$2.4M In ONE Day?!

Episode 544: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) talk about Bryan Johnson’s $2.4M dollar day, Pieter Levels investment portfolio, and the $500M exit no one saw coming. No more small boy spreadsheets, build your business on the free HubSpot CRM: https://mfmpod.link/hrd — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (1:00) Follow Up Boss sold for $500M (4:00) Boring Mattress (17:00) Pieter Levels is insane (23:50) Bryan Johnson: Zero to $200M Hero (34:00) OpenAI's new App Store (38:00) Vertical Google for research papers (43:00) Shaan's season of intentional internet (50:30) Joe Speiser's hyper-growth to failure (53:30 Partnership agreements (59:00) Shaan's nighttime routine — Links: • Boring Mattress - http://boring.co/ • Pieter Levels portfolio - https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1748713482692759647 • Bryan Johnson Blueprint - https://blueprint.bryanjohnson.com/ • Salary.com - http://salary.com/ • Consensus - https://consensus.app/ • Perplexity - http://perplexity.ai/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Try Shepherd Out - https://www.supportshepherd.com/ • Shaan's Personal Assistant System - http://shaanpuri.com/remoteassistant • Power Writing Course - https://maven.com/generalist/writing • Small Boy Newsletter - https://smallboy.co/ • Daily Newsletter - https://www.shaanpuri.com/ Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth 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. — Other 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?

  So let's do a little public math here. Let's break a rule. He just launched this product. He had more demand than he was willing to let in. He let in 5,000 people. That's 20 million in ARR that he had on day one of launching this product.

• 0:22Shaan Puri?

  All right, well, so it's me and Sam, two guys who you can't live without.

• 0:27Shaan Puri?

  You know, I should really think about what I'm going to say before I start.

• 0:32Shaan Puri?

  I literally just start talking and whatever comes out of my mouth is fine. And then also it's 9:00 AM for me. I, you know, I wake up. I don't talk to anyone from 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM. So these are the first words I say, period. And that's what came out. All right, well, here we are. We both have one topic in both of our lists, which is very, very rare that we have overlap here. We both have this topic because there's a business that sold for $500 million. That is a badass story and it's called Follow Up Boss. I had never heard of this company before. I find out they sell for 500 million in cash. Tell me about Follow Up Boss. I think you know more.

• 1:07Sam Parr?

  Do you know how I know about them? I know about them for two reasons. The biggest reason, they're Hampton member. And so I saw them post that they had just sold. Man, this story is crazy. So I had never heard of this company. Have you?

• 1:18Shaan Puri?

  Never heard of them until today.

• 1:19Sam Parr?

  So there's not really a reason why we would have heard of them other than we're just business nerds. But it's a real estate platform. So it's a, it's a vertical software. And so basically the gist of it is that if you are a real estate agent or if you own a company that has multiple real estate agents, you get leads from Redfin, Zillow, whatever else. Ideally, you get thousands of leads per month as well as you have homes that you're selling and people who are buying homes. You have to track them all. It's basically kind of what HubSpot or Salesforce does, but specifically for real estate agents. The guy, Dan, he started it 12 years ago, I think. Do you know how he started it? That's what's fascinating about it.

• 1:54Shaan Puri?

  I don't know how he started, but you're right. So the gist of it is it's a niche down CRM. So agents get leads. They need to follow up with those leads. You got to keep track of all those leads. So it's a sort of HubSpot for real estate agents, just zoomed in, zoomed way in on that one niche. Has a pretty insane exit. So how did they start it?

• 2:16Sam Parr?

  So they, what was the final sale? $500 million, so $400 million upfront in cash and then another 100 million earn out. Listen how this guy started. His name's Dan, he's from Australia, but they live in Wyoming now. So I guess it's technically, it's a remote company, but they're a Wyoming startup. It's gonna be one of the bigger tech exits out of Wyoming. Man, listen to this. So he actually went through the foundation. Do you remember that course like 10 years ago? It was like a course to teach you how to start a startup.

• 2:41Shaan Puri?

  The foundation? No, I've never heard of that.

• 2:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's what it was called. And so it's like their greatest success story, I guess now. But they, he went to this thing and he started just trolling Facebook groups. And he was like working a normal job. He was a marketer at a normal big company. And he was like, I want to start a company. I need some ideas. And so he was like, well, I've got a buddy in real estate that kind of interests me. So I'm, so he started joining these Facebook groups for real estate agents. And he just started like skimming in the, all the posts of like, what are people complaining about? What's like a common thing? And he saw this guy complain. He's like, man, I'm paying 500 bucks a month for the software that I hate for tracking all my leads. It kind of stinks. Like, how are you guys like tracking your leads? And he saw like, okay, that's interesting.

• 3:25Sam Parr?

  And so he partnered with a guy who's a developer, a friend of his is a developer. They build an MVP. They say that it took them like six, six months and they only had one customer paying 150 bucks a month. But he said, he goes, man, we built like, this interview that I read with him is a few years old. So I don't know if it was true till the end, but he's like, we basically built our entire business on Facebook, but not Facebook ads. He goes, I would just go into all these Facebook groups as the CEO. And I would see them talk about like, hey, what's a good platform for this? And it wasn't even related to Follow Up Boss, which was his software company. He was like, I was just like being helpful constantly. And people would click my Facebook profile and see that I was the CEO of this one platform or this one tech company. And then they would click off and buy it. And I would call them and become friends with them.

• 4:09Sam Parr?

  But he became, they found this idea just through trolling Facebook groups. And they would see people complain about stuff and he would DM them on Facebook and be like, hey, I think I'm building a solution for you. I don't care if you buy it or not, but like, could you just give me 10 minutes of your time? So I could figure out, make sure I'm solving the right problem. And he did this so often that that's how they came up with this idea for the software. They bootstrapped the whole company. I don't know how much the revenue was. The, the only source that I found was a source that I don't entirely trust online, but it was like 28 million a year in revenue, less than 100 employees. And a huge exit.

• 4:44Shaan Puri?

  Don't people have to tell you the revenue when you join Hampton? Don't you just have this? Can't you just take a peek at the quick HIPAA record here?

• 4:48Sam Parr?

  But I would never cite that. And so I'm, so I just Googled like, uh, you know, follow up boss revenue. And I'm just like, what, what can I see that's public? So, so I don't know.

• 4:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this, this is a, um, an awesome story and a good example of kind of the niche down, the niche down zoom in pivot. And I think that this is a, you know, there's many like, um, business plan blueprints. So for example, those guys from 37 signals, though what they're doing is they just go, hey, what's a super popular thing, but has too many features? We're going to make it do less and take up less of your life. And that's like, as an example, you know, hey, their email client, they're like, yeah, it's just going to do these things in this way. Less features, the better, less clutter, the better. And they're doing it again with once where they're doing software that you only have to pay for one time. No monthly recurring, right? So that their thing is it's the stripped down version of X.

• 5:42Shaan Puri?

  I don't know if you saw, well, I don't know if you saw, but the guys who started, uh, Tuft and Needle came out with a new company. Did you see this?

• 5:47Sam Parr?

  Crazy. What's it called? Boring mattress?

• 5:50Shaan Puri?

  Boring mattress. So the guys who created Tuft and Needle, they were part of the D to C. You know, mattresses were like the poster boy of the D to C wave that happened where Casper and Tuft and Needle and Purple got big, raised a bunch of money, burned a bunch of money, kind of didn't have a great exit. So these guys came back and now it's just boring.co is the name of their website. It's like, this is a plain mattress. Our friends told us that we should tell you about all the cool benefits, features that will make this quote different and quote sellable. But we're not convinced. We don't think you'll fall for that. So here's just a really good mattress that'll last you a while. No frills.

• 6:26Sam Parr?

  And it's only $400, right? Or it's like, it's cheap.

• 6:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, 500 bucks. And so that's their new thing. And so there's, that's one blueprint in a business is to do the same thing with less, less frills. Actually, like, you know, brand, less of a brand, uh, pump or, or less features that you needed to, to, to use. Trello is a good example of this. All productivity apps had more and more and more features. Trello was like, hey, we're just going to have less features, right? It's just the equivalent of index cards on the internet that you can move around.

