Shaan's Story: How I Made My First $1,000,000 By Age 31

Episode 377: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) talk about Shaan's business life story... while eating hot wings. ----- Links: * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ------ Show Notes: (01:40) - Seinfeld interview (11:38) - Shaan's story (14:20) - First job in Indonesia (25:40) - Stripe interview (31:20) - Monkey Inferno (49:10) - Selling (53:10) - Podcast (56:30) - What to do with the rest of my life * Production Credit: Caspian Studios ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  I now realize something I already knew, but I didn't have the guts to act on, which was that at any given time, you're really only going to get to throw your all into one thing. And so why not throw like, if you're gonna do that, like choose really wisely.

• 0:21Sam Parr?

  We were in San Francisco, we're outside of San Francisco. We're doing a live pod, the first time in a while.

• 0:27Shaan Puri?

  We're in this studio, what, what, is this a music studio? Is that what this is normally? Music studio?

• 0:31Sam Parr?

  Did the instruments give it away? All right, people were asking online. They said they want us to do a pod. We already did my story. It's the second episode. Now we'll do one on you.

• 0:42Shaan Puri?

  All right, let's do it.

• 0:43Sam Parr?

  So how old are you now?

• 0:45Shaan Puri?

  Good question, 34.

• 0:47Sam Parr?

  And you're from everywhere.

• 0:49Shaan Puri?

  Everywhere.

• 0:50Sam Parr?

  Where?

• 0:51Shaan Puri?

  I was born in Oklahoma, believe it or not.

• 0:54Sam Parr?

  What part?

• 0:54Shaan Puri?

  Tulsa, Denver, Texas, China, Indonesia, Australia, San Francisco. Yeah, that's it. And maybe a little bit of London too, two months.

• 1:06Sam Parr?

  And you're living in Australia in pre-college or right, right college age?

• 1:11Shaan Puri?

  I studied abroad there and then also after college, I started a company with a guy who

• 1:17Shaan Puri?

  like kind of a well-known entrepreneur in Australia.

• 1:20Sam Parr?

  And that was pre-college?

• 1:21Shaan Puri?

  That was after.

• 1:22Sam Parr?

  But and you went to college in Duke too. So you went from Duke to Australia?

• 1:26Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 1:27Sam Parr?

  And at Australia, you did the sushi thing?

• 1:30Shaan Puri?

  No, I did that just at Duke, like that's where it started.

• 1:34Sam Parr?

  The sushi thing was in Australia?

• 1:35Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no, that was here. And then we moved to Denver because basically, you know, like people move to Silicon Valley because it's like, that's the tech hub. And like people move to LA when they want to be an actor. If you want to start a restaurant, Denver is the place to go. So Chipotle started there, the first Chipotle started there, Noodles and Company started there, Quiznos started there, Smash Burger started there. There's like seven or eight.

• 1:57Sam Parr?

  Amounts of like open-minded white people?

• 1:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, people love lunch. Lunch is a really big deal there. But they like all the talent, the people who know how to like pick locations and like roll out restaurant operations, all this stuff, they're all still there. So when it was like, where are we going to start? It was like, uh,

• 2:14Sam Parr?

  Cause Denver is kind of like a big suburb.

• 2:16Shaan Puri?

  Like this is how dumb we were. We were like, we want to be the next Chipotle. How do you do that? Well, we're Chipotle start. And so literally we found the location across the street from the original Chipotle to open our restaurant.

• 2:26Sam Parr?

  That's a great plan.

• 2:27Shaan Puri?

  And so we were like, yeah, like, I guess we'll just do the exact. And then we were like, who rolled out their real estate? Oh, these two brokers? Okay. Well, we'll go talk to them. And then who did their this? Okay. We'll go talk to them. And that's basically, that was our whole plan of like figuring out how to start this restaurant. And so we just moved to Denver because, and it was funny, my two co-founder, my two, two best friends at the time, Trevor and Dan.

• 2:49Sam Parr?

  You're not really a co-founder of a, of a sushi.

• 2:52Shaan Puri?

  Restaurant?

• 2:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Co-owner maybe.

• 2:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's a good point. That should have been the signal one that this was not a great idea. It was like founding what?

• 3:03Sam Parr?

  You know, like, like, my, my father-in-law owns a moving company. He doesn't call himself like the founder of.

• 3:08Shaan Puri?

  Creator.

• 3:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 3:11Sam Parr?

  He's just the owner.

• 3:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's fair. So me and my two friends were trying to eat sushi and we basically started this thing. And they were like, we were at Duke. So they were just trying to find a location near us. And I had gone, I had actually quit the startup. I didn't really tell people this, but I basically, when we graduated, I got a really good job offer and it was a hundred twenty thousand dollars in Indonesia. And so, and my sister was working at the place and the guy wanted, my sister was doing a good job. So he was like, okay, I'll hire, you know, we need more.

• 3:39Sam Parr?

  Was that the guy who ended up going to went to prison?

• 3:40Shaan Puri?

  I went to prison. So I take the job and I'm like, I tell my friends again, like stupid. I was like, I'm going to go learn a bunch here. And then dudes, when I come back, think about how smart I'll be. And they were just like, okay, I guess we'll just keep working on it over here. Like total jerk move. I just like moved and took this job.

• 3:59Sam Parr?

  In Indonesia.

• 4:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 4:00Sam Parr?

  And you were working for like a mafia guy who like did like junk bonds or what did he do?

• 4:04Shaan Puri?

  No, he just, he basically, what he had done was he, he's like a dropout of second grade or something like that. So he's like, he basically didn't speak English. So my boss never spoke English to me. Only like broken words, crazy guy like um you walk into his office and there's four like executive assistants or EAs or secretaries or whatever and each of them have a giant TV screen and it's just his email because he can't read or type and so they would say out loud his email uh this person emailed you saying this and he would just dictate who's be wall pacing around he'd just say tell them we're not doing the deal unless blah blah and then one would be typing and then the next one would be like hey you got a another email from this person so there's just four screens like that and they were just

• 4:44Sam Parr?

  He's just like the brain.

• 4:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he's just the talking out loud.

• 4:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 4:47Shaan Puri?

  He literally can't read or write.

• 4:48Sam Parr?

  Just like his hands.

• 4:49Shaan Puri?

  And then when and so what he was doing was well his his genius plan was he was like he recognized this arbitrage opportunity that was illegal which is why he went to jail which was that US companies wanted to do business in Indonesia Indonesia is like I don't know maybe the fifth largest population in the world it's got a ton of natural resources like coal and they so Exxon Mobil BP all the ConocoPhillips they all wanted this coal but if you go there and you try to get the rights you go to the auction and they're like uh actually that guy owns it my cousin owns it and they're like what where was the process like yeah the process was done in the middle of the night you don't need to know about it.

• 5:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, deal with it.

• 5:25Shaan Puri?

  Basically you gotta bribe somebody to get something so what he was doing was he was like oh they want this so I'll just go and bribe all the local officials get the I'll get the leases and then I'll just sell it so he bought up for $2 million total like this huge amount of coal and then he sold each piece for 20 million and he amassed $500 million over the course of like three years just doing that and so when but

• 5:51Sam Parr?

  Like liquid so he was liquid.

• 5:54Shaan Puri?

  He was uber liquid like if you if you did something if you like did good job with the negotiation or meeting or contract you'd come into work and he'd just hand you keys to like a BMW or Mercedes or Rolls Royce and then you'd be like that was your bonus like there's no like

• 6:07Sam Parr?

  But did he have paper whose whose name was on the title?

• 6:10Shaan Puri?

  Of the car.

• 6:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 6:11Shaan Puri?

  Everything's his. Like, we lived in this like

• 6:13Sam Parr?

  But you're gonna drive it.

• 6:14Shaan Puri?

  Resort, but it's his apartment. But you get to live there. Everything he owned, and then he owned it under seventy-two Shell companies. So you'd be like, hey, what's this name? And then there's like this one woman who owns the file cabinet and she's got all these companies inside. And so that's what this guy's gig was. And so he was basically, he was like, I don't need to know. He's like, he would just talk to engineers, a technologist and be like, what would you do with this call? He's like, great. Then when, when he would get a, like, he had like all these geologists on, and he'd be like, do a survey, do a report that says this is fit for that purpose. And they're like, well, it's kind of fit. He's like, make it very fit. And he just like basically fudged the whole thing. It's my, my impression.

• 6:52Sam Parr?

  What do you think made him special? He was just bold and willing to cheat and lie and steal.

• 6:56Shaan Puri?

  And he wasn't cheating, like, he was just like,

• 6:59Sam Parr?

  Playing a

• 6:59Shaan Puri?

  That's how business is done in Indonesia. You don't get, like, that's how the property process is done. If you don't want to do that, you cannot play.

• 7:05Sam Parr?

  So you think that he was playing by the rules of the game?

• 7:08Shaan Puri?

  He was playing by the unspoken street rules of the game.

• 7:12Shaan Puri?

  On that part. And then on top of that, he was like, smart and ruthless. So for example, I met him because he met my dad. My dad worked at BP for like thirty years. And my dad was known as an expert at this one technology to get value out of coal. You do this process, you turn coal that's not that valuable into something pretty valuable. So he meets my dad and my, he's like, tell me about this. And my dad's talking to him and my dad's like, do you understand like these things that I'm saying? He's like, I understand that BP will want my coal, basically. He's like, I understand that, like, companies will believe this thing. You're saying there's potential here? It's all I need to know. And my dad was like, but like, should we test it? Or like, he's like, no, no, no. Why would we test it? Let them test it. They're buying it. They can test it. And like, they can see for themselves. Like, you know, if it works or doesn't work, why would I

• 7:57Shaan Puri?

  add risk into this by like doing this? And my dad was just talking to me. And then my dad, one day he goes, I think I've told this story before, but he goes, he's like, he's like, I probably am like a top five expert of this one coal, like, technology in the world. You know pretty much nothing about coal. Yet I've worked my whole career and I've been making a hundred thousand, a hundred fifty thousand, two hundred thousand a year and you're gonna make like three hundred, four hundred million this year. You're gonna make more money than me and I know more about this than you. And he goes, "Yeah, of course." And he was just like, he's like, "Yes." And um,

• 8:29Sam Parr?

  You idiot.

• 8:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Do you think that that's relevant? Basically, he was just like so matter of fact about it. And so I was like, "Oh, wow." So my job when I worked there was company comes in, he doesn't speak English. So he needed an English speaker to do the meeting. And then he would just do the pleasantries and the food and the drinks and all that stuff. And like, you know, just like with a translator, make that work. But he'd rely on us to like, go over the presentation.

• 8:52Sam Parr?

  What was his name?

• 8:53Shaan Puri?

  Kokos.

• 8:54Sam Parr?

  You're like, "All right, gentlemen, Mr. Kokos would like you to feel welcome to here and let you know that he's not here to play any games."

• 9:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it would be like, "Mr. Kokos and these two young women will now go to dinner with you guys and I hope you have a great night." You know, like, because again, that's how business is done there. It's like you go to karaoke. I don't know if you know about all this, like Asian cultures, like you go to karaoke rooms. And there's like, "Why are there all these cute girls here?" It's like bottle service at a club.

• 9:17Sam Parr?

  Were they prostitutes or something or just?

