SVB Collapse Explained, D2C Brands That May Fail, And Suli's Next Venture

Episode 430: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) are joined by Suleman "Suli" Ali (@sulemanali) to talk about the fail of Silicon Valley Bank, the D2C brands that may fall next, reverse Robinhood, going on good quests, and Suli's next business venture. Bonus: Listen to the end for a job opportunity. Want to see more MFM? Subscribe to the MFM YouTube channel here. SHAAN'S NEW DAILY NEWSLETTER --> shaanpuri.com ----- Links: * Figs * Allbirds * Grove Collaborative * Squarespace * Wish * Nelk Boys * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ------ Show Notes: (01:20) - Sam's and Shaan's most heroic moments (12:00) - Silicon Valley Bank Collapse (43:45) - Allbirds: The SVB of footwear? (55:20) - Chamath and the Reverse Robinhood (01:03:25) - Going on Good Quests (01:16:20) - Distribution before product ----- 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.

• 0:10Sam Parr?

  Sean, you want to set us up? What are we doing? What are we doing here?

• 0:14Shaan Puri?

  Uh, well, this is the first time the three of us have been on a pod. So please come on, I think, three or four times. Somehow you've never been here during during those, even though y'all are friends, you know, each other. And that's just strange to me. But I think this, we'll see how this goes. I mean, I think this will be fun. The three of us here, I wanted Sully to come on because there was a whole bunch of like, rich people, smart people shit that was going on over the weekend. There was the Silicon Valley Bank disaster, bank run, all that good stuff. There's stuff going on in the stock market. And so Sully is the guy I go to whenever I have questions. I said, all right, well, just bring him on the pod instead. I'll ask you the questions here instead of just texting or calling. And so that was my, that was my idea.

• 0:55Sam Parr?

  Did you guys, did you guys get impacted by this at all?

• 0:57Shaan Puri?

  I had money in Silicon Valley Bank through my, my fund. So our venture fund had money through Angel List. Angel List keeps all their money or kept all their money in Silicon Valley Bank. And so we were lucky that I started hearing about it. And I was like, yeah, I think we should get out. And, uh, and so we ended up, we had like 1.5 or 1.6 million dollars in that account. Maybe a little more actually, because they hold some for management fees. And then we got it all transferred out to a bank I've never heard of. They were like, you want to move to Grasshopper Bank? I was like, you could put it in the fucking field outside your office. You know, you can put it anywhere. Just don't leave it in the bank where the, where it's like a bank run is going on.

• 1:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah, exactly. Couch dude, we'll be fine.

• 1:41Shaan Puri?

  So we got, we got out like literally in the nick of time. So yeah, we were almost impacted, but not, not in a like major, major, major way. Like there were some people that were stuck. Tens of billions or even a hundred billion dollars. Sully, I'm sure you heard some crazy stories. Like, what did you hear? How did it play out from your perspective?

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was at this SV Angel founder event, founder summit in San Francisco on Thursday, when the bank run was happening. And people all around me were on their phones trying to take all their money out of SVB and transfer it. And people walked out of the sessions and were sitting on their laptop trying to do that. One guy told me that he wired seventy million dollars out of his SVB accounts that morning into his personal Morgan Stanley account because he didn't want to wait for a bank account in the business name to open because that would take twenty-four, forty-eight hours.

• 2:34Sam Parr?

  Which in normal circumstances, that would be maybe not illegal, but hugely frowned upon.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Definitely ill advised. Yeah. It looks like you're about to steal seventy million dollars of other people's money and put in your pocket. But I think this case there's-

• 2:49Shaan Puri?

  Were people right away, was it like, let's see what happens? Because you know, the series of steps was, I saw the stock price go down. That was the first text I woke up to. Sam, in our group chat, somebody showed the stock was down thirty or forty percent. And it just seemed like a stock problem. It seemed like, oh, the company is, you know, getting hammered. But like, dude, I feel like I've seen that five times in the last, you know, five months with some random stock is down forty percent. But then somebody was like, oh, yeah. Could this mean that the bank goes under? And then the wheel started turning in my head. And fortunately, I had seen, I had seen and not acted on two crypto like bank runs in the last year and been burned by those. So my, I'm a criminal under reactor.

• 3:32Shaan Puri?

  I don't really react even in cases of emergency, which is good because in normal life, usually things are not an emergency and it serves me well. But when there is an emergency, I'm also pretty laid back. And so this time, I was, I was smart enough to be like, hey, we should do something right now. Don't wait. Don't wait to see how this plays out. There's no upside in waiting to see how this plays out. Did people recognize it right away where you were, Sully, like, hey, this could trigger a bank run?

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think in the beginning of the day, no, everyone was kind of chill about it. But a ton of VCs, I think, starting with Peter Thiel, said,

• 4:06Speaker 02

  To their portfolio companies, if you have money in SVB, take it out and take it out immediately, like right now, do whatever you need, get it out of SVB.

• 4:14Sam Parr?

  And let me explain, I'm the least educated on finance stuff here. So let me explain from a five-year-old's perspective, what happened here. So basically Silicon Valley Bank, it's like the 19th largest bank in America, something like that, top 20.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  16th.

• 4:27Sam Parr?

  16th, and it's usually used by Silicon Valley-based startups and other people who related to startups. And so what happened was during 2021, 22, when VCs were going crazy and startups were raising a huge amount of money, they used Silicon Valley Bank. So they took on tens of billions of dollars of new bank accounts. But the, and so they had all this new money. And so what they did was they bought long-term bonds that yielded a rate of like 1.5%, which in a way, it was them thinking like, we're just going to be conservative and like, and not do anything crazy here with all this extra money. Then Fed increases the rate to three and 4%, and their customers, which is startups with new

• 5:08Sam Parr?

  cash, are burning tons of money and lowering their deposits or their savings and checking accounts. And then it became public on Wednesday at the quarterly earnings, at the earnings report, that they said, we bought these 1.5% bonds, which is not good, because the Fed recently raised the rates to three and 4%, which means our 1.5% long-term bonds are now devalued. We have to sell a bunch of them at a huge loss. People heard about that. Social media went crazy. VCs tweeted, get your money out immediately. Everyone starts pulling their money out. And then by Friday, the Fed set, or the government steps in and says, we got to stop this. They're going to run out of money. This is not good. Everyone's going to get hurt. Is that a good summary of, from a, from a, from a dummy's perspective of what happened?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's pretty good. I think that all of those things could have happened, except if, you know, Silicon Valley is just such an insular place, but also such a viral place where everyone talks to each other. So I think if it wasn't for the fact that it was Silicon Valley and everyone talks to each other, there wouldn't have been a bank run this fast. Like,

• 6:18Speaker 02

  On Thursday, when the bank run happened, $42 billion, people tried to wire out $42 billion in one day out of Silicon Valley Bank.

• 6:28Sam Parr?

  How much money did they have? 100 billion?

• 6:30Speaker 02

  They have something.

• 6:31Shaan Puri?

  200?

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, something like $180 billion in deposits. So about 25%, 25 cents on every dollar was tried to be wired out in one day.

• 6:41Sam Parr?

  And what happened when people tried to do that? It just said, uh, no? I mean, what was the, what, what did they see on their screen?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  In the beginning of the day, it was working. So, uh, this guy wired out 70 million dollars. A bunch of other people at that SV Angel event were wiring money out. No problem. Uh, come the afternoon, they couldn't log in to Silicon Valley Bank. So it just wouldn't let you log in. In fact, I tried to log in yesterday. I have a Silicon Valley Bank personal account and it also said, uh, you can't log in until Monday.

• 7:14Shaan Puri?

  And were you affected by this, Suli? Cause you've, I know in the past, your company's used Silicon Valley Bank. I think you, you raised money from them. So first, were you affected? And second, why does everybody use Silicon Valley Bank? I think they said 50%, this is on their website. I don't know if it's true, but 50% of venture backed startups, um, use Silicon Valley Bank. That's crazy. Is it just the brand or did they do something that, that was like advantageous to startups?

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, they do a couple of things. So one, they have strong relationships with all the VCs.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  And.

• 7:47Shaan Puri?

  Or so they thought.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they thought, so that this, they've had strong relationships with everybody. So all the VCs are like doing their own banking. All the LP, all the venture funds are doing banking at Silicon Valley Bank already. And then they host tons of events around Silicon Valley and sponsor tons of events. So you just see their brand name everywhere as the bank that you should use.

• 8:13Sam Parr?

  And it kind of has like an elite vibe a little bit, which is stupid because, or that's not stupid, but the, the, a lot of media headlines were like, bank used by the rich and famous or tech elite is going under. And so the sentiment was like, oh, screw them, which. Maybe that is part the reality. A lot of rich people do use them, but like payroll companies use them. And when you, there was a lot of companies like Rippling that the hustle used for payroll years ago, where you pay your payroll to pay your employees. Rippling is the middleman. They hold on to your money for three or four days and then they pay your employees. Rippling used them. And so three or 400, 500,000 employees of companies, both blue collar and white collar, weren't going to be able to pay their bill

• 8:55Sam Parr?

  or weren't going to be able to receive their paycheck. So it's not just like, you know.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  The elite.

