How to Scale a Profitable Agency with 0 Employees (Using AI Agents)

Episode 714: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) sits down with Matt Mazzeo ( https://x.com/Mazzeo ) about using AI agents as your go-to-market. — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (3:30) AI as the Go-to-Market (8:50) The Billion Dollar Secret  (12:03) Mario Kart Theory (18:55) Being a Tinkerer/Supabase (25:38) Amjad Masad/Replt (28: 41) Taste (36:44) Agents replacing VCs (37:57) Agent Employees (42:28) Story Game — Links: • Want Sam's guide to use ChatGPT? Get it here: https://clickhubspot.com/wpv • Supabase - https://supabase.com/ • Replit - https://replit.com/ • Clay - https://www.clay.com/ • Alpha Go Movie - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  My brain kind of exploded a little bit. I was like, oh, so any business, you can flip the sales model on its head.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 0:06Shaan Puri?

  You could basically, instead of reaching out and saying, hey, would you like me to maybe do this for you if you pay me and hire me and versus saying, check this out, I made this for you.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:14Shaan Puri?

  You want to work with me?

• 0:15Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 0:15Shaan Puri?

  Obviously, that's going to be a better sales pitch, but now AI made that scalable. That was not scalable.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 0:29Shaan Puri?

  If I think about Matt Mazzeo, I think about, I think about the word early. So

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:34Shaan Puri?

  Whether it was investing in companies early, you know, you were part of a portfolio that had Uber, had Twitter, had, you know, tons of hits. And you were early at CAA to the internet trend.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:46Shaan Puri?

  Like you're saying, like, first one to assign, kind of like YouTuber talent to a traditional Hollywood agency, or get Hollywood talent to put stuff online. Now you're early-ish and early on the AI train. Like, you've been texting me photos of myself and my house.

• 1:03Shaan Puri?

  But redesigned using a, like, AI-style agent. So can we talk about this?

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Well, it starts with my wife making fun of me. She's like, your entire closet is black and white. You don't buy clothes ever. Like, you default to the same exact things. It's like a laughable thing. So we took, we took a few months and lived in Japan and Korea. And everyone on every corner is the most stylish person you've ever seen. They're all put together. I'm like, what is it that they all look like? They're out of a magazine and I look a schlub. And I realized that I've just never taken the time to do it. So I'm like, fine, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to train this AI model oh three, which is spectacular now, and has all the vision modeling. I'm gonna try to train it like a Korean color theorist. And that's where I'm gonna start. Have you ever heard of these things?

• 1:44Shaan Puri?

  So I've seen on TikTok the idea of color theory. So they like, hold up a bunch of swatches and they're like, this one brings out your skin, and this one clashes, avoid these, do these, like an allergy test for fashion.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  That's right. Perfect example. And like, people spend like hundreds, thousands of dollars doing it. If you get a stylist in the US, it's like hundreds or thousands of dollars.

• 2:02Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  It's like, again, it's one of these classic, like, things rich people do that eventually, like, AI will open to everybody.

• 2:06Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  I'm like, I'm gonna see if the vision models are good enough. So I run the color Theory on myself and my wife. And it tells me, okay, you're a soft autumn, which, you know.

• 2:16Shaan Puri?

  I was gonna say that.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  I appreciate that. For what it's worth, you're a dark winter, which I think is super, super interesting. But for me, it was like, here are your, here are your primary colors. And then I was like, okay, great. Well, what do I need to avoid? And then it gives me a list of like colors that I gotta wear. And it tells me how to put them together. And as I dig further and further into it, I'm like, oh, can you like, give me a capsule collection that I could do? And I'm like, give me brands that I, that I like. Here's my, here's my measurements on like, brands that I wear. Here's how I think about it. And I'm like, my wife and I are doing this and we start like building it for each other. And then we start productizing it for friends.

• 2:48Shaan Puri?

  And so you sent it to me and you were like, you basically sent me of, of an AI version of me.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52Shaan Puri?

  And then it had me dressed up way better than I actually dress up.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56Shaan Puri?

  And then it was like, yeah, you can just like push a button and it'll buy this outfit.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  That's where we're going to.

• 3:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  So like, it's not there yet. And this is part of why I like, people laugh at like the AI rapper. But I actually think like, there's a huge moment in time to just be like, the rapper, you be the rapper.

• 3:10Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  And sell the service, sell the outcome and like, do the work for somebody before they even ask for it. Like, I didn't ask you for selfies. I just found selfies of you. I didn't ask you for like your fashion sense and your color, do you want a color theory? I just ran color theory on you.

• 3:23Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  And like, I gave you a final output of like, here's a bunch of looks that you're gonna look great in. And I got to the endpoint of what you actually want.

• 3:31Shaan Puri?

  So let's put the style thing over here for a second. Cause this is Golden Nugget to me, number one. This is the one I picked up from you in the last few months, which is this key insight. Which is that AI is not just a product. It can actually be, AI can be the, the, the go to market. So what you're doing is very, very smart. And I think you have a few ideas that are in this bucket. But you're like, all right, what if instead of just using AI to, to, to do the job? I use AI to sell the customer, to get the customer on board. And what you're doing is you're basically saying, instead of I, I as a customer have to find you, decide if I wanna try it, sign up, pay you, and then you do the work. What you're doing is you're saying, let me just grab pictures of you. Let me grab pictures of your house. I know you got my house off Zillow or whatever.

• 4:15Shaan Puri?

  And then you were like, hey, here's, here's what your house could look like. Wanna use my service?

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:20Shaan Puri?

  And that like, do the work upfront.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:23Shaan Puri?

  Seems to be like. That's not casual advice. My brain kind of exploded a little bit. I was like, oh, so any business, any business now, you can flip the sales model on its head.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 4:34Shaan Puri?

  You could basically, instead of reaching out and saying, hey, would you like me to maybe do this for you if you pay me and hire me? And versus saying, check this out. I made this for you.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:42Shaan Puri?

  You want to work with me?

• 4:43Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 4:43Shaan Puri?

  Obviously, that's going to be a better sales pitch, but now AI made that scalable. That was not scalable.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. I think you've nailed it. Like, that's actually the thing that triggered for me, which is like, when I think about like, uh, new technology unlocks, like I'm, I try to think about like, did it come with the distribution unlock too, right? Like, I got to start investing at a time when like, mobile and social got birthed and like, both of them came with totally new distribution mechanics, like, the feed, the algorithm, social sharing, the app store, were all like, these greenfield distribution hacks.

• 5:13Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. So not just apps are new, but app store is also new.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 5:16Shaan Puri?

  Not just doing a connected tool, but oh wait, social sharing, which is going to make this thing grow.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Zynga let you like, share natively as part of the product.

• 5:23Shaan Puri?

  It's not just a social game, it's a social share.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  That's right. All of it was baked natively into the products. AI doesn't really come with that, right? AI has like, this is why the incumbents are moving so fast. It like, makes your existing product distribution much better, right? You can add auto suggest, autocorrect, you can like, put Gemini in every product, you can tell your Gmail to like, just respond as if you're me and like, do all of these things. And if you're ChatGPT, like, you've, you were novel enough and early enough and powerful enough that you're now the dominant and default for the, for the category. But it didn't come with like, new distribution for everybody, yet, right? Like, there was the cheap, custom GPTs that was like, trying to get there. There's MCP that's like, trying to get the, but nothing obvious. But what did change was it let you do the work in advance.

• 6:07Shaan Puri?

  The cost of work dropped.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  The cost of work dropped so dramatically that instead of selling the promise, you can just sell the finished work.

• 6:14Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so you sell the proof instead.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  I think a lot of people are still stuck in this paradigm of like, you know how there's like, all those headshot apps that came around? Like, that's kind of a perfect example. It's like, let's say nowadays, it's like two to three cents to create like a high-res headshot, right?

• 6:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Everybody was creating these like, headshot products.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  And saying, I'll make headshots for you and you still have to go in and use the tools to make the headshots and upload the thing. But like their photos are out there.