• 9:18Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. I've never like gotten that far into the lion's den, but like, there's something going on. Like, you know, there's some service or I don't know if it's just flirtation or there's more. I don't really know. But like, all I know is this guy was getting mad deals done using this like workflow during the day.

• 9:32Sam Parr?

  They love singing, don't stop believing.

• 9:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm presenting at night, they're singing songs. And so that was, but that was a wild experience for me.

• 9:39Sam Parr?

  So how long did this guy go to jail for?

• 9:41Shaan Puri?

  Well, he died in jail. He's dead. So uh,

• 9:45Shaan Puri?

  why do you think I'm sharing all this? Because I'm like, less afraid now that I've never really talked about this stuff.

• 9:49Sam Parr?

  How much did he get sentenced for?

• 9:51Shaan Puri?

  I think he got like 20 years or something and he died a few years he got cancer or died. He was a nice guy. He was a nice, he was really good to us. He was really nice to us. I mean,

• 9:59Sam Parr?

  So you think he was like, again, I asked this before, like,

• 10:02Shaan Puri?

  He was not evil. He was just doing business by the way that that game was done. Whoever was gonna own that land was gonna do that. He just decided, "It'll be me." And he got fabulously rich off of it. And all the things that seem really crazy to me was also like, kind of standard practice in India and in China about like how business deals are done. Yeah, you drink a lot, you go out to the bars with the, with the And like you, you know, yeah, you, you have to grease the, the, the, the guy who's doing the deal, not necessarily so that you can win, but you won't get it if you don't tip everybody. Basically that's involved in the process.

• 10:34Sam Parr?

  That's actually, that's the first time of two times that you buddied up with a billionaire who says like, here's my playground, you can run it. So you, the sushi thing like was only mildly, it wasn't a success.

• 10:45Shaan Puri?

  Was not a success.

• 10:46Sam Parr?

  But you moved to San Francisco and you got a job with Michael Birch, right?

• 10:50Shaan Puri?

  That's right.

• 10:50Sam Parr?

  And who, who, who was he at the time?

• 10:53Shaan Puri?

  He, uh, by the way, John, like the, uh, hot wings are here. Would you mind getting them? So I told you this when I got here, I was asking people, I was like, yeah, me and Sam are in person. We're gonna just hang out. We're gonna have a good conversation. How do we make, how do we take advantage of the fact they're in person? And two, the two, first two people I said, they go, get a bunch of hot wings. It'll make it hilarious. Try to have the same conversation while you're not wings.

• 11:14Sam Parr?

  Hopefully there's milk.

• 11:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's not. There's no sides. Um, so I moved to San Francisco pretty quickly. I'm like, God, this can't be it. Like.

• 11:25Sam Parr?

  No, dude, it sucks.

• 11:26Shaan Puri?

  Every day I'm waking up at five in the morning, I'm driving to like the fucking fish market, picking up the fresh tuna for the day of job. And then like the business was actually working. Like we, we did it as a cloud kitchen. It was basically making money. I was like, this can't be it. Luckily at that time, my dad had met a guy in Australia who had sold his company and in passing.

• 11:44Sam Parr?

  Dude, your dad is like this.

• 11:46Shaan Puri?

  Looking it up.

• 11:46Sam Parr?

  A king.

• 11:47Shaan Puri?

  He met this guy and he was, he was like in passing. He's like, you know, what are your, what are your kids do? And he's like, oh, my daughter does this. And my son is doing this like, you know, sushi startup thing. You should, should check it out. They're, they write this blog that's really entertaining. It was like, I was, we were creating a word, we had a WordPress blog that was really just for our own amusement, but like, we used to do a lot of stuff to make content that in our mind was like somehow going to help the sushi thing. It didn't help the sushi thing at all, but what it did do was anybody who found that really got behind us. They like, kind of started rooting for us, or they thought these guys are good hustlers. They're entertaining, blah, blah, blah. So this guy who had just sold his company for like 150 million, and he was looking for his next thing to do. He had a non-compete, uh, with current, with the business he knew. So

• 12:30Shaan Puri?

  he knew he needed to do something new, but didn't know what. And he read our blog and he was like, oh yeah, I want to do business with you guys. Like, so he flew us out to Australia and we interviewed for a job with him. And he was like, uh, this guy Nathan Mitchell. So he's, uh, he's based in Brisbane. And his family had a drilling company, sells a drilling company. And so he wanted to do business with my dad, he wanted to do business with us. And he was like, okay, let's put a team together and let's do this like.

• 12:53Sam Parr?

  That's such a cool way of saying that you just, I want to do business with you.

• 12:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, well, that's what I told myself. I don't know what he, I don't know what he wanted. I can't put words in his mouth, but he, um, all right, here we go.

• 13:05Shaan Puri?

  So there's three, there's three flavors. There's like a sweet spicy, a spicy, and then what they called very, very spicy.

• 13:12Sam Parr?

  Which one's the very, very spicy one? I'm not touching that one.

• 13:17Shaan Puri?

  You think it's that one? Yeah, yeah, the six and the buffalo.

• 13:21Sam Parr?

  All right. Buffalo in a minute.

• 13:23Shaan Puri?

  So basically, if I, if we ever answer a question poorly or something, we gotta eat. I don't know, we'll make up a game.

• 13:29Sam Parr?

  I'm gonna eat them because I'm hungry.

• 13:31Shaan Puri?

  So basically, he's like, all right.

• 13:34Shaan Puri?

  I got a bunch of like smart engineers, but this will be so academic unless we get some hustlers. You guys are hustlers. Join me and let's make this happen. He gave us a job offer. I was just happy to live in Australia. So I was like, great, I'll do this. And so we started that company together as a biotech company in Australia. As that goes on, it gets to a point that I thought was, you know, like kind of the transition point where it's like, oh, we signed this deal, it's like ready to like change hands or whatever. And I was like, all right, I'm gonna move to Silicon Valley because I don't know about sushi. I don't know about biotech, but I know I like this early stage stuff. So I applied to two jobs. Stripe and then this place nobody ever heard of called Monkey Inferno. Stripe would have been pretty sick. It was probably 30 employees at the time.

• 14:15Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God.

• 14:16Shaan Puri?

  So if I joined even as just like what I was joining as like a biz dev manager or something like that, I probably would have made like 10 or 20 million dollars if I just stayed there.

• 14:24Sam Parr?

  You think 20?

• 14:25Shaan Puri?

  I think so, yeah, because I, I kind of, I went back one day and I did the math and I was like, I don't know. There's a bunch of assumptions like, will you vest out? Would you get a promotion like, you know, some bunch of things like that. But based on when it was like 20, 2012, early 2012 at the time.

• 14:39Sam Parr?

  Which like a lot of people, I tell people the story about me and they're like, oh, you would have gotten fired. And I actually think they're probably true. In your case, I think you wouldn't have.

• 14:46Shaan Puri?

  No, I would have played that guy. I like that. I'm good at that shit.

• 14:49Sam Parr?

  Because that shit was exciting and you seem like you would have gotten, I don't know those guys, but you seem like you would have got along great with them.

• 14:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like you're, you're more of a cowboy.

• 14:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but I think you legitimately would have made tens of millions of dollars.

• 15:01Shaan Puri?

  I think so too, but it all worked out in the end like I have less than that, but I was able to like, got myself into a position where I was able to do more. So basically it's like either like self-development or just like getting lucky with those shares. And not entirely lucky, like I only applied to Stripe because I thought that was going to be a winner, but like it still would have been lucky that it got to be such a huge winner.

• 15:23Sam Parr?

  Could you tell early on it was going to be a huge winner?

• 15:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know why. I think I was just like, at the time I was reading a lot of Paul Graham essays. I was looking at Y Combinator companies. Within Y Combinator, those founders, I watched some of their interviews. I'm a big like you bet on the person type of like, you know, the person is who builds all the value to the founders. No, I never talked to the founders. I basically blew, I had one interview with this guy, Ben, and he, and I blew it. Like I had the strongest, warm introduction. That guy's mentor was also my mentor. And the mentor thought so highly of me. He was like,

• 15:58Sam Parr?

  How did you blow it? Were you just cocky?

• 16:00Shaan Puri?

  No, they did a sell me this pen type of question.

• 16:03Sam Parr?

  That's a bullshit.

• 16:04Shaan Puri?

  But it wasn't a pen. He was like, he told me, he's like, I'm not going to do a sell me this pen type of thing.

• 16:07Sam Parr?

  But I am.

• 16:08Shaan Puri?

  But I'm going to do sell me this software. And I was like, okay, what's the software? And he's like, you pick, you pick. And so I'm like, it's my first job interview ever. I've never interviewed for a job and I go and I'm like basically dating Angelina Jolie, like Stripe is my first job interview. And I'm like not prepared at all. And he's like, what's a piece of software you like? I'm like, I don't know. Like, so I'm trying to think of what software other people like rather than what I like. So I was like, Basecamp by 37 Singles. I knew that was like a popular, those guys were popular.

• 16:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you didn't even use it though.

• 16:36Shaan Puri?

  And I didn't use it though. So I didn't know what to say, but now I'm pot committed. I didn't, and I didn't want to admit that, hey, I just picked a random company that I don't actually use. Like that didn't make any sense either. And so I'm like fumbling and stumbling and I've noticed the way I got messed up was I started to explain it like I would, I'd be like, you know, so what I would say if I was selling this, he goes, no, ring, ring, hello, go, you're selling this thing to me now. And I was like, oh God. And I just like,

• 17:03Sam Parr?

  Dude, I think that's a bullshit way to interview someone, by the way. I think that's, I think those games are stupid.

• 17:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know. Like, I guess, yeah, I guess I would agree. I don't want to say it's stupid just because I sucked at it.

• 17:13Sam Parr?

  No.

• 17:14Shaan Puri?

  That's not a good reason.

• 17:14Sam Parr?

  I've tried doing those when I've interviewed people. The best way, the best way I've found interviewing someone is I just want to know if I enjoy being around you. And the only way I'm going to judge if like you're qualified is by just looking at your history.

• 17:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's, that's fair.

• 17:26Sam Parr?

  Like, I just want to see what you've done in the past and I'm going to talk to your old coworkers. And then I'm just here to decide if like, this is a good culture fit.

• 17:33Shaan Puri?

  I, I heard of somebody got, this guy Kyle Samini, he's like a VC, he's, he put out a post or put out some interview or whatever where he said, he's like, yeah, there's only one way to apply to my firm. I don't look at any resumes or reference, nothing. He goes, just take one of our existing blog posts and write it better. Like write, write a better blog post than we have on our blog. You could take the same topic or a different topic, just write an amazing blog post. And I was actually like, that's kind of a good test as a good initial filter. I would still want to talk to the person, but like, that's a really good initial filter because when you see someone write, you see how they think.

• 18:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 18:07Shaan Puri?

  And, and how, how, how good they are at like, how good they're writing a blog was actually a pretty good test for a lot of things. So, so I'm kind of into that as a test.

• 18:16Sam Parr?

  What was, oh my God, he's brought milk. Is that milk or it's tinted glasses? So it almost makes it look like eggnog.

• 18:23Shaan Puri?

  Should we, uh, should we start with, uh, with the medium or you want to start with the light?

• 18:28Sam Parr?

  Uh, yeah. But do you want buffalo or sweet?

• 18:31Shaan Puri?

  Well, that's the, should we go?

