I built a $50M AI app in high school (and just sold it for...)

Free course: Build a profitable AI side hustle in 7 days https://clickhubspot.com/dki Episode 802: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to 19-year-old Zach Yadegari ( https://x.com/zach_yadegari ) about selling his $50M/yr app to MyFitnessPal. — Show Notes: (0:00) How much? (1:57) getting rejected from Stanford (5:45) 60-second origin story (7:27) "your biggest skill is your audacity" (12:50) the truth about selling a company (23:24) dos and don'ts (27:04) Zach's douchebag arc (29:44) first dumb purchase (33:08) decisions that made the app worth $100M (43:51) Idea 1: Semantic search on IG (45:10) Idea: apps (48:00) filter for good ideas (54:27) Dinner w/ Steve Cohen (1:03:39) Where Zach is putting his money (1:05:58) What Zach sucks at — Links: • Cal AI - https://www.calai.app/ • MyFitnessPal - https://www.myfitnesspal.com/ — 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 • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge — 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 • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  Zach, we gotta set the table. Zach, how old are you?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  I'm 19.

• 0:04Shaan Puri?

  You just sold your company. You just sold your company for how much money, Zach?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:17Shaan Puri?

  All right, what's up? Zach, you're here, 19 years old. The last time you called on this podcast, you were in high school. You, I think, were like between third and fourth period or on lunch break and you did a podcast recording with us in front of, I don't know, a quarter million people or something like that. And now we fast forward, I don't know, a year and change later, and you just sold your company. You just sold your company for how much money, Zach?

• 0:40Speaker 01

  I can't reveal how much we sold for, unfortunately, but I could tell you that right before selling, we finished 2025, having done $30 million in revenue. And now the company's grown. In January, we just did 5.7 million in revenue.

• 0:56Shaan Puri?

  5.7 million in January. So if you, if you were to multiply by 12 and say like what we could do this year, you're talking about like a, you know, 50 million plus revenue company, but 30 million last year. Dude, that's amazing. Like, you know, just the way you say it, you say it so calmly and like a grown up, but like, can we just take a second, Sam, just to be amazed and just give the kids some, some props? Like, that is incredible. You're a teenager who built an app with your friends, got it to 30 million in annual revenue and sold your company just now to, to MyFitnessPal.

• 1:33Sam Parr?

  And last time we talked to you, you were on, like, I think literally your lunch break and you were in high school. I know that you were applying to college and on the podcast, you were like saying, I think I'm gonna go to college. Are you, are you like on your lunch break at college now? Is that where you are? Are you at a dorm?

• 1:50Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm not gonna lie, I miss, I've missed like many classes this semester. I, I'm at the University of Miami. I am a freshman, but yeah.

• 1:59Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so you're a freshman at Miami. And I believe, by the way. I remember being outraged on Twitter by this. I think I was, I was one of your, your defenders here where you applied to a bunch of colleges you wanted to go to and you got rejected, which is insane to be a teenager who's got an app that's doing tens of millions in revenue and the college admissions office was like, "We didn't like your essay." Or whatever. "Your SAT score doesn't show that you're exceptional." Obviously, you were exceptional. Could you tell that story of maybe facing a little bit of rejection and how that felt?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, right after the podcast that we did last time, yeah, I was submitting everything. I applied to every single Ivy League school, Stanford, a few others. Stanford was my top choice that I wanted to get into. And just one by one, rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection. And, I mean, I tweeted about it because I had a 4.0 unweighted GPA. At the time I applied, my company was doing, I think, 15 million a year when I applied. And I had on paper what most people need to get in, but I was just rejected from everywhere, which I felt was pretty surprising.

• 3:08Shaan Puri?

  Why, why do you think that was? Do you know? There's no way to know, really. It's a black box, but do you have any suspicions?

• 3:13Speaker 01

  There's no way to know.

• 3:15Shaan Puri?

