#219 - How to Make Billions with a Niche DTC Clothing Line

In this episode Shaan (@ShaanVP) reveals the creation of the first My First Million NFT. Sam (@theSamParr) and Shaan also talk about Laird Hamilton's Superfood company, whether people should lie more, and they share their reactions to an recent twitter thread. They close out the episode with ideas around other niches Figs could work for, opportunities with crypto conferences, and in creating retreats. --------- * The MFM NFT - https://bit.ly/MFM-NFT * Stripe for Vice - https://twitter.com/mrskylor/status/1437182707675504640 * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (1:53) Laird Hamilton's publicly traded company * (6:04) The battery theory * (10:17) The MFM NFT * (14:08) The Stripe for vice story * (20:00) Should people lie more? * (23:32) Figs for construction * (35:40) Meet George Barber * (37:12) Meow Wolf for immersive experiences * (41:11) Two bit circus * (44:15) The big opportunities with crypto conferences * (47:29) Event & retreat opportunities * (51:36) What success can look like in VC

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  I never lie, but I think a lot more people should lie. You could look cool.

• 0:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't think more people should lie because as somebody who used to lie, it's, uh, it's really exhausting.

• 0:11Sam Parr?

  What did you lie about?

• 0:25Sam Parr?

  All right, I, uh, I want to talk about this open sea thing. I'm laughing about it, but before we get into that, people like story stuff. Let me quote, not a story, but do you know who Laird Hamilton is?

• 0:37Shaan Puri?

  Surfer?

• 0:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So he, uh, he like, is like, if you think of the word like surfer, hunk, he's like the guy you like think of, right? Like.

• 0:45Shaan Puri?

  He's like kind of the most famous one, I think. And he's a little bit older now, right?

• 0:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he's in his 50s. He could be as old as 60, but, uh, he's 57. And there's two amazing things about him. The first, he has this thing called Laird Superfood. Have you heard of that?

• 1:02Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 1:04Sam Parr?

  Okay, it's interesting for a bunch of reasons. The first reason why it's interesting is Laird is interesting to me. He's basically, so Laird Hamilton was a surfer in Hawaii. He had a troubled childhood, but he dedicated his life to surfing. He says that he might be a little autistic and that he like focuses on a goal incredibly, like he, he'll, he'll achieve it no matter what and he obsesses. So for a long time, he was obsessed with finding the biggest wave. He invented toe-in surfing and then eventually he got into, uh, health and he got obsessed with eliminating sugar, eliminating flour and just being very, very, very healthy. And so eventually he launched a company called Laird Superfood. And he's obsessed with coffee. He drinks tons of caffeine, loves coffee, and he didn't want to use like almond milk or oatly or anything like that. And so he invents this thing called Laird Superfood. It starts with a creamer.

• 1:49Sam Parr?

  Now they sell a bunch of different stuff, a bunch of different creamers, a bunch of different health foods. It seems legitimate. I'm gonna buy some of them, some of it because it does look, I like him. And I like the idea of what it promises, although I don't know the science behind it. But the second reason why it's interesting, it went public, it's publicly traded. It went public with like 18 million in revenue. Currently has a market cap of $163 million, revenue of like 50, I think. Uh, but kinda cool, right? And Laird interests me because he's kinda like, there's no such thing as a perfect human, but he checks all the boxes in terms of, he's doing pretty good at a bunch of stuff. So physically fit, great. He seems emotionally incredibly healthy, very stable.

• 2:31Sam Parr?

  Like when he talks to him, he seems very wise and like he understands how to treat people. Got a great family, it seems. And now financially, very successful, adventurous. This guy's my hero. Uh, but I didn't know if you had ever, I thought it was interesting that they took the company public.

• 2:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that sounds also just, did they take it public in the US or somewhere else?

• 2:49Sam Parr?

  Here, it's a, it's on, it's on the New York Stock Exchange, it's called Laird Superfood.

• 2:55Shaan Puri?

  Doesn't it seem too small, like a penny stock? Like what is the market cap of it, if it has 18 million in revenue?

• 3:01Sam Parr?

  It doesn't have 18 million in revenue now, maybe, what's it have now? You can look it up, like 40 or 50. It has, its market cap right now is 163. Its highest ever was, uh, two times that.

• 3:12Shaan Puri?

  Interesting, okay. Uh, and yeah, I'm kinda like you where there's something, you know, some, um, like if you're just like a normal Instagram influencer and you're like hawking some product, uh, or whoever, you're whoever, you're me, you're, you're just like a normal person and you're, you're hawking some product. It's like, okay, you know, you probably tried to do a good job with this, but like this is a business for you and you're doing this for the business. And then when you see someone like Laird Hamilton, who's like walked the walk for like, I don't know how many years, this guy's like 50 something years old. And you see he's just like ripped, absolutely ripped at that age. You kinda know that he's lived a certain lifestyle. And, um, I have a higher level of trust when this guy's selling me a tea

• 3:54Shaan Puri?

  or a, you know, a breakfast waffle, keto breakfast waffles or a creamer or whatever the, the stuff is that he has. I do feel like I trust a lot more than, uh, you know, whatever, Ryan Gosling's gin.

• 4:09Shaan Puri?

  You know, like where it's like clearly just celebrity face plus generic product equals like branded product.

• 4:16Sam Parr?

  Now, the second thing I wanted to ask you, okay, so when I look at this guy, I've been reading a lot about him. I've been obsessing a little bit about him and I've been watching all this stuff. He is always working out and for the past maybe four months, I've been working out really hard. I'll do like maybe 10 workouts a week, so sometimes two days and I'm always sweating. Yeah, moving a lot. And I started thinking about this because there's this thing that Trump said and it's always stuck with me and for some reason, the way that he said it, I just, it never went away. And someone was like, this was right after his physical and they go, Trump, why don't you exercise? He's like, it's a waste of time. I don't want to waste my energy. And they're like, what? He goes, yeah, look, like I only have a limited amount of energy in my lifetime. My, my, my body is like a battery.

• 4:59Sam Parr?

  I'm not going to use my battery on exercise when I can be using it building businesses or doing whatever. And I have no idea what the truth is of this, but it got me thinking.

• 5:10Shaan Puri?

  Did he really say this?

• 5:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I paraphrased it, but yeah, so if you Google like Trump health battery, they call it, they call it like, it's like Trump's battery theory or something like that. And I have no idea the validity of this. This could be the stupidest thing ever. I've, I don't know. I'm, it just, I just thought it was hilarious when he said it, but it got me thinking like, I read David Goggins biography and like the dude's sweating all the time and like, can, like.

• 5:41Shaan Puri?

  Let me read this out, let me read this out. Trump gave up athletics after college because he believed that the human body was like a battery with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted.

• 5:54Shaan Puri?

  What did he say? He goes, I don't know, here's a scientist. A better analogy would be it's like a fire that you continue to fuel with more coal or wood. You need to continue to add fuel or your flame will die. This is true whether you exercise it or not. Simply by existing, we're burning energy. Okay. I don't know what this guy's talking about.

• 6:10Sam Parr?

  So, well, I was thinking about it. I'm like, if our, if our life, if our heart.

• 6:16Shaan Puri?

  This Trump battery thing is too ridiculous. I can't get over it.

• 6:19Sam Parr?

  It's great, right? It's great.

• 6:21Shaan Puri?