• 6:39Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Like, there's probably an addressable market of like, call it 10 million, super high intent. Like, they all need headshots.

• 6:45Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  You know exactly who they are. You can audit LinkedIn and just be like, their headshots are terrible. Like, we can make it much better. That's your target market and you could literally just for like, a penny, two pennies, like, create a low-res version.

• 6:56Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Of it and sell it direct. Don't ask them, do you want to set up a whole new headshot? Just do the thing. Give them a new headshot and then use that as the entry point to a whole other part of the business. Like, I'll do the rest of your LinkedIn. Your LinkedIn could be optimized.

• 7:09Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  The, the second order service can be the service that you actually end up selling.

• 7:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  But you've closed them. You've got the opportunity to meet with them and close them on those other things because you gave them the value without ever having to have.

• 7:22Shaan Puri?

  So you could theoretically, what you could do is you could basically say, I'm gonna do the color theory part proactively and essentially free for everybody. And then I might even suggest a couple of looks.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:35Shaan Puri?

  And then if you actually, if.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  I can do it for you every day. Do you want it every day?

• 7:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  And you want me to keep track of things that are in, in style?

• 7:41Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Do you want to personalize it over time?

• 7:42Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Like, those seem like.

• 7:44Shaan Puri?

  And then that's, that's the upsell, but the kind of the, the initial sell is pretty powerful. And then you string it together with tools like Clay or whatever, which is like mass, mass personalized outreach.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:53Shaan Puri?

  So, okay, so what do you have now as an entrepreneur? Now you have the ability to say, all right, for any given market, let's just take real estate agents as a market.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:01Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I know who the agents are. I know what their listings are.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:04Shaan Puri?

  Let's say I had an app that could, um, with AI, could take your photos off your listing and I could stitch it together into a cool, like, Instagram-ready reel.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Perfect.

• 8:13Shaan Puri?

  All right, easy. I can then go, I can go into a tool like Clay and I could say, real estate agents, California, I can get all those. I can put an AI agent that will go scrape all their listings.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:24Shaan Puri?

  Because that's all publicly available. Get their listings, get their photos. You do the AI wrapper thing, which says, stitch these photos into a social video, a social optimized video. And then I literally just email that person, hey, Steve, saw you had a listing on 410 Montgomery Way.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Built you a reel.

• 8:41Shaan Puri?

  I built you a reel for it. Uh, I think it'll be really great. You could share this on your Instagram. You know, hope you hope you like it. Let me know if you have any suggested changes. And the guy could be like, wow, this is incredible. Be like, cool. Would you like me to be doing this for all your listings? I think this actually will help you sell. Sign up for this and like that.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:57Shaan Puri?

  Sales process is now like what

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Totally different.

• 9:00Shaan Puri?

  Engineer does versus what a sales guy does.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 9:02Shaan Puri?

  Let's do another example because when I heard what you were doing, which we haven't talked about on this yet, but that's okay. I texted Ben and I go, Ben, this is a billion dollar secret. Because if you actually learn like a differentiated, scalable sales mechanic, it's like our friends who started doing Google Ads back in like oh, five and they're like, dude, I used to buy clicks for a penny. And like, you know, friends who were doing e-commerce on Facebook back when it was like, you know, $1 CPM.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:25Shaan Puri?

  Right. Or less than a dollar CPM. It's like, those are billion dollar secrets that like, there's this arbitrage that can exist right now where this new sales model, new distribution model, that's less tapped today. So what's a, what's an example where you could use this?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  I think the beauty of like most enterprise software is like you're, you're either helping to make more money, save money or save time. And it's like, most businesses are pretty focused on the first of those, like just help somebody make more money. And so you can kind of go and help almost anybody generate new business, generate new clients.

• 9:55Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  And so like the exercise could just be like, hey, I delivered you new clients. Like imagine I am the person running sales for company X. You can do this with oh, three. I want to help them generate new business. What are two or three new innovative ways that I could use oh, three to generate business for this company? Just do that playbook for every business. It could be like, start a list serve that targets all of the potential customers of that client. It could be, create an Instagram account that like highlights that business. Don't even ask permission. Be like best HVAC service destined.

• 10:30Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  And like, create an Instagram account for that person. And do it at scale. And like, if anybody comes in his DMs, be like, hey, I got three new customers potentially for you.

• 10:39Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  I think those kinds of arbitrages like now exist for basically every company.

• 10:44Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Cause there's going to be this lag. There's always a lag between like, what's possible today and like, how long it takes the average person to end up figuring it out.

• 10:52Shaan Puri?

  What do you think? So you had some ideas that you had sent me. One of the ideas you talked about, you gave me a bullet point, which is, I think it's called the Mario Mario Kart theory. What's what is the Mario Kart theory?

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Mario Kart theory is, uh, this is actually like, you could have made a lot of money investing in tech over the last handful of years. Or at least in the SaaS era.

• 11:09Shaan Puri?

  Followed this one.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  If you just followed like, everything's better in multiplayer, like, uh, like build things that are like multiplayer by default.

• 11:17Shaan Puri?

  Figma.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Figma, Notion, uh, Airtable.

• 11:21Shaan Puri?

  Slack, yeah.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Slack, like, take the communication tools or the the enterprise tooling and like, make it real time and and, uh, and cloud based. Those things have network effects to them. Those things like instead of taking.

• 11:30Shaan Puri?

  Mario Kart's better with friends.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Mario Kart's better with friends. And so like, but like, if I look at AI today, it's all siloed. It's almost like I'm having an individual conversation. Like, where's where's like group chat GPT? Like, you and I are in a conversation all the time. Like, why isn't GPT in there with us?

• 11:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Why isn't it living with us in those social moments? Why do I never see your ex exhaust out of your feed? Like, there's a bunch of stuff you'd be fine with sharing. Like, there's a bunch of stuff that we'd all get better at. Like, Mid Journey was right. Mid Journey like, built, like, it's almost like lost to history of three years ago. That Mid Journey was like on Discord. They were social by default. That you had channels where you could see everybody's like outputs.

• 12:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  And it was like, kind of a magical experience, but almost nothing else went that direction. Like, it's all isolated and private and like, hidden and like, it's a, it's like a travesty that like, the outputs for the free tier of GPT are private by default.

• 12:31Shaan Puri?

  Mid Journey is a great example of bad is better. Cause it's like the product design, you're like, wait, so, okay, cool. I download your app. Like, nah. You open up Discord, you join our Discord. And in the Discord, there's gonna be. Thousand channels, you know, there's different numbers, just hop into any one. And there's a flood of absolute random people generating absolute random images. But it was actually kind of amazing because you go in and suddenly you're inspired. You see like, oh, that guy's using this to design T-shirts. And this person's creating like anime. And then you see that same person change their prompt and make their images better. You're like, oh, I never thought to add that to my problem. We copy paste that. So we were all teaching each other the thing. And this is like, you know, this is not the like chef's kiss. Product design looks sweet in a mock-up like.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  No.

• 13:16Shaan Puri?

  But it was just like the hacky way to get going. But it actually had this tremendous bet like the, the one thing it was great at was just putting you around other people doing the same thing.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:25Shaan Puri?

  Outweighed all of the downsides of, uh, you know, the, that initial user experience.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  And they could focus on just making the model better. They didn't have to focus on like front end resources and how to think about it. Like just, we know it's not perfect.

• 13:38Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  We'll eventually get to the thing, but that was like model five or six by the time they built the destination site.

• 13:44Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  And it frankly feels like less social to me in a lot of ways. They have the feed there, but I'm not like seeing it the same way that I saw when it was native in Discord. And so.

• 13:51Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  I bet there's a bunch of tooling like that, like the style, the style idea would probably be better as a social environment in Discord. Like you and I are different color types.

• 14:00Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Similar body types. Maybe we should have the similar channel for our like.

• 14:04Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  For our area.

• 14:05Shaan Puri?

  Because if I saw you actually like, this would actually be kind of magical, right? Like if I went in and I'm, let's just pretend I was also soft autumn. And I'm like, I'm in with my soft autumn, the soft autumn boys. We have our, our channel and I see you actually like proactively doing stuff.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:20Shaan Puri?