• 6:54Sam Parr?

  There's actually another takeaway here though, which is how long? So you started an e-commerce company. How long until you hit your first 100,000 in revenue per month?

• 7:04Shaan Puri?

  Like three months, probably.

• 7:06Sam Parr?

  Okay. You're involved in Shepherd. How long do you think it took them to hit their first hundred thousand in, in revenue?

• 7:15Shaan Puri?

  I have no idea. I'm gonna guess six months. Yeah, quick.

• 7:17Sam Parr?

  Okay, six months. So we're talking months. Hampton took a short amount of time, months as well. The hustle, I think it took nine months. Do you know how long it took Follow Up Boss to get to a hundred million in revenue? Or, uh, sorry, a hundred thousand in monthly.

• 7:32Shaan Puri?

  Well, you said they had one customer for a hundred fifty bucks, like hanging by a thread for a while. So is it more than a year to get to that first milestone? Four years?

• 7:40Sam Parr?

  It took them four years, four years to get to. So I was reading this interview with them. It took them four years. And they had eleven employees and they're at a hundred thousand in, in monthly revenue. They say, they, they said around a hundred thousand, so it could have been a little bit more. But what's crazy is these software companies, so I don't know what their revenue was. Like I said, I think it was between twenty five and thirty if you just Google like Follow Up Boss revenue. That's what I saw. They sold for four hundred, uh, well, potentially five hundred, four hundred upfront. What's crazy is these software companies. We, you and I both have this thing where we want to go fast. We need to learn and have a little bit of this attitude.

• 8:16Shaan Puri?

  I got zero percent of this. You are more of a stick to it kind of guy. Do you think, I mean, if you're under a hundred thousand in revenue, four years in, are you doing this still?

• 8:27Sam Parr?

  It's hard. So like, all right, so I have an audience now, so.

• 8:30Shaan Puri?

  Do you think you could have stuck with it?

• 8:32Sam Parr?

  It depends where I was in life. If I was, if it was twenty six year old Sam, fifty percent chance. If it's where I am now, I would say five percent chance. It's, it would be really hard. It would be, it would be hard.

• 8:43Shaan Puri?

  I'd have to be going into those meetings and be like, all right, guys, we're gonna review the metrics today. Ear muffs, everybody. We're gonna say the revenue number. And then everybody has to do this. And then I say, we're at, we're at forty two thousand in year four. And then, all right, but, but there's other things to be excited about.

• 8:58Sam Parr?

  But we talked to Dharmesh about this and Dharmesh is pretty, uh, he's pretty low key about it. He's like, it took forever. In reality, Dharmesh, HubSpot, Dharmesh is the founder of HubSpot. HubSpot, I think, grew like actually a lot faster. But he was like, man, the first like six years, we only got to like four million or something in revenue. I forget exactly what he said, but he like conveyed the idea where he's like, it's a slog at first.

• 9:19Shaan Puri?

  Also, at that time, things just grew slower. Now things grow much faster, right? The benchmarks and the expectations are way different.

• 9:27Sam Parr?

  But you have to have faith and of course, we're talking about the one that worked. Uh, and there's a lot, there's so many more that don't work, but like to have that faith of like, this can work and to stick to it for 10, 11, 12 years. If, if, if you have the right, you know, metrics, this shit pays off. This, these software companies are so much cooler than what we typically start.

• 9:49Shaan Puri?

  So I did a, I remember many years ago, I did a fireside chat with Michael Birch, who was at the time was, you know, my mentor, he was my boss. Uh, he's a guy who's built four or five super successful internet companies that scaled to millions of users. He's basically a billionaire at this point in Silicon Valley. And a bunch of entrepreneurs came over and they were asking questions. One of the questions they asked was, how do you know when to pivot or persevere? Meaning you hear the stories about follow up boss or Pinterest where it's like, there was, it was not taking off for a while and then, you know, they stuck with it and then it did.

• 10:24Sam Parr?

  Did Pinterest take a long time?

• 10:26Shaan Puri?

  Pinterest took a long time. Um, like the graph was, you know, not like some explosive social app at the beginning. And, um, and so they, and I, I turned to him because I was like, I want to know this answer too. This is like, this is, I want to know, what is the guy who's done it in Silicon Valley? What does he, what does he say? And he goes, this is the hardest question for any entrepreneur and it's deeply personal and situational. He goes, for every, you know, one story you hear of a Pinterest that just keeps going after 12 months, even though there's no signs of life. You know, there's a hundred people that did that and failed. And you just never hear, they don't get to talk at the conference, right? So he's like, it's super hard because you have this survivorship bias to know which story should you listen to?

• 11:07Shaan Puri?

  And so he's like, I was like, this is the one where there's no real advice you can get from somebody else. The one thing that we figured out at our company was like, we would set a time box. We think we can hit this milestone by this date. And setting that time box is really important because it keeps you honest upfront. When you're super optimistic. All right, let's say something then. We think that in the first, like I set one for this new company. I haven't, I haven't announced it yet on the pod, but I set one, I said, I think we can get to 500,000 ARR in the first 60 days. So I think we can get to 500K of revenue in the first 60 days. And I said that now, if we don't hit that, doesn't mean I'm gonna like throw in the towel or shut it down. It meant like-

• 11:45Sam Parr?

  But maybe.

• 11:47Shaan Puri?

  No, me, you never know. Life's on the line for these companies. No, but, but the reality is you set that so that you have to have a conversation about why you didn't hit your expectations. What, what were you wrong about? Or what assumption did you have that was incorrect? Cause it might be a fatal assumption or might just be, oh, I was just, I underestimated how long it takes to do X. And that's okay. You can have that conversation. The, the thing we did when I worked with Michael was we asked a question. What metric gives us the most faith? So what metric worries us the most and what metric gives us the most faith? So let's say four years in, we don't have a million or we don't have a hundred thousand of revenue. That's the one that worries us the most. We have very little revenue. Okay. But what gives us the most faith? It's, well, of the 52 customers we do have, they love it and nobody's churning, right?

• 12:31Shaan Puri?

  Then it's like, oh, okay. What can I hang my hat on to give myself the excuse to keep going? And so I think that's a useful question to ask if you, if you don't know whether I should pivot or persevere. I think what metric is giving me the most faith and what metric is keeping me up at night? And then you can almost kind of weigh the two against each other. Um, you know, if the thing that's giving you faith is like, yeah, that one guy told me he likes it. It's like, oh, that's not a very strong counter punch to the fact that the evidence on your revenue and usage side is pretty low.

• 12:57Sam Parr?

  But it feels horrible when you're in it. So I posted a link in our M D B document. Okay. So it goes to a TechCrunch. If you, I remember it goes to TechCrunch article, but I remember when we were running the hustle, I looked up to, there, there weren't that many media companies to look up to. And so I really looked up to Business Insider. And the reason I liked it was Henry Blodgett was fairly transparent about their traffic. And so Henry Blodgett, they wrote an article, it looks like, uh, maybe six years into the company. And he made a funny joke. He was like, we eked out a net profit of $2,100 on revenues of $4.8 million. It's basically enough to buy a MacBook Pro and, uh, and he reveals their traffic. And you see that it looks like this nice, like arc where it's like, or this nice graph where it's like exponentially going up.

• 13:43Sam Parr?

  But I remember when I was running the hustle, I was like, well, their graph looked amazing. Like it looked amazing, but then I zoomed in on this picture and you could see that it's broken down by month. And if you really focus on it, what you could see is basically February of oh nine, they hit an all time high. And then they didn't surpass that until something like December of oh nine. So basically for

• 14:06Shaan Puri?

  The whole year.

• 14:06Sam Parr?

  The, for 10 months. Yeah, the whole year, which I think it looks like they started in oh seven. So for 10 months, two years into the company, the monthly traffic, which for a site like Business Insider, that's how they would gauge if they're doing a good job. It basically either went down or didn't go up. And when you do that every single day, every single week for 10 months, it feels miserable. And then you zoom out and you like, see like, okay, well, it has gone up, but these graphs are never a smooth going up. And a lot of times, sometimes I imagine for two years, it'll be pretty shit. Three years, for years, it'll be shit. And then after a while, it starts picking up if you do a handful of things right.