  It's like, you know, a possible val- this is like, I walked in on my sister once. She was supposed to be studying and she was, I walked into her room and she was just laying down, sleeping. And I was like, oh, wake up. Well, you're supposed to be my mom. Like I was a little kid. My mom had sent me in to be like, is she studying for the test? I was like, Mom said you're supposed to be studying for the test. She's like, no, no, I'm reviewing in my head. And I was like, oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. And I went back to my mom and I was like, she's reviewing. She just closed her eyes to review.

• 6:45Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God.

• 6:45Shaan Puri?

  She was definitely just sleeping. That's what Trump's battery thing is to me. It's like some bullshit excuse for not wanting to exercise.

• 6:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah, well, I was thinking, I'm like, well, again, I'm an idiot. I know nothing. But like, if your heart can only beat some number of beats throughout your lifetime, am I wasting it by just like being sweaty all the time and working out all the time? And I, I was thinking about this Laird Hamilton guy. And I'm like, dude, maybe you should just go for walks instead of like, like, how much exercise like do we actually need? You know, like when I see David Goggins, like running hundreds of miles and he's like on his Instagram, he's always working out. It's like, I just, I want to start reading about like where, where's the threshold of where it actually doesn't matter?

• 7:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, well, okay, I think, you know, here's my, my very basic theory, which is it's not like a, okay, it's like a battery, but batteries can be recharged and whatnot. It's basically right. Your heart and other parts of your body are muscles. And the muscles can grow stronger with, you know, exercise and then they develop, or they can grow weaker without use. And so not using them doesn't just preserve your precious energy marbles. And you're going to go live till you're 200. It's, it's that if you build your muscles up, including your heart, your brain by, you know, studying or cardiovascular exercise, you're going to get more out of it. You're going to be able to do more now, plus it'll be able to like last longer through atrophy in your life.

• 8:09Sam Parr?

  I hear you, but, but when I see Laird Hamilton at 57 and I'm like working my butt off right now, I'm like, he, all of his stuff is about recovery. He talks about recovery. He talks about how this helps. And I'm like, well, just like do less and you don't need to recover. Just like do less stuff, you know, like.

• 8:26Shaan Puri?

  Like, okay, look at Laird Hamilton and then look at Trump. And just look at their results and say, which body do you ultimately want? Do you want that guy's body and energy? Or do you want this guy's body and energy? And I think it'll guide you down the right path.

• 8:39Sam Parr?

  Like, I'm just saying, I'm thinking out loud here. This is something that I'm questioning myself. Like, how hard am I going to go? And like, why do I want to recover all the time? Like, I just, I, there's just should be no need to recover all the time. Do you want to, before we get into topics, do you want to, do you want to talk about this NFT thing or no?

• 8:54Shaan Puri?

  So I just finished up my crypto week, which was, I talked about it last pod. Basically, I took a week of time, canceled all my other meetings. I said, I'm going to go into, I'm going to go neck deep in crypto. What does that mean? All these ideas I knew about, but I, basically I wanted to go play with, I wanted to go do, right? So if you think about like, how you can participate in things, you can sit on the sidelines and watch, you can kind of, you can kind of jump in and be a player, but not the, not the driver. You could participate, or you can create, and that's when you're really hands on, you're actually making shit happen. So I wanted to create as much as possible this week. I had already been on the sidelines watching, I'd already been a participant. There's a whole bunch of protocols and tools and ideas that I'd never done. So anyways, I had this idea and tell me what you think.

• 9:37Shaan Puri?

  So I think we should create an NFT and I, you know, side note, I created it. It's ready to go if I just push this button.

• 9:43Sam Parr?

  Push it.

• 9:44Shaan Puri?

  Okay, push it. Okay, great. So I created this NFT called Five Minutes of Fame. And what it is, it's a one of one token that anybody can own, that gives you the right to five minutes of airtime on our show now or anytime in the future. You can hold this thing for five years. If you think we're going to be massive, much bigger in five years, just hold it, it'll appreciate. But once you use it, and the way to use it is you burn it, right? So you own this token and it's only one of one. And when you want to use it, you send it to our wallet and that, when you send it to our wallet, we've received it. That tells us this token has been burned. The five minutes of fame, now you can come on the show and you can hang with us, talk with us, and you can do whatever you want. If you want to just repeat the name of your company for five straight minutes, annoying, but doable, you could do it to promote your shit that way.

• 10:29Shaan Puri?

  If you want to come brainstorm with us, or you want to come ask questions, you can do whatever you want, as long as it's obviously not like, you know, vulgar, hateful, or whatever, not some like uncool shit, you know, like.

• 10:38Sam Parr?

  Can they, can they sell it?

• 10:40Shaan Puri?

  They can sell it, yeah. So, so somebody, so I've started the floor price at 0.5 ETH, right? So less than one Ether. I wanted to see how high this ends up going. So I'm going to start the bidding there. It's going to run for one week after this episode airs. And when, it's going to run for one week and so anybody can go on OpenSea right now. And I gotta figure out how you find it. It's called Five Minutes of Fame, My First Million. And I'll tweet it out too.

• 11:06Sam Parr?

  You gotta spell My First Million. It's just MFM now.

• 11:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna change the title of it. I'm also gonna put it in the show notes of this description. So you go to OpenSea. If you don't know how to do NFTs in OpenSea, uh, there's a hard way to start. But if you kind of know what this stuff's all about, you know what we're doing here. What we're doing is we're basically saying, look, money has always been like a, uh, a frozen block of time, right? I go do a bunch of work. I, I put in time, I get money. I go give that money to a restaurant. I say, hey, thaw this frozen block of time out and, uh, you go work for a bit. You, you go, you go spend some time for me, make some food for me. And then, you know, like, that's how money trades hands. It's just frozen blocks of time. So what I did was I just took five minutes of airtime and I froze it. I said, anybody can buy this. You can hold it, you can use it, or you could sell it, you could flip it.

• 11:51Shaan Puri?

  And I want to see what happens with this thing over time. And I want to see if, who buys it? I want to see what they do with it. I want to see if they use it or if they wait, because our show's growing like 20% month over month, 25% month over month. So, you know, you wait a year and all of a sudden you're gonna have, it's a bigger show. It's a big, it's a, it's more valuable airtime for you to go on. And by the way, we don't take sponsors anymore, right? We sold the show to HubSpot. They're the only sponsors. If you wanted to come sponsor a show and buy some airtime, you literally couldn't right now.

• 12:18Sam Parr?

  Couldn't.

• 12:19Shaan Puri?

  This is the only way. And so I, this is an experiment. I don't know what's gonna happen, but I'm excited about it. It was one of my things is make and mint an NFT of my own. That was part of my crypto week.

• 12:29Sam Parr?

  All right, great. I'll, I'll share it. Yeah, I'll, I'm gonna wait for you to tweet it and then I'll, I'll take lead on how you write it and then I'll.

• 12:36Shaan Puri?

  Okay, sounds good. All right, let's see what happens.

• 12:40Sam Parr?

  That's awesome.

• 12:40Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, okay. So what, what do we want to do? Let's do this. Let's do this in order. So let's, let's first do another story. Let's do this guy who took our Stripe for Vice idea, which was a long time ago. So he's.

• 12:52Sam Parr?

  I don't know if I buy it. I don't know if I buy it.

• 12:54Shaan Puri?