• 9:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's kind of a, the name's a little bit of a misnomer for who it represents.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. The other reason we use them at TinyCo, and this might be my greatest personal achievement, was I got free tickets to the NBA Finals from Silicon Valley Bank, where they invited me to hang out in their box and watch the game. So, you know, there's a bunch of perks like that for using Silicon Valley Bank. And then also if you raise any debt, they're a huge venture debt provider in Silicon Valley. So oftentimes when companies will raise an equity round, they'll also raise a little bit of debt. So they'll raise, you know, $10 million equity and $3 to $5 million of debt sometimes, depending on kind of what their capital needs are. And so when you raise debt from Silicon Valley Bank,

• 9:47Speaker 02

  they require that Silicon Valley Bank is your exclusive banking provider. So all of your deposits have to be at Silicon Valley Bank as well. That way they've got visibility into it and that kind of thing. So a ton of startups will get debt and then they have to use Silicon Valley Bank as their bank. So they have no other choice.

• 10:06Sam Parr?

  And over the weekend, basically, there was a bunch of people, we have a bunch of our mutual friends, where they were just like sitting there Friday to Saturday and Sunday morning thinking, I think I just, all my money's gone. I don't know what's going to happen. I was with like maybe a dozen people and they're like, you know, I've had hundreds of thousands or tens of millions of dollars. I just don't have that and I have no idea how I'm going to pay my employees. I don't know what's going to happen. Sunday night, we find out that everything's going to be fine. The corporation, Silicon Valley Bank, is going under. If you're a stockholder in that, I think you're going to lose everything. If you're a bondholder in that company, I think you're going to lose everything. But if you're a depositor, if you are a customer, you're going to be made whole. And so it's no big deal. I think you can access your money now. Is that right? Is that how this is currently being resolved?

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's exactly right. So the Federal Reserve and.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  US Treasury Department were like, if Silicon Valley bank depositors lose their money, this is going to create a systemic risk. That systemic risk is everyone who has money in these 2,000 local, community, regional banks is going to take their money out Monday morning because they're afraid that their personal bank will have a bank run also. So this is literally what-

• 11:21Shaan Puri?

  Also, right? Like, anybody being proactive would be triggering an actual bank run across many, many other banks. And so, they had to, they had to basically get people to chill before Monday morning.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Like, First Republic Bank is a bank that I use and a ton of other startups use. And in fact, First Republic Bank provides, is the bank that Mark Zuckerberg uses to get loans for, from, for buying a house or just getting a loan against his stock. And there were rumors over the weekend, a bunch of my finance friends in New York texted me and said, hey, do you have any money at First Republic Bank? If so, get it out Monday morning.

• 12:02Shaan Puri?

  Well, even today, it's down 65%. So even though this happened, why is it still down so bad?

• 12:12Speaker 02

  I think people are just still afraid that there's going to be, the depositors are still going to take money out of First Republic Bank.

• 12:21Sam Parr?

  There was a funny, there was a funny headline and it said that, you know, when you think of this, you think of like literal pitchforks and like guys wearing straw hats and like torches standing outside of the bank. Because there was like a headline that says, people are rallying outside the bank, just banging on doors to get in. And you think like, you know, like a pitchfork mob. And it was really, it was like eight or nine, like Asian guys wearing Facebook book bags and like North Face sweaters. And they, and they were smiling at the camera. Like, this, this article, like, they look really happy. And they were like waving at the camera. And I saw that because it was a pretty funny thing.

• 12:58Shaan Puri?

  Well, I think that was part of the problem here was like, like you said, in Silicon Valley, everybody's so tightly networked that like words spread like wildfire. And then back in 2008, when the global financial crisis happened in the sort of the other bank failures happened, there wasn't really like Twitter was very new at that point in time. Smartphones had only come out that same year. So it wasn't like as fast. So this was basically like a bunch of people who are all incestuous and all talk to each other a ton. On top of that, you can now do online banking and just quickly log into your phone or your laptop and wire out $70 million. You don't even need to go to the bank. Like normally, it's like bank run, there's going to be a huge line. And that huge line itself is a like barrier to this happening. But in this

• 13:42Shaan Puri?

  case, everybody talks about it. Everybody moved it out digitally and words started spreading, you know, basically fear started spreading across Twitter, TikTok and other places. And it just felt like it's the end of the world. You know, move now. And that that sped this whole thing up into a one day, like tsunami, financial tsunami that that hit. What do you think about like?

• 14:04Speaker 02

  It's crazy because the I bet the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank woke up Thursday morning and was like, what's the big deal, guys? This is gonna be fine. And

• 14:14Sam Parr?

  Was it a big deal, Suley? Like, besides the the fear, was it actually that big? Like, was the was the business itself at risk?

• 14:23Speaker 02

  There is some, there's a real problem with the Silicon Valley balance sheet because of the the sort of depositors taking money out in general. So even before Wednesday, because of all of the startups that because the startups are the ones that bank at Silicon Valley Bank, they were withdrawing money every week to pay payroll and because of their burn rates. So there was already a problem. But I think that, you know, regulators are monitoring bank balance sheet on a monthly basis very closely.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  So they were like, this is all fine up until that point. And so nobody thought this was a problem. Like the Silicon Valley Bank CEO was like, this isn't a problem. Regulators thought this isn't a problem.

• 15:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but he had one line that was bad. He goes, I, we don't panic. I think he said, don't panic.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Exactly. He did such a terrible job of PR and the way that they came out on Wednesday and said, hey, we're going to raise 1.8 billion, we are going to raise $2 billion because we lost 1.8 billion. Like they just mismanaged this from a PR perspective. And I think if they'd done a better job of that, they wouldn't have gone, wouldn't be dead today. And to Sean's point around just the speed of this happening. So the biggest bank failure in American history is Washington Mutual in 2008. And in 2008, 10, 17 billion dollars was removed from Washington, withdrawn from Washington Mutual in 10 days.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  And in Silicon Valley Bank, it was $42 billion in one day on Thursday. So just the speed with which business happens is like, you know, so much faster now.

• 16:07Shaan Puri?

  And I want you, I want to get your reaction to two people. So Peter Thiel, some people are like, oh, Peter Thiel strikes again. He's the, you know, this guy's the menace. And then they're like, he brought down Gawker. He got Trump elected and now he, he triggered the bank run of Silicon Valley Bank. So Peter Thiel, you know, do you think that that's a, is there, is there any truth to that? And then the other side is Mark Suster, who's another VC down in LA, who basically came out during the process and was like, this is like, like you should, companies, you should keep your money there, support Silicon Valley Bank. It's supported us. There's, you know, we don't have to have this hysteria. If we don't do the bank run, there's, there won't be a bank run.

• 16:47Shaan Puri?

  I'm, you know, keep your money there. And if, you know, for people who had listened, he could have caused them to basically, you know, lose or lose access to the majority of their money. So what do you think about those two people? And where do you play, place the sort of, how much blame or credit do you, do you give to those people?

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Uh, I do think Peter Thiel has a ton of power. He's like this godfather of Silicon Valley. Uh, you know, we had a tiny guy, we had Mark Andreessen on our board and he would never mention what anyone else says, except he would constantly mention what Peter Thiel says. So I think he has a-

• 17:21Sam Parr?

  What's an example?

• 17:24Sam Parr?

  And why?

• 17:26Speaker 02

  I think he just, Marc Andreessen, I think, just looks up to Peter Thiel and thinks that Peter Thiel has a bunch of good ideas. So for example, one idea, one thing I remember him saying was,

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Peter Thiel says the best startups have one source of revenue, not eight sources of revenue. I'm sure you've seen this in startup pitch decks where they're like, we're going to generate revenue from ads, plus we're going to generate revenue from businesses, plus we're going to generate revenue from these customers. So having like eight different revenue streams is much worse than, we're Facebook, we're going to generate revenue from ads, one single clear revenue source in the beginning.

• 18:05Sam Parr?

  And, and do you think that, I mean, I don't think he's the bad guy in this situation because basically what happened with him was, it'd be like if just a normal person went to the bank account and they tried to, or the ATM, they tried to withdraw money and the ATM is glitching and they're like, this doesn't feel right. Hey, family, I think you should bounce and go get your money out of this. This is like glitching. This does not look good because I believe Peter Thiel, he did a, I think Silicon Valley invested in Founders Fund or something like that. Is that the story? Or he did some type of capital call and Silicon Valley didn't pay up right away. Is that right?