  And you're prompting it. You're like, oh, I got a wedding coming up and you prompt it. It gives you a really good recommendation. You actually like take action on it. You upload a photo of you in it. I'm like, damn, that actually worked. That actually looked good. Now your success kind of like triggers me, inspires me, teaches me how to use the tool. And then I go back in and use it like that's a fundamentally better experience. The more, it's going to be a more powerful experience than.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 14:42Shaan Puri?

  You doing this on your own, me having to discover this, learn this, remember to use it. And then get the, only the benefits are siloed in my experience, right?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  I, I designed your, I redesigned your house like from Zillow photo. I'm like, that's a probably better in a social experience, right? Like, I just delivered you the work.

• 14:57Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Like, I used to have to sell you on the idea that I'm a great designer and call my references.

• 15:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Don't do any of that. Here's a, do you like this room? I can do the rest of your rooms.

• 15:05Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  You have a different budget? You have iterations? I can do it all for you. But should, that should live in a social environment. Almost all of these experiences outside of like the health ones and illegal ones are probably good enough that like a free social tier would be like accretive to the value. And like, right now, we're all like these bonobos. Like, you ever see the videos of bonobos with like the ants on a stick? Like, they're like, they're like the first example of like tool you spreading.

• 15:30Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  And it's like, they put the ants, they put the stick in the tree, they get the ants out, and another bonobo is like, that looks like an ant lollipop. I like that.

• 15:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  And they go and do the next thing. And it's like, instead, we're like, cut off from everybody else. And so I'm the only one eating the ant lollipop.

• 15:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  And nobody else gets it.

• 15:44Shaan Puri?

  I feel like that's a really big idea. Like, I think you could without, don't need to make a model. You don't even really need to make a new use case. You just have to like, design a social experience of the same use case.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  The social by default is always better.

• 15:58Shaan Puri?

  Right. So, is there anyone doing this right now? Like, is there any, like, have you seen any cool social? Like, I want to basically take something like Claude, which Claude is so powerful. Claude's kind of losing the race of the individual.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:12Shaan Puri?

  User thing. But I'm just thinking like, what would be the Figma type of experience where you, you know, what would be the use case? Like, is it something like with work? So for example, you know, I have a lot of friends, we're all looking at how we can use AI in our.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:26Shaan Puri?

  In our company. And everybody's kind of self, doing the law, the stick in the tree to get the ants, where it's like, oh, you set up a thing where you connected it to your calendar and it.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, the workflows.

• 16:37Shaan Puri?

  It researches who you're meeting with, and then it sends you the brief through text message, and then you have that and. Like, oh, I want that. How did you set that up? And I have to like, ask them for a tutorial, whereas I really should just be able to fork that.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:48Shaan Puri?

  Right? Like, and that's what I think Gumloop and some of these other guys are gonna get towards where like,

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:51Shaan Puri?

  One person makes a great workflow. It's like, that problem should now be solved for the rest of us.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:57Shaan Puri?

  And we should just be able to fork that.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  People are doing, I mean, like Zapier, there's tons of like, uh, recipes or whatever for like workflows that you can use. The thing that's missing is the social proof. The thing that's missing is like, how many people liked it? What are the comments on it? Like, what are the likes? What are the, like, the remixes that you're doing?

• 17:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Who's using it? Like, if you're using it, that's a big signal for me. Like, if I'm doing it and I'm like, getting value out of this fashion thing.

• 17:19Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Like, that's probably a good signal for you. Like, those are things that, like, I think tip people. And it's what's missing, like, these were like lessons of web, web 2.0 that are kind of like, gone.

• 17:29Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Like, they're just like, like, we, we've almost like collectively forgotten a bunch of these things that were like, oh, social by default, like, makes a ton of sense. Like, all the social apps, all the, like, iOS apps went social. It feels like collective, like, forgetting.

• 17:42Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  And some, it does feel like a big market gap.

• 17:46Shaan Puri?

  You know, one of the things I've picked up from you is that you have this, like,

• 17:51Shaan Puri?

  your process is sort of like, I go try to do a thing.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:56Shaan Puri?

  Firsthand experience. In doing so, I run into the problems of doing that thing. Maybe it's like styling yourself or whatever it is.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:03Shaan Puri?

  And then, and then learn by building.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:05Shaan Puri?

  And like, I, it's so funny, because I thought of you because you started your career with like CAA. And you're like, this, like, kind of charming guy from, you live in LA. I just thought of you, I was like, this is like Hollywood pretty boy. And like, actually, you're more of-

• 18:17Speaker 01

  I appreciate that.

• 18:18Shaan Puri?

  Hacker, ticker, yeah, no, you focus on the pretty boy part.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's-

• 18:21Shaan Puri?

  But you're actually like a hacker, tinkerer type. And I'm curious, I don't know the full story, but like, I would bet that that's led to some very good things in your career, even though you're not building the end company.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:33Shaan Puri?

  But it's the learning by tinkering-

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Oh, dude.

• 18:35Shaan Puri?

  That led you to the investment, that led you to the opportunity after that. Can you tell the story that-

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. So, uh, during COVID, I, uh, I have a buddy, Brian Wagner, he's like one of the best product guys I've ever met. I like, uh, back in the day, uh, he was building a company. I was like, that's not the right company, but this is a guy who just like, I- Want to spend time around because we just, I love jamming with them. I love the way you thought about it. And so we'd always like built different products together. It was like our weekend hang. It was like the thing that we would do. And during COVID, we got obsessed with this idea of a product called Road Trip, which is like a music listening product that you're co-listening. And it was like, you could talk while listening to music. And it's like, it was this experience where like, when we got into it, we would be in a room, and I don't know if you've experienced this, you'd probably sit on a phone for like five minutes of silence, two minutes of silence. And it's like, I gotta get off this phone call. It's like the most awkward thing.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  But if you sit in a room with somebody and there's music playing, it takes all of the edge out. And you could last for like hours in a room with a grown man and have like a conversation that dips in and out as long as there's music playing in the background. It's almost like the music creates the substrate that lets you pay attention. And we started building this thing and, you know, it ended up not working. We couldn't figure out retention. Turns out live is really friggin hard. Synchronous is really, really hard. But in the process of building it, we were like, God, Firebase just sucks. Firebase sucks. Every, like, it's like, I'm in the Google universe, like, everything is tied to the universe. Like, if somebody, Brian, I remember this moment where he's like, dude, if ever you see a company, I was, you know, investing early stage at Code2.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  It's like, dude, if you ever see a company that is like an open source, Postgres, like Firebase alternative, like, that's our ticket. A week later.

• 20:12Shaan Puri?

  By the way, from the outside, it just seemed like, alright, Firebase, solve problem. Firebase does this, it's probably fine, right? If you weren't building, you wouldn't know.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  I would never have thought, I would never have thought. He's like, and we had built so many social products. It's like every time you gotta go through the same thing. It's like you're stuck in this like Firebase universe. Then eventually you try to like cycle off of it and it's like a pain in the ass to migrate and you ever do it. And they weren't upgrading the product a lot. Now they're actually putting a little bit more attention because it's like their replit competitor. But at the time, there was like no development there. And so a couple of weeks later, it's like YC, I'm looking at the list of the YC companies, I'm just ripping through it. And I'm like, Superbase, open source Firebase alternative.

• 20:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  And I'm like. Okay, this is just, this, this feels like a great moment in time. And I'm talking to, I'm talking to one of my partners, he's like, I love this idea. And, uh, and Ben Tossel, who's like an incredible tinkerer, builder, investor out there, uh, was an angel in the company, made the connection. And we ended up leading the seed round at, at Co2 and did a, a series A there as well. And, um, it's a great company. I love those founders and I, I think it'll be a great, uh, investment, but I never would have gotten close. I never would have thought about that idea if I hadn't experienced the pain first.

• 21:21Shaan Puri?