  Okay, we'll, we'll preface it with this. Might be total bullshit, right? Sounds a little made up. Sounds a little bit fanfictiony, but I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. So, okay, so, so we said this idea, I don't even know how long ago, maybe a year ago, which was, my friend, our mutual friend, Sully, had this idea and I brought it to the podcast, which was Stripe for Vice Ventures, right? So what does that mean? So Stripe is a payment processing platform. So if you want to take payments on your website, you use Stripe. But the problem is Stripe has, like many payment processors, like PayPal, like others, terms and conditions, which basically say, you can't use this if you're cannabis, if you're crypto, if you're, you know, porn,

• 13:39Shaan Puri?

  if you're all these different use cases. And so the idea was to build a product, you know, clone the product quality and developer friendliness of Stripe, but have your terms and conditions open. And this is like kind of a strategic move because one of the best ways to compete against the big monopolies is not to do what they're not doing now, right? A lot of people do this. They pitch us an idea that says, oh, you know, you know, Twitch isn't focused on this right now, music. So we're going to do Twitch for music. It's like, yeah, but you know, they could if they wanted to, especially if you proved it out, they could do that. Or, oh, Facebook doesn't have, you know, doesn't let you see this. So I'm going to add this feature. Okay, but they could easily add that. Whereas, whereas

• 14:22Shaan Puri?

  these are, they can't do it because it would go against, it would threaten their core business. So Stripe can't, Stripe might even, the CEO might say, hey, I think cannabis is great, but he can't do it because it's going to threaten his relationships with his banking partners. And so it'll put the core, big valuable business at risk, which is why you're actually safe going and pursuing this because they're just not going to do it. In the same way that, like, OnlyFans is safe because it's something Instagram will never do. Instagram could have all those same models on there, but they will never release this feature, which lets you pay for kind of this locked, locked, not safe for content, because it threatens their advertising business with their, with Coca-Cola and whoever else.

• 15:04Shaan Puri?

  And so Terms of Conditions is actually an amazing way to compete against big, successful incumbents. Go do what they explicitly say they won't do. And they can't do. So, okay, anyways, there's this guy on Twitter. The name is Skylar. Mr. Skylar is his handle. And he says, "Public service announcement for all the My First Million Pod fans. From stealing ideas from the pod, don't play short-term games." He goes, "Take it from me. I took their Stripe for Vice idea. I grew it to a business doing over $400,000 a month in 60 days, less than 60 days. And then I got pushed out by literal gangsters. I wish I was joking. Here's the story." Anyway, so he tells a story. He basically says, he looked at Stripe's Terms of Service and it said, "You can't do get rich quick schemes. You can't do cannabis. You can't do

• 15:50Shaan Puri?

  mugshot publication or pay to remove websites." So he's like, "Great, that's my prospecting list. I will just make a list of these companies that do exactly those things. And I'll start cold emailing like crazy." And he's like, "And then in parallel, I went, I went to Galileo and Synapse and I tried to find payment providers, infrastructure companies that would let me do this. They both said no. So then I called some like new fintech companies. They also said no." He's like, "But then I went and I found this small, like, Canadian bank that I have used in the past, like a local bank. And it turns out for a monthly fee, they'll work with it. It'll work with me. Great." And so then he sets it up and he starts getting like online dispensaries, cannabis companies start using them. And this is where it gets a little bit weird. Like, that business is working,

• 16:33Shaan Puri?

  but one of the dispensary companies, I guess, like that he knew that was super profitable, like, they needed help. And he's like, "Oh, they asked me to come on board and blah blah." I didn't really understand this part. Did you get this? He like basically joins their company. He joins their company or something like that. And anyways, it starts making $400,000 a month. And he's like, you know, "I moved into a dope condo in Vancouver, downtown Vancouver. I fly first class to Turks and Caicos. I spent $13,000 a night at this hotel." And, you know, he goes, "The girl I'm seeing is now running around with a fake set of, a new set of fake titties somewhere. I wish I had saved this money, but instead I was spending it, right?" And then he's like, so this is where, this part of the story sounded a little unbelievable because I don't think you'd even be balling out that much on

• 17:18Shaan Puri?

  this small, this little amount of money. But I guess some people just don't, don't save. So maybe. Anyways, he, um, he says, you know, the company that they were buying product from, which is like a publicly listed company, is run by crooked gangsters. They started harassing me and my family, blah, blah, blah. I ended up paying them, I don't know, I met up with them with a bag of cash and I told them to leave my family alone and I left the business forever. And, you know, that's my story of, you know, I've traded peace of mind. I traded my money for peace of mind and here's what I learned. And then he's like, subscribe to my newsletter.

• 17:55Sam Parr?

  I, so I'm, I'm, I googled this guy a bunch. He, I think he's full of it. This is, maybe, I, I think that maybe there's like some truth here. Like, maybe he tried to start this. Maybe like someone sketchy emailed him and that's about it.

• 18:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. It definitely seems like the bag of cash. I met them in a park and they told me, you're lying, bro. Are you lying? Is this, is this you lying? I think you're lying. So I don't know. I don't know if he's lying or not. He needs to show some receipts if he wants us to to fully vouch for it. But I thought it was an entertaining story nonetheless.

• 18:32Sam Parr?

  I think that actually, like, more people should lie, to be honest. I don't know why more people don't lie. Whenever I'm on the internet and I'm like talking about stuff anonymously, I always tell the truth. Like, like-

• 18:42Shaan Puri?

  What a great zag. Everybody else is all about honesty. You know what? Lying. Underrated.

• 18:47Sam Parr?

  I never lie a lot. Like, I'll comment, like, in different posts and they'll say, like, like, just ridiculous stuff. And I'm like, no, no, no. Like, I've done this before. Like, here, like, just like on a random Fox News thread or, or on Reddit. I'm like, no, that's not true. For this reason and that reason. And I'll explain my personal experience. I never lie. But I think a lot more people should lie. You could look cool.

• 19:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I don't think more people should lie because as somebody who used to lie, it's, it's really exhausting.

• 19:14Sam Parr?

  What did you lie about?

• 19:16Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I used to like, I used to exaggerate. So, you know, I used to do everything that I wouldn't call a lie. But if you look back, it's a lie, right? Like, I would exaggerate. Or, somebody thinks something and I like let it run. I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm not going to correct that. I'm gonna let you run with this mistaken assumption. I didn't lie. You got it wrong and I didn't, I didn't correct you. That's not my fault. And so there was all these little things like that. Or, I don't know, like, it was just being where it was always like insecurity. So it's like, you know, if I wanted to seem cooler, smarter, richer, more successful than I was- I was willing to kind of like embellish or lead somebody on in the wrong way or whatever. And, um, and maybe I still do it sometimes. I don't really know. I don't want to say like I've completely gotten rid of it.

• 19:58Shaan Puri?

  I can't remember the last time I did that, but I definitely remember a point in time about five years ago where I was like, I'm just not gonna lie anymore. I'm just gonna actually say what the situation is and then I'm gonna let the chips fall where they may. And it was so freeing and relief. It was like just relief. Cause, um, somebody said this once, they were, they go like in programming, there's this thing where like anytime an application slows down. One of the, one of the reasons that people will say, if you talk to programmers, they're like, oh, you know, it's like a threading problem. Or like, there's a multi-thread problem. And what it means is basically there's like multiple processes running at once and they start to like use up all the memory of the computer. And basically that's what happens in your head when you lie is your brain has to keep two threads open.

• 20:39Shaan Puri?

  There's the thread that basically is like what I said, and then there's the truth. And you constantly have to keep track of what you said versus the truth in order to like maintain the lie. And so that becomes like, we're having two processes running in your head just drains you of energy is what I found. So I don't lie anymore. But I think you're right that in the short term, there's a big benefit to lying, um, which is like, you know, like most people can't figure it out. Most people don't, don't check you, even the people who do check you, just like their voices like small compared to the most people that'll, that'll just take it at fake value, right? Like fake news, I think is popular for a reason.