• 18:32Sam Parr?

  I want buffalo. I don't want sweet.

• 18:34Shaan Puri?

  Okay, here's the buffalo one. We'll do, we'll start with the buffalo. The sweet can be our like palate cleanser.

• 18:40Shaan Puri?

  Nothing like eating on microphone, by the way.

• 18:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Hot wings are the worst.

• 18:44Shaan Puri?

  You have any paper towels?

• 18:45Sam Parr?

  You're going to hear me gnawing.

• 18:47Shaan Puri?

  All right. This is the hot ones episode of my first million.

• 18:53Shaan Puri?

  Thank you. Dude, I'm doing no milk for.

• 18:55Sam Parr?

  What brand? I mean, what, what restaurant?

• 18:58Shaan Puri?

  Shout out to our sponsor, Wing It, providing these wings today.

• 19:02Sam Parr?

  Dude. I used to live in an Asian neighborhood here in San Francisco. And the Chinese and like Hong Kong restaurants would make hot wings. They are the worst at making those hot wings. Cause they put like

• 19:11Shaan Puri?

  Too crazy.

• 19:12Sam Parr?

  It's too breaded. And they uh, put like sticky shit on it. You know what I'm saying? You know, I don't know what that crap, you know that sauce that like

• 19:21Sam Parr?

  Dude, have you ever had a like lunch or dinner at like one of the Chinese restaurants on the inner sunset?

• 19:25Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 19:25Sam Parr?

  Like it's like their hot wings are like breaded, like fried chicken, but then dipped in like sticky sauces.

• 19:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what those are gonna be. I think that's

• 19:33Sam Parr?

  I hate that sticky shit. All the Chinese restaurants I go to, I was like, I was like, I don't know what that sticky crap is, but don't give me that, please. Like, I wanna know.

• 19:39Shaan Puri?

  Also, I went wing in because I knew you would not want a boneless wing.

• 19:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm not an idiot.

• 19:45Shaan Puri?

  I would have done boneless.

• 19:46Sam Parr?

  Dude, that's such a

• 19:47Shaan Puri?

  Cause I'm such a domestic cat.

• 19:49Sam Parr?

  No, this is

• 19:50Shaan Puri?

  You're like a feral cat.

• 19:53Sam Parr?

  You know, the right way to eat these is you just, well, it's easier with the other ones, but you gotta stick the whole thing in your mouth and just pull it out.

• 20:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's like, I've seen so many TikToks of that. Everyone who shows that is fat.

• 20:05Shaan Puri?

  Hundred percent of people who have a strong opinion about how to eat buffalo wings are fat.

• 20:12Sam Parr?

  Those are healthy things to eat.

• 20:14Shaan Puri?

  What, wings?

• 20:14Sam Parr?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:15Shaan Puri?

  This is good. This one's not too spicy at all.

• 20:18Sam Parr?

  What was Monkey Inferno when you applied?

• 20:21Shaan Puri?

  So I um,

• 20:23Shaan Puri?

  I applied and it's basically, it's a startup studio or an idea lab. I forgot what they called themselves at the time. Basically, it was like sixteen engineers. A designer, one designer. And then Michael and Zochi Birch, who were the like, the owners and the, the husband and wife couple that was married. And they were

• 20:42Sam Parr?

  They sold their company for like eight hundred fifty million dollars.

• 20:44Shaan Puri?

  They sold Bebo for eight hundred fifty million.

• 20:47Sam Parr?

  This is how you do it.

• 20:48Shaan Puri?

  Do it into the camera.

• 20:52Shaan Puri?

  Wow, clean.

• 20:54Sam Parr?

  Clean.

• 20:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it looks like you're having fun over there.

• 21:02Shaan Puri?

  I'm a stick to just nibbling on the outside. It's all good for me.

• 21:07Sam Parr?

  I like, I like my, I like my, my wing bones. Like I like my women clean.

• 21:17Shaan Puri?

  In your mouth.

• 21:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So monkey Fred was basically like, this guy's done what I want to do. So let me just go work with him again. Like, well, how did Chipotle start? I don't know. Or how should we be successful? Like the next Chipotle? Let's just go where Chipotle started and follow their footsteps. Same thing. I was like, this guy has built several tech companies, like maybe three or four companies that have gotten millions of users, millions of dollars and one huge one for 850 million.

• 21:47Sam Parr?

  And when he sold that company, that company is considered, I read this article where they said, here's the top 10 worst acquisitions of all time. Number one was Mark Cuban's thing where he sold to Yahoo for two or three billion.

• 21:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:59Sam Parr?

  Number two is Bebo, which sold to AOL for like 850 or whatever. And when he was doing that deal, he must've seen the numbers and been like, oh, Facebook's way better. We have like three weeks to get rid of this thing.

• 22:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. He told me that story. Basically he was like, yeah, Facebook was just growing super fast. And they were just better. Like they were just better at what they were doing. And he's like, we were just getting swamped with like, we had all these like spam bot problems. And then we had like, you know, this other problem. And then like, VCs wanted us to make money. And this, this is our, you know, I heard this president, she wanted to expand and make money doing these like deals with, oh, Eminem is, is doing a takeover of the homepage. And like, wow, we made like half a million dollars doing that. He's like, but.

• 22:38Sam Parr?

  The candy or the rapper?

• 22:42Shaan Puri?

  But they actually did have other stuff. Like they, they started a reality TV show called like, I forgot what it's called, like Joanna or something.

• 22:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that ain't gonna work.

• 22:49Shaan Puri?

  But like at the time, MySpace was like, MySpace was one model. They were like the media company. They sold for 400 or 500 million. Bebo was looking at that, was like, okay, we could do that. Like Hollywood.

• 22:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:59Shaan Puri?

  At, you know, big advertising, big marketing thing. And Facebook was like, blue website, no ads, just focused on photos, engagement, growth, like all that stuff. And they were just growing like crazy because of that. And they had a more controlled growth because they were doing college to college first. So they were able to like. Not have all this like spam and all this other problems because they were gated by you had to have a university email address for a while.

• 23:23Sam Parr?

  And he sells this company and he has all, how much you think he was worth after he's told?

• 23:26Shaan Puri?

  Well, they owned like 70%. So no public math, but you know, 70% of 850 million.

• 23:30Sam Parr?

  70% of 850 and then half to taxes. So hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 23:36Shaan Puri?

  Hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 23:37Sam Parr?

  And he comes to America and he basically hires like, but he had.

• 23:39Shaan Puri?

  He was already in America the whole time.

• 23:40Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 23:41Shaan Puri?

  He was here. He was in the, literally this part of the Bay area.

• 23:43Sam Parr?

  Oh, I didn't know that. So he was here. He buys a place in San Francisco and he hires 10 engineers. And then they're all just working on crazy shit.

• 23:51Shaan Puri?

  He buys seven condos, smashes down the walls to create one huge office. And it was the same office at the Beats by Dre headphones were designed in and stuff like that. So that was one part of the office. The rest were just condos and he builds, he leaves one as a condo that was there. You saw that the bedroom that was there. And then he puts a bar in there. He puts like a whole ping pong kitchen, entertainment area. And then huge office space where we all worked. So day one, I get off a plane from Australia. I come straight for the airport to the office to interview. And I get there a little early and right across the street was a Burlington Co. Factory. So I walked to the. I walked to the Burlington Co. Factory and I'm just standing there in the.

• 24:32Sam Parr?

  Looking for a deal.

• 24:33Shaan Puri?

  With a suitcase.

• 24:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 24:35Shaan Puri?

  They're like, what is this guy doing?

• 24:37Sam Parr?

  You had a suit on?

• 24:38Shaan Puri?

  A suitcase.

• 24:38Sam Parr?

  But, but, oh, a suitcase. What were you wearing?

• 24:41Shaan Puri?

  I was just wearing like, you know, tech casual hoodies.

• 24:45Sam Parr?

  Like trench coats and Burlington Co. Factory, just walk around.

• 24:48Shaan Puri?

  And I'm just standing there for like half an hour. And then I walk across the street and I ring the doorbell. I go inside and I'm just like, wow. And the walls were mirrors that were one way. So you could, if you were inside the restroom, you were looking at a mirror. If you were outside the restroom, you could see into the restroom or something like, no, the other way. If you're looking at the restroom, it looked like a mirror. If you're inside, you could see out. Yeah. The non-weird way. It looked like people could see you, but they couldn't. So they're like, this guy had a good sense of humor and sense of style with different things. So I'm just like, I don't know. I've never seen anything like this.

• 25:14Sam Parr?

  That place probably has like.

• 25:17Sam Parr?

  A few million dollars worth of furnishings.

• 25:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it was crazy. That was a crazy place.

• 25:23Shaan Puri?

  And then I interviewed him and it was the easiest interview I ever had. Most chill interview. It was just like, tell me your story. He's kind of amused with my story.

• 25:31Sam Parr?

  Cause he's like a cheeky guy.

• 25:33Shaan Puri?

  And he's just, he had already decided. That's what he told me later. He's like, you had, I had applied with this like website resume where I was like, oh, why I'm the guy for the job. I wrote this email. And then I started sending them like, ideas for their current products. I was like, hey, I checked out the flow for this. I think it could be improved here and here. So I was like trying to make an impression. I was, I didn't do a job search. I did a job hunt. I was like, this is the job I want. I'm going to zone in on it and I'm going to go like hunt for that. And I'm going to try to capture that job.

• 26:00Sam Parr?

  That's exactly what I did too.

• 26:02Shaan Puri?

  And so that had worked. Basically by the time I got there, he was already into interested. As long as I wasn't a weirdo, I think I wouldn't have blown it. And so chill. And I got the job working under him. And then like six months later, he was like, hey, you should run this thing, basically.

• 26:17Sam Parr?

  And you guys started three or two or three products?

• 26:21Shaan Puri?

  Um, more than we did like maybe six or seven.

• 26:24Sam Parr?

  Two or three that were like.

• 26:25Shaan Puri?

  Some would only last a month. Some would last.

• 26:27Sam Parr?

  What was the?

• 26:28Shaan Puri?

  Two years.

• 26:29Sam Parr?

  What was the MO? He said, just all right, here's $2 million a year. How much budget did you have?

• 26:32Shaan Puri?

  We had a business that was already making about $2 million a year, but it was declining.

• 26:37Sam Parr?

  Birthdayalarm.com, right?

• 26:38Shaan Puri?

  Birthdayalarm.com. And then we.

• 26:39Sam Parr?

  It was like a business.

• 26:40Shaan Puri?

  One project was just maintain it. And then at one point, as it was just declining, because it's like, you're just fixing bugs. Like, let's turn this around. So we did a turnaround. Then that got back up.

• 26:49Sam Parr?

  And that was a website where like, my aunt would pay you $10 a year and you would be reminded when it was someone's birthday.

• 26:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. She'll never forget Sammy's birthday. And then when it's Sammy's birthday, if she's paying, the reminder is free. If you want to send a card, you pay the subscription. Like $14 a year or something like that.

• 27:08Sam Parr?

  And it made between two and three million dollars, all profit almost, other than hosting.

• 27:11Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. Um, and so that was the cash guy that funded the whole lab. And then on top of that, if we, you know, if we needed more expenses, they would just invest money into it. So I think it funded, I think it funded half and he put half, uh, just cash. And his, his mandate was like, Uh, we don't do B to B and we don't do real world like T-shirts or Uber or things like that. We don't do like physical world stuff.