• 14:46Sam Parr?

  But that requires extreme faith and it's very, very, very hard to manage your emotions every day when it's like that.

• 14:53Shaan Puri?

  I totally agree. This is a

• 14:57Shaan Puri?

  Tony Robbins said this thing, he goes, the number one choke point of any business is the psychology of the owner. Like every problem you think your business has, if you do the root cause analysis, it goes right back up to the root, to the psychology of the, of the owner. Right? Let's say, oh, we're not growing fast enough. Why? Because, um, you know, we don't have, uh, our paid acquisition sucks. Why? Cause we, the guy who's running our paid acquisition has been doing it for six months of his life. You don't have somebody experienced. Why? Cause we're not hiring the right people. Why? Cause our owner hasn't made that a priority and isn't willing to spend money, right? Or is afraid to spend money on, on talent. And so everything just comes back to the psychology of the owner, which is both empowering, but also I think scary for some people. The empowering part is it's in your control.

• 15:41Shaan Puri?

  The scary part is shit, it's my fault.

• 15:45Sam Parr?

  And it goes back, you could also like go back to like what inefficiencies or like where does the owner or CEO, where do they like suck? So like, for example, I remember at the hustle, I was always fearful of overspending. And so I was cheap about shit and I was actually overly cheap. And when there was times when Facebook ads opened up and it's like, dude, we got to spend more here. Looking back, I should have spent way more, but I didn't because I was being too cheap. And like, why am I cheap? Well, because of all this other shit that I experienced in life. And so like, it's basically like, what do they say? Like, a person with money is it's just gonna like magnify the things that the traits that they already have. Or like, you always say that with people when they're drunk, like, oh, you're the true feelings are just gonna come out. Right. It's the same thing as with running a company and you got to like, master that inner game. And it's really hard.

• 16:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, for sure. Let's do another one. Um, I want to talk about, um, let's do, you have this one, Peter Levels is insane. Tell me the Peter Levels is insane one. That's a good headline.

• 16:41Sam Parr?

  I love this guy. So Peter Levels, we had in the pod, I think we've only had him once, but he's got an open invitation if he wants to come on again. So Peter Levels, we both love him. He has like four or five different businesses that he runs. I think he's by himself doing it. Collectively, his businesses probably do two million a year in sales and he's super transparent about all of it. So he puts his revenue in his bio on his Twitter. He shares everything. Really fascinating, thoughtful guy. Did you see what he did with his stock portfolio? So he basically, so click that tweet and you'll see it. But he basically created a Google sheet. And he, you can kind of, I don't, he doesn't explicitly say it, but you could do the math.

• 17:24Sam Parr?

  He says, here's how much my stock portfolio made me. And it was up 32%. So you can kind of like, just do basic algebra and figure out how much he has in his portfolio. And he reveals every holding that he has. And I think that A, I'm happy he is doing this. B, I would never ever do this, though. Like, it's, this is like, his transparency is wild. But it's super fascinating to see what this guy is doing when it comes to like, sharing his numbers out in public. It's pretty, pretty fascinating.

• 17:58Shaan Puri?

  I gotta say two things about Peter. So first, Peter, come back on the pod. We miss you. You've done a bunch of interesting stuff. This, plus your new AI stuff that we didn't talk about yet. So I want to do that. Second, We've had a bunch of people on this podcast, some that have big names, some that have, you know, big, uh, big track records or billionaires or built this hundred billion dollar company or whatever. Nobody, and I mean, nobody has a higher approval rating amongst entrepreneurs on the internet than Peter Levels. Have you ever met anybody that is not a fan of Peter Levels?

• 18:32Sam Parr?

  I've had billionaire friends like or associates in a, in a, in a conversation and they'll go, that guy's doing it right. Everyone likes this guy.

• 18:42Shaan Puri?

  Put this guy's profile picture up on the, on the fucking screen. Go, go to YouTube and just look at this guy's profile picture.

• 18:51Shaan Puri?

  This is your personal branding seminar. Look at this guy's profile picture. It's him on a couch in the like international pose of like guy scheming on the internet, just messing around, having fun on the internet by himself. He's on a couch, half his body's dangling off. He's got his laptop, he's nowhere, no shirt. He's got his laptop up on a pillow because you know, the laptop starts to just squirt you after a while. And he's at this messed up angle, his neck's all messed up. But you know, this guy is a one man band just having fun. And I, this is why you're right. CEOs of like, you know, major companies are like, that guy, that guy's doing it right. Cause everybody is jealous of being able to be this guy. A guy who's just one man and a laptop, travels around the world, builds projects, whatever he wants for fun.

• 19:33Shaan Puri?

  He builds cool stuff like an artist that, um, whatever he builds tends to have some, some juice behind it because he's a very creative guy. Um, he's had many failures, but who cares? And he's got a bunch of successes. He's very open about them. He's not trying to sell you anything.

• 19:49Shaan Puri?

  Peter Levels is a hero amongst makers and nobody, I, I will contend this, nobody has a higher approval rating on the internet amongst entrepreneurs than Peter Levels.

• 19:58Sam Parr?

  He's great, man. He's great. And I think on this podcast, a lot of people like, oh, you're talking about just big companies too often or whatever. And it's like, we always reiterate this, it's like, we like people who carve their paths. And that path could lead to a huge exit. It could lead to something really small, like, uh, just, you could just be a great artist. It doesn't matter if it's a big money thing or not. And Peter Levels, the reason why he's so fascinating is he has carved the hardest path and he sticks to it. He's very value based, really, really, really cool guy.

• 20:29Shaan Puri?

  He did a tweet that it goes, he goes, only four out of the 70 projects I've ever done have made money and grown. 95% of everything I ever did failed. My hit rate's only 5%. So ship more. This has 15,000 likes. It is just literally a, like a, you know, like a VS code, like a screenshot of projects that made money and grew. Four. He's got Nomad List, Remote Talk, Rebase, and a YouTube network. This is before his AI thing. And then here's all of his lit, all of his projects and his stuff like Ice Cream Chat, Tubalitics, Gift Book, Taylor Telegram Chatbot, StartupRetreats.com, Places to Work, Fire Calculator. I don't even know what any of these are, but each one of these is like, you know, a great week. It's

• 21:12Shaan Puri?

  like, you know, a great weekend that was had by him doing these projects.

• 21:16Sam Parr?

  You know that meme where it's like, babe, wake up. Sean Perry just tweeted again. Or like, babe, wake up. You know, like-

• 21:24Shaan Puri?

  Peter Levels bought a domain.

• 21:25Sam Parr?

  Yes. Whenever Peter replies to one of my tweets, it's like one of those. It's like, babe, wake up. Peter just said he liked what I'm doing. That's how I feel about this guy. Really cool guy. And-

• 21:37Shaan Puri?

  I have a theory that people, ultimately, what is lacking in most people's lives is that they don't live life on their own terms. And then the way that that expresses itself is you have a lot of fun when you're living life on your own terms. When you're just doing your, not your thing, you're doing your thang. And if you're doing your thing, you're having a good time. Peter Levels, that profile picture of him on his couch, like all crooked, just on his laptop, he's doing his thing. And I feel like this is, honestly, it's a bit of why people like this podcast. We're not the most prepared or researched or well spoken, whatever. But people could tell we have fun in our lives. That we, like, we literally just do shit that we want to do, and we're having a good time. And it might be that the things we do are

• 22:22Shaan Puri?

  not at all the things you want to do, right? Sam's like buying a ranch and like, you know, tipping cows and I don't know what all this shit you do. I don't want to do all that stuff. But I could tell that you want to do all that stuff, and that's awesome. It's great that you want to do all those things. You know, you build your like gym and your farmhouse and whatever, all that good stuff. I think that- Peter Levels is a great example of somebody who's just living life on his own terms. And that is one of the most attractive traits that people have in general. And it's so funny because what most people do is the exact opposite. Peter Levels has a bunch of influence, but when most people try to become influencers, they strip down their personality and try to appeal to others and people could sniff that out.