• 21:16Sam Parr?

  Like I've done stuff like I bought, I bought my car. So I bought my car. It was a, it was over, it was six figures. And I bought it. I saw a picture of it online and it was like three hours away and I called the guy and I go, hey, what's up? You got this car? I go, great. I'll send you the money right now. Will you drive it over in a few days? And I just, it was all done on my cell phone in the car. I just wired in the money and he brought it to me a days later. And I've done that so many times, motorcycles, vehicles. I buy shit all the time and I'll just say like, yeah, I'll just give you the money now. Don't sell it. And so many people are honest and I'm, and in my head, I'm like, everything would be so much more profitable, but way worse. If like, you can get away with lying. You can, you could totally get away with it and most people would never do it and it does shock me.

• 22:00Shaan Puri?

  All right. And we'll end that segment there.

• 22:03Sam Parr?

  All right, let's go. Let's do another one.

• 22:06Shaan Puri?

  You want to do an idea? I got some ideas.

• 22:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so this idea, this comes from Ben. So Ben gave me this idea today.

• 22:13Sam Parr?

  And I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna burn you hard on this one. So keep going.

• 22:17Shaan Puri?

  Okay, good, good. Figs for construction. Okay, so for those who don't know what Figs is, Figs is a, a brand that came out that basically was making like cooler looking scrubs, medical scrubs. So the stuff that doctors and nurses wear, those little blue outfits that were like, kind of traditionally like, well, it's all blue, the same color of blue. They're all kind of baggy and they're all kind of look shitty. And here you have these people that are like, working really hard. They wear this stuff all day. It's kind of like their identity. It's like their uniform. And, and they make good money. They're doctors make good money. And yeah, why are they wearing this stuff? And so Figs came out, I think it started with nurses and they just started making like better fitting. So it didn't look as baggy and loose, a little more flattering. And they had some different colors and patterns that you could have for your scrubs.

• 23:02Sam Parr?

  And we, we talked about them right, I think, right when they got going.

• 23:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like pretty early on, we talked about them and fast forward now, a couple, we're two years into the pod.

• 23:13Shaan Puri?

  Things is a public company now.

• 23:14Sam Parr?

  Wow, they went public?

• 23:15Shaan Puri?

  Seven billion dollars, seven billion dollar market cap. If you go read any of the articles, it's like, why Figs is the next Lululemon? Why it's the next Nike? Why Figs is, is Starbucks for scrubs? It's like they just put every sexy brand. Figs is several years old. I think Figs is like probably eight years old or something. Figs founded, let's see.

• 23:38Sam Parr?

  And the woman who started it does not look like the woman who would start it. She, I mean, she looks like a, like a, like a fashion, like a supermodel.

• 23:45Shaan Puri?

  Oh, really? Okay, that's.

• 23:46Sam Parr?

  Like I would have thought, like, I guess a nurse in my head, like she's wearing like fancy ass shit in her pictures.

• 23:51Shaan Puri?

  So, so Figs is, yeah, I think I got it right. Eight years old. It went public at four billion. It's now seven billion. And, and I think, what, what is it? So, so there's this guy, Thomas Toll, who I didn't know, but he's the founder of Legendary Pictures. He had sold that to a Chinese company for three and a half billion dollars. And, uh, and he was the majority shareholder. And so I think he owned 58% of Figs at the time of IPO, which is kind of a ludicrous amount of a public company to own. And then, uh, you know, is this the person you're talking about Heather, Heather Hassan?

• 24:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you see it like in a lot of her photos, she looks like she's like, I was like, uh, she just looks like a, like a, she's in what's the equivalent of GQ for women. I don't know. I'm an idiot, but you know what I mean?

• 24:34Shaan Puri?

  Vogue?

• 24:35Sam Parr?

  Like she's wearing Vogue. I don't know. She's wearing, she's, I would just imagine someone wearing a nurse's outfit.

• 24:41Shaan Puri?

  He put 50 million in in 2018 and became a majority owner. So 2018 is when he, he puts 50 million and becomes buys, you know, 58%. Three years later goes public at a 4.4 billion dollar valuation. So his 50 million turned into 2.2 million of, of equity value. So, so good on him. Um, okay. So anyways, so basically the, uh, okay. So the idea here, so Figs, a $7 billion market cap, I think it does just over a quarter billion dollars, so over 250 million dollars of revenue a year. I couldn't find the exact number quickly during my last minute research here, but here's the idea. Figs for construction. So how many other industries have a large workforce that kind of needs specialty clothing for doing what

• 25:25Shaan Puri?

  they do? And today they have like a generic default and, um, and maybe you could build sexier D to C brand like Figs for construction. So this is the idea. Um, this is the idea. Figs for construction. You know, construction workers have a lot of different things that they wear.

• 25:41Sam Parr?

  Listen, I know that you don't know who Dolly Parton is and you're just so disconnected to like normal Americans. It's called Carhartt, you dummy. This is a thing. I've been wearing this for years and it's awesome. Google Carhartt. You don't know Carhartt? You've, you've never heard that word Carhartt?

• 25:59Shaan Puri?

  Never even heard, never even heard any of that rhyme for Carhartt.

• 26:03Sam Parr?

  Dude, Carhartt, you don't know.

• 26:04Shaan Puri?

  Obviously, obviously, there's brands that do durable, you know, rugged wear.

• 26:09Sam Parr?

  No, Carhartt is like, I remember as a kid, like, we used to go to the hardware, this sounds like I'm real redneck, but I'm not that redneck. But when you go to the hardware store and you get a coat and you get a Carhartt. Carhartt is like, it's like the thing. It's so like, and it's even like cute now. Like they've like cutified it. So now if you're in college and you're in like a country area, the hot girls were like Carhartt overalls. And that's like, they're like cute now. They have like Carhartt Louis Vuitton collabs.

• 26:39Shaan Puri?

  Okay. So when did Carhartt start? Carhartt started in 1889. Is this the company you're talking about?

• 26:43Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 26:43Shaan Puri?

  This company from the 1800s, bro. I'm talking about building a modern day thing. You're talking about this 1800s company?

• 26:49Sam Parr?

  It is modern at this point. They've, they've revolutionized it. Like go to Carhartt Fall Collection. They've got like a whole like cute kid, like it looks like a fucking like the kids are wearing Carhartt and bands and doing like pickcack.

• 27:02Shaan Puri?

  Good for them for modernizing.

• 27:04Sam Parr?

  They totally changed it. It's like, yeah, Carhartt is like, it's like, it's like cool now. I mean, it all, it was like the workers man thing.

• 27:12Shaan Puri?

  So here's the mistake you're making. Here's the mistake you're making. First of all, you're yelling at the mic. That's a mistake for the podcast. Second, second of all, uh, the mistake you're making is thinking that because something exists, that that's not how e-commerce works, bro. E-commerce is fucking

• 27:25Sam Parr?

  I agree.

• 27:26Shaan Puri?

  clone on clone crime. It's just, oh, this works great. I'll do it too. Thank you. Take my piece of the pie. And, uh, and so this working tells me nothing more than that. This is a even better idea for somebody to go start.

• 27:40Sam Parr?

  Look, I agree. I agree. To say, oh, does, does this exist? Like, that's a dumb, we always get those DMs all the time. What, why doesn't this exist? I'm like, I don't know. And it doesn't matter.

• 27:49Shaan Puri?

  Probably does. Yeah.

• 27:50Sam Parr?