  And so do you, when you're going into them, is it like, I'm doing this to learn or I'm doing this because I think this is the next big hit? And it just turns out that's wrong. And then the learning was like the consolation prize, like mentally, how do you approach that?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  It's curiosity sometimes. It's because I'm solving a problem. It's because I have an idea that's been sitting on me and nagging at me and I just got to build it and get it off my brain. Sometimes it's like, I just think this is going to be a category that's going to be huge and I have to like, understand it. Like I built a live or a video shopping product.

• 21:49Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Um, I got upset, so I'd spend a lot of time with the team at ByteDance. And I, one of the, I used to spend like a few hours a month and we would share notes on like what I saw coming in the US and what they saw coming out of China. And it was just like a really fun jam with like the team at ByteDance. One of those sessions we spent on like video commerce and I was just like, you know, it was four years ago, five years ago. And I was like, this is going to be just like such, it was such a massive category in China and nobody had cracked the nut in the US. And you've seen attempts at it. And I was like, it just feels like somebody's like, we're all just close on it. Um, and I was like, I'm going to go build in that space so I can understand why it's not working here and like what's broken here. And so I built like a, my, my wife is a, a Korean expert and knows beauty really well.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  So we built like a, the first shop we built was like around Korean beauty products. And I like went through the whole process. I went and found wholesale. I went and spent hours at like different Korean beauty shops to like, get a sense of like, what were the products and like, what was the full stack of a Korean beauty process? They told me how shitty my skin was. Uh, and like, I went through the whole process with them and built the store on TikTok and like did the fulfillment myself and was like going down. Cause I think that's like, that's one, it's fun to learn these things. Two, the only way to do it is get close to the metal of it. And if you just approach it out of curiosity, like it's just a win no matter what. It, maybe it turns into an interesting business and at the very least you've like seen what the pain point's there.

• 23:12Shaan Puri?

  Most VCs don't do this. Do they?

• 23:15Speaker 01

  I don't know. Everybody's got a different process. I think like my process has always been like, I will be better at understanding the pain points. I think it'll resonate more with the founders if I can like cogently talk about how I've used the product. Like those things matter and it's like you're you have more authenticity and it's like, I don't know if other people do this, but it's like my best way of learning. Like I actually know what the product does. I actually use the product and it like makes me better. Like when I was talking to Amjad.

• 23:42Shaan Puri?

  From Replit.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  From Replit, who he did an awesome pod with, by the way. I loved that that episode. I love that product. I we were lucky enough to lead the series because I was a board member at Replit. And partially because like I love tinkering and it was like a tinkerer's dream that you would like never have to worry. And I was technicalish, but like never could have built like some of the products that I wanted to build. And it's like the idea that Replit would help me get closer to being able to unlock that felt like something that everybody would want. Turns out it was like perfect timing for like the entire AI wave as well. But like the way I got to to spend time with Amjad was like I was just using the product. Like the first meeting I ever did, I built a REPL. It was like free to hang. And I was like, I learned Python to like figure out how to send him an app in a REPL that I could like, you know, pick a meeting time and it was like.

• 24:26Shaan Puri?

  VC courtship. I like it. So what's their story with with Replit and with Amjad? Because he seems like a real force of nature. Like when he came on the podcast, we I just really thought like he just seemed impressive to me. He seemed like somebody who's got a shot to build one of these like generational companies. And I don't know if Replit will, I'm an investor in it. I hope it succeeds. I think it could succeed, but like I just think he was really unique and that product was really unique and the story of how he got there.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  The origin story is amazing. I mean.

• 24:54Shaan Puri?

  What stood out to you from him or that story?

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Just that he was always, it wasn't like a new thing for him. He like didn't have access to, you know, to the tools of technology, knew how powerful they would be and would like find whatever way, like working in like PC bongs or whatever, like in his hometown and like to like just get access to the computer. It was like the same thing that like, you know, the when when people were like spending time at like the research labs in, you know, in Silicon Valley to like get access to their first computers. It felt like he was going through that like hero's journey.

• 25:23Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Just to get access. To compute.

• 25:25Shaan Puri?

  As a kid in Jordan.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  As a kid in Jordan. And then like, you know, uh, and then he was obsessed with like spreading it to everybody. So he was like, one of the first guys at, uh, what's it called? Code Academy and like, you know, he was, it was like the mixture of true believer, technical enough to build it, knew what the pain points were for him and for like everybody else who was coming up, has like real mission to like make a billion, like there's going to be a billion developers. And if he has anything to do with it, he's like, gonna get to that endpoint. And then he's almost like a, an endurance athlete in the sense that he's willing to wade through like decade of boredom. Like there's like, it's sexy now, cause like there's a replit agent and like you can build your idea and you can vibe code.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  And he's like, it feels like a wild roller coaster ride right now, but it was like years of waiting through like school, like going to schools, building tools for teachers to teach kids how to code. And like the infrastructure needed to full stack it and a religion around the fact that you had to full stack it. You couldn't outsource these things. And it was like, all of that minutia would like, there's a lot of people out there who are like, I'm going to build the ultimate vibe coding platform. It's like, you know, this whole moment where we're in and like, where it's like the idea guy's time. And like, everybody's like, yeah, the time for the idea guy. It's like, the idea guy, like now you get to skip like, what was the first six months to validate the thing? But it really just gets you to the, the entrance of the maze.

• 26:45Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  And it's like, now you've got to go through like.

• 26:47Shaan Puri?

  What's up, idea guy? Welcome. Welcome.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  You ready? Yeah. You up for this? Cause the maze sucks and you're going to tear apart every idea. It's all that matters is like the number of iterations on the experiment you can run and like ripping that idea you had in half. And like telling you, like the world telling you, your idea is garbage and like giving you the feedback that like is brutal and honest from your customers that they hate your idea. And it's like, maybe there's a kernel of something from that idea that leads you to the next one. It's like, the idea guy's time has come and that like, we can validate ideas really fast. But it's like, I don't know if you've experienced this, but like, just because you can build the thing, like, and we've moved from like your Apple notes to like replays, with the ideas fully, the MVPs built, doesn't mean that you want to spend the next, you know, decade eating glass for that world.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  I have a lot of friends who are like, idea guy, builder, product people who are like, I'm just looking for the person who wants to take this idea over.

• 27:38Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Like, no, that's actually the job.

• 27:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  It's like, the job is, uh, you know, going and spending time like courting a dentist to sell them a product.

• 27:47Shaan Puri?

  It's like the same thing with people who are like, uh, taste is all that matters now.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Oh dude, the taste copers are-

• 27:52Shaan Puri?

  Cause it's even more, it's even, they're obscene of the idea guys. They're like, no, no, I don't even make the idea. I just, I just judge the ideas.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  If I hear another person talk about taste in this market, you know, you ever read the articles of Lee Sedol for, from a decade ago? Do you know this story?

• 28:06Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Oh my god, it's, it's an epic story. Lee Sedol is like the Korean master of Go.

• 28:11Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Do you understand this moment that happened a decade ago with AlphaGo?

• 28:14Shaan Puri?

  AlphaGo, yeah. So he was the best at Go.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Chess, chess is a known thing, but no one will ever get to AlphaGo. And it's like, there's more possibilities in AlphaGo than there are atoms in the universe, was like, the quote.

• 28:23Shaan Puri?

  I remember hearing that, yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is the quote. It's like, at least it all's, you know, we're safe. And it's like, you know, at least it all plays AlphaGo, and at some point, AlphaGo makes a move, and it's like this absurd move that nobody's like, this is, AlphaGo made a mistake.

• 28:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  You know, all those possibilities, it made a mistake. And it's like 78 moves later, the AlphaGo beats the shit out of the human, and like, he's sitting there looking at the mirror, he retires. It's like a sad story. Like, he retires. And it's like, you know, the quotes are things like, I never truly scratched the surface of Go. And it's like, you know, I'm embarrassed and I feel helpless, like the feelings of helplessness. And it's like, I feel like everyone, you know, is gonna have that moment. And it's like, all those people who are talking about, VC's safe. It's like, it's all about taste and psychology. Uh, all those people are gonna experience like a taste moment. Where it's like-

• 29:10Shaan Puri?