• 27:33Sam Parr?

  That from Bebo probably.

• 27:34Shaan Puri?

  He was just like, yeah, like whatever. You gotta pick a lane and like, we're pretty broad. Like it could be any idea, but like of the lanes, let's not, let's do only consumer and let's do only software.

• 27:42Sam Parr?

  How many engineers did you have there?

• 27:44Shaan Puri?

  It's like 16 ish, 18.

• 27:46Sam Parr?

  When I went there, I was like, oh, this is a tech billionaires country club. That's what it felt like.

• 27:51Shaan Puri?

  Not even a country club. Nobody else was there. It's like his play. It was like his man cave.

• 27:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Playground. Just like, yeah, man cave is a better word because you had like old Mac computers as like art and he had like really nice actual real art and like, it was just like, oh, if I'm a billionaire nerd in San Francisco, this is exactly what I would do as well. So instead of like owning like old Ferraris, he just hired 16 engineers to make dumb shit.

• 28:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Yeah. Those two, he just didn't keep them in the office.

• 28:16Sam Parr?

  Oh, he had those two. Yeah. Uh, and so, all right. So.

• 28:19Shaan Puri?

  He had all the, he's got an island. He's got cars. He's got, you know, his own projects. He owns his own hotel, his own private.

• 28:26Sam Parr?

  Do you think he was happier than you? Did you think he, back then, do you think he was happier for back then when he was a, you know, billionaire? He was probably in his late 30s at that point, maybe early 40s.

• 28:37Shaan Puri?

  40s, yeah.

• 28:38Sam Parr?

  Would you think he was happier than you are now?

• 28:43Shaan Puri?

  He's definitely more at peace. So I think I'm pretty joyful. Like on a day to day basis, I'm kind of bouncing around and he's more stoic than that. Like he's, he definitely has a good sense of humor and laughs a bunch and just that doesn't take stuff too seriously. I get, I'm more easily excitable. So I'm excited about random stuff, anything. I can get excited about anything.

• 29:03Sam Parr?

  And probably still want to prove yourself.

• 29:05Shaan Puri?

  But I have this inner, not peace. I'm not just at rest. I'm like trying to do something, prove something, be something, make something, earn something, win something. And like I, he just didn't have that, that same.

• 29:19Sam Parr?

  Because of the acquisition?

• 29:20Shaan Puri?

  Because of that. And I think just wisdom. Like I think he saw, okay, you know, his whole cohort of friends mostly became super successful. They were, they were the who's who of Silicon Valley. And so he told me once, he was, cause I was like, I was like, how come you don't blog? Like, I feel like all the VCs are blogging. At the time, that was like the big thing. And I was like, why don't you, he's like, well, I just don't feel like I have anything like that interesting to say. And I thought that was the funniest answer because I was like, I could have heard him say, I should, I or I do, and then, or he could have said, no, I don't want to do that because of this, like, I play the game this way instead. But it was so humbled to just say, I just don't feel like I have, like, if I don't have something interesting to contribute, why would I just blog in your face?

• 30:04Sam Parr?

  Dude, today.

• 30:05Shaan Puri?

  That would be rude.

• 30:06Sam Parr?

  Dharmesh Shah, the founder of HubSpot, he's, you know, this billionaire guy, he's like uber successful. He told me, he goes, yeah, I'm speaking at Masters of Scale, Reid Hoffman's thing, his conference. And he was like, yeah, it's like, you know, the founders of Stripe, Bill Gates, the CEO of Uber, whatever, like, kind of the who's who of all these big shot, he's like, I'm so humbled and honored and I can't believe like they're having me. And I was like, I said, I go, really? Can you really not believe that? Like, it seems like, it seems like pretty believable, like, you're like, that seems like a very believable thing.

• 30:40Shaan Puri?

  Evidence.

• 30:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like, I don't, I don't, like, from an outside perspective, you're like a billionaire, you're HubSpot at some, I don't, I don't know what the cutoff of a Fortune 500 is, but like, it's definitely there or right around there. You know, at times it's worth 20 to 30 billion dollars and you made it. I mean, I, I can believe that you'd be there and he's like, well, you know, they're just, I'm just honored. And I just, and then like, I, you know, I cannot believe I'm actually going to be there. And I was like, well, I don't, I don't even know what to say. That's just so hard for me to grasp because from the outside, you guys all seem like the same thing.

• 31:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 31:14Sam Parr?

  You know what I mean?

• 31:14Shaan Puri?

  Totally.

• 31:16Sam Parr?

  But I thought that was weird. So you're the-

• 31:17Shaan Puri?

  I'll give you, I'll give you an example of a way where I saw that he was more at peace. Like, we had a product that was launching and the press was covering it, TechCrunch was covering it. And it was like, oh, sweet, TechCrunch wants to do an article. And they sent, they either sent over the draft or they sent over like some bullet points or whatever. No, no, it was good, but it was like, they had said something that was like more than, it was like, they had said 200,000 and actually it was 20,000 users or whatever, like, whatever, some number was inflated. And I was like, so happy, I was like, yes, this is great. Like, they're just going to say a great thing about us even greater than reality, like, but I was just sort of like, I wasn't going to correct the record. Like, that's on them, right? You know, like, in my mind, I was like, this is a good thing, they're over giving us credit.

• 32:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 32:02Shaan Puri?

  They're giving us more credit than we deserve. And he was like, he's like, well, we should just correct it so it's the real number. And I was like, but then it's like worse for us, right? He's like, yeah, but like, you know, we don't need to- We don't need to do that. And that was the first one. Then the second one, he was, uh, he was talking about, um, I think he had a bad experience with his VCs at Bebo. And when we had some VCs interested in funding us at Blab. And he was just like, he was sharing some stories and he had told me, he was like, um, I was like, do you think that they'll follow through? He's like, oh, they'll follow through like Silicon Valley. He's like, he's like, I was like, I would never not follow through. He's like, if I commit and

• 32:41Sam Parr?

  Even there's not a contract.

• 32:42Shaan Puri?

  And then I realized that, oh, it's not going to work out for this. I committed. I'm in. He's like, because this, this is a town where you play the game for like 30 years with the same people. And if you make a move that's like self advantageous now, um, like your reputation is worth more than whatever that's whatever that is.

• 32:59Sam Parr?

  That was the, I did.

• 33:00Shaan Puri?

  That was his approach. And like, actually I've, there's many examples of people who are like, sure, my reputation is bad, but like I banked 40 million or 80 million or a hundred. There's like all these examples of that in Silicon Valley too. And you, you know what? Like, they won in their way. But when he's like, he was just so high integrity. And I was not as high integrity. And I realized the reason why I was a high integrity is not because I'm evil. Not because I'm a bad dude or because I have like, I just don't have morals.

• 33:25Sam Parr?

  Short-term thinking.

• 33:26Shaan Puri?

  I was just short-term oriented and I was, I was afraid of failing. I was like, you know, so it was like, okay.

• 33:33Shaan Puri?

  What can I do to like increase my odds of winning? Where he was just more confident. He was just like, we're going to win and we don't need to, we don't need to play the game in any way other than the, the straight way to win. And like, I hadn't really internalized that. But once I saw that, that was really sick to see because then I was able to like adjust my knob and be like, oh, yeah, I just never going to lie. Like I just don't want to lie. Even though my instinct was to exaggerate or my instinct was to not correct if somebody else believed something about me that wasn't true. Like whereas, you know, he would just, he was just totally comfortable in his own skin. So is he happier than me? I would say yes, because he's more comfortable in his own skin. He's more comfortable with where he's at. He's more at peace with where he's at.

• 34:15Shaan Puri?

  He's not like at this inner, inner fire or war to whatever. Now, at the same time, I'm sure he misses like the adventure, the thrill of like building something and having it succeed and having that mean something. Cause now, no matter what he does, like it's very hard to have it mean something unless it's just like intrinsic motivation, like I just love the product or it's helping impact people. But like the thrill of winning is kind of gone because he's already won it like such a high. You know, if you go to the arcade machine and you set the high score and it's so out of reach. You know, like you can play and have a good game, but like you're still gonna never touch that high score again. And I think he knows that.

• 34:50Sam Parr?

  You guys like launched two or three things, but the last thing was, the last thing was Blab, which I remember. So that's where we became friends when you were one or two years into being the CEO, I think.

• 35:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 35:01Sam Parr?

  And I was like, what do you do? And you're like, well, we're launching this thing. And then you kept jumping from thing and I would criticize you. I'm like, dude, you just gotta stick to this one thing.

• 35:10Shaan Puri?

  Right. But you're probably right.

• 35:11Sam Parr?

  Well, who, who knows? I, I now I, I used to firmly believe that was the way. Then I've seen some of the things you've done. I've seen some of the way, some of our other friends have done, like there's tons of ways to get things done. What was the final thing that sold?

• 35:23Shaan Puri?

  The final thing that sold was we, after pivot, after pivot, after pivot. We got to a thing that was like a esports app. So basically esports is just like trend where people are playing.

• 35:33Sam Parr?

  And back then it was just starting.

• 35:36Shaan Puri?

  It's like, it's, it's still just starting. It's like, it was around, but whatever.

• 35:40Sam Parr?

  But it was really just starting. I mean, Twitch was like only six or seven years old at the time.

• 35:44Shaan Puri?

  No, no, this, oh yeah, I guess, I don't know. Twitch was, Twitch was around, Twitch was big, but it wasn't, that wasn't really the thing. It was basically the last idea we had, the one that we got acquired for. We basically built an app that was like the way a high schooler could go and play, you could sign up for basketball or soccer or whatever, like some game. You could go play in a league for it. And you would pay your league dues and like, there's little league baseball, then there's like, you know, AAU sports, there's all these youth leagues, youth sports is a big deal. There was no youth esports. That was the whole idea. And so we had had a bunch of technology. We'd already been doing stuff in streaming and gaming. And so we took all that tech and we made an app that let any high schooler sign up and play in a Fortnite league. Fortnite was the big game at the time. It was like Fortnite was ripping.

• 36:27Shaan Puri?

  And there were more people that played Fortnite in the world than played basketball. And so we were like, that's crazy. This has more players, but there's no organized league. There's only the pros. There's no like amateurs. And so we created the high school Fortnite league and we had an app that you would sign up. You'd make your team, you could invite friends and then you would compete against other teams. And you get like ranked, you play in tournaments and all of it was streamed, which was cool because it would make it turned into like a spectator sport.

• 36:52Sam Parr?

  How big did that get?

• 36:54Shaan Puri?

  It was the biggest esports league, but it was small overall. We were only maybe six or nine months into that version of it. It maybe had

• 37:05Shaan Puri?

  10 to 25,000 players, active players at the time.

• 37:10Shaan Puri?

  Which was big because it like in youth, like, you know, in theory, those people would pay us like you. If I go take my daughter's three and put her in a soccer league, I'm going to pay 99 bucks or whatever for her to be in that league. So same thing, if we charge, if we started charging for it, it would have this like SaaS business that was going to generate. I thought millions of dollars a year, but maybe tens, probably never hundreds. And so that was the problem. I was like, oh, if we do this really well and we succeed at this, it'll get to maybe like 10 million a year, maybe 20 million a year in revenue, but never really beyond that.