  It probably does. It has, just do it or don't do it. But whether something does or doesn't, it doesn't matter. But I just gotta check you for a minute. Act like you're like coming up with this, oh, we should just do things for construction wear. Like dude.

• 28:03Shaan Puri?

  There is an opportunity for somebody to do this. And by the way, I'm looking at their stuff. And they definitely have a lot of the like, like there's like this, I don't even know what you call this thing. This like, you know, it's like super yellow neon jacket. That's like,

• 28:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. You're not a fireman, but you wear this for some reason. So, so they definitely have a lot of the pieces. But when I was going down the rabbit hole of looking at what, what, what are all the things that basically outdoor workers wear? Whether you're on an, you know, you're in a shale fracking, you know, field, or you're doing construction of homes or, you know, it doesn't really matter which, which version of these, but it's like, there's a premium to be placed on super rugged durable shoes, but also mud shoes, but also heavy jackets. There's a towel that goes under your neck. That's a cooling towel. There's like this whole line of stuff. And the reason I think this might be bigger and better than Figs is if you look at Carhartt or Duluth, which are a couple of the companies that do this,

• 28:56Shaan Puri?

  I think they're both like 600 million plus in annual sales. Duluth, I looked up before this. They're 638 million in annual sales. It's only got a $500 million market cap. So double the revenue of Figs.

• 29:09Sam Parr?

  So what's Duluth?

• 29:10Shaan Puri?

  One tenth of the market cap. Duluth Trading Company is another, it's like Carhartt. Their D to C business is growing 70% year over year. So it's a, it's obviously like where, where the action is versus all their retail, retail shops. And so I think you could come in, I think you could build a new brand in this space and get acquired by Duluth, get acquired by Carhartt, these multi-billion dollar companies as just another, another brand. And, you know, there's an existing D to C playbook. That's like some combination of Facebook, Instagram ads, influencers, blah, blah, blah, like cutesy colors, nice packaging, all that good stuff. And I think you would want to not do so cutesy here for, for the rugged wear. But I think there's an opportunity to create a pretty iconic brand here. I wouldn't be surprised for somebody to do, to do Yeti Coolers

• 29:55Shaan Puri?

  for this Carhartt brand, right? Like I think there's a Yeti Coolers type of brand to be built in this space.

• 30:00Sam Parr?

  Do you remember Lands' End? Did you ever shop there as a kid? Like your parents get you like, you don't remember Lands' End?

• 30:05Shaan Puri?

  Monument in San Francisco.

• 30:08Sam Parr?

  Uh, well, yeah, but yeah, it is. But it's also like, uh, it's a store. Like, remember East Bay as a kid? Like East everybody, it lands in. So it's American made clothing. Basically, you probably know what their boots are. So if you Google Lands' End, and then the word duck, they'll probably, it's called the duck boot. You definitely know what that looks like. It's like the traditional like, snow boot that you wear as a kid. And it's way popular now again. Lands' End, I was just, is another thing. It's just like Duluth. But yeah, these companies are trading for crazy low. 1.5 billion dollars in sales, 800 million dollar market cap.

• 30:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know why their multiples suck so bad. And that just kind of shows me that Figs is, Figs is story. The thing I talked about at the beginning, like, we are, you know, Starbucks for scrubs. What does that even fucking mean? That means nothing. That's just words. Uh, you know, we're Nike, we're Lululemon, we're Figs, we're the next one. You know, that story.

• 31:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's true. It is just words.

• 31:07Shaan Puri?

  That's just words. That's, that's a good diss to anybody at any time, by the way. Those are just words. Immediate shutdown.

• 31:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so I think they're, you know, I don't know if they're overvalued or what, but they're definitely like trading outside of their category.

• 31:22Sam Parr?

  But you need to do, if you're gonna do this, so construction is interesting. It lands in is interesting because it was like midwestern people, but you have to do like a brand and a niche where you feel like us against the world. So nurses feel it's predominantly women. So they already have that little like segment of like, you know, we're, we're the underdog nurses. They probably think that they're overworked, underpaid. So you got that vibe going. And it's like, look, we're overworked, we're underpaid. This thing's gonna make us look good and actually feel good. That's we, that's the least we deserve. You know what I mean? So you, so you, it's, it's been far better. You gotta go with this angle of this group who feel downtrodden.

• 31:57Shaan Puri?

  Brand that we talked about, that's the like, America grunt, grunt style, grunt work. What is it called?

• 32:03Sam Parr?

  I don't know what you're talking about. What do you, what do you mean?

• 32:06Shaan Puri?

  No, it's called Grunt Style. So go to gruntstyle.com. I think we talked about them.

• 32:10Sam Parr?

  No, what's that?

• 32:11Shaan Puri?

  It's it's a us against the world. Um, you know, proud for the, we are proud of the police. We are proud of the military.

• 32:18Sam Parr?

  Oh, yeah, these guys like kill it.

• 32:20Shaan Puri?

  We are proud of our country. We, we don't, you know, vaccine, you know, you can stick your vaccine here. That's the vibe you get when you go to Grunt Style and, you know, it's very much a us against them. Flags flying everywhere, using American IP basically to build the brand, right? Like, here's a whiskey glass with two cross rifles, you know, uh, you know, here, here's a, here's a, here's a hat that looks like it's been used for, for, you know, 10 years. That's the type of stuff they sell. This company crushes. I think they do over a hundred million in sales, this company, you know, alone. So, so I definitely think that us versus them is a, it's a turbo charge when it comes to marketing, especially for, especially for D to C.

• 32:59Sam Parr?

  Um, all right. Can I, can we, can I tell you about an idea? So this one had, this is weird how I got to this, but basically I am interested, like my dream, there's this guy named George Barber. George Barber in the early 1900s, his father started a dairy farm. And eventually George Barber took it over. Now George is either dead or in his like 90s. I can't remember if he's dead or not. And he sold his dairy farm, uh, based out of Arkansas or Alabama, Barbella, I forget. And he sold it for like five or $600 million and he crushed it. And with a lot of that money, he opened this thing called Barber, uh, Bar, the Barber Museum. And he created a F1 racetrack in Alabama.

• 33:42Sam Parr?

  And now, um, if you are motors, uh, they do it for motorcycle racer races. They do it for, uh, F1 races, for NASCAR, all types of stuff. You can, they, people from all over the world go to watch races there. And now he has got the largest collection of motorcycles in the world. And the way that he set it up and is how the way that a lot of these places set up. So have you ever been in like a small town or somewhere outside of San Francisco? And you see like a car museum? And it's usually just like one person that owns it. It's just like a rich guy who like sets it up, but they.

• 34:12Shaan Puri?

  Okay, let's pretend I have.

• 34:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Too American for you, but anyway, they set up a, they set it up as nonprofits. And so you can actually go and like see their assets and stuff. And so that interested me. Anyway, I just got really interested because I want to own a fuckload of cars. I want to own like historical memorabilia. And the way that you do it at a tax advantageous way is you create a museum. And so I went down this little rabbit hole. Have you heard of this company of like, basically I went down this rabbit hole of places that you can go to just to see interesting shit? And like, that's all you're doing. You're sightseeing and you just leave and you pay a little money. And that just got me interested. Have you heard of Meow Wolf?

• 34:49Shaan Puri?

  Meow Wolf, sounds familiar. Let me just, let me look it up. What is it?

• 34:53Sam Parr?