• 23:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I just think he's the best and I DM him on a regular basis. He replies to me 10% of the time. So Peter, if this makes it to you, come on the pod, man. Come on, come back on. What do you got?

• 23:13Shaan Puri?

  All right, let's do.

• 23:17Shaan Puri?

  So another person who is gone from zero to hero, Brian Johnson.

• 23:22Sam Parr?

  Have you seen the T-shirt that he wears lately?

• 23:24Shaan Puri?

  Don't die?

• 23:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, don't die.

• 23:27Shaan Puri?

  Don't die, that's a new, that's a new brand. You know what I like about it? It's the same look as the Austin 316 T-shirts.

• 23:33Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 23:35Shaan Puri?

  And I think he should have just done Johnson 316, don't die.

• 23:40Sam Parr?

  It's good, man.

• 23:41Shaan Puri?

  Make Johnson 316, don't die shirts because that's who he should become. All right, so I was looking the other day because I saw that Brian Johnson finally started to sell something. And me and you had made a prediction about six months, a year ago. We said, you know what? I don't think Brian's doing this for the money. I don't think he's doing this for the fame, although he's going to make a lot of money. And I'm sure the fame, you know, the attention feels good in the moment.

• 24:06Sam Parr?

  Very obvious prediction.

• 24:08Shaan Puri?

  Very obvious prediction, but we said, dude, is this the greatest pre, like pre-launch marketing stunt ever? Cause what he did was he basically turned himself into a character. And a lot of people have done this in the fitness niche, but he's not a fitness influencer. He branded himself as a longevity influencer, a live forever, a don't die influencer. And he spent a couple million bucks on tests and content and building his brand. He came on pods like ours and you could look at Google Trends, you could see the interest in Brian Johnson growing over time. Actually, we should map out when our podcast was with him on that trend because I'm curious where that was. And he has built an amazing following and he's doing everything you should do as a, as an influencer. Not that he wants to be an influencer, but he's doing everything you should do.

• 24:53Shaan Puri?

  Like, I don't know if you've seen his meetups that he's having lately, these runs that he's doing.

• 24:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they look awesome.

• 24:58Shaan Puri?

  He's taking people and they chant like, don't die, then they like run up a hill. Or something like that. And then they get at the bottom and they eat like, just, there's a pot of lentils and they're all eating lentils. It's amazing. And so he's building this little cult and it's, it's a great thing. So he came out with his first paid product. Did you see it?

• 25:15Sam Parr?

  It was, it, it's the meal service, right?

• 25:18Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no. So he came out with like a, it's kind of like a meal service. It's like, basically it's a a part one of his blueprint diet as a, you know, ready to eat, sort of like delivery package. I think you pay 330 bucks a month and you get this thing, 12,000 people applied.

• 25:34Sam Parr?

  Wait, wait, wait. But what is it? How's it not, you, you said, you implied I was a little wrong with meal service. It is a meal service then, but it's just like powder, right?

• 25:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's not like meal delivery. It's not like Blue Apron, but it is like, you know, the supplements and the drink and the whatever, whatever. It's like some version, some skimmed down version of the, um, of his like anti-aging protocol.

• 25:54Sam Parr?

  Got it.

• 25:55Shaan Puri?

  It's the blueprint self experimentation study. And there's like a level one and then there's, there's going to be a level two, a level three. So there's 67 interventions in this and it looks like there's a couple of powders. There's a bottle of olive oil and then there's a bunch of pills.

• 26:09Sam Parr?

  I like all those things. Powders, pills, powder, pills and oils. Send me out.

• 26:14Shaan Puri?

  So he, um, he got 5,000, he got 12,000 people to apply, 5,000 people paid. So let's do a little public math here. Let's break a rule. He just launched this product. He had more demand than he was willing to let in. He let in 5,000 people. That's 20 million in ARR that he had on day one of launching this product.

• 26:35Shaan Puri?

  And 20 million of ARR for a subscription supplements business essentially is like a $200 million business.

• 26:42Sam Parr?

  What do you think Athletic Greens is at revenue wise? They, they raised at 1.2 billion in valuation.

• 26:48Shaan Puri?

  100, 150 is my guess, maybe 200 max.

• 26:51Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 26:52Shaan Puri?

  Not, uh, yeah, but this is day one. Day one, come out the gate with 20 million. And this is, he let in less than half of that demand that he had, right? So he could have been at 40 million if he, if he wanted to. Again, I don't think he's doing this for the money, but goddamn, that's a, that is an impressive start to a business. And it shows that I have this phrase now that I say, and my wife doesn't think it's cool. And she's the one who I've tried it on, but I say this. I say all content is now marketing and all marketing is now content. And this is what Brian Johnson did. He was putting out content. It happened to be marketing. And that that marketing is now leading to a lot of sales for his new protocol.

• 27:27Sam Parr?

  When you say that to your wife, I can just hear the world's loudest eye roll of like, shut the fuck up, Sean. That shit works on those fucking dorks that listen to you. But take out the fucking trash, Sean.

• 27:41Shaan Puri?

  Did you warm up the mac and cheese like I asked you to?

• 27:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 27:45Shaan Puri?

  What are you talking about?

• 27:46Sam Parr?

  This is awesome. It's sort of like, have you seen that What's That movie where they talk about the biggest short? And Ryan Gosling's character, you know, they're like, what are you getting out of this, Ryan? He goes, look, look, listen, Vinnie, you're getting the ice cream. You're getting the nuts. You're getting the chocolate syrup. You're getting the whipped cream. And when this works out, I'm going to get the cherry on top. That's my fee. I just get a little bit of this. That's, that's, that's what Brian Johnson is doing with this business. He's doing everything else, I think, actually just because, because he's a dork and he enjoys this shit. Then it just so happened that he got famous. And now he's like, yeah, yeah, that's pretty cool. Okay, fine, I'll do that, too. You know, and I dig that. And isn't it weird? Like, why do you think we have so much trust and faith in this guy? It's part of it is because he already has like the FU money.

• 28:31Sam Parr?

  And so we think like, he didn't give a shit. He's just doing this just because. But the way that he's turned himself into a character is actually really interesting. In his case, there was a high barrier to entry. He spent millions of dollars, it seems, doing this. He also kind of lived like a hermit for two years to like, perfect this. But the idea of turning yourself into a character and then doing it in front of a lot of people, that's actually a really appealing, that's an exciting route to go for a lot of people. Where it's just like, you change your identity and you go all in on this. And you could actually make an, make a great living by doing this.

• 29:02Shaan Puri?

  It's the same reason I bought shoes from knees over toes guy, right? I probably never bought shoes from any brand besides Nike in like 20 years. And then. I see this guy who's over 40 years old dunking a basketball. I see what he looked like before he was doing his thing and how he had knee surgeries. Undeniable proof is a very, very powerful lever. This guy literally just does like a somersault, then he gets up and dunks the basketball and he's like this 45 year old white guy.

• 29:30Sam Parr?

  Which shoes?

• 29:31Shaan Puri?

  He came out with like a pair of shoes that are like, you know, the knees over toes like thing. Not great shoes, by the way, for the record.

• 29:39Shaan Puri?

  Definitely don't buy V1 if anybody's anything. So, so, you know, it wasn't great, but I have a high amount of faith and trust in this guy because again, all content is marketing. So for two years, he was just putting out free content, didn't sell a thing. And so for two years, all he did was put out very helpful content and showed an undeniable level of proof that this guy was in incredible shape, that his legs were super, super strong and that, you know, where he started to where he was is a very powerful transformation. So anybody who wants to have that transformation will trust him. And then when he comes out with a thing and he says, hey, this is what I use, people will buy it and it's very, very effective.

• 30:13Sam Parr?

  By the way, I also bought knees over toes shoes. Before he came out with that shoe company, he was always wearing these other shoes and I also bought them.

• 30:23Shaan Puri?

  I also bought those, that, that white shoe that looks like it's from Japan, that's like $70 or something, $45. Couldn't even really get it on. I have like a thick American foot or something. It's like, it doesn't fit in this like European shoe.

• 30:35Sam Parr?