• 37:43Sam Parr?

  And Dude, isn't that fucked up?

• 37:45Shaan Puri?

  That's not what we signed up for.

• 37:46Sam Parr?

  I know, but that's messed up. That sucks. It's not, it doesn't suck because I agree that that, well, that's just the game. That just sucks at that.

• 37:53Shaan Puri?

  That's not enough.

• 37:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah. If you owned a hundred percent of that, you could have made a sip, maybe a similar ish amount of wealth as Mike Birch.

• 38:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. Uh, you know, but it wasn't structured that way.

• 38:04Sam Parr?

  I know. It sucks.

• 38:05Shaan Puri?

  And so once, once I kind of got that feeling and I was six or seven years into the whole monkey inferno experiment with creating products with that same team, same group. It was like, let's sell this and let's shake things up. You know, I had a guy, I was lucky, a friend, Sully, like, like on the outside, everything was amazing. Office was amazing.

• 38:24Sam Parr?

  When I met you.

• 38:24Shaan Puri?

  Product was cool.

• 38:25Sam Parr?

  You were like, I'm making a hundred and 50 grand a year. And I'm like, oh my God, you're like the wealthiest person I've ever met. It's like, you have a hundred and $50,000 a year? That's crazy. And you're only in your twenties? I remember you told me that and I was like shocked. I was like, and you have this sick office? Like you're set.

• 38:41Shaan Puri?

  Felt that way at that time. And then over time, your expectations change. You meet other people who are doing better, better. And you're like, oh, man, hundreds, I was like 160, 160. That's nothing like I'm way underpaid. And, and in general, I was just like, I just wanted to get a win.

• 38:54Sam Parr?

  I don't think you're underpaid.

• 38:56Shaan Puri?

  Well, for a startup founder, I wasn't underpaid. But if I just worked at a job, I would have sold the equity, the equity was what mattered. And so I own 20% of that, of that, of the business. And so anyways, we decided to sell. And then that was, you know, a crazy process and.

• 39:13Sam Parr?

  Life changing?

• 39:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 39:16Sam Parr?

  Financially life changing?

• 39:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, because go from no millions to millions is, you know, that's life changing.

• 39:22Sam Parr?

  And you actually stayed there. Amazon, Amazon bought the company and you stayed there for two years, right?

• 39:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 39:26Sam Parr?

  And are you happy you stayed?

• 39:29Shaan Puri?

  Um, like, I don't really think about the past, like, what's like, am I happy I stayed? Yeah, sure. Like, you know, fine with it. In retrospect, if I could go advise myself now, I would have stayed only one year. I stayed two. But I also got a bunch of other benefits. Like, I popped out two kids and was able to, like, spend time with them and didn't have to stress about.

• 39:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you like collectively had like 10 months of paternity leave.

• 39:53Shaan Puri?

  What's that?

• 39:53Sam Parr?

  I mean, you had like 10 months of paternity leave.

• 39:55Shaan Puri?

  No, actually, stupidly, I only took two weeks with the first kid.

• 39:58Sam Parr?

  What were you thinking?

• 40:00Shaan Puri?

  And I fell into all the traps you could follow to like at a big company. It's like, oh, they put me on this special project and the CEO really loves it and cares. And now's the critical time. And, and also being at home, honestly, as a, like, being at home is harder than being at work. So it was like, actually, kind of easier to go back to work in a way. But like, I should have taken more time and I just sort of like, didn't. And I think a lot of employees fall into this trap in companies. They don't take, that's like, the company has unlimited time off. You don't take it. You could take this much for paternity maternity. It's like, oh, you feel pressure to cut it short because you want to get back to your team or your, whatever, stupid. But the second year I was way more chill and basically did very little work.

• 40:37Sam Parr?

  When did you start the e-comm thing?

• 40:40Shaan Puri?

  Somewhere around that time.

• 40:41Sam Parr?

  And you, we don't talk about it on purpose.

• 40:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 40:43Sam Parr?

  And so we won't talk about it much. But what do you want to say? Anything about it?

• 40:47Shaan Puri?

  Uh,

• 40:48Sam Parr?

  It's a big business.

• 40:49Shaan Puri?

  I think, yeah, I think we'll start talking about it soon. Maybe that'll be.

• 40:52Sam Parr?

  You want to say how big it is?

• 40:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it does like 15 million a year, profitable.

• 40:58Sam Parr?

  Damn, dude.

• 40:58Shaan Puri?

  Bootstrapped in two years.

• 41:00Sam Parr?

  You told me you were doing it. And I was like, why would you ever do that? And are you happy that you did that or not?

• 41:07Shaan Puri?

  Same thing. In retrospect, I would go advise myself, don't do this path.

• 41:10Sam Parr?

  Because you already had like clout a little bit. And now, so during the sale of the first company, you started this podcast. And then that's when the hustle and this podcast kind of collaborated. But this podcast, people asked me how to grow a pod. And I'm like, I don't know, because Sean like started doing it right away. And it kind of worked the day one. Like, we got, I think, the first episode with 60,000 downloads.

• 41:33Shaan Puri?

  The first one was just, hey, there's a new thing and people will go check it out.

• 41:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but it still was a good start.

• 41:38Shaan Puri?

  But it got to a good start. And then when we switched it to this format, it got even better. It like took off in a better way. And then just time, time, like, time.

• 41:47Sam Parr?

  It's been three years.

• 41:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And so the thing I've learned, so why do I say I would go back and do it differently is because I now realize something I already knew, but I didn't have the guts to act on, which was that at any given time, you're really only going to get to throw your all into one thing.

• 42:05Shaan Puri?

  And so why not throw, like, if you're gonna do that, like, choose really wisely. So for example, when we got acquired by Twitch, I didn't want to throw my all into that. That wasn't like, gonna be my, my, my baby, my future was to be an employee at Twitch. I wanted to earn out the deal. And I was feeling like I needed to get that check, right? So there was like a desperation to secure the bag.

• 42:30Sam Parr?

  Which, by the way, is the right move, I think.

• 42:32Shaan Puri?

  Maybe.

• 42:32Sam Parr?

  I think selling out is the way to go.

• 42:34Shaan Puri?

  I had asked a buddy who was more successful at the time. And I was like, what would you do if you were me? He's like, I would quit on day one. He's like, I would sell so that your team is fine and your investors are happy. And then I would quit on day one. I go, why? Like, it's so much money. If I just stay even one year, one year, no big deal. And he's like, he goes, the surface area of opportunity is too wide.

• 42:52Sam Parr?

  Who said that?

• 42:53Shaan Puri?

  Sully.

• 42:54Sam Parr?

  He's so smart, man.

• 42:55Shaan Puri?

  Because I went, I remember we went for a walk and we walked for like an hour and a half in the mission. We just walked back and forth through the mission on the streets. It was like, everything's closing, mission's ghetto as hell. And we were just like, imagine like pacing furiously. We were doing that. And we were just talking through what's next. And I said, I really want to do this podcast. I want to create a podcast. He's like, podcast? I was like, yeah. I was like, I think if I could just be in a million people's ear balls every morning. That's like, that would be the most fulfilling thing for me. And it'd be awesome.

• 43:20Sam Parr?

  You're like 20% of the way there, maybe.

• 43:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know, million is now I realize like very aggressive of like every morning.

• 43:27Sam Parr?

  Aggressive.

• 43:27Shaan Puri?

  But like, you know, if you just keep going for five years, it could happen like that. That that's realistic now. But I remember thinking that's what I want to do, and I couldn't explain why I was just sure I wanted to do it. Which in retrospect is a really good signal like that's the type of stuff you should go do. And I did that. But then the other thing he was just like, yeah, we just quit from day one, the surface area of opportunities too wide. And I looked at it and like, uh, and I was like, well, what would I do if it wasn't this? And he's like, again, the surface area is so wide and anything. And I was like, give me an example. He goes, all right, I got a company for you. We could do right now. I'll co found this with you.

• 43:59Sam Parr?

  And he totally talked you into it. Because the Sully was all he had just sold an econ business that he had just.

• 44:06Shaan Puri?

  No, no, this is a different idea, not even the econ business. This is a different thing. He goes, he goes in e commerce, there's this company called Klaviyo, their email sending company.

• 44:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and they were really taking off.

• 44:16Shaan Puri?

  He goes Klaviyo for SMS. And I go, doesn't Klaviyo do SMS? He goes, no, I go, won't they? He goes, yeah, they probably will. Aren't there these other companies? Yeah, sure. But he's like, you're focusing on the wrong thing. I'm telling you, I'm in econ. And SMS is like, it's like email, but better people open it. And he's like, you just need a bit like, if we just build SMS for econ, I think we can go get like 100 brands that matter. And this will be a valuable company. And I was like, okay, it kind of sounds like, I don't know, it was just like this idea. It was almost boring because it was like, here's a ready made idea. There was like nothing else to think it was like, anything I said was basically a distraction.

• 44:50Sam Parr?

  You think he was right?

• 44:51Shaan Puri?

  He was absolutely right cuz uh, so we talked about it. We went kind of down that rabbit hole for like a little bit. We tried to find maybe a different operator to come run it. And then I see this company in Y C called Postscript. And I send it to him and I go, hey, this is they're doing Klaviyo for SMS. He goes, all right, I'm going to invest. So he goes and him and his brother invested it. And Postscript is now like a multi hundred million dollar company in the same, this is the same period of time, right? So like, that was a path. Sure, maybe it wouldn't have worked out for us, but like, I don't know. I would guess it probably would.

• 45:21Sam Parr?

  But like physics has allowed it to happen.

• 45:22Shaan Puri?

  And like, it played out. And so whether it's that one or even just the econ thing, if I just started it at day one, like the econ thing is more valuable than what I earned out at Twitch. Like it will be. And so like, again, the surface of our opportunity was very wide and I was, one thing was a guarantee and it was right in front of me. Everything else was unknown. And so I've learned now that like, you should just. Keep going until you like go like turn down a thing that's known if it's not what you want. If it's not the real thing that you want, because only when you turn that down, then do you get the opportunity to go find the thing you want. It's like dating, right? You're dating somebody who you don't want to marry,

• 46:03Shaan Puri?

  but they're okay, they're good. It's just not, they're not the one. And you might try to talk yourself into it, but like if you're talking yourself into it, you're already losing.

• 46:09Sam Parr?

  And then like.

• 46:10Shaan Puri?

  You gotta, you gotta break up in order to meet the next person.

• 46:13Sam Parr?

  And like six or 12, I forget when you started the milk road eight months ago.

• 46:18Shaan Puri?

  We launched in January. Yeah. So.

• 46:20Sam Parr?

  So, and that's actually going really nicely. You have 150 to 250,000 subscribers.

• 46:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, over 200.

• 46:27Sam Parr?

  Wow. Okay. And maybe you'll run that forever. Maybe you'll sell it. Who knows? Have you ever thought about what you want to do for the rest of your life?

• 46:35Shaan Puri?

  I think about that all the time. I want to brainstorm that with you.

• 46:36Sam Parr?

  Well, okay, what would you like to do?

• 46:39Shaan Puri?

  Well.

• 46:40Sam Parr?

  Assuming that Milk Road's not a thing.