  Okay, I put their deck in here. So I came across their deck. It's, it's an old deck. It's from 2017. And what Meow Wolf is, it started in 2008 in Santa Fe. And it started as a, a, a place to explore immersive art. What the hell does that mean? Like that, like that does a very, who the hell knows? That could be anything. And so basically what it is, is they would rent out these massive old warehouses in Santa Fe. And I believe also in Las Vegas. And they would hire these artists who typically don't make any money. And they would say, hey, come and make stuff here at our place. And we're going to create like, uh, not quite a museum, but almost like a haunted house meets a museum meets Circus Soleil.

• 35:35Sam Parr?

  And, and you pay like $50 and you just walk through and it's like an immersive feeling. It's very challenging to explain, but do you see the pictures?

• 35:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm looking at it. I think you described it pretty well. It's like, like the haunted house meets kind of like, uh, a rave, you know, like some kind of rave meets like a museum.

• 35:57Sam Parr?

  And it this this thing got me interested because I was like, I want I want to own like a warehouse and finance it with this stuff and just collect cool shit. But guess how much revenue these guys well, guess how big this business is?

• 36:11Shaan Puri?

  Let's just say 50 million a year.

• 36:13Sam Parr?

  So they've raised like, I believe, $250 million. And they projected that just one of their locations will make close to 40 million a year in sales. And they're having like over a dozen locations throughout the country. Is that freaking nuts? Would you ever have thought that?

• 36:31Shaan Puri?

  How how old is this? Is this like, was this started like in the like this year, 10 years ago?

• 36:37Sam Parr?

  Oh, wait, okay.

• 36:40Sam Parr?

  And so they opened one in Las Vegas in 2021, and they already sold 500,000 tickets for it. Then they're opening one in Denver. They're going to Austin. They're going to Los Angeles. It's crazy. Is this it's just a crazy, crazy, crazy business? And they said that their projections for the the Santa Fe location, oh, sorry, their Austin projections were 60 million in revenue, 30 million in profit of one location.

• 37:06Shaan Puri?

  Right. What would you like? How do they get people to come to these? What what is it like? What's the what's the marketing to get to sell 500,000 of these tickets? Obviously, there's some word of mouth and stuff like that because it's a pretty remarkable looking thing. But do do these guys advertise it crazy? Do you like you have their deck? Do you see much about like their growth like?

• 37:23Sam Parr?

  I put the deck in the I put the grow I put the deck in the Zencastr thing, by the way, so you have it. But oh, it's locked.

• 37:31Shaan Puri?

  I think I don't have access.

• 37:33Sam Parr?

  And so, yeah, sorry about that. And so what they do is they they team up. So they teamed up with Santa Fe, the government of Santa Fe. So the government of Santa Fe was like funneling people to them. If you Google Meow Wolf Santa Fe, they even put together a they even put together a like study, an economic study to show how much Meow Wolf is helping the the local area. And so they team up with the with local governments, and that helps them like so like they funnel people in there. But I actually don't know. I don't think they do a significant amount of paid advertising. I'm not seeing it anywhere.

• 38:04Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, I think that I'm really into this idea. And by the way, I see they have a bunch of Facebook ads on. So I don't know how much they're spending, but they definitely are running a bunch of Facebook ads. And they look pretty cool because the exhibits are cool. So I'm pretty into this idea. And I feel like there's a whole bunch of different niches you could go with this that are like hyper, have like hyper engagement. And so I think there's, you know, if you just go city by city and you say, all right, what, what could I do that's a pop up here that would be able to consistently draw people? So I think I told you about this once, but there was this, what's it called, Two Bit Circus? Are you familiar with Two Bit Circus? No, what's that? So, so look it up. It's, um, it's like the number two, you know, like T W O, Two Bit Circus.

• 38:49Shaan Puri?

  I think this is the name of it. So there's a guy who, um, okay, so the guy who invented Chuck E. Cheese, his name's Nolan, whatever his name is. His son or grandson, I don't know which one, Bushnell, so Bushnell or whatever their names are. His son or grandson created this thing called Two Bit Circus, right? So, so grandpa maybe or dad creates Chuck E. Cheese. This person created Two Bit Circus. And what Two Bit Circus was, was basically like a traveling pop up museum like this. But it was all for like interactive, like it's kind of like technology. So like imagine like, like if this is like kind of like a haunted house vibe, this is like, you know, you're in the year 2050. Watch this, like move your hand, this laser will move and follow you. Oh, okay, kids, come into this room.

• 39:34Shaan Puri?

  Look at this, like with one small mirror, you can reflect light and create this like crazy thing. Or put on this VR thing and play Dance Dance Revolution, you'll feel like you're in space dancing or whatever, right? Like just a whole bunch of high tech, kind of like attractions that existed. And they would take this from city to city and the video made it look like.

• 39:54Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I want to take my kids here. This looks like so much fun. And unlike those other ones that have like a fixed location, this would pop up a tent and they would run this thing. And in one weekend, they would have like 60,000 people in the Bay Area come through, you know, like in a four day period or whatever. And then they would like pack up the tent and they would go hit the road. And I thought this is like a genius idea. And the guy who I knew who was working with them, he was kind of like an exec there. He was like, dude, this is amazing. It's an amazing product. He's like, but, you know, the founders have kind of like shiny object syndrome. They, you know, they want to do this. And then like, you know, like whoever like, you know, Facebook will say, oh, we want to do a private exhibit. They'll be like, cool. We're going to create the most epic thing ever. Or Obama wants to have us for a party. So like, hey, everybody, like, forget the like systematized process that we could just grow repeatedly.

• 40:41Shaan Puri?

  Like, let's blow everyone's mind with this thing at Burning Man. And like, just let's create something nobody's ever seen. And they would go do that. He's like, dude, it's like so annoying. Like, we just can't stay focused. But what ever since I saw this idea, like, I don't know when this was, seven, eight years ago, I first heard this idea, this two bit circus thing. I just thought it was such a cool, smart idea. And I was so I was shocked. I don't see more of this where this traveling circus where it's a pop up tent that maybe leverages science or technology, because I think parents care to take their kids there. And I think science and technology naturally make for great exhibits and demos and like learning, learning plus like visual stimulation. Like if you just think back to like, science fair or a science class with a volcano exploding or whatever, like basically that on steroids. And I feel like that's a pretty big thing. But, you know, these are hard businesses to do.

• 41:28Shaan Puri?

  I would never go try to do one of these because I

• 41:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they're hard, but they seem I don't like events either. But this is a little bit different than an event. But it does seem cool. Speaking of events, let me tell you about something. So I got dinner the other day with Jason, my friend who runs this thing called Blockworks. And he had just hosted an event and he and I asked him for I go, can you tell me numbers? So I could talk about in the pod because I think it's interesting. So scroll down to the bottom and you'll see where we're scroll down past where it says a digital asset summit. You see it?

• 41:57Shaan Puri?

  Yep, I see it.

• 41:58Sam Parr?

  Okay, so this is Jason. He's got this company called Blockworks, blockworks.co. It's like the hustle, but for

• 42:06Sam Parr?

  Crypto. So two day conference that he just hosted recently. It did two million in revenue. He said, he told me it did about 50% in profit. Eight hundred attendees, ticket costs one to $2,000. And, uh, and then they're doing another event. He has another event coming out in May of, so, uh, in about, what's that, six months, eight months? And their goal is eight million in revenue with 5,000 attendees. And then most recently, he did a

• 42:36Shaan Puri?

  And these are digital, or this is not even a physical conference, right?

• 42:40Sam Parr?

  The eight million dollar one is, and the digital asset one, yeah, it's, it's, it's, uh,

• 42:47Shaan Puri?

  Like you go there, you see people's faces?

• 42:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, it's live.

• 42:49Shaan Puri?