  Dude, I wore the shit out of them. I love those shoes. I like, I remember seeing the picture and like Googling like, what are those shoes?

• 30:42Shaan Puri?

  They're not very comfortable. They look cool though.

• 30:44Sam Parr?

  They look great.

• 30:45Shaan Puri?

  They're like Fuyé or something like that.

• 30:46Sam Parr?

  Like Fugazi or it's like such an F.

• 30:48Shaan Puri?

  The Fugazis too, man. They were, they were Fugazi as hell.

• 30:52Sam Parr?

  Can I do a quick thrill of the show, by the way?

• 30:54Shaan Puri?

  Okay, go.

• 30:55Sam Parr?

  All right. So basically at Hampton, we've got access to all this data. And so in order to grow, we decided, I love data, you know, they say data is the new oil. I already mentioned, I love oil. I don't know how to, I don't know how to make money off of it yet, but somehow oil is good. We've been doing these surveys where we survey different industries and we give benchmarks for different industries. Right now, we just did one on agencies. And so we did this thing where we surveyed 60 agencies. They give us all their revenue, all their profit. And we did like the school survey where we show here's the benchmarks for profit per employee, revenue per employee. You can find it at, if you just go to joinhampton.com and then you go to our blog, you'll see the surveys. We did one on wealth. So like people say their net worth, how much money they're spending each month, how much income they're making each month, how much they're working each week. We just did one on agencies. So if

• 31:38Sam Parr?

  you're an agency owner, check it out. But more so, that's, that's the show. Here's the thrill part. I think Sean, that if I, if I decide to do this, have you ever heard of the, have you, I think this could work. Have you ever heard of like benchmarking? Like I didn't know anything about this industry. Do you know anything about benchmarking?

• 31:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, of course.

• 31:57Sam Parr?

  I didn't know that people would ever pay for this. And so there's the most common form of benchmarking is salary benchmarking. So there's a company called salary.com and then there's like 10 or 20 other ones who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, whatever. I think in a couple of years, if I get enough data, I think we could, I can spin this off and create a data company where I do benchmarking for different industries. And the problem that we'll be solving is, let's say that you're an agency, let's say you're an econ business and you're above 50 million in revenue, you want to know, are we spending the right amount for ads? Are we spending the right amount for employees? Whatever. I think we can build a cool data business off of this. So that's the thrill of the show. But I just wanted to call my shot and say, maybe eventually, I think we're going to do this.

• 32:40Shaan Puri?

  I don't think it's a call your shot if you say maybe eventually. Calling your shot is, I'm going to do this. It's like the only requirement of calling your shot is to say, I'm going to do this. Not call my shot. If I so happen to do this, which I probably won't, but it could kind of work.

• 32:59Sam Parr?

  It's like if Babe Ruth just went like this. It's at the point you just went like, like.

• 33:04Shaan Puri?

  He kind of shrugged.

• 33:05Sam Parr?

  He just waited and said, he's like,

• 33:08Shaan Puri?

  Dude, also.

• 33:13Shaan Puri?

  You reminded me of something. I don't mean to to rain on your your thrill or your shill here, but do you remember, have you seen these leaked, I'm sure you've seen this because we're both internet, like, uh, what's it called? Like the people who look for fossils, whatever archaeology?

• 33:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 33:30Shaan Puri?

  When Mark Zuckerberg had his old, like, AIM messages leaked when he was 19 years old, starting Facebook, and he

• 33:36Sam Parr?

  Where he's like, these, these effing idiots are actually downloading this.

• 33:39Shaan Puri?

  Here's the transcript. He goes, he just DMs a friend, just because he can't wait to break. He goes, yeah, so if you ever need anyone, if you ever need any info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, social security numbers. His friend goes, what? How did you manage that? People just submitted it. I don't know why. They quote, "Trust me, dumb fucks." It's a Sam in his Slack about Hampton. He's like, yeah, every agency just submitted their profits, their revenues, their growth tactics. They trust me.

• 34:10Sam Parr?

  For the record, I want to say

• 34:11Shaan Puri?

  You're like the next Zuck, dude.

• 34:13Sam Parr?

  Dude, I want to say, I have access to zero of the documents that people submit for, in order to join Hampton. I've got zero access. I purposely did this, just like for years. I purposely didn't ask your name of your econ business. I just like, I don't want to know because I don't want to accidentally say anything. I have zero access to this. Not only because I don't want to say anything, and also because I just literally don't know how to, you know, like, use computers and like login and I don't have a password.

• 34:45Shaan Puri?

  That was the equivalent of, you know, no obla in glass. Like, oh, I got pulled over. I don't even speak. I don't even know how to use my computer. I can't act. Trust me. All right. Let me stop making funny about that. Let's, let's move on. Let's do another one.

• 34:57Sam Parr?

  All right. So last year, I invested in this company called Consensus. And they basically, it was like an AI company for research, for like scientific research. So if you wanted to like, figure out like, um, you know, instead of like reading individual studies, this website would just tell you in aggregate what many studies would show. And they were only doing okay. There, it was basically just two guys and they were still just trying to figure it out. Like it, it was like, this sounds interesting, but like, I don't even know if this is going to work. Let's see. Well, something happened a few weeks ago. That I think is going to change their business, but I think that there's an inflection. So basically, like when the iPhone came out, the App Store happened and we heard stories about Pandora. So Pandora was a company before they were the music service. The App Store came out and they're like, oh, let's just use our service and pivot and build an app. They were one of the first apps.

• 35:42Sam Parr?

  That's what made Pandora popular. When COVID happened, there's companies like BetterHelp, which is like a therapy online. Or there's like telemedicine because the laws during COVID changed where a doctor can prescribe meds across state lines. There's been a lot, a bunch of these. Right now, one just happened. So I think January 14th, so I think it was 10 or January 10th. OpenAI created an App Store. They've kind of done this where they've like made their own, like you can make your own GPT and all this other stuff. But they've created an App Store. I don't even think they said what the pricing was. So with the iPhone App Store, I think the developer gets what 70% of the revenue? Apple gets 30%? OpenAI hasn't even said what that, what it's going to be. So it's still really early.

• 36:27Sam Parr?

  And so this company that I invested in, they're like, oh, well, like our thing is going okay. But like, what if we just like went all in on this like plugin for OpenAI Store? And so their version is basically like you just type in, you ask it questions, medical questions, and it just gives you a slightly better answer than OpenAI, but it's a lot better. Or at least enough that you want to pay for. And there's not that much traffic right now, or not that many new apps in the OpenAI, OpenAI App Store. But this is one of those inflection moments. So here's two more examples. So you remember Honey, that company that was like, uh, uh, what do they do? Coupon codes for a website. And then Grammarly did the same thing. They both did that with the Chrome Store. You have a bunch of friends because you kind of ran in that world where people did this with the Facebook platform.

• 37:12Sam Parr?

  So Zynga, I don't know how much money they eventually made, but it was at one point a multi-billion dollar company. I think right now we're going to see like a Facebook store. You're going to see like all these mafia wars, all these like weird games. I think you had a buddy, what was the guy's name? Dan who went to Camp FM, who started like OMG Pop or something like that? What was that called?

• 37:29Shaan Puri?

  Draw Something was the game that everybody played.

• 37:31Sam Parr?

  And I, I think he had a multi hundred million dollar exit. I think this is right now about to happen with the OpenAI like plugin store. It's really fascinating what's happening.

• 37:41Shaan Puri?

  I thought this was interesting. You asked the guy or somebody asked the founder. He said, I think it's going to be something between like more than the Chrome Extensions market, but less than the App Store. Yeah, short term, it's awesome for marketing and functionality for users.

• 37:56Shaan Puri?

  And OpenAI is footing the bill on a lot of the compute costs.

• 38:01Shaan Puri?

  In the medium term, we have two X the usage of the next biggest GPT. And I think Canva is the next. So this is the number one GPT.

• 38:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, it's taking off. And these guys, they're smart guys, but it was still when they were starting their company, when we invested, it was like, uh, I don't know. Hopefully we'll figure it out. And there was a time where I was like, you guys better figure this out soon. Like, I don't know if this is going to work out. And then this inflection happened. This change happened.