• 46:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, assuming that Milk Road's not a thing and assuming that the e-commerce thing is not a thing. So let's assume two things right there, because in the spirit of what I'm talking about,

• 46:52Shaan Puri?

  if it's not the one, then you gotta find a different way. So let's say, let's say that there's something else that's the one. What would it look like? What would it be like? I, I think there's one version of it that's like this podcast, just more like, like, what if this podcast, if this podcast was 10 times bigger? Would I really care to do anything else?

• 47:13Sam Parr?

  Financially 10 times bigger?

• 47:16Shaan Puri?

  Uh, either way, audience, I think.

• 47:17Sam Parr?

  Well, is there.

• 47:18Shaan Puri?

  Translates to money. So.

• 47:19Sam Parr?

  Is there a, is there an amount of money? Like whether money is important or not, it is kind of, you have, I think you should have worked backwards from that.

• 47:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Sam Parr?

  Is there an amount of money that you'd want per year?

• 47:31Shaan Puri?

  The target currently is 50.

• 47:34Sam Parr?

  In net worth?

• 47:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, total net worth. Uh, that's not like in tied up in one company that's like can, can die next month. Like in, you know, assets you own, kind of like liquid, you know, but it could be a little bit more.

• 47:47Sam Parr?

  Like loanable against.

• 47:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like not concentrated into one paper valuation of one company.

• 47:52Sam Parr?

  But a podcast would more so be a, or a media company for you would be more so an annual income thing, I would imagine.

• 47:58Shaan Puri?

  So it could stack up to 50 or it could just wait and then sell for 50 or, or, or net 50 in the end in some way.

• 48:07Sam Parr?

  Well, I think that you so.

• 48:09Shaan Puri?

  And by the way. Fifty is this random number.

• 48:12Sam Parr?

  You just made it up, yeah.

• 48:13Shaan Puri?

  So, maybe we should start there. Maybe that's the wrong number.

• 48:16Sam Parr?

  No, I think that's a good number. I know what you like. You like nice shit. You like spending a lot of stuff. I think fifty is a good number for you.

• 48:21Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 48:22Sam Parr?

  I think the difference between thirty and fifty for you or me is actually not a significant amount.

• 48:28Shaan Puri?

  Right, so shoot for fifty, then land where you land.

• 48:30Sam Parr?

  I think that's a good number. The difference between anything above a hundred is enough today that you would really, really have to work hard. Like, you'd have to be, you'd purposely have to be a jackass to go through it. That's mostly true for fifty. Ten, you can go through. You know, that's just like a big house and like a medical emergency. And like, you can like, kind of blow through that.

• 48:49Shaan Puri?

  A bad investment.

• 48:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I mean, it is. You know what I mean? And you can go and you'd be back.

• 48:53Shaan Puri?

  A lawsuit, yeah.

• 48:54Sam Parr?

  You'd be back on a two or three, like, pretty quickly. Thirty is in the range of where it's enough that, like, you can't screw it up. A hundred, for sure, like, you're, you're, you would have to have, like, some crooks around you. Or, like, a stupid, like, your dad's smart enough to be like, hey, man, um, can we have a, can we talk about this? Uh, I think you're going too hard. You don't need a Lamborghini yacht. You know what I mean?

• 49:16Shaan Puri?

  Buffalo, Buffalo time.

• 49:19Sam Parr?

  So, anyway.

• 49:19Shaan Puri?

  Hot one?

• 49:20Sam Parr?

  We'll do hot one. Dude.

• 49:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we're talking money now.

• 49:24Sam Parr?

  Fifty, fifty's enough. I think that's a good goal. But, and I think that I've seen you grow to be this, like, tech person to a media person. You are better at media than you are tech.

• 49:35Shaan Puri?

  I believe that.

• 49:36Sam Parr?

  You are better at investing than you are at running things.

• 49:39Shaan Puri?

  I believe that.

• 49:40Sam Parr?

  You are better at starting things than you are running things. And you are horrible at managing, like, I don't, theoretically, at managing fifty-plus people.

• 49:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't even know.

• 49:51Sam Parr?

  I think you'd be awesome at leading them, but horrible at managing them.

• 49:55Shaan Puri?

  Just don't want to.

• 49:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but you're really good at being, like, a leader. I bet you'd actually be a really good CEO, too. I think you'd be a horrible.

• 50:03Shaan Puri?

  Just like, what, like inspirational speeches?

• 50:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you're, you're naturally inspira-, like, what Jerry, Jerry Seinfeld said, comedy is like a secret weapon that most people don't understand. Comedy is kind of, and storytelling, it's just charisma, the ability to capture someone's, like, imagination and make them believe something. Or, or capture emotion from them. Or make them feel certain emotion. You definitely have that. You have that. You, everyone, a lot of people ask me, like, was Sean always good at this? I'm like, yeah, he was actually always good at it. And then he's gotten better. So I think that you, you have that. So I would say you could be a CEO, but you're, you actually got really lucky and Ben Levy doesn't publicly get enough credit, but that's like your partner in all these things.

• 50:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 50:41Sam Parr?

  He 100% is your yin to the yang. And if I was you, I would go way harder on that partnership with him and potentially launch more things. And

• 50:52Sam Parr?

  let him operate.

• 50:54Shaan Puri?

  Who's having the most fun? Like, who's got the, who's having the most fun with?

• 50:58Sam Parr?

  I mean, you.

• 50:59Shaan Puri?

  With their life stuff.

• 51:00Sam Parr?

  You are doing pretty good.

• 51:01Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Besides me, who else?

• 51:04Sam Parr?

  Rob Dyrdek was pretty amazing. I think they're like, like you're more of a Rob Dyrdek than you are Mark Zuckerberg. That's for sure. You know what I mean? Like if it's like, just like one guy, one company, hardcore tech versus like little here, a little there, a little here, all based around like a personality.

• 51:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. You know,

• 51:21Shaan Puri?

  what is like, okay, you exited recently. You had to think about what you're going to do next.

• 51:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 51:27Shaan Puri?

  How did you think about it?

• 51:28Sam Parr?

  What I, I actually gave this advice to someone. So what I did, I sold. So I sold for enough that I'm.

• 51:34Shaan Puri?

  You don't have to do anything.

• 51:34Sam Parr?

  I don't have to do anything. Not enough that like, I'm going to go and buy crazy jet, enough that I still am ambitious, but enough that like a fairly luxury level of needs are met forever. And when I did, I did that and I realized, okay, for the next 12 months, but it could be longer. All I'm going to do is research and think. And I never give anyone that advice because I say, you just got to start and do stuff. And by the end of this weekend, like have something live, but I'm like, no, I already, I know I do that. I, I have that ability. So for the next 12 months, wherever long I'm going to feel, this sounds like I'm fucking Oprah. I'm going to be not guilty about like.

• 52:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. This is so Oprah.

• 52:14Sam Parr?

  There's like some woo woo shit.

• 52:15Shaan Puri?

  Is that actually from Oprah?

• 52:16Sam Parr?

  No, but I just like.

• 52:17Shaan Puri?

  It sounds like it.

• 52:18Sam Parr?

  I, cause like you feel guilty not doing shit. You're like, oh, I'm missing out. I'm missing out. I'm like, no, this is like really Oprah. I'm going to, I'm going to let, I'm going to forgive myself.

• 52:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 52:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Like, cause I sound like I need one of those Coachella hats that chicks wear. Like I, I, I was like, I'm just not going to be guilty about doing stuff. I'm just going to research. I'm going to read. And when the feeling feels right, it's going to feel right. And I'm going to go all in. But until then, I'm not going to, I'm not going to say maybe this stuff. I'm not going to say yes to anything. I'm going to say no to everything. I'm just not going to, I'm just not going to worry about it.

• 52:45Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 52:45Sam Parr?

  And I just read and I researched and I think that. I actually think you suck at sitting still.

• 52:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's why I gotta, I gotta do it and forgive myself, give myself grace.

• 52:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 52:58Shaan Puri?

  Have grace for myself.

• 52:59Sam Parr?

  But you have to, you gotta chill because like someone like you, you can execute. Like you, you already, you can do stuff, right?

• 53:06Shaan Puri?

  But then, okay, so you chill, you read, you do all the stuff.

• 53:10Sam Parr?

  Talk to people and you talk to people, you, I mean.

• 53:12Shaan Puri?

  And then ideas come up.

• 53:14Sam Parr?

  The business that I'm talking about, the business that I end up doing now, I interviewed them on the pod. Like multiple, I was like, I'm just gonna talk to you. Like I got that, go and interview people.

• 53:24Shaan Puri?

  So, so you do that, but how did you resist the temptation to, okay, how many ideas did you have for this one?

• 53:30Sam Parr?

  None.

• 53:31Shaan Puri?

  That you were, none? You weren't tempted to do anything before that?

• 53:34Sam Parr?

  No, no, I, no, I was not.

• 53:37Shaan Puri?

  This was the first idea that you were like, I'm gonna do it. And then you just did it.

• 53:40Sam Parr?

  It was the first one that I felt, okay, I did investing. So I did angel investing. I realized that's stupid and I hate it. I hate angel investing. You're good at it and you love it. I think I'm only good at it because I'm popular, but I don't like, I don't like it. Uh, and I hate it. It's so boring. Dude, it's so stupid. So I did that and we invested $15 million in one year into 70 companies. And so I kinda like went fast on that and then I realized, uh-uh, I'm out. I hate this. So I bailed. Uh, and so I like tinkered with that, but that wasn't like a full-time thing. We only worked on that 10 hours a week.

• 54:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 54:15Sam Parr?

  So anyway, um, I do, I just read like crazy and talked to people. I think you should do that. Why wouldn't you just take like 18 months and just like.

• 54:23Shaan Puri?

  That is my plan, not 18, but like.

• 54:25Sam Parr?

  Just however long it takes.

• 54:26Shaan Puri?

  Uh, basically I was like, let's take 12.

• 54:28Sam Parr?

  Listen, here, this is, this analogy or this visualization will help. Imagine your life is this line, all right? You're about a third of the way through, maybe 25% of the way, maybe if we live a long time. This amount of time, this like one inch on this 15 inch segment, this one inch of time can, was gonna impact the rest of the 10 inches. Do you know what I'm saying?

• 54:50Shaan Puri?

  It changes the color of the rest.

• 54:51Sam Parr?

  It changes the entire trajectory. So why not spend like a ton of time early on, really focusing instead of, because there's a chance that had you done that previously, which you didn't have the luxury to, but had you done that previously, or maybe you did have the luxury to.

• 55:06Shaan Puri?

  You would've made better decisions.

• 55:07Sam Parr?

  You would've made better decisions and you would've gone all in on one thing, which have cumulatively made more than all the other stuff combined.

• 55:13Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so the question then is, the fear I have is. How do I make sure that's not just a kind of like, like, sort of like a how will I know? Also, um, how do I do it in a way that's not just absolutely meandering? Or maybe that's all right. Maybe it is supposed to be meandering.

• 55:31Sam Parr?

  I, I think that's all right because that's not your personality. And so just by meandering, like it, it's almost like, it's almost like most people, we have to tell them to hit on the gas harder. With you, you're a car whose back wheels, we lift it up and you're already going all the way as hard as you can. And all we're going to be doing is just figuring out which direction we're going to place that car. And then when we're ready, we're just going to drop it.

• 55:51Shaan Puri?

  That's a good analogy.

• 55:51Sam Parr?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 55:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 55:52Sam Parr?