  Okay, okay.

• 42:50Sam Parr?

  And then he most recently did one called, uh, I think it's called Brenton Woods. And that's for, where basically he had 200 people come. And, or maybe he had like 100 people come and they were basically large asset managers. And all they did was talked about crypto. And, uh, he, it did close to a million in revenue and they only had four sponsors. And it seemed like a pretty sick event. And I was just talking to him and we were at dinner and I was just, I was just like, just tell me everything that everyone said. Like, what are the takeaways? And I thought a few things. One, I think Jason's only 26, so kudos to this fucking guy for building this business. And second, what a great hack. I mean, just to like, get the, get, get the intel from the best minds in the world. And like, he's smart, but he's just the, he's not smart enough to be able to predict the future.

• 43:35Sam Parr?

  Like, you know, you could if you're sit around with 200 people who are asset managers for, you know, the Oregon State Pension Fund, things like that.

• 43:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 43:44Sam Parr?

  Pretty amazing that he pulled this off.

• 43:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this, shout out to him. This is like, this is what I would call crushing it, right? You have this new wave of technology and you say, all right, I'm going to go be the hustle or be whoever. I'm going to be the hustle for, for crypto. And then on the event side, it's basically a win, win, win, right? You do one of these events, you make money. You get to rub shoulders with all the most interesting people. That's going to open up a whole bunch of other doors that you don't even need to think about ahead of time. And then all of them are going to like, think highly of Blockwork, subscribe to it, pay for your premium stuff, like tell their, you know, tell their employees about it, that sort of thing as they go. And in doing so, you're promoting that you're evangelizing crypto amongst these like really wealthy people who will start betting on it. And it'll grow crypto, which will just make your business more popular, plus your individual holdings more popular.

• 44:31Shaan Puri?

  So it's like win, win on top of win for a 26 year old. I think that's very, very impressive. And I think, by the way, this is a thing anybody can replicate, not just in crypto. Okay, this is like, let's say, I'll call this a home run and it's in crypto. But I think there's a lot of people listening to this that would be happy with, you know, half or a third or a fourth of the type of success of this. And I think you could achieve that with, in any profession. So like, take any niche, whether it's like gaming or like in venture capital, right? Like we have rolling funds. Like, why isn't somebody just doing this with all the VCs constantly? Like I know Chamath tweeted this out the other day. He goes, hey,

• 45:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I saw that.

• 45:08Shaan Puri?

  Solo, solo GPs that are out there. If I organize like an event or retreat for all of us to get to know each other. Hey, we're all solo VPs, right? But if you just said new VCs, right? You could be at the bottom, you could be some associate somewhere or not even have a job in venture capital. And you could arrange the kind of like next gen, the next wave VC thing where you invite all the new people to VC, to this badass retreat, you know, in wine country or wherever, where it's like, we're all off the grid, we're going to do some cool stuff, there's going to be some speakers, you're glamping, whatever it is. You would be able to make a couple million dollars, network with every single person you want to, and you'd kind of have that little mini industry in the palm of your hands. I've seen people do this with additional marketing and every niche.

• 45:50Sam Parr?

  There's this guy, or our friend Nick went to, went to this thing the other day and it's got a great name. It's called Capital Camp and I believe it's in Columbia, Missouri where I'm from. And I forget the guy, oh Brett, Brett started it, I think.

• 46:04Shaan Puri?

  Brett B. Shore, yeah.

• 46:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I don't know if he runs it or what's the deal is anymore.

• 46:08Shaan Puri?

  I think they started it, yeah.

• 46:09Sam Parr?

  They started it and it was like, it's hard to explain what the niche is, but I totally know what it is or who would go. But it's basically at this point, we talked last week about the circle of people on Twitter who tweet about finance and tech and real estate. It's kind of this group of people who talk about real estate and sweaty and uh blue collar businesses on Twitter and they all go to capital camp. And it's like $10,000, I think.

• 46:34Shaan Puri?

  Private equity is like the bucket, but then like Nick's not really private equity. He's like self-storage. But like, you know, he'll go to capital camp. So it's, you're right. It's basically private equity is the big umbrella and then like any kind of sweaty business or uh

• 46:47Sam Parr?

  Like cash flowing things.

• 46:48Shaan Puri?

  Or or reset, real estate business, kind of non, you know, non fancy, fancy schmancy tech, basically.

• 46:54Sam Parr?

  And it costs 10 grand to go and Nick went and he said it was totally worth it and and the people who I know who go, they say it's totally worth it and they're going to go back every year. And it probably made a good, I bet you it made uh, it probably made a little bit of profit, but in a fair amount of revenue.

• 47:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm gonna spin up like a mini one of these. Um, I've one that I'm gonna do for Club LTV, which is my like e-commerce, like all store owners who do between one and 100 million in revenue. Basically, I'm gonna do a retreat for them, uh, which is just my own excuse to do something fun. Uh, I'm not really gonna try to like make a profit off of it, but as long as they cover all the costs of of hosting a radio, that'd be great. And so I'm gonna do this in the e-commerce niche, but I just feel like you could do this across like it just in the two, two of the camps that we're in, right? Uh, startup investing and uh, and I'm in e-commerce. I think you could do this in either one of those and have, you know, have fun, profits, big, build your network, all that stuff.

• 47:50Shaan Puri?

  It just takes, it just takes hustle, which unfortunately I don't have that much hustle anymore. All my hustle goes to my kids now. There's no hustle.

• 47:56Sam Parr?

  You will soon, I think. Let me tell you something really quick. I, so you're, you're, you've been angel investing longer than I have. Uh, I would not claim that I'm like nearly as good as you or some of our friends, but I um. Two things, I did, I did these two things in 2019. One of them just 50 Xed.

• 48:19Shaan Puri?

  Nice.

• 48:19Sam Parr?

  And one of them just 12 Xed.

• 48:23Shaan Puri?

  Amazing. On paper or exited already?

• 48:26Sam Parr?

  On paper.

• 48:27Shaan Puri?

  Actually, I know one of them, the, the, the 50 X, I know it's on paper.

• 48:30Sam Parr?

  On paper, yeah, they're both on paper, so they're not real. But I, I, I feel good, uh, cause, cause this whole angel investing thing, you just, you spend, you spend, you spend, and I'm like, is this ever going to work? I'm just spending all of this money. It's just leaving my bank account, I don't even know if it's there. And when you count it as part of your net worth, like, I, I pretty much don't, I'm like, oh, this sucks. What's gonna happen? And we'll see, like, if it starts to actually hatch and those eggs start hatching.

• 48:59Shaan Puri?

  Okay, let me tell you, I have something related to this. So I texted a friend who, I won't say their name, um, but they're, they're an investor. They've been doing this much longer than me. Angel investing, seed investing, that sort of thing. VC, personally, all, they've done it all.

• 49:12Sam Parr?

  Do I know them?

• 49:14Shaan Puri?

  I don't think so. And, um, and so they, they've done very, very well. Bunch of eggs, a bunch of winners that are like public companies that we know about, which is like, you know, the, that's the, that's like as high, as high as it goes, basically. And so multiple winners like that. So I texted him, I said, I said, hey, I gotta ask you a question. I said, feel free to just brush this off if you don't want to tell me. But, uh, I'm not asking to be nosy. I'm asking because I'm trying to weigh out my options here. And I said, you know, in terms of investing, you've basically done as good as anyone, as good as I could hope to do, right? Like, I would say you have done extremely well. It's kind of like best case scenario type of outcome.

• 49:57Shaan Puri?