  Lee Sedol.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Where they're gonna be Lee Sedold, and they're gonna have a moment where it's like, you're gonna present their taste, and the AI's taste, to the end consumer. Cause ultimately, taste is in the eye of the consumer. It's in the eye of the customer. And it's like, they are the ones that are arbiters of taste. You think you're a tastemaker until you put like, the burger in front of the person, like, actually, I like this burger more. And it's like, but that's a McDonald's burger. You're like, yeah, I like the McDonald's burger. Billions of people like the McDonald's burger more than you're like, you know, Saint Char- Four Charles burger. And it's like, I prefer this thing. And so- You might, you know, it might not win the award, but it wins the, the choice of the consumer. And so I think all these people who are like, taste is our salvation are gonna get leased dolls.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  It's gonna hurt real, it's gonna hurt real bad. They're gonna run into the brick wall of consumer choice on taste.

• 29:59Shaan Puri?

  Well, dude, this just happened. Like, remember, I don't know, rewind five, seven years ago? And it was like self-driving cars, what people were working on.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:07Shaan Puri?

  What's gonna happen to the truck drivers? It was like the truck drivers and the grocery store checkout people. It was like, you know, we're just gonna have to find them new jobs. And then all of a sudden, like Dolly and these other tools came out. I was like, oh shit, it's actually us.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  It's every, oh no, it's us first.

• 30:23Shaan Puri?

  It's the graphic designers, the copywriters, the like, what were the first things that actually chat GPT?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:28Shaan Puri?

  And like the modern wave of tools were good at. It was like writing. They did like the fake podcast of Joe Rogan talking to Steve Jobs. And I was like, oh, podcaster. All right, that's gone. Like, you know, it's just a matter of time, you know? And so I don't really think there's really any sort of like safe space.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:44Shaan Puri?

  But I definitely don't think it's the, um, oh, I have, I have unique taste. Cause you're right. Like whether the AI maybe has better taste or it takes one million shots on goal.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:54Shaan Puri?

  While you take one and it's just gonna play the law, like the law of large numbers and get it, get it right just by doing so many variations.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Like, yeah.

• 31:01Shaan Puri?

  I tried to write a movie script. I was like, oh, I want to write the opening scene of this idea for this movie I have.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:06Shaan Puri?

  And so I'm like, sit down. I'm like, oh shoot. Like the idea was really great. I told like five people the idea. They're like, that's incredible. This is great. You should do this. And then I sit down. I just actually have to do the work. I'm like, oh my God, this is so hard. How do I, what do, where do I start?

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:19Shaan Puri?

  Are they in a cafe? Are there a bar? Where, where do the characters? What do they say? And so I go to chat GPT and I upload a script of the social network. And I upload like all of Aaron Sorkin's like work. And I'm like, all right, you're kind of like Aaron Sorkin, but you're also me. And you get, here's the idea for the movie. Give me a draft. Gives me a draft. Kind of sucks. I'm like, give me another one. Gives me another one instantaneously with no, with no ego about it. Gives me another one. Gives me another one. Gives me another one. And eventually like it got pretty good at doing that scene and.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Pretty good measured by your, your taste.

• 31:50Shaan Puri?

  By my taste as.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  By your taste of what you enjoy. Right?

• 31:53Shaan Puri?

  But what I'm saying is like, even if, let's say my taste maybe is right or maybe it's wrong. Either way, it did 10 attempts before I could even lift a finger.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  The volume was there.

• 32:01Shaan Puri?

  The volume is gonna win in a taste game. It's gonna take 100, 1000 shots on goal. Same thing with like ads, right? Like, if you look at like fashion brands that do good with Facebook ads, go look at their ad library. It's not like they have one David Ogilvy sitting in the room and he just comes up with this one beautiful ad. They're running like 1,000 ads in a catalog, quantitatively testing which one gets the highest ROI. And they're doubling down on that.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  It's so funny because like, we've gotten over the idea of taste in all these like really fuzzy areas of like human consumption. And it's like, taste on video taste? Like, turns out like, people preferred the algorithm of ByteDance and TikTok to like,

• 32:37Shaan Puri?

  You're following.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Your, you know, programming on television. Like, your years of study of what people are, you know, enjoying, got replaced, like, by like the algo. You know, I can't tell you how many mistakes I watched.

• 32:51Shaan Puri?

  That's so true. The algo is literally the definition of taste.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Of taste.

• 32:54Shaan Puri?

  It's your taste. And it's already proven that the algo dominates.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 32:58Shaan Puri?

  You know, whether it's editors inside the company, or it's me for myself. It's better than what I could do for myself even.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  It's funny, and we make these mistakes all the time. I'm watching, I mean, you could argue that Apple lost the entire podcast business based on like, based on their, their religion around taste. Like, Apple from, yeah, so like, Apple started the entire podcast movement, right? Like, they owned, every podcast got launched on Apple, right? And they were like, we really, on the other side of Apple, they're like, we really need to own the future of entertainment. And they're like, what is the future of entertainment? It's like, great shows, it's HBO, it's taste. That's tasteful creators, tasteful makers, like, things that are just like,

• 33:41Shaan Puri?

  No slop.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  No slop. But on the other side of the house, the, the volume was being made by people that didn't look like the top Hollywood creators. And all of them, no, no product iteration, no help for monetization, no like featuring of them, no studio production, no tools, no budgets, no like, give them metrics and data back. None of the things that you would do if you had like, a million free creators doing things and building awesome audiences that turns out can now sway elections. And all of them start on your platform. And then you fast forward, it's like, where's the, where's the most of that consumption? It's like YouTube. And Spotify and you're like, they fumbled and they fumbled because like they didn't think it was tasteful and they missed it. And it's like YouTube back in the day did the same thing.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  They actually had half a billion dollars for content. They, there was like the

• 34:30Shaan Puri?

  Red originals, right?

• 34:32Speaker 01

  The originals. It was like a half billion dollars and they came to all the agencies and say, we want your best creators. And we all went and pitched them five million dollar channels and they gave a big budget. And then they gave like five million dollars for the native creators, like Phil Franco and Michelle Phan got like little touches of like cash here and there. Like the only channels left standing were the creators, the native creators. It didn't match the taste profile of like the advertisers that were upstream of all of this shit. But they were the ones creating stuff that people wanted. I mean, Sam Altman's got like the initiation point for basically every new business that's getting built, right? And he turns out he ran Y C for a long time. We're not like that far away from him saying like, hey, why not just build like a funding model into the next G P T and be like, somebody's

• 35:16Speaker 01

  talking about starting a business. I actually like that business. Like, do you think it'll make money? Let's provide them like credits. Let's provide them a little bit of funding to get going. And like, I don't know, does that change how investment works? Is that maybe like upstream of all of the tastemakers?

• 35:31Shaan Puri?

  So what do you think it looks like? Let's say A I just keeps getting better.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:35Shaan Puri?

  There's no, there's no life raft for the taste guys or the idea guys or the whatever. Like A I is getting better at all these things and you're gonna, you know, so what happens? What happens to us? What do you do? How do you think about that?

• 35:47Speaker 01

  I think you just keep creating things that people want and like, you know, use the tools to piece them together. And it's like, just get to the final, get to the answer faster. Like, do customers want this thing? And give them, give the customers what they want. That's true north. Like, build something people want. Like, it's the Y C mantra. It's like, build a product people want. And it's like, how fast can you get the product to people that they want? And like, how many times can you iterate on the thing so that eventually you get the thing that people want? And it's like, just laser focus on that and cut everything else out of your life. And like, that's how you build most of these like scaling businesses.

• 36:17Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  And it's. To me, that's like, that's never going to go away. People are always going to want things and you can use these tools to provide those things to them. And there's probably a good arb for the next long while. Like, we got a long period of time before this stuff filters through the economy. Because it's not how fast the technology is moving, it's how fast people adjust their reality and their habits. And that's like the friction that actually exists here. Technology is mind boggling, but like my mom, learning how to second brain is like, even you and I learning how to second brain is really hard.