  Most people, we gotta.

• 55:53Shaan Puri?

  Makes me feel cool too, because I'm like a really fast car or something.

• 55:55Sam Parr?

  Well, like most people, we have to like fuel that car and like, no, go harder.

• 55:58Shaan Puri?

  Convince them to push.

• 55:59Sam Parr?

  You're good. You're good. Like, all right, you're already moving a little bit. Now go even harder. With you, it's like, no, dude, that gas is down already.

• 56:03Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 56:04Sam Parr?

  Like, we might as well just find out the right place to put it. And then we put it, you're going all in.

• 56:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 56:07Sam Parr?

  That's exact. So that's how I would look at it.

• 56:09Shaan Puri?

  All right. I like that.

• 56:09Sam Parr?

  Like people who are, who are, whose oven burned hot is what I say, like, they're going to be burning shit. It's just like, pick the right thing.

• 56:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 56:16Sam Parr?

  Like, you know what I'm saying? Remember I made a joke that people made fun of me, but I actually stole it from the departed. They're like, John Lennon, give him a fucking tuba and he's going to make art. That's what he does. You know what I mean?

• 56:25Shaan Puri?

  He's an artist.

• 56:26Sam Parr?

  That's kind of how I feel about like, whatever our stupid industry is. It's like, I don't know, man. Just like, give me a computer, get out of the way and I can figure out how to like, be cool, not be cool, but like make something at least somewhat intriguing because it's just what I love doing. And I think the same 100% with you.

• 56:40Shaan Puri?

  All right. I like that. That's good.

• 56:42Sam Parr?

  Right?

• 56:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I like it.

• 56:43Sam Parr?

  Also, your last podcast, you have me 100% convinced that AI is the thing. So I would go into AI.

• 56:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that could be it.

• 56:52Sam Parr?

  I just think that that's like a huge pond and you just cast anywhere out in that pond and you're going to have a winner.

• 56:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 56:57Sam Parr?

  You think so?

• 56:59Shaan Puri?

  It seems that way at the moment, but I think it's more like, if it's like, if I was going to meander or wander around, I'll definitely spend in some time in that neighborhood to see what's up. I'm trying all the different bars.

• 57:10Sam Parr?

  It's still early enough.

• 57:10Shaan Puri?

  I'm asking people where the best tacos are. I'm talking to people and being like, what was here before this? And that's, that's what I would do in that space before I just.

• 57:19Sam Parr?

  Dude, it's still early enough to, you could take time. Like you take your time. You could take six to 12 months off and just relax. I talked to someone the other day who works at OpenAI. And I was like, you're, and this guy's like a little bit naturally of a pessimist. Like he's like, not, he doesn't just believe in hype. And I was like, hey, is this legit? And he goes, yeah, it's legit. I was like, should I, do I have to be worried that it's gonna like take over the world? He's like, no. I don't know when that will happen or even if it will happen because we are a bit away, but like in terms of just like replacing like developers' jobs or just like making life easier and like just like for art, making new types of art. It's 100% legit and it's almost here. It's basically here.

• 58:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 58:02Sam Parr?

  And so I think that's like, that stuff's pretty amazing.

• 58:05Shaan Puri?

  Should we do a hot one?

• 58:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I guess.

• 58:07Shaan Puri?

  Let's try it.

• 58:08Sam Parr?

  How hot is it?

• 58:09Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. I've never tried these before.

• 58:10Sam Parr?

  I don't want to get like a panic attack.

• 58:14Sam Parr?

  Where's this place?

• 58:14Shaan Puri?

  That'll make a good thumbnail though.

• 58:16Sam Parr?

  Where's this place from?

• 58:18Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. I DoorDash it.

• 58:20Sam Parr?

  Is it hot?

• 58:21Shaan Puri?

  No. Is that hot? Maybe this is not the hot one. Let's see.

• 58:24Sam Parr?

  No, I don't think so.

• 58:27Shaan Puri?

  I think this is supposed to be the hot one, but not that hot.

• 58:30Sam Parr?

  That's not hot, right?

• 58:31Shaan Puri?

  No, this one was hotter.

• 58:32Sam Parr?

  I don't want to eat like a ton of it and for it to like.

• 58:35Shaan Puri?

  Kick in?

• 58:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:38Shaan Puri?

  It's like, it's not hot.

• 58:40Sam Parr?

  I don't think it's bad at all.

• 58:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 58:43Sam Parr?

  I think you got got.

• 58:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's all right. It's good though.

• 58:46Sam Parr?

  Rick Ross probably owns this wing place.

• 58:49Shaan Puri?

  Does he have a wing place?

• 58:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he owns like 30 Wingstop. He's like the rap version of Shaq. You know what I'm saying? Like he owns like Five Guys and shit.

• 58:57Shaan Puri?

  Should we just do that on like 30 Wingstops?

• 59:00Sam Parr?

  No, dude. So I've been in the Airbnb and like real estate game. It's, that's whack too. I thought that was dope. It's whack. It's just, it takes too long. It's just too slow. Like I, I will come up with an idea and want to do something and like you don't get results if you're building something for 18 months, 24 months.

• 59:15Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 59:15Sam Parr?

  Or with like a rental, I'm like, let's do this, this and this. And like, I don't know if it's any cool for three months. Or if it's like, you know, if it's actually a good idea. No, I think real estate's stupid. I think it's really cool to invest in, but like as a creative person.

• 59:29Sam Parr?

  It's whack.

• 59:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 59:30Sam Parr?

  It's like no dopamine rush either.

• 59:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but people are like, oh, buy boring businesses, invest in boring businesses.

• 59:37Sam Parr?

  I'm like, I want a little boring.

• 59:39Shaan Puri?

  It's in the name.

• 59:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 59:41Shaan Puri?

  It's also in the name, guys.

• 59:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Like where's the buy exciting businesses at?

• 59:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they talk about boring business, like, bro.

• 59:49Shaan Puri?

  What you want is something that's boring to other people, but not boring to you. If it was also boring to you, like, ah, come on, you wasted your talent.

• 59:55Sam Parr?

  I don't want boring life.

• 59:57Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 59:58Sam Parr?

  I see that stuff, too. I'm like, man, I don't want, and I don't want to work with a guy who runs a dry cleaning company. I just like to be, I, you know, I'll be like, sitting outside on the corner like King of the Hill, like, yep. Like, I don't want to have that conversation. You know what I mean?

• 1:00:13Shaan Puri?

  I don't want to talk about it.

• 1:00:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I want to like, do stuff.

• 1:00:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah, these are all right. That's not hot, though, is it?

• 1:00:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most CRMs are a cobbled together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot, grow better.

• 1:00:38Sam Parr?

  Where do you want to go with this episode?

• 1:00:41Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I don't know. What would make it interesting?

• 1:00:43Sam Parr?

  You're looking spelt, by the way.

• 1:00:45Shaan Puri?

  Oh, thank you. You want to finish with like a rapid fire? Hot seat questions?

• 1:00:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:51Sam Parr?

  That, I think that's the hot one.

• 1:00:52Shaan Puri?

  This one, right? This one's hotter.

• 1:00:55Sam Parr?

  That one's hotter.

• 1:00:58Sam Parr?

  That one actually is hot for me.

• 1:00:59Shaan Puri?

  There we go. The milk is coming into play.

• 1:01:03Sam Parr?

  That was hot.

• 1:01:04Shaan Puri?

  All right, let me dip this one in.

• 1:01:05Sam Parr?

  Oh, this is almond milk, by the way.

• 1:01:10Sam Parr?

  All right, what's the rapid fire?

• 1:01:13Shaan Puri?

  All right, let me think of a couple of questions. All right, hot seat question, uh, here's number one.

• 1:01:20Shaan Puri?

  Would you rather be three times as famous and half as rich as you are today? Or stay as you are?

• 1:01:27Sam Parr?

  Stay as I am.

• 1:01:29Shaan Puri?

  Why?

• 1:01:31Sam Parr?

  I'm married. Being famous isn't that cool? I mean, what's the point?

• 1:01:34Shaan Puri?

  It's for single people.

• 1:01:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, what, what? What advantage does fame have at this point?

• 1:01:39Shaan Puri?

  Well, some people bet that.

• 1:01:40Sam Parr?

  My ego, but like, I.

• 1:01:42Shaan Puri?

  Some people just feels good. And then also, uh, you could argue that if you were three times more famous, you could actually earn a bunch more too. So, you know, it could make other things easier.

• 1:01:51Sam Parr?

  I'd rather be two times as rich.

• 1:01:55Shaan Puri?

  Twice as funny? And half is ripped? Or twice as ripped and half is funny?

• 1:01:59Sam Parr?

  Being funnier is better for, for like, picking up girls and having guy friends, probably. So, funny.

• 1:02:06Shaan Puri?

  You said you're married, why are you trying to pick up girls?

• 1:02:08Sam Parr?

  I said, meet guys, too. Didn't I say that?

• 1:02:14Shaan Puri?

  I know being ripped seems to do it too.

• 1:02:16Sam Parr?

  Dude, being funny is better. Being funny is way better. What would you rather be?

• 1:02:22Shaan Puri?

  Funny. I'm all in on funny.

• 1:02:23Sam Parr?

  What about the fame or wealth?

• 1:02:25Shaan Puri?

  Being half as funny, that would be like, that'd be really sad. Like you could be half as fit and you could kind of recover. If you're half as funny, there's just no recovering from that. That's like the end of the game for you.

• 1:02:38Sam Parr?

  And you were half as fit three years ago and you were doing fine.

• 1:02:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. I've been there before.

• 1:02:45Shaan Puri?

  Hello, my old friend. Nice to see you again.

• 1:02:49Sam Parr?

  What about the other one?

• 1:02:52Shaan Puri?

  Tell me a story. What's the highest stakes negotiation you've ever been in?

• 1:02:56Sam Parr?

  Selling the company. What about you?

• 1:02:58Shaan Puri?

  Well, when did it feel high stakes for you? Was there a moment?

• 1:03:00Sam Parr?

  Every single day. I'm almost positive every single day. There's a chance I can kill the deal. The HubSpot CEO, did I tell you this?

• 1:03:08Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 1:03:09Sam Parr?

  You know, he got into a

• 1:03:10Shaan Puri?

  Oh, the skiing accident, the day after, right?

• 1:03:13Sam Parr?

  It was even worse. Brian was on the pod. He told you about it. He, him and his son were snowmobiling in Vermont or wherever people snowmobile. I don't fucking know. And like his son hit the gas instead of the brake and they ran into his dad, Brian, and they fall over a cliff. And it was either like 12 or 24 hours that he just sat there. He's like, and he said goodbye to his son and he's like, you know,

• 1:03:37Shaan Puri?

  Might be it.

• 1:03:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah, this is it. And suddenly they get cell phone service and someone comes and finds them. And then afterwards he comes back and quits.

• 1:03:45Shaan Puri?

  And close the deal.

• 1:03:49Sam Parr?

  Did you text Sam today?

• 1:03:52Shaan Puri?

  One more thing.

• 1:04:00Sam Parr?

  That happened two weeks after the deal closed. And like, I think that company is big enough that him like frankly dying.

• 1:04:07Shaan Puri?

  Put a pause on it.

• 1:04:08Sam Parr?

  I don't know if that would have, like, I don't know if that would have.