  And what does that mean personally in terms of what you end up making? I said, here's what my guess, here's what my guess is. Tell me if I'm, if I'm on point or if I'm off. And I basically said, I think with this.

• 50:10Sam Parr?

  Can you, can you, can you give all the numbers because the person's anonymous?

• 50:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm gonna say the numbers. So I said, I think that you probably will make 15 to 30 million dollars over a kind of 10 to 15 year period. Of investing. So it takes probably, probably you don't see any of it till 10 plus years, but between 10 and 20 years, you're going to make, I don't know, 20 to 30 million dollars. And that's that payday at the end of the day. And I think along the way, you're making half a million bucks cushy, kind of like off the management fees or salary. I said, is that about right?

• 50:42Sam Parr?

  Wait, so this person has a fund?

• 50:45Shaan Puri?

  They have done many things. So they've invested personally as an angel. They've been a VC at a big fund. They now, I think, kind of like are a solo GP, maybe have their own fund, maybe it's personal. I can't really, I don't really know. I don't know all the details, but they've done both. I said, either way, along the way, yeah, they're not, it's not, I'm not saying from their personal money. They've had other people's money, right? OPM, they've always been using OPM or they've definitely been using OPM for a lot of it, right? Maybe some of it was angel money, but now it's a lot of OPM. So I said, all right, um, am I right? Uh, so first, like, let me, let me ask you to guess. Do you think they said that's right? That's low or that's high?

• 51:20Sam Parr?

  Okay, so 10 years, they've been doing it?

• 51:24Shaan Puri?

  Let's call it 15 years.

• 51:26Sam Parr?

  They've been doing it for 50, 15 years and they've been using other people's money?

• 51:30Shaan Puri?

  For most of it, yeah.

• 51:31Sam Parr?

  How much money did they invest?

• 51:34Shaan Puri?

  Can't tell you.

• 51:35Sam Parr?

  Over, under 100?

• 51:40Shaan Puri?

  Let's say they, they're, they're a seed investor, they're early, they're early stage.

• 51:44Sam Parr?

  Okay, I understand. I would guess they made.

• 51:46Shaan Puri?

  Checks that might be like as low as 100K and maybe high as 500K or a million bucks.

• 51:52Sam Parr?

  And it was their full, a full-time job for 10 years?

• 51:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this is what they do.

• 51:55Sam Parr?

  My guess is way above 15.

• 51:59Shaan Puri?

  That I'm low. I, I, my guess was low.

• 52:01Sam Parr?

  I would guess like 40 or 50.

• 52:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So you're, you're right that my guess was low. So what they said was they go, yeah, it should be much more than that, but it's hard to say because a lot of it's still illiquid. They go, uh, they go, it should look more like 150 to 200.

• 52:18Sam Parr?

  No way.

• 52:20Shaan Puri?

  Done. Um, yeah.

• 52:21Sam Parr?

  And this person's like the best of the best.

• 52:23Shaan Puri?

  They're not a booster, but they are one of the best of the best, meaning their portfolio, you could stack up against pretty much anybody. Like obviously if you hit one, like, you know, I was, you know, the lead investor in Google. Okay. Yeah. You, you're going to have like the outside, but I'm saying this person has multiple. Like, you know, almost, I don't know, more than five, somewhere, somewhere around 10, like, known big winners. And so I'm like, okay, cool. But you know, you don't know what round, how much they invested, like, in each of those, right? So.

• 52:53Sam Parr?

  Look at, uh, look at the message. Is that the person?

• 52:56Shaan Puri?

  No, that's not the person. So, um, so, so basically, I was like, whoa, that, okay, that's a lot more.

• 53:02Sam Parr?

  But and have they made money along the way, other than their management fee or their salary?

• 53:08Shaan Puri?

  Uh, well, just like, you know, the exits as they, as they come through, as they do trickle in. Yeah. So like, you know, first five years, not much. Next five years, some, next five years, a whole bunch, but you're recycling and you're reinvesting. So, you know, you always have kind of a new batch of companies that you're waiting, you know, you want these things to age 10 years for you to go get a big win out of them. Uh, you always have a new vintage, right? What I did 2020, I want to, I want to go uncork that bottle in 2030 and see how it tastes.

• 53:36Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God. Sorry.

• 53:38Shaan Puri?

  Is your ringtone a duck?

• 53:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's fucked up.

• 53:42Shaan Puri?

  Country shit, dude. That's like the hunting duck call used to attract animals.

• 53:48Sam Parr?

  I don't know. I just liked it. I just wanted to be a duck. I just liked the I just like that noise. Um, so, so wait, so this person, but are they investing their own money?

• 53:57Shaan Puri?

  I was pretty stunned. So, so what I told him, I go, I go, wow. So that's basically like you started, you're like a founder of a billion dollar company. If you're gonna net 100 million to 200 million dollars, uh, at the end of this, that kind of like this journey, this career, I said, you know, it sounds like it happens a little bit slower, but you make the same amount of money and way easier, way less stress.

• 54:18Sam Parr?

  Way easier. It's way easier, like way easier, not even close.

• 54:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 54:23Sam Parr?

  And what did they say?

• 54:25Shaan Puri?

  They were like, I mean, they were like, they're so humble that they're kind of like trying to deflect. They were like, well, you know, tell me how you're thinking about it so I could help you here, right? Because they're like, you know, what are you asking me all this shit for? And like, you know, I don't, enough about me. I've done well, but like, let me help you if you're trying to get some help out of this. And all I really wanted to know was like, what's the size of the prize if you knock this out of the park? And like, what's the real, what's the real nuts? Like, what really comes through at the end of the day? Like, for somebody who's, because, you know, anytime you go into something, there's like, you know, you could, I can go read about real estate. I'm not a big real estate investor. I can go read about real estate. I could talk. Oh yeah, you're gonna make this much gross, this much net, you've got a cap rate, blah, blah. It's like, then you talk to somebody who's been doing it for 25 years, like, yeah, but like, you're, you know, all these hidden costs you're not accounting for, all this extra heartache

• 55:10Shaan Puri?

  you're not accounting for, all this extra stress, and then, you know, one of the four buildings, you know, burns up in a fire and you have to account for that loss. So there's always the reality versus expectation.

• 55:20Sam Parr?

  What was your takeaway, though? Like, what did you, what did he, what did you, what?

• 55:23Shaan Puri?

  I wasn't looking, I, I wasn't like trying to make a decision on anything. I was just thinking.

• 55:28Sam Parr?

  Where's your head at, though?

• 55:31Shaan Puri?

  My head is basically like surprised, frankly, that, that, that it can be that big. And again, this person's not a boaster. I'm pulling this information out. I think they were just doing me a favor of being honest about what they think this nets in the end. I was like, wow. The reality, though, is, do I believe I can have the same hit rate as them? No. Like, I think they have had like, they have extreme skill and extreme luck. And so it's like, okay, and they do this full time, right? So it's like, I'm not planning for that, but I like knowing what, what winning looks like today, or what does the top, top range of winning look like? So I was pretty impressed by that. So that was kind of my, my takeaway, or something, you know, something I learned kind of from, I don't remember what you were talking about before this. You're talking about your, your, your multiples.

• 56:15Shaan Puri?

  And so, yeah, it's pretty, pretty impressive. But I would say, you know, that, that's on a large amount of invested capital, I should also say, that, you know, it's, it's much more capital than I'm investing because they've done it for longer and they write bigger checks.

• 56:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's way more boring, but it's definitely way easier. And that's the show, right?

• 56:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. All right, we're out of here.