• 36:48Shaan Puri?

  Do you, do you have any other AI sort of theories or frameworks that are interesting that you've been noodling on?

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've only, I've made, I made three AI investments post code two.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  As an angel, all of them follow the same kind of framework. One of them is to a buddy of ours in the, in the travel space. And the other two are founders that I backed before, but all of them are basically agent platforms. One's called cognition, which is like the maker of a product called Devon. And the founder, Scott, was a founder that I backed once before. And Scott is like-

• 37:22Shaan Puri?

  He's a genius, correct? He's the actual mathematical genius.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Among many things, one of the, one of the things I was riffing on was like, it's possible that Devon is just Scott in the background answering all the coding questions. Cause he's so good. And then another product is called Augment, it's Harish Abbott. And Harish was a founder of a company that I was on board of called Deliver, which was like, third party logistics for everyone. It was like Amazon Prime for everybody. He worked at Amazon in fulfillment and then built Deliver, sold it to Shopify for a couple billion dollars. And like, Harish is one of those humans where like, if you could imagine what the ultimate like logistics hire would be, you would hire Harish. No detail escapes him. He doesn't mind staring into the abyss of like a warehouse and figuring out how to optimize. Every minute detail of like, product comes in, where does it go? What platform? How do you get optimized?

• 38:11Speaker 01

  What's the routing? Down to the minute, like, he's that brain. It's just his, it's his gift. It's his dark gift. And so both of these people, actually all three of these people have these dark gifts. Where it's like, you could never in your wildest dreams hire Scott. You could never hire Harish to do your logistics. But what you can do now is they've like, they've built these platforms that are agentic. And so it's like, imagine if like the reinforcement training was done by the ultimate employee. And that was priced at tokens.

• 38:39Shaan Puri?

  What does that actually mean? So like, they're building an agent, that's going to be like, let's say your logistics. Employee, but he himself is literally like kind of auditing the like the answers.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  He and the team that he is building are saying like, hey, we know exactly what goes into building world-class fulfillment and logistics. We've done it at Amazon. We did it deliver. Like, I know all these details. Now, you've got a company that's an SMB, it's an e-comm, and it's like, you don't know the knowledge that I have, but I can program it into into an agent so that like all the workflows that you're eventually going to have to do, this agent can help you with, and it'll give you the the things that would otherwise take you a lot of time. Even if you were the best in the world at, it'll do those things automatically for you. And so I think we're moving to this world where like, the best, the best at a task will be able to productize themselves as these agents and deliver it.

• 39:29Shaan Puri?

  So, you know, when social media came out.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:32Shaan Puri?

  One of the cool things that happened, and one of the reasons why there's this word influencer, is because prior to social, the only people you knew who did a thing were the people around you. You were limited by your geography.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:44Shaan Puri?

  And the internet, the superpower of the internet is that it vaporized geography. So, you know, like, when we had a baby, we're following these like, mom influencer types who are teaching you like, how to like, get your baby to sleep and like, little tips on, you know, swaddles and diapers and all these little things. Like, I'm getting the best

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:01Shaan Puri?

  mom coaching and dad coaching.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:03Shaan Puri?

  From, like, not just my geography, but like, the world. And those people became, so the best teachers were not teaching in schools anymore. The best teachers were teaching on Instagram and YouTube and other places like that, and they were getting millions and millions of followers, because like, the best teacher actually should have a few billion students.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:21Shaan Puri?

  And so the best got rewarded in that way. And so that's what the internet, you know, like, like, last 15 years has done. And now with agents, it's kind of the same thing. It's like, the best employee, you're no longer limited to who you can afford.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:34Shaan Puri?

  Or who's nearby you, who you can hire locally. But actually, like, no, globally, who's the best at travel planning and booking? Who's the best at logistics, you know, workflows, planning and analysis?

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Who's the best coding agent?

• 40:44Shaan Puri?

  Who's the best, who's the best engineer you know, right? It's actually not who's the best engineer, it's who's the best engineer, period.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:50Shaan Puri?

  He can program himself in the same way that like, content creators were able to like, make pieces of content that scaled, and you know, I can go to sleep and millions of people can listen to this podcast. And now they're doing that with like, a piece of software, a piece of code, that's gonna actually like, take their brain and be like, yo, I got, I got that guy's brain here in this piece of code.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  And do the digital work that they would have done for you.

• 41:09Shaan Puri?

  Right. And they can, and just like the best teachers have millions of students, the best employees now actually work for millions of companies is what's going to end up happening.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's amazing.

• 41:18Shaan Puri?

  I want to do some stories. So I have here.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Oh, this is scary.

• 41:23Shaan Puri?

  These are scary. We're going to draw a card and then I want, is there people that you've encountered in your life? I want you to tell me some stories.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Or story timing.

• 41:30Shaan Puri?

  Pick a card, yeah. All right, show the camera. Who'd you get?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  I got Peter Thiel.

• 41:34Shaan Puri?

  Peter Thiel, do you have any Peter Thiel? Either lessons learned, funny encounters, interesting stories, seeing him in action. What you got on Peter Thiel?

• 41:42Speaker 01

  The only time I've ever encountered Peter Thiel was on the opportunity to invest in Replit. We were both going for the opportunity. And I think when you go against somebody like Peter Thiel, you plan to lose in most cases. And I didn't, I didn't end up losing the opportunity to invest in Replit. And I think part of it is like the realization that like any given Sunday in, in, in a lot of games, like a lot of people count themselves out. But on any given Sunday, you have the opportunity to, to, to pull out a W. And I, I love that product. I love it authentically. Like I use it all the time.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  I love the vision of like empowering like a billion people to build the companies that they want to build. And to like, I feel viscerally like the tinkerer's dilemma of like, I'm not an expert, but I wish that I were, and I wish I could bring this idea to life. And that software is this like bicycle and I don't, I'm like, I'm on a tricycle. I'm on like training wheels at best. And like this thing makes you feel like you're on a motorcycle. And it's like, I love that feeling. And if you can tell that feeling to somebody and get them as excited about it as you are, and use the product and obsess over the details of it. Like I would send Amjad, like every product thought I had, every like I have, like I'd have shower thoughts about it. I was like, you know, whatever, and it wasn't like work. It wasn't like, you know, the art of the VC deal.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  It was like, I just, I genuinely loved it. And then I think there was a moment where like, where he was like, I can have a guy who's probably the, one of the best on, you know, investors of all time, or I can have Matt.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  And Matt loves me. And, and, uh, and that was his choice. Um, and so I think that's the, I think the lesson is like, if you, if you really do the work and you really love it, like you might not win them all, but any given Sunday, you could pull out the dub.

• 43:43Shaan Puri?

  Bondo.

• 43:45Shaan Puri?

  Who you got?

• 43:45Speaker 01

  David Bonderman.

• 43:46Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Tell his story. Who's he and what's your interaction with him?

• 43:50Speaker 01

  David Bonderman, um, passed recently. Um, David Bonderman, uh, was the founder of TPG. David Bonderman, uh, was a guy I got to know, um, later in life. He worked with a very close friend and mentor of mine, um, named Rick Hess. And he was during, during my sabbatical, one of the things that I did was like, I'm just going to go and try to spend time with people who I've always admired and never really gotten to, to meet. And David was on the shortlist. David had ultimately been part of the group that acquired, uh, a majority position in CAA. And I'd gotten my first exposure to him there and he had just had this like incredible storied career of like, how he, you know, he ultimately, you know, he was a huge investor in like the airline industry and,

• 44:34Speaker 01

  you know, uh, had owned sports teams and was like a titan of industry and did it his way. And

• 44:39Shaan Puri?

  What was his come up by the way? Cause like, you know, that's the cool stuff you do at the, at the top of the mountain?