• 18:39Speaker 02

  I didn't see anything about that. And yeah, I don't know what that is. What I know is that he basically, Peter Thiel was, was one of the people in Silicon Valley that was like, this is not good. Everybody take your money out. And then, you know, all the other venture firms heard that and sent emails to their portfolio companies saying the same thing. Like on Thursday, you know, I'm an investor in a bunch of venture funds, a bunch of them emailed their LPs and said, hey, this is our exposure to Silicon Valley Bank as a fund. We're talking to all the portfolio companies and trying to get them to remove all of their money out of Silicon Valley Bank. So really they caused the bank run.

• 19:21Shaan Puri?

  You're an, you're an LP in like, you're an investor in a bunch of funds, like maybe what, like 15 or so big venture funds?

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 19:31Shaan Puri?

  Did they have their money tied up? And I'll ask, I'll tell you why I think this was, something was a little fishy here. So.

• 19:39Shaan Puri?

  On that Thursday or Friday, when it was all going down,

• 19:43Shaan Puri?

  VCs were simultaneously telling their portfolio companies, hey, get safe. But at the same time, we're basically saying, hey, the Fed needs to come in and ensure that all the deposit depositors are going to be made a whole.

• 19:57Shaan Puri?

  And they were saying it anytime somebody uses the like, what I call like the single mother story, it like, makes me very suspicious. And what I mean by that is they were like, you have to do this because jobs are at stake. These companies have to make payroll. And if they can't make payroll next week, you know, this is going to cause jobs to be lost. And you know, who works those jobs? Single mothers and like they're basically, it was all about payroll, small businesses, jobs, saying all the political like buzzwords to get like Washington to do something. Cause you know, nobody wants to go be like, hey, I'm a venture fund. We had $90 million in Silicon Valley Bank because they gave us lines of credit and we were, we had to keep our money in there and we're stuck.

• 20:41Shaan Puri?

  You know, we're way above that FDIC limit. And if we're not made whole, we're, we're screwed. Was that the case? Or is that just my conspiracy? Should I take off the conspiracy hat? Or, or is that, do you think, was that a part of it?

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I, I saw a bunch of videos of David Sacks and Jason Calacanis and stuff saying that kind of thing. I, I'm skeptical that any of that matters. I think the way that Jay Powell and Janet Yellen look at this is there is a systemic systemic risk to the banking system. So, you know, taking a step back from Silicon Valley Bank, like the, the American financial system is this amazing black magic that exists. And it is a source of tremendous amounts of prosperity in America and in the world. Like if you go in places like Pakistan, where I was born, you don't have a, you don't have

• 21:37Speaker 02

  access to a credit card. You don't have a FICO score. You don't have the ability to go get, buy a piece of property and get a 30 year mortgage on it that the government backstops.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  You are constantly worried about the, uh, your currency being inflated because you're not sure that, um, the, the government is going to, isn't going to just print so much money that your rupee that's worth a hundred rupees is worth, yeah, your life savings basically disappears because of inflation.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  And you're not worried when a company that's a publicly traded company reports earnings that those are lies in the United States. Like, there is so much stuff that is amazing in America from a financial infrastructure perspective that the rest of the world does not have. And the Federal Reserve coming in and bailing out Silicon Valley Bank and doing it without using any taxpayer money, making all the depositors whole, wiping out all the equity holders, wiping out all the unsecured debt holders. Like, that's the right thing. And, well, and where'd the money come from?

• 22:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, if it didn't come from taxpayers, where's that 25 billion backstop come from?

• 22:56Sam Parr?

  And, and also bailout, I don't think is the right term because they didn't bail out the bank. The bank is out of business or, or it's dead. But they bailed out the depositors, right? The customers.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah. And, and you know what people were saying on the internet?

• 23:08Shaan Puri?

  Bailed out the single mothers.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:11Sam Parr?

  Cause they need that third home in Truckee.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, what people were saying on Twitter, which I agree with, is that, hey, when you put money into a bank, you're not thinking of this as buying, um, a risk asset. You're just thinking of it as, I literally have cash, I could store it under the mattress, but that would be silly. I'm going to store it with the bank.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  And the bank is going to do a better job of taking care of my money than me by storing it under my mattress. And that's an important American value.

• 23:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 23:45Sam Parr?

  Like that is a super important American value.

• 23:47Shaan Puri?

  That is the product that the banks sell.

• 23:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 23:50Shaan Puri?

  Is safety and security and trust. Faith that you are, your money is safe. And if that product, if they, if people start to question that product, the banking system doesn't work and you're one step away from people saying,

• 24:02Sam Parr?

  everything's good.

• 24:02Shaan Puri?

  Dude, who cares about this little green piece of paper? I don't know if anyone's going to care about this or if this is going to be, have any buying power tomorrow. Right? Money, money also has the same thing where the, the only attribute that matters is belief in its value. And, and banks have the same thing. It's belief in the safety there.

• 24:17Sam Parr?

  And where'd the money, where'd the money come from though? You, you didn't answer that.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. The FDIC is basically, is funded by other banks. So, um, think of it as an insurance fund and banks pay a premium to that fund. And the FDIC insurance fund has a hundred billion dollars in, uh, fees that it's collected from banks. And in fact, um, in the Federal Reserve letter that they printed, they released yesterday, they said, any other fees, any other money that we need is going to come from a special assessment of other banks.

• 24:45Sam Parr?

  Oh, wow.

• 24:46Shaan Puri?

  So they had this money and they said, we're going to make up to this much available, not just the Silicon Valley Bank, but any bank that, um, that needs a loan against their, their other, like their long-term assets. If they have the same kind of duration mismatch where they, they own, like they're good for the money. They just can't get it out today. It's in 30 years, they'll have enough money, um, for sure. It's just that today, the, the value of that mortgage that they owned, uh, you know, had gone down 30% or whatever.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 25:14Shaan Puri?

  They said, they said, we'll give you a loan against that asset, uh, in the meantime.

• 25:18Sam Parr?

  Who are the, uh, who are the winners here?

• 25:22Speaker 02

  To me, the winners are other community banks and other banks that have this problem. So yesterday that, uh, the government announced this new, brand new program on like, uh, one sheet of paper.

• 25:34Sam Parr?

  It was like a Google Doc. I saw it.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, yeah. It's so funny that they, uh, release stuff in the way that they do. They created a new program called the Bank Term Funding Program. And that's basically going to prevent the Silicon Valley Bank problem that they had with the, uh, long duration bonds. So basically.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  Silicon Valley Bank had a $1.8 billion loss because they sold a bunch of 10-year duration bonds and they have to sell them for 70 cents on the dollar. And what the Fed announced is that if you're a bank and you've got a bunch of 10-year paper that's worth 70 cents on the dollar, you could get a loan from us for all of it. You can get a hundred, you can get dollar-for-dollar loan. So if you've got $90 billion of 10-year paper that's now worth $60 billion, we will give you a loan for $90 billion so that you can not have this problem. Yeah, you can basically not have liquidity problem.

• 26:38Sam Parr?

  And then the other winners were like, there's a lot of like startup banks like Mercury. It seems like they were just like crushing it. I think Brex was another one, like they're just killing it, right?

• 26:48Shaan Puri?

  Well, I think the best thing for them, so I think the real winners is First Republic because they would have been wiped out today probably and many others like First Republic. So they got, you know, the bullet just whizzed past their ear and, you know, luckily that was the last bullet and now there's no more bullets coming today.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  And there's 2,000 community banks in America and so like all, a bunch of those would have had a bank run today or this week if the Fed didn't do what they did.

• 27:14Shaan Puri?

  Mercury and a bunch of these other startup banks, basically when everybody needed to move out of Silicon Valley Bank, it's like, who's the fastest, what's the next bank name I know that I can open up an account now? And Mercury and others were beneficiaries of that. Now, they got billions of dollars, billions and billions of dollars of inflows yesterday, or sorry, Friday. Now, I think that a lot of that would have skipped town this week. So I think they would have been a middleman because who the hell is going to keep their money in a startup bank when this is your fear? You're not going to keep $10 million or $20 million. You might have moved it there just because you needed a quick safe haven, but you weren't going to move in there.

• 27:54Shaan Puri?

  You were going to still next week go to Chase or Wells Fargo or whatever and go put the bulk of the money there. So now I think they're in much better shape because. Instead of being just a middleman, they might keep a lot more of that that depositor, you know, those deposit relationships now.

• 28:12Sam Parr?

  And is it possible that other than the equity holders and the people directly impacted by this, that just like the average American might be impacted positively by this in the next six to 12 months? Because maybe the Fed won't be doing more rate increases. So then, you know, maybe you can get a mortgage in for four and a half percent or 4% in six or 12 months. Because the, you know, the government is like, oh, hey, we kind of like achieved our mission because these guys screwed up. Like inflation might not be as bad now because of of this big loss. Is that accurate or is that too much of a reach?