• 38:25Shaan Puri?

  Dude, this product is awesome. I just went to their site. I didn't do the chat GPT thing, but just their app is really cool. So you go there, you ask any questions. So I just did. Are microplastics dangerous for humans? And then it has all these papers. But then you hit synthesize, which I think is the credits that you have to buy if you, but you start with 23 credits. And it says, summary, we looked at 10 papers. The study suggests microplastics are dangerous for humans and they carry toxic chemicals.

• 38:50Shaan Puri?

  Contaminate ecosystems and are linked to various health issues, including cancers and immune system disruptions. And then it says, we looked at the 14 papers. Yes, was 43% of the time, possibly 57% of the time, no, 0% of the time. And that was the like, that was the thing. And then you could see below each specific paper and it's like tagged like, oh, this is a rigorous journal. This is highly cited. Um, and you can kind of get AI to summarize each of those papers. This is, this is a sick, like, this is a sick product.

• 39:17Sam Parr?

  It's cool. And it, but by the way, just like all great stuff, it did not start that way.

• 39:21Shaan Puri?

  I'm mad you didn't tell me about this. This is, uh, why did I invest in this? This is great.

• 39:25Sam Parr?

  It wasn't obvious. By the way, it's still not obvious. This company, just like any, any startup, it could still totally fail and not work.

• 39:31Shaan Puri?

  No, but it's a very interesting bet, right? Like to do a verticalized Google specifically for scientific papers. And AI being the, the, the why now of what you could do differently than you could do before. This makes a lot of sense.

• 39:44Sam Parr?

  And it was, uh, I'll give the shout out. It's consensus.app. That's their website. But the point being, A, consensus is great. I think it's actually going to work out. And these guys, uh, they, they kind of put their head down for like 24 months and like are really starting to figure out. There's going to be a lot of stuff just like them on the chat GPT store. Because I think when we invested in them, I don't remember exactly. I'm almost positive the word AI didn't come up one time. Like, it wasn't like, it was like, we have this, like, I, we know what the outcome that we want to, what, what, what we want it to be, but we're not entirely sure how we're going to come to that. And then they started figuring out AI got more popular. And then this chat GPT store opened up and they're like, Boom, we found the path. And I think that path is opened right now. Now it's more competitive than than the App Store and it's more competitive than Chrome because there's more people who are doing this stuff.

• 40:30Sam Parr?

  OpenAI is already huge, but that inflection is happening right now. This is one of those things that's happening in real time. And I wanted to call out because I think OpenAI even said, we didn't even know how, what payment terms we're going to give these people. Like we're, they're still all figuring it out, but this is happening this second, right now. There's an opportunity here for a lot of different companies.

• 40:47Shaan Puri?

  They're like a, like, you know, some celebrity relationship. They're like, oh, we don't, we don't know, we don't want to put a label on it yet. We're just exploring each other and figuring out, you know, who we are together and individually.

• 40:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's definitely trying to figure it out. Have you seen perplexity? Have you used perplexity?

• 41:02Shaan Puri?

  I don't like it. I don't know why people are going nuts for it.

• 41:05Sam Parr?

  It's pretty cool. It's just like OpenAI, but for some reason it's like has a science bent.

• 41:10Shaan Puri?

  That's one of these companies. I don't know. I don't know much about it. I, this is an uninformed opinion, but I feel like every VC who missed, like you can't get into OpenAI, or if you could get in now, it's at a hundred billion dollar valuation. There's not much money to be made as an investor there. And so all the capital, you know, realized, all the investors realized, holy shit, this is the big thing. And they're like, what's the next best competitor? And they're like, all right, uh, stable diffusion and

• 41:35Sam Parr?

  It could be.

• 41:35Shaan Puri?

  perplexity and the next thing and the next thing. And they get these super inflated valuations and um, I don't know, I'm not, I'm not really a believer in that. I, I think those get way ahead of the skis and I just seen that story many times. This happened in crypto. This happened in, uh, you know, when mobile, when mobile was happening and you would get, you know, for every Instagram, you would then get the 10 super funded other apps that didn't make any sense. And um, yeah, I, I would take, I would take the under or I would short that, uh, that.

• 42:05Sam Parr?

  Uh, after the pod, go to your email and type in consensus. I'm almost positive that I heard about this company and you were CC'd on the email. Just, I just want to put that out there. I, I, it was, uh, 2002, it was two years ago. I'm almost positive.

• 42:21Shaan Puri?

  You're like, after the pod, take some lighter fluid, pour it over your eye, light it back.

• 42:29Sam Parr?

  I hope no one finds finds out what happens. We're gonna burn it down and hide it.

• 42:34Shaan Puri?

  Can I do a rant about something? So I've had a realization that my world, like a lot of the content I'm consuming was algorithmic. All right, that's pretty obvious.

• 42:48Sam Parr?

  What does that mean? Just Twitter, TikTok, whatever?

• 42:51Shaan Puri?

  Everything I was using, you'd go to, you go to Twitter. It's an algorithm telling you, here's the content you need to see. You go to TikTok.

• 42:57Sam Parr?

  It's all tech and business shit.

• 42:59Shaan Puri?

  Facebook, Instagram, yes, all of that. Even email, email is not really algorithmic exactly, but it's, you go there and it's here's what other people want you to look at. Here's my problem. Hey, here's my problem. Read me, right? And then same thing, same thing with, you know, all news. Go to news and say, hey, here's everybody's problems on the other side of the world here. You know, pay attention to this. I'm calling it the intentional internet, which is, I started really being intentional about, oh, no, no, no. If I'm going on the internet right now, what is it that I want to see? What is it I'm curious about? What is it that I want to learn about? And then I go in and I'm stiff arming algorithms left and right.

• 43:43Shaan Puri?

  You know, I'm Marshawn Lynch on that one run where he just sheds eight defenders. It goes all the way and just rumbles to the end zone. That's me on the internet now, and I think more people should be doing this. Join me on the intentional internet where you get on and you don't just, you're not just, you know, a little puppy, just eating the puppy child that the algorithms give you. Go on with some intent and say, what is it that I'm looking for? I want, maybe it's, I want certain type of entertainment. Maybe it's, I want a certain type of information or I want to be inspired. Okay, so then go look for the things that will give you that.

• 44:15Sam Parr?

  Dude, but you follow.

• 44:16Shaan Puri?

  That way.

• 44:17Sam Parr?

  You follow 13,000 people on, on Twitter.

• 44:20Shaan Puri?

  The trick is you don't go to Twitter, right?

• 44:22Sam Parr?

  What do you do?

• 44:23Shaan Puri?

  Well, Twitter's not a great place for this, right? Because if you go to Twitter, you're gonna get your first thing, you're gonna be served up this is a feed and you're gonna start scrolling.

• 44:31Sam Parr?

  What are you gonna start reading books? That's very unlike you.

• 44:33Shaan Puri?

  So I make a little list. I say, you know what? Curious how this started or I want to learn more about this. And then I'll go to YouTube or Google or wherever looking for that. But there's that adding that little paper step in between me and the internet has been very, very useful. And I learned a bunch of interesting things the last three days. I got more out of the internet. So I'm just putting that out there for anybody who.

• 44:54Sam Parr?

  What's been on your list?

• 44:56Shaan Puri?

  I'll give you an example.

• 44:59Shaan Puri?

  I was doing research for one thing and I saw this name. Do you know this guy Eric Van Veen?

• 45:07Sam Parr?

  Yes, he's amazing. I have got him. Oh, wait, are you talking about Ricky Van Veen or Eric?

• 45:13Shaan Puri?

  Oh, maybe he's Ricky, Ricky Van.

• 45:15Sam Parr?

  Ricky, Facebook guy? Dude, dreamy, super dreamy. This guy is dreamy as shit. I've talked to him a bunch via email a handful of times.

• 45:25Shaan Puri?

  It looks like the internet Pete Buttigieg or something.

• 45:28Sam Parr?

  No, man, this guy's great.

• 45:30Shaan Puri?

  So this guy created College Humor.