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Well, he worked for the Bass family and he was like, uh, he like helped build like the investment strategy for the Bass family in Texas. And ultimately like pivoted that into, I think the first investment was like Continental Airlines where he made his first real, like buku exit and ultimately ended up building TPG into like one of the titans of the private equity industry. And I got to spend a bunch of time with David, like hours at a time. He was like the kind of guy where like he was late in life, but he still had it. Like he had, he'd have these days where he was just like as hot and fired up as anything. And so some days it would just be like, let's just spend time talking about his job and his career and like lessons along the way. And then other times.

• 45:19Shaan Puri?

  Sorry. How did you do this? So you're on your sabbatical. You're like, I want to spend time with these people. What'd you, you call them up? You're like, hey, can I just come hang for a couple of days? What do you say?

• 45:26Speaker 01

  I called Rick Hess and Rick was building a, a, a new strategy, uh, for investing. I was just helping friends. And he was like, um, I was spending time doing, you know, doing, I treated like all of my friends and family kind of like, um, I was still in the portfolio VC mind. I was like, I'm gonna treat them all like portfolio companies. I'm just gonna go do things for them that matter and help. And so like, I would help friends like start companies. I would like go over and clean out their garage. I would like just, I had time for the first time in my 20 years. And like, I just wanted to spend time with people that I loved. And I had a list. I wrote a list of all the people. And I like would say, hey, I have time for the next couple of weeks. Can I help you on something? And so Rick was like, well, I'm building this thing and I'm partnering with David. And he's like, why don't we go over and talk to him about it?

• 46:09Speaker 01

  And one of those trips, he was like, hey, David's really interested in AI. Will you like put together some thoughts? And I was like, a hundred percent. And so I got to go and spend like a three hour session with Bondo. And I was just like laying out where I saw AI going. I'm like showing him mid journey. I'm showing him like chat GPT, you know, and, and like just walking him through all the new products. And, uh, and he's just silently like, kind of like riffing on it and like asking a couple of questions here and there. And, um, and at the end, he's like, so what are you gonna do? I'm like, I don't know. I'm gonna invest in a couple of friends who are smart and, and building stuff here. I'm like, what would you do? And he goes, I'd buy railroads.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  And I'm like, okay, this guy's maybe, maybe he's just gone crazy. Maybe he's gone crazy. I'm like, I didn't understand what he meant. I'm like, you gotta explain that to me. I don't know what the hell you're talking about. He goes, well, there's two ways to play it. One is these, this world is moving so fast that everything is changing. And it's like, if you built software today, or you built a product today, it feels like it's moving so fast that it could be obsolete in six months. And so that's shifting sand. You can play towards the bleeding edge, but that's where everyone is gonna be playing. Cause it's shiny and it's fun and it's distracting. Or you can buy a railroad. And it's like, think about the things that in the times of most change are still gonna be here. And it's like, focus on the industries that aren't going anywhere.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  And it was, it was like this moment where you're like, oh, I'm talking to like a business Yoda. And it was just like a really interesting framework. And it's like, I think it does apply is like, the business that, that I've been, that I ended up spending a bunch of the last year working on is in a really old, dirty industry that is like gonna be around forever, but applies these tools to it. And so I kind of like met him in the middle, which is like, I was gonna use the tools that are available today to help an industry that I knew would be stable in the face of all of this change. And so he was just like one of those guys where he could like pull out a, invest in trains and have it be like one of the most incredible business, you know, pieces of advice. All right, we got three more.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  I think the thing that I pulled from from Mark was like the idea that like where venture was heading and the institutionalization of venture and it kind of feels to me like we're at the almost the apex of that. Like when I joined this industry, like there was all of this tribal knowledge. There was like things that were hidden secrets. What's an example? Like you could like, like how to write a term sheet was like unknown. Like how to do a closing process was unknown. Like how to, you know, the, the real mechanics of the industry were unknown, let alone like the metrics of like, what is good, great, bad growth metrics or retention or net dollar retention? Like a lot of venture today feels like it's really like institutionalized. And it feels like even like further out, we're at this point of like the industry where it's like,

• 48:59Speaker 01

  the knowledge is all shared. It's all public. People have like posted almost as much institutional knowledge about an industry as possible. We have like documents, like the safe that like revolutionized it. Like Y C created a whole process for like how to institutionalize a fundraising, the handshake protocol. Like we protocolled the industry and it's like, we're at like the furthest ends, maybe not the furthest end, but we're like the match, the mature part of this industry. Like when I got into it, there were like 10 seed funds in market that like, you know, you didn't have to be good. You just had to be alive to like go and find these things. And there wasn't a ton of competition. There weren't like mega funds coming in and doing seed rounds. It's like you met a founder, you liked the founder, you went to Y C, there were 50 other people in the room. You kind of like said, hey, I like this one, let's do it.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  And you got to a handshake on a, on a note. Mark, I think saw where the world was heading on this. He's like, all these asset classes are maturing and we're going to build like a much bigger platform for it. And I think was inspired by a lot of the C A A mentality early on of like, C A A shifted the way that agencies had been done. It went from this like, I represent one client with one deal and it's like boutique. But also like strategically, like Ovid's had this insight that like, if I rip an agent away from another agency, all their clients come. And it was like, whereas at CA, one client sat in the middle of 10 agents with each of their own like personalized expertise. And it's like, in VC, the same thing kind of existed.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  You had one VC, you had this boutique, you're like, I've got this board member, that's my person. And then Andreessen comes along and it's like, no, you've got all of us. And we all come with this like value proposition. And it's like recruiting and marketing and all of these services. And it was the realization that like VC was a service industry and institutionalizing of that, that like changed the way that a lot of venture was there, like had been done. And then everybody rushed to create platforms and teams and like structure, because they were just beating people on that. Even if it wasn't like effective, they pushed the edge of that and they owned the brand of that, of like what a platform VC could be. And the other edge, you had like Benchmark and you know, Founders Fund and like people

• 51:06Speaker 01

  who are like, you need me and or Founders Fund where you're like, you don't need anybody.

• 51:10Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  You know? So I think what I took from that was like, you can look at any industry, VC included, and like bring a new institutionalization to it. And I think they're still doing it. I think they just acquired Turpentine and Torneberg. And it's like the realization that like one of those edges that you're competing again is like distribution, media, and you know, if you can bring customers, right? Like, what do the startups really care about? It's like customers and attention. The scarce resource is attention. And so it's like, we're going to build attention into the offering. And it's like, that feels again ahead of like the customer first centric, like customer centric like response. And it's like, most VCs were selling things that weren't necessarily like what the customer needed.

• 51:53Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  It was capital.

• 51:55Shaan Puri?

  What's that guy's name? Gilly something? He invested in Wiz and like every security startup. Basically, he was like, he unbundled the Andreessen model. He's like, cool, we're not going to help you with, you know, marketing or recruiting. Like, we have a network of CISOs at the top 500 companies, and you'll get to 2 million in ARR if you invest with us.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:16Shaan Puri?

  And then to those guys, he was like, hey, you're going to own a piece of this portfolio.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:19Shaan Puri?

  While you're sitting in your job, you're going to also be a venture investor, a venture partner in our fund.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:24Shaan Puri?

  And like, kind of created a little bribery network that like actually worked and actually is like, huge, huge results, like in a way outperforming results by figuring out that platform.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think like, those are like, What he's continuing to do is find like what those gaps are, what the customer really wants.

• 52:41Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  And it's like, if you could tell me like, oh, I want revenue, like I want, that's what I really want. And you can deliver that, that's pretty incredible.

• 52:49Shaan Puri?

  And part of what the startup founder wanted was like, you know, the brand A16Z.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  I want cool.

• 52:53Shaan Puri?

  I want cool. I want Andrea Godala to be like, I want to meet him. Like I want these different things that, you know, again, just work backwards from what actually resonates.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Most VCs were selling cool, right? They were selling, they were selling, uh, maybe not cool. They were selling,

• 53:10Speaker 01

  the promise of de-risked, right?

• 53:12Shaan Puri?