• 28:46Speaker 02

  I personally think that's too much of a reach. I definitely see people saying that on Twitter and CNBC, but I think inflation is rampant and is has nothing to do with the Silicon Valley Bank problem. And basically, in two weeks, people will have forgotten Silicon Valley Bank problem. And they'll have all the, they have all their money as of today. So like, it's back to businesses as usual and business as usual still has massive inflation. And the Fed is going to continue to raise rates, in my opinion.

• 29:17Shaan Puri?

  I, this showed me how naive I am because I was under the impression that if I kept a bunch of cash in the bank, that was me doing the safe thing. I wasn't investing this money or trying to get yield on it. I was saying, look, you know, I just want to keep this in the bank so that, you know, just in case. And the 250K FDIC thing was this like idea that existed. I had never heard it ever coming to play. Like in 2008, I was a sophomore in college. Like, I didn't care or know, I didn't have a bank account, you know, like, I didn't do anything at that time.

• 29:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you thought Lehman Brothers was where you like buy khaki pants. Like, he thought it was a clothing company. Like, oh, you got that new pair of Lehman?

• 29:57Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. I was like, are they hosting Thursday this week? What's going on? So it's like, yeah, this is kind of my first time for this coming into play. Did you like, because I was like, who the hell is going to take, if you have $5 million, are you really going to go open up 20 bank accounts each with a 250K limit? Like, that sounds so inconvenient and outrageous.

• 30:16Sam Parr?

  I think that's what a lot of people do.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  But yeah, did you see that Giannis does this? Giannis, the Greek Freak, announced that he has 50 bank accounts at different banks, each with up to $250,000. That's how he kind of secures against this.

• 30:30Sam Parr?

  Well, I saw Jared Kushner, when he, when Jared Kushner became whatever his role was in the government, was secretary, I forget what he was, but he had a release like his, his income. And I remember, or his, his net worth, and I remember looking through it all. And he had dozens of bank accounts and it just said $250,000 in each account. And I was like, why? And, and this is one of the reasons why.

• 30:49Shaan Puri?

  Do you guys do this? I mean, this seems, is, is this normal? And I, you know, I'm just the only guy who didn't do this.

• 30:55Sam Parr?

  I try not to go above, too much above 250,000. But for my business, I did. But personally, no, I try not to go above 250.

• 31:01Shaan Puri?

  So you spread it across, you know, how many accounts exactly then, Sam? What would that be?

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, give us the count.

• 31:09Shaan Puri?

  This is our new way to trick people into telling us their, their like liquid net worth. You're an FDIC guy, right?

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was surprised that Giannis only has 50 banks. I was like, that means.

• 31:22Shaan Puri?

  That story is from his rookie year. So he came over from Greece, where Greece was like having the banking crisis.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  And yeah.

• 31:28Shaan Puri?

  And so that was his rookie year that, that his, he, he and his agent did that. Now he's worth like $200 million. There's no way he could be doing that at this point. He's got some other, you know, but rich people have this, right? Like if you're at JP Morgan and you got 20 million plus, they'll do an auto like sweep into a bunch of accounts for you. I think, um, I'm not sure exactly how it works, but I'm pretty sure there are, there are products that exist that will do this. They just seem niche to me and seemed like, I don't know, a tool for the paranoid. It didn't seem like a thing that, um, I needed to worry about personally.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's so funny because my father, you know, immigrant to the US, always worried about the banking system and the US dollar is always like, let's go buy gold bars and bury them under the house, just so that we know that our money is secured. And then he's also like, let's go open bank accounts in Swiss banks because those are the safe banks and they're not going to have this problem.

• 32:28Shaan Puri?

  Because those also don't do fractional reserve, right? Like a Swiss bank is, I think, one for one. They don't, they don't keep, you know, just a fraction of your cash in the bank.

• 32:37Sam Parr?

  What's an example of a Swiss bank? And how do you, I mean, I've only seen like Wolf of Wall Street where they like go to Switzerland with like cash in hand. Is that, that's not actually how you do that. I mean, how do you open a Swiss, I don't even know how you would open a Swiss account.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  You know, I think Credit Suisse is actually a Swiss bank, but it also has a bunch of, was seen as, as dangerous for a while. I don't even know the name of a Swiss bank, but I bet you can just open a bank account online and wire the money without having to attach cash to Margot Robbie and send her to Switzerland.

• 33:08Sam Parr?

  But that would be cool if you could.

• 33:11Shaan Puri?

  I can't find this client info.

• 33:13Speaker 03

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• 33:27Sam Parr?

  All right. We, I think we, we did a good job covering the Silicon Valley Bank, but Sully, you actually had a few other things that I thought were interesting. One of them being the Allbirds, right? What a shit company, man. They are really, it's not working out for them, is it?

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, Allbirds is, in my opinion, the ugliest fucking shoe I've ever seen in my life. And I remember seeing these like five to seven years ago in Silicon Valley, all the venture investors that I knew were wearing them around town. And I was like, you, you are ugly. Your shoe is ugly. You're ugly. This sucks. This is not a good looking shoe. And I've heard, I saw this tweet that I think is the best way to describe it. Allbirds socially acceptable sweatpants for your feet.

• 34:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm not a big fan of them either, but basically they've raised two or $300 million in funding. They've done $300 million in revenue. Market cap is down from $4 billion to 200 million. Is that right? It's 200 million right now?

• 34:29Speaker 02

  Yep, yeah, down 95% from their IPO in November of 2021. From 4 billion to 200 million.

• 34:36Sam Parr?

  How much of the founders, you think, how much do they own?

• 34:40Speaker 02

  I didn't look at how much the founders own. I bet they owned a lot of it before, when it went public. And I didn't look at, you know, kind of how much have they sold off? But I bet a decent amount.

• 34:51Sam Parr?

  So what's going to happen with that?

• 34:54Speaker 02

  So I think that, you know, the, the problem that they've been having is that their revenue is shrinking. And their costs are really high. They've opened up a ton of stores, like 58 stores in the US and abroad. And I think that store strategy isn't working because not enough people know what Allbirds are and walk into the stores and want some.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  So they've, they've decided they're going to stop opening stores. They're only going to open three more stores this year. And those are places where they've already signed leases. They're going to stop any international growth by, they're not going to open any more international stores. They're going to just do, find distributors internationally to try to grow. They're trying to contain costs by, they're manufactured today in New Zealand. They're going to stop manufacturing them in New Zealand and move it to one place in Vietnam.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  So, you know, my sense of what's going to happen to Allbirds is somebody.

• 35:51Shaan Puri?

  We're here to bring your own laces from now on.

• 35:56Shaan Puri?

  Cut every corner here. There's like, you know, we don't have running water in the office today. We're doing that every, every other day until this thing is profitable. So what do you, what do you think of this in terms of like D to C? So like, I think people have basically, I think D to C got hot. People started a bunch of brands, a bunch of investors came in and funded these companies like they were tech companies, but they weren't tech companies. Casper, Allbirds, and then some like Warby Parker and others that they got, that broke out. And then, you know, so on one hand, if I, if that's all I knew, if I was just sitting from afar, I would have been like, this space doesn't make sense then. And now it's playing out where it's like, yeah, these companies are not profitable. They're not doing that well.

• 36:38Shaan Puri?

  You know, I think they're burning a hundred million dollars a year or something like that. Like they're just, they're very mature companies that are still losing a ton of money. And I would have just, my opinion would have just been that, but you and your brother, like your brother built native deodorant. It was a profit, you know, basically raised almost no money. What did he raise? Like 500 grand for that business? Is that, is that all he ever raised?

• 37:01Speaker 02

  About 500,000, yep.

• 37:02Shaan Puri?

  Raised $500,000, built it up basically by himself with like, you know, a very, very small lean team, you know, packing deodorant like, you know, at the kitchen, at your kitchen table in your apartment and sold that thing for a hundred million dollars when it was highly profitable that whole way. You know, then you have that model and you've had a, you know, you, we don't talk too much about your business, but you've been involved in a very different style of D to C. That is highly profitable, lean and mean, raise zero capital or very minimal capital. And I feel like nobody even knows about those businesses. Those are like, you know, more under the radar. Everybody only hears about the big VC ones. You know, like away luggage and stuff like that. What, what is your take? Are you sort of like,

• 37:44Shaan Puri?

  that other way is dumb? Or are they actually just two different games? And, you know, both, both, both are valid.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they're two different games. The native playbook of raise little capital, focus on profitability, acquire customers. So that you're break even on the first purchase or profitable on the first purchase and scale through repeat purchases that are generating a ton of profit using that to either reinvest in the business to launch new products or just take distributions. So I think that's a super valid playbook. And I think there is a valid approach to the raise a bunch of venture capital and try to build.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  A business at a much larger scale.

• 38:27Sam Parr?

  Who who's doing that that you think that they have a good shot? Figs, maybe?