• 45:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Shaan Puri?

  And then he created a couple of other things. So what did he create? Create College Humor? And then he, he created a few other things that cracked or whatever. Then he bundled it up, sold it to IAC. He was running media at IAC and then he.

• 45:47Sam Parr?

  You're forgetting the biggest thing they started.

• 45:50Shaan Puri?

  Which one?

• 45:51Sam Parr?

  So at College Humor, this was like pre YouTube days. They create, this was like eBombs world days. They created a better way to host videos. And that's what Vimeo is, which they sold to IAC. IAC spun off and became a billion dollar plus publicly traded company.

• 46:08Shaan Puri?

  So creates Vimeo, creates College Humor, goes to IAC. IAC is a super interesting company with like a very cool pedigree of people that come out of it. Like Tinder came out of IAC. You know, there's, there's a bunch of really interesting things about IAC. They, they're sort of like the, they're the proctor and gamble of the internet. They're a conglomerate of internet sites, mostly media.

• 46:28Sam Parr?

  And then. Match.com, I think, came out of there.

• 46:31Shaan Puri?

  Now he's head of like, head of like video or head of creative content at Facebook. And I was like, oh, this guy's interesting. I was kind of just noted it because I think I was thinking about College Humor. And so I just, who, who's behind that? What are they doing now? And I think this, this, what are they doing now? Has been one of my threads. So I'll, I'll think of something that was cool. And I'll be like, where did they go? I haven't heard about their new album. What, what are they working on? And I'll go look at that. That's just a very. It's a very useful way to go look at things. So.

• 47:01Sam Parr?

  By the way, Ricky Ricky ended up marrying, and I don't think they're together anymore, but he like, if you just, you could just Google like tabloids or whatever. He married Allison Williams, you know, the famous like actress whose father is Brian Williams, the famous newscaster. And if you Google his name, the guy's just like hanging out with like all these celebrities and stuff. And he's like, seems so cool. Like this guy's dreamy as shit.

• 47:22Shaan Puri?

  So he acknowledged that. Strategy of Facebook. So anyways, what, what, what's my point? So I, I'm, I'm, I have a list of cool companies or cool things that were built, you know, 10 years ago, and I'm wondering, what are those people doing now? College humor was one of them. So I go look at this guy and then I'm like, I'm researching Vimeo and I'm, I'm looking at him. And then I'm like, he gave this talk in 2008 at this media conference and then he comes back again eight years later. I don't know if you've ever seen this talk, but it's a, it's a, I mean, it gets no views on the internet. But for nerds like us who create media and content on the internet, it's very interesting to see what somebody thought in 2008, which is like, the iPhone has come out, but it hasn't changed the world yet. And like literally the presentation, he's like, yeah, kids on their BlackBerries are not going to be doing XYZ.

• 48:03Shaan Puri?

  And back then, you know, when he created College Humor, it became the number one comedy entertainment site on the internet, way bigger than Cartoon Network and all these other like incumbents. Okay, that's interesting. Then he comes back eight years later and he's like, here's what I got right and here's what I got wrong. And one of the things he was talking about and he's like, he's like, at some point, people on the internet will stop leaving the internet. Like they want, they still stop using the internet as a springboard to go onto Netflix or on to get, get cast into a TV show or whatever. Like they'll realize that their YouTube channel is worth more than, than those shows. And they won't want to leave to, to go do those. They will view this as just a stepping stone. And that's happening. He basically had like four or five predictions about where, where the world was going.

• 48:47Shaan Puri?

  He put up the, all the sites like viral Nova and Upworthy and whatnot. He's like, right now, these are the hottest sites in the world. Their traffic is crushing ours and they're, they're getting more traffic than anybody, more traffic than God. He's like, I think all of this is going to zero. I think this is highly commoditized and it's not going to work for these reasons. He was absolutely correct. And so it was very interesting to go learn from this guy. He's kind of a master at what he does. And I've done this before with like, um, when I looked up all the infomercial kings. So the guys who created like, you know, proactive, that acne, uh, you know, medicine, like, how did that story happen, right? But. If I just log on to the internet and I just take the, the, the last thing that somebody tweeted or the latest TikTok somebody uploaded, you know, I'm playing defense, I'm playing their game, not mine.

• 49:31Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so I'm just trying to have a little bit more intention when I, when I, when I use the internet. So, you know, I'm not the type who's just gonna go like total digital detox and just not use the internet. But when I do use it, I'm trying to use it in a bit of a healthier way.

• 49:43Sam Parr?

  So Ricky, did he, he predicted that the viral novas of the world are, he predicted that it was gonna go to zero and they did?

• 49:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 49:50Sam Parr?

  Did I ever tell you the story about my partner, Joe in Hampton and a bunch of other stuff? Did I tell you a story about little things?

• 49:56Shaan Puri?

  You've mentioned it before that he got like really big, like the most trafficked Facebook referral, right? And then he had an offer to sell and he didn't take it or something?

• 50:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 50:03Shaan Puri?

  Is that the story?

• 50:04Sam Parr?

  So Joe, Joe's an amazing entrepreneur. So he started his first company, it was an ad tech company. He sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars when he was like 25. So he just had this like huge success at a young age. Then his next business he started was called, I forget exactly what it was called, but a pet flow. It was a pet food company and they started it before Chewy, except he was a little conservative and he was like, we have to spend money profitably on ads and that's hard to do. And so we're gonna go a little bit slower. Chewy comes in and go, nah, F that, we're gonna lose money for the first six or 12 months at a customer. And we're gonna do such a good job that they're gonna come back. And Joe was like, that's a dumb strategy. Turns out it was right. But in order to make a pet flow grow, he created a blog where they just wrote content on pets.

• 50:47Sam Parr?

  And within a very, very, very, very short amount of time, they started getting 10, 20, 30 million people a month coming to this blog on pets. And he's like, ah, screw that, let's just do this blog. And so within four years, they were the most shared website on Facebook, bigger than viral Nova, bigger than BuzzFeed, bigger than HuffPo, all these publishers that were huge in the 2014, 15 era. And it started getting something like 250 million uniques a month to their website. And they were scaled up, I think, to 90 million in revenue in four years. It was a huge company. I went to, I cold emailed them. I went to his office. He had these studios and they're like, Facebook lives, the next big thing. We just built out this $250,000 studio in the, in the Manhattan office.

• 51:31Sam Parr?

  And it's going to be the greatest thing ever. We have 150 employees. This is going to be the biggest thing ever. The problem, of course, that we all know was Zuck does what Zuck wants. And they built this entire company, littlethings.com, on the back of Facebook. And they got an LOI to sell the business and they were literally three weeks from selling. They were going to sell for hundreds of millions of dollars. Facebook puts out this annual report, they go, we're actually changing. We're pivoting from this thing to this thing. And three weeks away, or something like that, from this deal closing for hundreds of millions of dollars. The company backed out and within six months, the business basically laid off everyone and had shut down.

• 52:10Sam Parr?

  All in a matter of like six or seven months of like, we're on top of the world, making 100 million a year to now we are not. And it's a crazy, crazy story. If you Google like his name, Joe Speiser, Little Things, you'll see the story. I think Inc. just did some big story on it, but it's pretty wild.

• 52:27Shaan Puri?

  Ah, the lessons we learn, unfortunately. That's, you know, that's like, it's, it's cool to be like, yeah. You learn so much from failure, but it's like, God, sometimes it's so painful.

• 52:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he was basically, he posted this publicly. He was like, I was set to make $50 million and three weeks away from the closing, it went away. And I, he like has all these crazy stories about that.

• 52:49Shaan Puri?

  What's he like to work with? Cause you picked him as your partner for Hampton. Uh, why'd you pick him?

• 52:54Sam Parr?

  He's the best, man. He's the best. He's the best. He's a harmonious partner. He's even keel. He's very easy.

• 53:00Shaan Puri?

  Not like the partnership dynamics, cause you've told me about those. What is he? What's his edge? What's he great at? What's, what is he like, what is he amazing at?

• 53:08Sam Parr?

