for real? What does that guy even do? Does he do anything? Like, is he just like a personality? Is he like Tim Ferriss now?

• 55:09Shaan Puri?

  Well, he hired a CEO for Angelus, so he, he's not the CEO anymore. So, yeah, he just thinks about shit and meditates and invests.

• 55:16Sam Parr?

  Where does he live? Does he live in San Francisco, you think?

• 55:18Shaan Puri?

  I have no idea where he lives.

• 55:19Sam Parr?

  That guy's weird to me. I mean, in a good way.

• 55:21Shaan Puri?

  Someone sent me a shirt. They sent me a very, very kind letter. I should find out what the person.

• 55:26Sam Parr?

  Oh, and Abra, you sent you a Naval book?

• 55:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's right. So I got the book here that my friend Eric wrote. This is actually a really smart tactic, by the way. This guy Eric Jorgensen, he was like, I think the fastest way to build your following and build a mailing list is to just capture all the philosophies of a famous person like Naval or Charlie Munger or Warren Buffett or whoever. He just wrote the Almanac of Naval. He just took all the shit Naval had said in his different podcasts and blogs and stuff like that.

• 55:51Sam Parr?

  Jack Butcher did it with him.

• 55:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. Jack Butcher got famous too with, with visualized value. He just took Naval's philosophy and created dope visuals around. And tweeted it out every day until those caught on. And so like, instead of, you know, I'm going the long, hard, slow shitty way of trying to like, come up with my own ideas and make those famous. I should just be hijacking these other people's fame and building content about them. And then slowly slip myself in.

• 56:14Sam Parr?

  Whatever. It works. Yeah. I mean, now, at this point now, people are doing that with Jack Butcher. He has like a, he's like a Jack Butcher. Someone made like a fan page for him.

• 56:23Shaan Puri?

  I might have made it. I love that guy. He's great.

• 56:25Sam Parr?

  The Correttes, is that what they're called? No, I don't get that joke. What's that mean?

• 56:28Shaan Puri?

  I don't get the joke. That was a lame joke.

• 56:34Sam Parr?

  Okay, I'm out of here. I'll talk to you guys soon.

• 56:36Shaan Puri?

  Later.