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, Figs, in my opinion, is a great example because they're like, one of the problems with Allbirds is they're a fashion brand. And at some point, the world turns against you. And like, I believe that Allbirds are ugly. I think other people are going to arrive at a similar conclusion at some point. And then Allbirds is going to have to find the next style to get to that place to kind of continue to succeed.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Figs is basically a uniform, so it doesn't need to be better looking over time.

• 39:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but that's a bullshit. I think you're wrong there. I think that I think that that strategy is not bad. Like, look at Louis Vuitton, you know, they've been around for 300 years and it's always been cool. I think that their execution, they just picked a lame thing. So I don't think I don't think it's a bad strategy. I think they just it's a stupid shoe. Or at least that's what that's what a lot of people think.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, Nike is a great example of a business that has scaled to, you know, more than a 100 billion market cap, I want to say. And they're a fashion brand that serves, you know, the super high end as well as the low end. So they figured out how to do it. So I think there is a playbook to go raise venture money or private equity money and get to scale. I just think a lot of the the companies that have raised money have been undisciplined. They've hired too many people like Grove Collaborative.

• 40:04Sam Parr?

  What do they do?

• 40:06Speaker 02

  Grove Collaborative is a San Francisco based startup that's 10 years old. It's also publicly traded. They started out being this marketplace of kind of natural products. So I saw them as I would see ads for them saying, get free Mrs. Meyer's kit. And I'd click on those ads because I was like, free stuff, sign me up. And They're basically trying to give you, get you involved in a, get you enrolled in a subscription of buying a bunch of home products.

• 40:39Sam Parr?

  Got it. Okay. Cool idea. Cool idea.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Great idea. And it went public through a SPAC and it has the same problem as Allbirds and Away luggage, although Away is private. Grove Collaborative's stock is down 96% and has a market cap of $70 million. It's worth, you know, way less than the cash that they've raised.

• 41:02Sam Parr?

  That's crazy.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the stock is sub $1. So they have to do a reverse stock split to avoid being delisted. And, uh, yeah, they basically have to fire a bunch of people and, uh, stop spending as much money on marketing so that they can be profitable.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  And have, they basically have to accept declining revenue to get to profitability. And that's what Grove Collaborative just did in the third quarter of last year. It was their first profitable quarter ever.

• 41:34Sam Parr?

  So what companies do you like? They're saying all the companies you hate. On here you have Wish, you have Grove, you've talked about Allbirds. You don't like Box, uh, which is like Costco online.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:46Sam Parr?

  What do you like?

• 41:48Speaker 02

  I think there's a bunch of companies that are, uh, awesome businesses that are worth less than they were in March of 2020. Uh, so they're trading at less than pre-COVID valuations and I love those companies. But, uh, some of them are the ones you hear about all the time, which is, uh, Facebook, Amazon. I think those are two great businesses and their, uh,

• 42:08Sam Parr?

  I was, you and I were walking in SoHo in New York and after some meetup and I, uh, I won't say the amount. You can say the amount if you want, but you said, I just bought blank amount of stock in Squarespace and my jaw like kind of dropped. I was like, what? Did you really? Why? And you like told me how much you love that company and it was a very large amount. Um, and so are you still into Squarespace?

• 42:33Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah. I bought a million dollars of Squarespace stock. I still own it. I don't know if I made any money on it. I, at some point it turned into like $250,000 because Squarespace stock went down. So I'd lost $750,000, but I think it has since turned around.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  You know, it's up 15% year to date. I think Squarespace is super undervalued as a business, but I'm not sure it's a great stock to buy.

• 43:03Shaan Puri?

  You have like a long history with Squarespace. Let me ask you a different, different question. At one point, you tweeted out something like, hey, if you know, if a guy happened to have 50 million liquid and wanted to double it, you know, what's your best idea? And you got like 100 replies. I remember going through them and being pretty unimpressed with most of the ideas. It didn't seem like I thought, you know, you some, some great stuff would come out of there. But, but maybe in something like this, 100 people reply. And it's really three interesting ideas. Did you get anything interesting? Or what did people say when you tweeted that out? And did you get any interesting ideas on what to do with your money from that?

• 43:39Speaker 02

  I got one interesting idea, which was try to go buy all of Wish or, you know, 51% of Wish. Wish has $700 million in cash and its market cap is 286 million. So it's trading at less than cash. So, you know, buy enough stock that you can convince management to distribute the stock, distribute the cash and shut the company down.

• 44:07Shaan Puri?

  Right. And can you, and I remember seeing that. Why doesn't that happen in practice, right? Companies got 700 million in cash, it's trading at 300 million. Why doesn't, you know, it seems like the, the, like the video game move is you buy the $300 million company, you shut it down tomorrow, so it stops burning cash and you distribute 700 million out, you profited 400 million. Why doesn't that happen in practice? Or does it happen in practice?

• 44:31Speaker 02

  So there are people like Bill Ackman, Carl Icahn, that are activist investors that do this kind of thing. You know, they do it with Apple, even Netflix, like Carl Icahn. Will basically go buy 5% of a company and then call up management and say, hey, we want you to do X, Y, and Z. And if you don't, we're going to just keep being a thorn in your side.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  And so, and we're going to try to remove your board directors and put our board directors in. We're going to threaten to fire you as CEO. They do a bunch of this kind of stuff. And generally, what will happen is the CEOs will just listen to Carl Icahn and do what he says, or do something else that makes their stock price go up 10, 15, 20% that, and then Carl Icahn will sell his position, make billions of dollars and be like, great, that was fun. With something like Wish, it's, if you tried to go buy up Wish stock, it's so thinly traded

• 45:36Speaker 02

  that you would basically drive the price up and you would never be able to buy 51%. You'd have to, you'd have to pay, you know, 700 million, 800 million dollar market cap to basically own 51% of it.

• 45:49Sam Parr?

  Dude, it seems like most of the companies that you've mentioned, or a lot, many of the companies you mentioned, went public via SPAC. Has there been one SPAC that has worked out?

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Uh, that is a great question. I have no idea.

• 46:03Sam Parr?

  And for the, like, I remember Chamath was all about SPAC. I don't pay attention to the public market, so I'm a little, I'm definitely out of my depth here, but I know enough to know that he was big on SPACs. What are these guys, what's their reputation right now, which is, they got, and did they make money, they made money going up, making it happen. And so now are they just like, oh, fuck y'all. Like, you know what I mean? Like, are they just like, they don't care?

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, the way the SPACs work is if you're the sponsor, which is what Chamath was in a bunch of these, like, he took Open Door public through SPAC, SoFi public through SPAC, you end up getting a percentage of the company without taking any real risk. So Chamath has made out like a bandit in, I think he's done five to 10 SPACs. He's made money in each one of those SPACs, and I think every other-

• 46:54Sam Parr?

  How much? How much?

• 46:56Speaker 02

  Um, more than a billion dollars across all of those, for sure.

• 46:59Sam Parr?

  Wow.

• 47:01Shaan Puri?

  And so how does the math work? So I remember, I think I had heard at one point, you have to put up 3% of the capital to own, but you own 20% of the company when it goes public. Is that right? Or did I misunderstand?

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't remember the math, but it's something along those lines, which is for taking the company public, you get, it's probably not 17%, but you get something like 5% or 10% of the company's stock for basically taking it public. And you don't take any risk. You basically raise money from a bunch of institutions.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  You hold that money for up to 18 months. You have 18 months to find a target that you want to take public. You find a target, you make a deal with them to take them public. All those investors that have gave you money 18 months ago, they can either keep their money in the deal or sell it and get their $10 back.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  And so a bunch of people will sell because they're like, oh, this isn't going to work. Sell, I want to sell my stock. So oftentimes the SPAC, which is publicly traded, will be trading at $10 and then it'll get, and the target will get announced. We're going to take Grove Collaborative public. And then the stock will drop immediately when the target gets announced. Cause everyone is selling and is like, oh, this isn't gonna, this isn't a good target.

• 48:31Sam Parr?

  So what's his reputation then? I mean, is, or is he just like, so, I mean, he's so rich, he doesn't give a fuck about his reputation?

• 48:37Shaan Puri?

  Did you guys say the thing that's on this doc? Which was the reverse Robin Hood, steal from the poor and give to, make himself rich?

• 48:44Sam Parr?

  No, not yet. I was waiting for you because I know, I don't, I mean, I don't know enough to know about him and like his whole shtick. But Sean, you have a strong opinion about it.

• 48:53Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I mean, I want to hear Sully's opinion, but I don't think I have that strong of opinion.

• 48:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah. You give him a hard time, dude. You give him a really hard time.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  You know, I think Chamath is super smart, super successful. I love his, you know, those cashmere sweaters that he wears on the All In Podcast. They look dope. I gotta buy me some.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  But what he's done with the SPACs is literally the opposite of Robin Hood. He's stolen from the poor and given to himself. And I'm surprised that his reputation is not tarnished in the public markets or in CNBC.

• 49:31Shaan Puri?