  You ever hang out with Israeli guys and like Israeli guys have a culture of like they're quite competent because they served in the military and they're like you're really good at stuff. Oftentimes they're good at spotting opportunities because that's also part of the culture of like just like negotiating well and like finding interesting deals. He is so good at spotting opportunities and he's technical and he's so fast. I've never met someone who's like significantly faster than I am at making stuff and going all in. And like he'll just find an opportunity, he'll build a website for it and he's like, yep, this is what I'm doing now. And he pounces so fast. I've never met someone who moves faster. One thing that we did that was so great, did you ever have this with Ben or any of your other partners where you do like a, you're like, look, before we like hop in bed and before

• 53:52Sam Parr?

  we get married here, let's just sit down and map out what do you want your life to be like? What do you want in five years and 10 years? What do you want on a day to day basis? And you like write out like how you want to live, what you're willing to, what you're willing to give up, what you're not willing to give up. Have you ever done that?

• 54:05Shaan Puri?

  Not exactly, but you know, you told me you did that. I think there's a version of that that I do, but I'm not. I think everything changes. So you know, it sounded really great in theory and I think it's a useful exercise just to clarify your own thoughts. But I don't,

• 54:21Shaan Puri?

  I think people themselves are quite incongruent in general.

• 54:25Sam Parr?

  Well, yeah, you change.

• 54:27Shaan Puri?

  You change, but also you don't know what you want. And also you say one thing because it sounds good or you think you want it, but then something comes, you know, something comes up and you're, you know, it's your stated preference versus revealed preference. I think it's very hard to get to people's revealed preferences, their true preferences or their true, their true, you know, desires or whatever. And so I think it's a good exercise to do, but I don't put as much weight in it as you did, I think.

• 54:54Sam Parr?

  Well, I think that, I think that A, it starts a really good conversation. So I was like, look, let's be transparent, just like you should with like your wife or girlfriend. You're like, let's talk about like what type of life that we potentially want and let's be very open about that. So I think that that like creating that like, let's just be very clear about and we'll, we'll acknowledge that it will change. So I think it creates a great version of that. But Joe's also 42, I think he's older than me. And so I would think that at that age, he has a little bit of solidified the values that he stands for. And so it was helpful. I think if I did that exercise when I was 24, it would not have been good. In fact, I did do that exercise when I was 24 and it sucked. I said, I wanted, you want to know what I said I wanted when I was 24? I said, I want 10,000 employees. I go, wouldn't it be awesome if you had 10,000 employees?

• 55:37Sam Parr?

  And then I hired three people and I'm like.

• 55:40Shaan Puri?

  It went out the window.

• 55:41Sam Parr?

  I'm like, yeah, that's, that's a no for me, dog. Like that, that ain't gonna work. But so I think if you're a little bit older and you have some experience, you might know a little bit more that you want. But when I was younger, no, that wouldn't have worked.

• 55:51Shaan Puri?

  My thinking on this is the Buffett thing of you want some, a partner with an energy, integrity and intelligence. I think that's the like core thing you, I look for at least, which is basically, in order, energy is the easiest to spot. And it's the easiest one to try to write off if somebody doesn't have it. Meaning seems like a, seems like a nice to have, it's actually not a nice to have for me. It's a must have for me.

• 56:19Shaan Puri?

  And so energy is the first one that shows up. And it's the easiest one that I've tried to talk myself out of with certain people. And that's been a mistake every single time I've done it.

• 56:27Sam Parr?

  Who have you worked with that's high energy? And like almost exhausts you because you're like, I can't keep up.

• 56:32Shaan Puri?

  Sully's like that. Uh, he's super high energy, but not in an exhausting way. And like, I get energy from that. So it's all good.

• 56:39Sam Parr?

  I don't mean exhausting, like they wear you out, but you're like, oh my God, dude. Like you're, you're almost hard to keep up. You move so fast. That's inspiring.

• 56:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, everybody that, yeah, it's a, but it's in a good way.

• 56:49Sam Parr?

  Um, like, yeah, I mean, in a good way.

• 56:51Shaan Puri?

  And that they bring their own energy to the table. I'm not bringing it out of them. Ben is a fun, so Ben Levy, who's my current business partner. On the surface, when you meet him, he's a more quiet guy. He's more reserved. He's not like, he doesn't come across like this huge booming personality. But Ben's got that energy where it's just, it comes out for him, like through text message or through like, you know, he, he'll just wake up and do something. Or he can't sleep at night because he's thinking about something. So energy reveals, energy is not just being a wacky, flailing arms guy. It's, do you have the, are you driven yourself? Do you take action quickly? Do you think about things all the time? Or are you, am I trying to force you to, to, am I dragging your brain into the conversation? And do you get excited about things? Are you, when an opportunity arises, does your, do you shift gears up?

• 57:36Shaan Puri?

  So energy is the first one. Then it's, um, intelligence or competence, which is like, what are they great at? Oh, this person's great at selling. This person's great at building. This person's great at, um. Just pushing the ball forward every day, whatever it is. And then the last one, which is integrity is the hardest one to get a feel for, which is, how is this person going to treat me when they have the opportunity to be selfish? Will they be selfish when they have the opportunity to be selfish? And it's very, very hard to know that. You can kind of only talk to people they've worked with before or ask them questions and try to see if they're, they're pretty honest about that. And then I just work with them on something first before we commit. So it's like,

• 58:12Shaan Puri?

  we have that conversation. Sure. But let's like, and I would always trade an experience for a belief. And if I can have an experience working with you on something for three weeks, that's going to be way better than me trying to put, take a leap of faith on a bunch of things you said, or you wrote down in a Google Doc.

• 58:26Sam Parr?

  Did you just make up that word or that phrase?

• 58:29Shaan Puri?

  Tony Robbins special, baby.

• 58:31Sam Parr?

  Oh, I was gonna say, that's, that's yours now. Do you, uh, what, how late into the evening are you working on business stuff versus family time or fitness or whatever else there is?

• 58:44Shaan Puri?

  I basically, I work out in the middle of the day. I work about two, 2pm. So it's basically like I've done, I've done enough where I could stop working. I wake up and I work. I wake up, I do my morning routine, then I work. And then I take a break to work out. And then I'll either just, if I've done enough that day, I'll just play with my kids. I'll start playing with them and just hang out. If I, if I haven't, I'll do another hour or two of work. And then I do family time till about, till they go to bed. So they're, you know, usually fully asleep, eight 30 or nine. And then I chill out slash work, one of the two. They're both kind of the same to me. So sometimes it's just like, watching a show, sometimes it's working or reading something. And I'll do that till 11 or 12 and I go to, go to sleep.

• 59:25Sam Parr?

  But between that 11 or between kid, kids going to sleep and you going to bed, are you on the phone talking to people ever?

• 59:32Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no. That's me time. That's, uh, me on the internet. Uh, I'm not talking to people. No.

• 59:38Sam Parr?

  I, uh, I've got a bunch of friends who are like that and they'll like,

• 59:41Shaan Puri?

  Even my, my wife, she'll try to talk and I will be like, I'm doing no talking. That's my friend. I'm doing no talking right now. It's a, it's a nice way of saying like, I don't want to talk to you. I'm doing no talking.

• 59:53Sam Parr?

  There's this thing, there's like this like unspoken rule at my house where like at eight or nine, when she wants to like ask me like, hey, what dates do you want to go to this place? And I just mumble, I go, that means like, dude, I just shopped at Ikea all day. I'm overwhelmed. I can't look at anything. I can't think. Don't ask me a date. I'm not thinking about anything. You know, we've been, you know what we've been doing lately is fucking Legos. Have you ever done Legos?

• 1:00:19Shaan Puri?

  I've never done Legos. I, I have a whole separate pod topic about adult Legos because I think it's a thing. And you're one of those. So we should talk, we should actually do a full segment on it.

• 1:00:28Sam Parr?

  I'm so into it. I'm so into it. That's all I'll say. I am so, I just got into it in November. I'm a Lego guy now.

• 1:00:35Shaan Puri?

  Okay, we're gonna talk about that next time. I gotta jump. Uh, this has been good. This is the pod. That's the pod.

• 1:00:40Sam Parr?

  That's the pod.