• 1:04:11Shaan Puri?

  Hey, guys, not to be insensitive, just wanted to check in if we're still on for the whole acquisition.

• 1:04:19Sam Parr?

  R I P Brian, but uh, so.

• 1:04:23Shaan Puri?

  Sending out the DocuSign in case you guys are still ready.

• 1:04:29Shaan Puri?

  Totally understand if you need a day.

• 1:04:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so anything could have killed it. No, no pun intended. Anything.

• 1:04:37Sam Parr?

  All due respect, Brian. I love Brian. So I'm only joking, but any, anything could have like destroyed that deal. And I think that is stressful. So that was the highest one. What was yours?

• 1:04:47Shaan Puri?

  Well, I have two. One was, I think I've, did I tell the auction story when we bought the Bebo brand back? I told the story before. So Michael tells me at one point, he goes, hey, we have an opportunity to buy Bebo back.

• 1:05:00Sam Parr?

  Oh, yeah. And you had to go like looking like a schmuck. So no one knew who you were?

• 1:05:06Shaan Puri?

  That's how I look. Thanks though. But the, we go to a courthouse, basically. So, so he tells me we're gonna buy it back. And we, in my mind, I'm like, awesome. What are we gonna do with it? He's like, I don't know. We gotta figure something out. He's like, it's a good domain. You get the email list, you get the domain, you get the hardware, and you get like the legal ownership of that.

• 1:05:28Sam Parr?

  What hardware?

• 1:05:29Shaan Puri?

  Like whatever servers or whatever they had. So, and so we were like, okay, what is this worth? And so we came up and we were just like, we sat in this room trying to speculate. And then Michael just like put down the hammer at one point. He's like, I don't think we're gonna be able to buy it for less than a million. And I don't think I really want to pay much more than a million. So let's do it with a million. That's your bid. So we fly to LA. It's me, our lawyer, and our COO. And we get to a courthouse. And I'm like, is that a courthouse? What are we gonna do? It's stand in front of a judge? Like, and the judge goes, okay, are there multiple, multiple parties here to buy it out of bankruptcy? Yeah. And then, and we don't know who else is gonna be there. We don't know if anyone else is gonna be there. And there's two other groups that raised their hand. And they say, she's like, all right, go to that room. And you're gonna auction against each other to see who wins.

• 1:06:14Shaan Puri?

  I was like, what? We go to this tiny room.

• 1:06:16Sam Parr?

  Just gonna fight.

• 1:06:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, basically. And one person from each, it's like a rap battle.

• 1:06:21Sam Parr?

  One out.

• 1:06:22Shaan Puri?

  One person from each team got to sit at the table. Everybody else was behind them like, oh. And so then it's us, and then it's match.com, and it's some other social network. Well, like IAC, they own a bunch of internet properties. They wanted to buy it.

• 1:06:36Sam Parr?

  Just kind of like vulturing.

• 1:06:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they were like, we're gonna harvest the profiles and use them for dating. It's like, what? The SEO, we need that SEO juice. It's like, damn, I hope you guys don't win. That sounds awful.

• 1:06:47Sam Parr?

  Were the people kind to one another? Or were they like pulling up?

• 1:06:51Shaan Puri?

  You just sit down and it's like bid. And we're like, oh, here, I'm the representative from this, this, and this. All right. So it starts. And it's like, we'll start the bidding at 100,000. And then it'll go up by 50,000 increments.

• 1:07:03Shaan Puri?

  Up to 500,000 and then it'll just be free form after that. We'll be here as long as it takes to finish the bid and you get like a minute between or you get like a minute between minute or two minutes or something like that in between bids to decide if you're gonna bid. And so it goes 100, 150, 200, 250, so on and so forth. Goes up to 700,000 and then the guy, one guy drops out. So then it's just us and match. He calls timeout. He's like, we need to go make a phone call right before 7.

• 1:07:27Sam Parr?

  Dude, that's like getting in a fight with someone and being like, timeout. You're like, that's bullshit. You can't do that.

• 1:07:31Shaan Puri?

  It's exactly what happened. He got punched in the nose and it was like, timeout. So we're at 750,000 and they go outside. They had to make a phone call to their boss and I was like, oh, must suck having a boss.

• 1:07:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And you like tattled on them. You're like, uh, sir, is that?

• 1:07:46Shaan Puri?

  So I tried to go eavesdrop. I walk outside. They immediately stopped talking. I just go to the restroom twice just to see if I could pick up anything. And then, and I come back in, I'm like, I talked to our lawyer. I was like, okay, they're calling at 750,000. They're probably getting authorization to go up. That was probably their max. They're probably getting authorization. Probably the highest they can go is a million.

• 1:08:04Shaan Puri?

  And I told like auctioneer person, I was like, no more timeouts. Like that can't, we can't do that again. And so she, they come back in and she's like, there's no more timeouts. I'm like, okay, cool. Pressure is on them now and bidding goes 800, 850, 900, 950.

• 1:08:18Sam Parr?

  When you are going, when you make your bid for 900, do you say like, oh, fine?

• 1:08:23Shaan Puri?

  So we had been acting like that to be like.

• 1:08:25Sam Parr?

  Are you kidding me, guys?

• 1:08:26Shaan Puri?

  And then, then I told the lawyer.

• 1:08:28Sam Parr?

  You're like, I built this thing. It was not worth that.

• 1:08:30Shaan Puri?

  I go, I go, we gotta just act like we have an infinite bankroll so that they just feel like they can't win this auction. And so I said, as soon as they say a number, just top it. Immediately top it with no hesitation. Just like not like, we're here all day. I could say, I could, I could go on and on and on. And so that's what she did. She changed up her demeanor. Started doing that. And basically we got to a million and at a million, she pulls a great move. She doesn't say a million. She goes 1,025,000 to just up it.

• 1:08:58Sam Parr?

  And then you know that they were all were stopped at a million.

• 1:09:00Shaan Puri?

  We knew they had gotten authorization for a round number. So I think it was actually 1,010. I think she did. She had 10,000 above and they just go, you guys can have it. You guys can take it. And they were like, yeah, our max was a million.

• 1:09:11Sam Parr?

  Smacked them.

• 1:09:15Shaan Puri?

  And so we got it and then we like, but that was like the most high stakes like hand of poker I've ever been involved in basically.

• 1:09:23Sam Parr?

  All right, we'll do, we'll do one more. Um, I can't read it from back here. What were the questions that you told me?

• 1:09:30Shaan Puri?

  Uh, another one was like, what is the, um,

• 1:09:35Shaan Puri?

  I don't like, what's the?

• 1:09:36Sam Parr?

  Oh, so something that you thought you were on to something, but it turned out to be totally wrong.

• 1:09:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you thought you were on to something you turned.

• 1:09:42Sam Parr?

  What's yours?

• 1:09:43Shaan Puri?

  We had one when, uh, building Blab, basically like when we built Blab, it looked like it was taking off. And this is now like four years in. And imagine you're four years in and you feel like you might've just like made the next big, like basically what Clubhouse ended up became, that's what Blab was. And we started seeing this like rapid growth and people loved it and everybody felt it was new and fresh. Everything else we had made, people like, oh, this is just like Snapchat. No matter what we did, they're like, this is kind of like Snapchat. And we were like, God damn it. Like the next thing we build is not going to be like Snapchat, no matter what. That was Blab. And it takes off to 200,000 users pretty quickly. It gets to a million users. And VC, you know, Founder's Fund wants to invest and all this stuff.

• 1:10:22Shaan Puri?

  And it felt like we did it. Like this is going to be the next social thing and we own it. Like we are actually going to own one of those things. And then it got to about four million and then it started to just, we started to realize, why isn't the number going up as much? It's like, I don't know, signups are still up. It's like, oh, it's super leaky. The retention, like the retention has been getting worse and worse. It started out okay and now it's just pretty bad. And this was all the span of like.

• 1:10:45Sam Parr?

  And it's like an impossible problem to solve too. It's not like, like even if you operate at an A plus level, it's just like a.

• 1:10:52Shaan Puri?

  Retention is like the, retention is the thing that's worth anything in business. And retention is the thing that's also the hardest to solve because like, it's like dating, like you, if you wanted to pick up somebody, that's like just getting users, like you could change the way you look, you could teach you two pick up lines and like.

• 1:11:08Sam Parr?

  Finding a keeper.

• 1:11:10Shaan Puri?

  If I get you some, you know, a shirt that fits you a little bit better and like, you know, whatever, pick the booger out of your nose, you can get the, you can go get their number. But you can't make them date you. You can't make them marry you. And like, that's what retention is. It's like, are they going to marry your product or not? And so once I knew that was a problem, I was like, oh, God, we tried so many things to try to fix it. And it was just like, not, not move it because it's more fundamental. It's like, is this something people want to do all the time or not? And it's very hard to like spam them with notifications to try to get that number up.

• 1:11:37Sam Parr?

  So the year we sold the hustle, you know, we sold in February, so we set a whole year ahead of us. But I think we probably would have done around 20 million in sales. And I started the company wanting to hit 100 million in revenue before year 10. And we sold it between four and five, I think, year four and five. So we were kind of on track.

• 1:11:57Shaan Puri?

  We would have got there, yeah.

• 1:11:58Sam Parr?

  We could have, maybe could have gotten there. And I knew I could like, I started the company with just an email, even though people said it's stupid. Because I was like,

• 1:12:05Shaan Puri?

  I remember telling you it's stupid. I was like, do video, dude, do Facebook video.

• 1:12:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but I was like,

• 1:12:09Shaan Puri?

  Snapchat, Instagram.

• 1:12:10Sam Parr?

  The math is such that like, I'm pretty sure that like, you know, people are kind of dismissing this as like a hobby. But look, if you like, just change a 10,000 person email list to like 5 million, like the numbers add up to $100 million. No one's real, I don't know anyone who's ever done that, but I'm pretty sure that could happen. Like, I understand the math and like each seller of advertising would sell 1.5 million dollars of ads. And there are already people that do that. So if I just hire like, you know, 100 of them, like, things add up, like this could all work out fine, actually. But I didn't truly believe my own prediction, even though I knew like this list lines up.

• 1:12:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you could tell everybody else, but yeah, telling yourself in your head is different.

• 1:12:49Sam Parr?

  I was like, this works. Actually, this works. And I didn't entirely believe it. And so I sold right when I got like a pretty decent offer, because I wanted to secure the bag. But in reality, I made a mistake. I didn't make a mistake because I actually would have did the same thing again. But I could have achieved my goal.

• 1:13:06Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:13:06Sam Parr?

  Now, looking back at it, I know.

• 1:13:08Shaan Puri?

  Morning Brew is kind of doing that, right? They're like 7500 million, something like that.

• 1:13:11Sam Parr?

  Well, they're at, um, They're probably 80 million in sales.

• 1:13:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so they're close.

• 1:13:15Sam Parr?

  So they're like getting close. And, and I knew, and him and I, Austin, are good friends now. We both talk, and I'm like, he's like, yeah, you guys actually would have been there like, they're a year older than us in terms of company. They're like, you guys actually would have been there even better because you had subscription revenue. And he was like, you're, and he's, he was like, I'm actually amazing at operating things, but you guys are always way better at like inventing new shit and we would just copy you. And, or, you know, he said something like that. And he is really good at operating though. And I, that was my biggest mistake.