  Let me ask you a question. Is it that he ended up, you know, dumping on retail because it was always designed, it was kind of designed that way. It was gonna be that way. Or, oh, well, the markets just turned and everything's down. You know, like, I don't fault Jeff Bezos because my Amazon stock is down. You know, like, that's out of their control. It's a good business, blah, blah, blah, versus, no, the way these were set up, it was a bit of a house of cards, you know. He was gonna make money, and at some point, this was gonna happen because these fundamentally didn't make sense. Which one, which one is it more?

• 50:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're asking, is, what's the intention?

• 50:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, do you think, do you think he knew and that the intention was, hey, this is probably how it's gonna play out, but let's just see.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  To me, these are pump and dump schemes, like in Wolf of Wall Street. If the company is sound and gonna go public, generally, the companies will go public on their own, using the traditional IPO path or a direct listing. You know, that's what Squarespace, Spotify, Slack, all these companies that went public during the same era that he was doing these SPACs. The companies that go public through SPACs are trying to rush to get public. And it's not the Airbnbs of the world. It's the Grove Collaboratives of the world and Sofies of the world that are doing it.

• 50:53Shaan Puri?

  Businesses that, that are not as sound. Now, what they would say was, like, the very first one, I think he did was Virgin. And it was, look, this is a company that you'd have to be a real, like, you know, tech investor to understand. It's got a really long-term, huge vision. And, you know, they needed somebody who believed and they didn't wanna, you know, take their chances with the, with the short-term minded stock, you know, IPO stock market. So some version of that was like, you had to be a true believer in technology, innovation, and you had to be smart enough to understand how big this business could be. That's why I'm taking it public. And so it kind of made sense on the first one. And then pretty soon it was like just putting lipstick on the pig and selling it.

• 51:34Shaan Puri?

  And that's how it felt to me at least. And so I'm kind of of the same opinion, which is I think obviously he's smart and obviously he's successful. I don't think those are arguable. I think that uh he's also very pompous, you know, I don't love his personality. I also think that what he did with the SPACs, I think, you know, uh, seems to be more like, like more like the puppet job or uh, putting lipstick on a pig like, you know, these weren't great businesses. It was what can I do to just, you know, uh, to get something to cash here? Because he, again, he had a free role in a lot of these.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 52:12Shaan Puri?

  And so, you know, and I, and I, and I find him to be, you know, somewhat disingenuous when he, when he talks like, you know, I remember before he took Metromile public, it was uh Buffett had GEICO, I have Metromile. And here's why it's better, blah, blah, blah. Fast forward like less than a year and Metromile is, you know, sold for 30 cents on the dollar to Lemonade, uh, because it was whatever, not in good shape at that time. And then, you know, no mention of it ever again. Yeah. It's like, yeah, on to the next.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, the, the thing, um, you know, there's a bunch of people that were uh, pumping Bitcoin or other crypto products. And when they tweet, there's a ton of people that reply to their tweets saying, fuck you, I lost my life savings because of your, um, because I took your financial advice. When Chamath tweets, I look to see what the responses are. There aren't many people that are like, hey, you screwed, uh, all the, you know, the public moms and single moms and uh, families on uh, on these SPACs.

• 53:16Sam Parr?

  Dude, I was with your brother one time, Suli, and we were hanging out and someone was talking about a get rich quick scheme and how like, uh, I think I, someone, they were like saying like, uh, you know, no, no one likes a great get rich quick scheme. And your brother goes, uh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Getting rich quick is the best way to get rich. And uh, and your brother's pretty funny because sometimes they'll say funny stuff, but it's like, oh yeah, you're right. That is like, that's way better. And Sean was talking about Chamath and Virgin. He's like, you know, we don't care about the short term. It's, it's for the long term. And a lot of times when I, when I read about this, these uh, public markets and they talk about long term, I'm like, Yeah, I think you're, I, I kinda care about the short term. I definitely care about the

• 53:58Sam Parr?

  short term a bit too. Uh, so, and, and they like use that word long term to disguise like bad shit. Like, you know, it's about the long term. It's not about the short term. Just hold, it's the long term. I'm like, I don't know, getting rich quick and in a short amount of time. That's, that sounds nice too. Uh, I would like it not to fail in the short term. Uh, that would be nice.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  There, there's this Warren Buffett quote where, um, somebody is like, some reporter is like, hey, what you talk about is pretty, um, simple and sounds like anyone can do it. Uh, why aren't more people applying the Warren Buffett strategy and, and becoming billionaires? And his response was, everyone wants to get rich quickly. I'm about getting rich slowly and nobody has the patience to do it.

• 54:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but here's my issue with that. And when he talks about that, he keeps talking about the long term and he's 95. Uh, it's like, bro, there, there, there ain't a long term. Have some fun. Like, there's no, you don't have long term anymore. Stop talking about long term. Maybe, long term stops when you're 60. It's like, enjoy it.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was talking to these, um, 25 year olds and I was like, $2 million when you're 25 is more valuable than $20 million when you're 45. Cause you can basically do awesome stuff at 25 that you're not going to be able to do at 45.

• 55:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah, dude, I agree. I agree. Um, Sean, what were you gonna say?

• 55:23Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I was gonna say, uh, you had shared this blog post about a good, a good quest, which is, uh, I think, uh, a guy from Founder's Fund, I think, wrote it a while, a while back. I remember reading it and being like, this is actually pretty interesting. Um, it seemed like something, uh, that maybe, maybe resonated with you. Can you explain the idea of a good quest? And then I want to hear you guys, uh, talk about it.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, it's kinda like, this guy basically was like, um,

• 55:51Sam Parr?

  Who, who was it?

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Some guy at Founder's Fund.

• 55:54Shaan Puri?

  Trey Stevens, I think.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  He was basically like, a bunch of the brightest minds in Silicon Valley and in America and in the world are focused on bad quests. So kind of in a game you can, in the game of life, you're either focused on something that is noble and honorable and makes the world a better place, or in his language, you're focused on short-term things that are going to make you rich quickly, even if they're incremental improvements to a slightly better mousetrap. And he basically is like, there is no, we're wasting society

• 56:39Speaker 02

  and people are wasting their energy. Brilliant people are wasting their brilliance on dumb problems. And we should be trying to solve the greatest problems that we have in our lifetimes. And that is the noble work and everything else is bullshit.

• 56:57Shaan Puri?

  And he points out, he's like, most-

• 57:00Sam Parr?

  I don't know, man, but this guy, I look, but to our bro, his former job, he, he, he used to work at Mike's Hard Lemonade. I don't know if I can trust this guy.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Did he really?

• 57:11Shaan Puri?

  That's how he knows, dude. That's the, that's the experience.

• 57:15Sam Parr?

  He did the total opposite. He works at Andrel, a defense company. But like, I don't know, man, this guy worked for Nerf, like, sorry, go ahead. I'm an idiot.

• 57:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he's a co-founder of Andrel. So he points out this thing, which is like, you know, the average person is not capable of going on one of these good quests. So if you're brilliant, if you really are in the kind of like top 1% of talent and motivation and ability, it's kind of like your moral imperative. Like you, you kind of got to be the ones doing this because who else, if not you, then who? It's sort of the mindset that he has. And so I would say that like- You know, I think you're awesome, but you, you yourself are like, I want to go on a good quest. You've been telling me this for like five years.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 58:08Shaan Puri?

  And you're like, I spent my whole life building these like mousetraps that make a bunch of money. Cause I just see them. I just see them. They're obvious. This widget and I could sell this widget and make a bunch of money. And you've done that. Are you, did this blog post tip you over the edge to do a good quest? Or did it have the opposite effect and turn you off and say, actually, you know, F this guy and F this whole like noble quest bullshit?

• 58:32Speaker 02

  Maybe next week.

• 58:35Speaker 02

  You know, I went to this SV angel event in San Francisco last week. And I'd been to San Francisco in a really long time because I was having this like existential question myself of, uh, should I be going on good and hard quests versus easy quests?

• 58:54Speaker 02

  And you know, easy quests are great because you have a great quality of life. Like, uh, you don't work that hard. You can go play tennis in the middle of the day or work out at noon. Like my brother, every day at noon will go work out for two hours in the middle of the day.

• 59:11Sam Parr?

  We could have a sick pad in, in, in New York and maybe a place in LA and, and travel all over the place. I mean, you guys have a pretty nice life.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Like he's going to go to Japan, uh, next week, um, just for fun to look at, uh, go to the cherry blossom festival. So, you know, he's, uh, it's very easy to be seduced by like quality of life and easy quests in my opinion.

• 59:37Shaan Puri?

  I like how you're using your brother here instead of yourself. You do all the same things. You're just like, yeah, using him as like this guy.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  Way easier to use him than kind of look at the mirror, look in the mirror more closely. And so, you know, I went to that event and, uh, Sam Altman spoke and he was basically like, um, everyone thinks OpenAI is an overnight success. I've been working on this for seven years, god damn it. And so have all of these other AI, um, scientists and AI engineers. And it took us seven years to make chat GPT what it is today.