  Credibility, yeah.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  The promise of credibility that we, that we were something that had been like validated. They were selling like, if you got a Sequoia investment, like that's like, this is a real business. They've, they've looked at billion, like how many trillions of dollars of market cap or like from those people? We're among the, you said, you sell the association with market cap.

• 53:31Shaan Puri?

  All right, we got two more.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Derek Jeter. I have, I have one absurd Derek Jeter story. That's super funny. So one of the things you realize at a talent agency and being around like, like A-list stars all the time is that like, a lot of people go a little bananas.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  There's almost no equivalent though for sports stars. Cause something embeds in your brain when you are a little kid that these people are like larger than life. And so I am a young VC at lowercase and Derek Jeter and his partner are starting like a media company, a sports media company. And they're like, we want to spend time. And like, I saw all of this, anything like media and tech, I was like, I saw for years. And so we like go out for a dinner. We go out to this nice restaurant in, in Beverly Hills and, we're sitting down, it's the three of us and up to the table walks a guy and the guy is like,

• 54:35Speaker 01

  the thickest, deepest New York accent that you have ever heard in your entire life. It's like, hey guys. And like, He sees Jeter and he's like about to talk about the specials and his face melts. The guy almost like he gets like time is a flat circle and he is lost. And it's like one of those moments where you see him like, like reverse age into an eight year old. And he's like, this is like the moment of his life. And so he's going, he's like captures him like Mr. Jeter, Mr. Jeter, like I'm a big fan. He's like goes through the whole thing. And at some point, we all order the same thing. We order like the special that the guy recommends. It was like truffle pasta. He comes back to the table a little bit later and he's like, you know, it's fresh truffle on top. And he gives me a little bit of fresh truffle and he gives the manager a little bit of fresh truffle. And then he's over at Mr. Jeter and he looks at Mr. Jeter and he's putting the fresh truffle on and it,

• 55:19Speaker 01

  and he just like he, his brain freezes, but his hand doesn't. And it, it gets to a point where it is, it is so funny that we just start laughing as it's happening. Cause it is an ongoing mountain of truffle on this plate. It is, the whole plate is black. It is, it is, it must've been hundreds, hundreds of dollars of fresh truffle on Mr. Jeter's plate. And he's like, he's just looking at Mr. Jeter and he's like, I think you got it. And it was just one of those moments where you're like, it's really funny to watch people in that moment of their life. I don't have, I don't have like a good lesson from it.

• 55:56Shaan Puri?

  At least have like a different level of cool.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  It's like, it's another thing. It transports you to being a little kid. And so, you know, I, I've, I've had one of those experiences myself. And, uh, yeah.

• 56:09Shaan Puri?

  Well, this might be the one.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  That is, that is, uh, that is the one. I grew up as a, as the most diehard of diehard Lakers fans. I grew up in LA. I went, I was a, I went to college during, during the Shaq Kobe years and the high school and the Shaq Kobe years. High school, uh, you know, Christmas was like Laker game on TV. Like that's what we did. He's one of those people for me that was like, I got to watch this guy. And then I got to be obnoxious at college, like watching this guy beat the crap out of the Celtics. And it was really fun. But as a, again, at lowercase, I had an opportunity. There was a brief moment in time where I was a managing director of a fund called lowercase 13, which was a, a Kobe Bryant partnership. And it was like for a split second.

• 56:56Shaan Puri?

  How does that happen? Kobe reaches out.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  I had a friend who was advising Kobe. Her name is Betsy Skolnick and Betsy said, hey, Matt, Kobe. Is, I think he'd been injured at the moment. He was like, he's thinking about what comes after basketball. And he's always been obsessed with tech and venture and he really wants to learn. Will you come down and have dinner and spend time with Kobe and teach him a little bit about venture capital? And this is my Jeter like, like truffle moment, like I'm like, let's go, I'm ready. Like, I'll get, do you want me to come now in the car? I'll come right now and we can do it. And she's like, great, we'll set up a time in the next couple weeks. You can come down. So Chris and I go down and have dinner with Kobe and we like, sit there and he's like, asking questions. And it was like, one of these things where you can kind of tell some people like, whether they have like,

• 57:43Speaker 01

  the second gear of curiosity, like sometimes they ask the surface question and then there's another layer curiosity where they ask like, every relevant follow-up question that you could imagine, having been in the industry for a long time, you're like, oh, this person's gone through and like, they have real depth of curiosity. They want to know the details. They don't want just the surface answer. They want to be like, but how? This is actually what makes you great at like podcasts and interviews is like, you do the second question. You don't just leave it at the first, you do the follow-up. And he did it for the entire, it was like a three-hour dinner. By the end, he was just like, this was awesome. Thank you so much. I'd love to find ways to do this again. Will you send me stuff that I can read? And I was like, okay, I'll send him some stuff that he can read. So I put together like a, like the, the essential reading list of venture.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Every blog post that I ever loved, like, I'm going through all the girly posts and the Wilson posts and like, all the, all the stuff. And thinking that he would like, never read it. 2am, I get a text, be like, I read that post. And it was just like, whoa. He was like, in it. And he would like, text and like, we'd have these conversations in the middle of the night. I was like, when is this guy sleeping? He must be like, going crazy because he was injured. He was like, just like texting. And then eventually he goes, I really want to go spend some time and meet, like, we'd suggested, like, you can come with us. And go to San Francisco and meet a bunch of the startup companies. He's like, I'd love to. Again, thinking like, I'll never do it. He's like, let's go. When, when, when are we going? And so we take him up to San Francisco and we go to see a couple startups and we spread

• 59:08Speaker 01

  it out. It's like early stage apartment startups and then we go to Twitter and, uh, and we do like the tour of Twitter and Twitter just bought Vine and we're like walking around, we're onboarding him to Vine and doing the conversation with Dick and Adam, uh, Dick Costello and Adam Bain. And he's like, I want to see the whole place. So we go down to like the engineering floor and he's walking past one of the like, the hang rooms for the engineers and there's a kid in there and, uh, there's Papa Shot basketball and the kid, have you ever watched those people who are like savants at Papa Shot?

• 59:36Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  And they can like both hand it and it's like they go into like whatever the fourth gear of like the, the Matrix, you know, they're in it and they're like both handing and like.

• 59:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they look like the Tesla humanoid robot that's just like.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're like, this guy is that to the T. And Kobe looks in and he's like, I gotta do it. And he walks up behind a guy and he goes, I got next. And all the engineers see like Dick and Adam and then they see Kobe and they're like, holy shit. Like Jimmy's about to play Kobe. And they rush in. It's like Vine has just come out. So they're all like taking video of this thing. And like Kobe goes, he's gonna bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, and hits like 80. And then like Jimmy goes and it's like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. He hits like 82 and the room like erupts and it's like the greatest moment in this guy's life. He has never been like it, the whole like, it's like no one will ever believe this moment, right? He'd be like, I beat Kobe at Papa Shot. He's that guy. And like,

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  you expect every, you expect Kobe to be like, oh, congrats dude, high five. And I just remember the look on Kobe's face where he was like legitimately pissed. It was like, no, it wasn't like a fake piss. It was like, I'm buying one of these things. It's never fucking happened.

• 1:00:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I will destroy you. The next time I see you.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  I'm never letting that shit happen again. And he like walks out.

• 1:00:46Shaan Puri?

  Deletes his Twitter account.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Anyway, so it, I, it was a pretty incredible, like getting to spend the time with them. And then, uh, yeah, we, he was like, hey, I really want to build a shop. Um, and so for a brief moment, we had like a side fund that we were putting together with Kobe and we, they'd like two investments. Um, it was like one of them was, ended up being Stripe out of that fund. But he had a, he had a business partner who ended up like trying to renegotiate and we don't do those kinds of things. So anyway.

• 1:01:14Shaan Puri?

  Matt, full of stories. This is amazing.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Super fun.

• 1:01:18Shaan Puri?

  Thanks for, thanks for doing it.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  I feel like I could rule the world, I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.