• 1:00:11Sam Parr?

  That's not that long.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  It's not that long, but, uh, it's, it's a really long time. Like basically they didn't launch a product for maybe five years or something along those lines. And you know, now.

• 1:00:23Shaan Puri?

  He, he had every quest at his disposal. He could have just simply sat back and angel invested and done, you know. Become, you know, as proficient at pickleball as one can be, right? Like he had, he was running Y C at the time and he left probably, you know, the, the best job in Silicon Valley, which is running Y C. Probably the highest paid, lowest effort job you could have. Like it's up to you how hard you want to work there.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  And exposure to new people, new entrepreneurs, new ideas constantly.

• 1:00:55Shaan Puri?

  You get to do all the fun shit. You get to see all the smartest people. You get to be the kingmaker. You know, you have the infinite money glitch. If you're, if you're doing that.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  Everyone in Silicon Valley is coming to kiss your ring.

• 1:01:05Shaan Puri?

  He quit to go do this nonprofit A I thing. And I remember at the time, I remember literally at the time, this was like, what did he do this? Like 2016 or 2019 or something like that. He, he left, he had been funding it as his own, like, you know, personal passion project, basically up till then. Then he left Y C to do that. And I remember thinking at the time, I should probably just go follow Sam Altman. Like if he is going to do this with his time, there's really no better signal in the world that that's, this is like the right place to be. Unfortunately, I didn't act on that, but I remember having that thought back in the 2018, 2019.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's funny to me that you say that like seven years is not a long time. Cause yeah, I guess in a sense it's not, but um, seven years at the same time seems like infinity.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  When you're working on a startup and you're, there's no immediate gratification. Like I can't think of the last time I was able to work on something for seven years without some form of immediate gratification.

• 1:02:03Sam Parr?

  I mean, there was, there was, there was milestones. Look at this guy, the, did Trey Stevens who started Androl, like funding rounds, winning certain contracts, some type of press. I mean, that's like pretty cool. You know, there you got, you can get your dopamine, you can get your dopamine hit. But what are you going to do? Are you going to quit doing this small boy shit that makes a lot of money? You're going to start doing something like legitimate that like actually matches your I Q.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I want to try and do a hard quest.

• 1:02:27Sam Parr?

  But what's, what's the, what are the handful of ideas or industries that tickle your fancy?

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  I think doing something in healthcare would be really amazing and transformative.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  I think healthcare in America is so bad. It's shocking to me like, you know, my mom had a bunch of medical problems last year and just getting access to doctors is insane. Like, if you want to get, see a specialist, you have to wait 60 or 90 days to go see a specialist, specialized doctor. And a friend of mine who's a doctor was like, here's how you solve this. Here's the concierge medicine practice. You pay them $30,000 a year.

• 1:03:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I had one, it was 25 grand a year.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, you pay them 25 grand, 30 grand a year, whatever it is. And all they do is they are able to get you appointments faster because they're able to text the doctors because they know the doctors personally because they used to work with them and say, hey, can you do me a favor and see my guy next week instead of three months from now?

• 1:03:33Sam Parr?

  It's kind of like gangster a little bit. Like, it's like, it's like the doctors are, it's run by the streets, you know what I mean? It is pretty weird. It's not cool.

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not cool. It's broken. And then the other really fucked up thing is if you have a medical problem and a neurologist will be like, this is a cardiologist problem. And the cardiologist will be like, this is a neurologist problem. And the two of them are like Superman and Clark Kent, which is they're never in the same room at the same fucking time. So you can't actually get real information about what the problem is. And they never talk to each other. They talk to each other through like handwritten notes in the dark of night. So it doesn't work.

• 1:04:16Shaan Puri?

  And do you have a tangible idea on this? Or you're just like healthcare? It's like healthcare is just too big of a word. It doesn't mean anything.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is too big of a word. One idea that I've been tinkering around with is like remote monitoring of patients. So, you know, my mom lives in Dallas, sometimes there, sometimes traveling. And I want to have some device that she has that is like monitoring her blood pressure, her blood sugar, her heart rate, and reporting that to me and to all these other doctors in, you know, real time so that if there's a problem, you know it faster.

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  And so that you can go track this stuff. Right now, when you go to the doctor and if you have blood sugar problems or high blood pressure problems, they're like, what was your blood pressure last week versus what is it right now? What was your blood sugar last week versus what it is right now?

• 1:05:16Sam Parr?

  It's always reported. Self reporting is always wrong. Yeah, it's always wrong.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's self-reported and it's just so broken. And I think being able to track this stuff in a more automated, seamless way would be really interesting.

• 1:05:29Shaan Puri?

  Embedded device?

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, like I got a whoop and you know, that's doing some extra tracking. But yeah, some kind of embedded device that's like continuous glucose monitor plus some way to measure your blood pressure and kind of keep it in one place. The other thing that I think is a really interesting idea is that I went to Georgia Tech in 2003. And at the time they were working on building a smart home. And one of the ideas they had for a smart home was a smart toilet. So imagine when you're using the toilet, every time you use the toilet, it texts you and says, dude, you're eating too many french fries.

• 1:06:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  Stop.

• 1:06:13Shaan Puri?

  Stool sample, basically.

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, stool and urine sample and are measuring in real time what's up.

• 1:06:19Sam Parr?

  Wasn't there a company that was doing that in San Francisco that was totally a fraud? Was it Ubiome? Is that what they were doing?

• 1:06:25Shaan Puri?

  It wasn't a smart toilet, though. I think you had to send it to them.

• 1:06:28Sam Parr?

  Ah, okay. Wow, fuck that. That's, that's kind of weird, right? I can't even, how do you get a, well, I don't know. But, uh, no, those are interesting. I've seen people like tinkering around with this idea. I do think it's very fascinating. I have no idea how you do it. What do you shit in a net and it like takes a little strain?

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't know. I don't know what the mechanics are, but I think it's an interesting idea that like.

• 1:06:49Shaan Puri?

  Let's put it, let me ask you a different way. I think you have a very good way of thinking about problems. And what I mean by that is.

• 1:07:00Shaan Puri?

  Every time I've come to you with an idea, like two things happen that are different with you than with most people. One is you're like, I'm not, you don't sit there and ask like, is this feasible? How would we do it? You know, like that question comes late later. It's like, first, let me decide on like the big idea and you know, how could, you know, would this be amazing if it happened? Okay, then I'll go find a way to make it happen. Or like, you know, your brother, when he started the deodorant company, I remember somebody was like, Mois, do you know anything about deodorant? He's like, no, I know nothing about deodorant, but in six months, I know everything there is to know about deodorant. And sure enough, you know, built a very big deodorant. So like the kind of like not being limited by what I know today is like, you know, I would say one factor.

• 1:07:44Shaan Puri?

  And the other is like, um, you're not one, at least from what I could tell, like you don't really consider like plan Bs. Or like, if this fails or why would this fail? Uh, you, I remember when we started a thing together, you were like, yeah, I just, I was trying to do that. And you were like, I don't know, man, I don't really think that way. I just sort of, uh, I decide to win and then I do it and I just plan to win and I don't really focus on the rest. Am I, am I correctly understanding that or no?

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, I think, I think starting with, um, starting with is if, can this work? And, uh, or like, you know, what are so many people when they're evaluating an idea are immediately are like, no, this is not going to work for reason X, Y, and Z. Actually, my brother is like this. Um, and so I hate talking to him about new ideas because he's always just like shitting on them. Uh, he's just kind of a skeptic by nature. Um, so I definitely start with the, uh, if this works, uh, what does the world look like? And, uh, can this be a big deal if it actually works? So when I think about the smart toilet, I'm like, cool.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  Uh, right now to figure out if you have colon cancer, they do a, you have to poop in an envelope and send it to a lab. Um, what happens if this is automated?

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  Right now, uh, like there's all these medical things that I should probably be doing differently. I just have no idea what they are. And even if I knew them, I didn't, I don't have a good way to like have somebody enforce it in a automated way. If that happened across America, we could solve diabetes. Cause oftentimes diabetes is a disease that you choose instead of a disease that you're forced with.

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  So yeah, definitely start with the if this works, is it going to be a big deal? And then, um,

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  then I'm kind of like, cool, could I get customers for this? And if I could, then I'm kind of like, that's all you really need to start. You don't really need any more information about like how to build a toilet or, um, any of the science, like I think you can figure that out later.

• 1:10:07Shaan Puri?

  But can this be big? Would this be big if it worked? And can I get customers?

• 1:10:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Those are the two. And often what, you know, one thing that happens, I look at a lot of startup like investment deals with Sui and, uh, it'll be like, here's these great people. There's this great technology, great product, blah, blah, blah. And he was like, cool. So how are you going to get customers? And like, you, you think like, this like appears to be like a baffling question to so many founders or they'll say something. And he'll be like, okay.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  So like, what do you mean?

• 1:10:37Shaan Puri?

  So what do you mean? Like, what, what do you, where are you going to go? Or like, you know, have you done that? Tell me about three times in your life that you've done that. And, uh, and then he's sort of like, you know, I'm in or out based on their ability to get customers. And I think, you know, it's like the, I told you that my meme of the year is that midwit meme. It's like the genius and the idiot, the way they think is aligned. And the analyzer who's taking into account 75 variables actually ends up with the wrong answer more often than not. And like this idea of like, can it be big? You know, if it worked, would it be big? And can I get customers is the sort of the midwit meme, like, you know, in real life.

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think you need to know more than that. In fact, Sam and I were on this call where this guy was pitching, I think it's the company was called Firefly. It was pitching

• 1:11:28Speaker 02

  ads on top of Ubers and taxi cabs in like this physical device that was on top of

• 1:11:35Sam Parr?

  And they're around now, but I think at the time he wanted $100 million or maybe $60 million valuation. And it was crazy. I remember being off that call and I was like, huh?

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, Sam messaged me and was like, this is bananas. Can you believe this guy, this guy's valuation and the audacity? And he was, I think at the time, losing money on each individual device for years.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  So yeah, there, there are often times where people, I'm shocked by how many people are like, cool, I figured out what the product is, but I have no idea how to get customers. I have no idea what the economics of that look like. And that's where companies go to die.

• 1:12:15Sam Parr?

  How'd that company end up, by the way?

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  It still exists, but I have no idea.

• 1:12:21Sam Parr?

  Got it.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  I'm drinking the water, this water here. This is a $25 bottle of water because it's like pure water that's been filtered. I'm in LA right now. It turns out that if you drink tap water in LA, supposedly, according to this guy, it has pharmaceuticals in the water.

• 1:12:41Sam Parr?

  What's that, from Irwan or something?

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think this is from Irwan. And this water is basically pure in a way that like you can't get water anywhere else these days. And so it costs $25 a bottle. This is insane. And it tastes just like water.

• 1:13:01Sam Parr?

  And your point is?

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  And so it's a, yeah, so, you know, super interesting idea.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  I didn't talk to this guy or anything, but I wonder what their distribution strategy is. Cause I think putting $25 water at Irwan or Whole Foods is like an inadequate distribution strategy to get to a meaningful scale for that.

• 1:13:20Shaan Puri?

  Well, I'll give you the counter example. I was doing some research on the Nelk Boys.

• 1:13:26Shaan Puri?

  Who, and I won't do the full thing about the Nelk Boys and their kind of business empire, but one thing that stood out was I was watching this clip. And it was John Shaheidi, who you guys might know, cause he's like, kind of came, he was like in Silicon Valley, then he transitioned into like Hollywood influencer stuff. When he had his like mobile app, shots get popular from like a bunch of fine stars.

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  Is John their manager?

• 1:13:46Shaan Puri?

  And he's now their manager. So like shots didn't work out. He didn't build the next Snapchat. Even though he had every influencer and Justin Bieber and Floyd Mayweather and like all these people using it and investing in him. But he was like, cool, I can help these influencers out. So he started managing influencers and now he just is the manager of the Nelk Boys. And they were like, so their, their hard seltzer brand, Happy Dad, which is basically like, it looks literally like a Bud Light. Like just like, it looks like the right product. It's towards the right market. And they value the company, I think at $250 million right now. They're doing like, I forgot how much exactly. I'll pull it up.

• 1:14:23Speaker 02

  It's getting close to a hundred million in revenue.

• 1:14:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's close to a hundred million in revenue. So somewhere between 50 and 100 million in revenue. So the brand's doing really well and it's very young. It's like, it's like a very new brand. But they were like, oh, so for Happy Dad, like, you know, what's, what's the next product? Are you coming out with a new flavor? Or like a hard alcohol? Like what, what do you get to do? Because no, we have basically foot soldiers. We've done all the hard work to get foot soldiers to get into gas stations, 7-Elevens. And whatever. And so rather than compete with ourselves and like the fiercest competition in the drink market in those. We just looked around the store. We just sent people into the stores that were like doing these like gas station sales for us. And they looked around and were like, what's the easiest category we can win?

• 1:15:08Shaan Puri?

  And they're like, so we're doing beef jerky. They're like, beef jerky is like a really stale category. We already have this distribution channel into these gas stations and convenience stores, like hundreds, if not thousands of these stores across the country. That is the edge. All we have to do is work backwards from that. Like, we have the, we have the front end sales. Now we just need to figure out the back end product that should go into that, into that sales channel. And when I hear that, I'm like, the Nelk Boys run a more sophisticated business operation than like 95% of Silicon Valley in just that one way of thinking.

• 1:15:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, there's this Justin Kwon quote, "First time founders are obsessed with products, second time founders are obsessed with distribution." Now, I think there's this concept of, "I just focus on distribution. The product comes after I have distribution."

• 1:16:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's what, like, what we did with the audience, right? It's like, cool, I'm gonna build up a big podcast. We didn't sort of intentionally go about it this way. We just wanted to do a podcast. But once you realize, oh, cool, I could just build up a huge audience, I can come up with great products after. I don't even need to like, know what product it would be going in.

• 1:16:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I didn't understand that with the hustle. I was like, why are you guys investing? And they're like, because building an audience is really hard. And I was like, that's not that hard. Just do this, this, this, beep, bop, boop, and you got it. And then I kind of later on, I realized that to build an audience that's engaged, it's kind of, it is a little formulaic, but it's also a lot of luck in kind of catching lightning in a bottle where, and then once you have it, it's a very, very, very, very valuable. Now that I don't have it anymore, I'm like, ah, I get it. That was hard.

• 1:16:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's amazing to see people all around the world doing this now in all these verticals. Like, you know, Doug Demuro did this, then got an audience, then started Cars and Bids.

• 1:16:56Sam Parr?

  Dude, I was early on that, man. Sean, I was telling you, Doug Demuro, that Cars and Bids is gonna be big. Now his competitor was just in the New York Times last week for selling a billion dollars with the Cars.

• 1:17:05Shaan Puri?

  Congrats on investing on that when you called it.

• 1:17:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, about that. Yeah.

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  Did you try to invest in Doug Demiro's thing?

• 1:17:15Sam Parr?

  Maybe like a DM on Twitter was about the extent of it. But so, no, it was most I just it was I talked the talk. I didn't walk the walk. And also, I didn't have a lot of money at the time. I think he it's about four years old. But no, I talked the talk. That's about all I did.

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  It's also amazing because these guys will are often bootstrap, right? Because they basically start with no audience. They just start making an audience. And then, once they have an audience, they're generating so much profit from the audience through YouTube videos or whatever. So they don't even need outside capital. So I think even if you chased them down, he might have been like, I'm already making money. I don't need to raise money. So it just turns a lot of Silicon Valley stuff upside down of like, you know, distribution first, that generates profit, then use that profit to make product.

• 1:18:02Sam Parr?

  Sully, did you look at the feedback from your last episode? People loved you. They liked your voice. They say that you're calming, and I agree.

• 1:18:09Speaker 02

  Great. All right. I only listened to the feedback that like Sean or Ben Levy texted me.

• 1:18:15Sam Parr?

  You had very positive feedback. People liked you. They said that you're calming, that they would do anything that you'd say, things like that. Very.

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  It got a little weird by the end of it.

• 1:18:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for doing this. Hopefully, people enjoyed the Silicon Valley Bank breakdown and a few other things. And if you made it this far, we're doing a meetup, actually, Sean, tomorrow. You're not going to make it. We had, we have it like sold out like right away, 500 people. But we'll be doing another one April 28 ish, and we'll announce that more info on that soon.

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I got one quick thing I want to plug, which is, you know, Sean has this guy who's his right hand guy who helps him on all these different projects. I want to find a right hand guy to help me with a bunch of projects. So like source and diligence investments, research, random business ideas I have. Come work for me full time for the next five or 10 years, and let's go do something amazing.

• 1:19:13Sam Parr?

  And where do they find you?

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  You can find me on Twitter, DM me.

• 1:19:18Sam Parr?

  All right, and is your, what's your handle? It's S U L I?

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  Uh, no, it's my full name, S U L E M A N A L I.

• 1:19:26Sam Parr?

  All right, that's good. You're one of the very few people that has taken advantage of this to actually promote something. But you did it at the end, you could have done it in the beginning, but that's all right.

• 1:19:35Speaker 02

  Fuck it.

• 1:19:35Shaan Puri?

  Only the strong made it here. That's, he filtered about.

• 1:19:38Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:19:38Shaan Puri?

  He filtered out the weak, the weak people. All right, we're out of here. That's the pod.

• 1:19:42Speaker 02

  Cool.