  Well, your post kind of went viral. Did anything happen from that? Did anybody reach out?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, to be honest, it was actually great. Like, it might have been better that I got rejected from colleges than got it into any, because I posted it, got like 40 million views on Twitter. And I had a ton of really cool people, like the mayor of Miami, texted me afterwards and we actually met up. That's part of the reason I even decided to go to U-Miami, was the support from him and a bunch of other cool people like Alex Ohanian and a bunch of others that had like reached out to support me after that.

• 3:44Shaan Puri?

  That's awesome. Yeah, you kind of needed that. Nobody wants a team that's too perfect and successful. So you kind of needed a little bit of likeability, a little bit of rejection in the backstory. So I think in the end, it's a good thing.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I didn't get any sympathy from the post. They were just like all mad at me.

• 4:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I don't think that you deserve sympathy. I don't think you deserve it. I think, I think, I think it's, things have worked out as they should. Are you, did the University of Miami or any of, did they ask you for donation already?

• 4:14Shaan Puri?

  The first freshman to have a library that he donates?

• 4:18Sam Parr?

  No, seriously, because they have really good processes for identifying whales and reaching out to people.

• 4:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you actually should hire one of them. They'll kind of help your onboarding flow. The university donation people are exceptional.

• 4:32Sam Parr?

  What's your dating life like? Like when you're in college and you're 19 and you just sell an app for $100 million? And even before that, you own an app that is doing tens of millions in revenue. Are you by yourself all the time working or are you able to have fun? And is the world's easiest pickup line actually successful for you?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  So I'd say the first semester, I had way too much fun. I was doing too many things. We had thrown a bunch of parties, me and a couple of my other entrepreneurial friends who were living in Miami with me at the time. We all moved into this house together. And so every, like every couple of weeks, we'd throw a house party. And I'm not going to lie, it was definitely, like I had a lot of aura throwing these parties. And the word got around in the college that this is like the Cal, they called me the Cal AI guy or calorie boy. Those are like my nicknames.

• 5:25Shaan Puri?

  That's amazing. Calorie boy. Okay. So by the way, we didn't say what your app is. So your app, Cal AI, is basically an app on your phone where you could take a picture of the meals that you're eating. And it kind of uses AI to track and log your calories. So you don't have to type in that you had six ounces of chicken breast with the skin or whatever, you know, you don't have to do all that logging. You just take the picture and it does the thing. And so that's what you guys had built. And for those who haven't seen the first episode, give just a quick origin story. You did the full one before, but just do the quick one here.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Sure. So I started programming when I was seven years old. I was obsessed with video games and I wanted to learn how to make my own. So started building, by the time I was a freshman in high school, I built my first company. I built an unblocked gaming website that lets students play games in school unblocked. It was actually kind of accidental that I stumbled into turning it into a real company. First, I just built it for my friends at school, but it spread really quickly and it grew to five million users through mostly me just making TikToks about it. It was generating $60,000 a year by putting banner ads on the website. And then when I was 16, I sold it for $100,000.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  After that, I got into the app space, started building a few small projects. And then Calais is really the one that I went all in on and it really took off. It exceeded all expectations.

• 6:47Sam Parr?

  All right, guys, here's the thing about side hustles. Everyone wants one, but most people overthink about it and they never actually launch anything. But because of AI, you can go from an idea to your first sale in only seven days. My old company, The Hustle, they just dropped an AI side hustle crash course. They look at stuff that we said and they broke it all down into simple, bite-sized steps. Which means you're going to get a guide that gives you everything you need to launch a side hustle without any of the guesswork. So you can get it right now. You can scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now, back to the show.

• 7:27Shaan Puri?

  And you, just, I mean, you're not like, you started programming early, but like, you're not Albert Einstein out here. You're not Mark Zuckerberg. You're not a prodigy in terms of coding, correct? Like, what makes you unique, it seems like, was the blend of good enough at building and then, you know, good enough or great at marketing and just being an entrepreneur. And the combination is what's important. I think that's important to call out because I remember when I was on the come up, I sort of had this misconception that I needed to be some, I needed to be some sort of 900 IQ giga brain in order to enter a space. And what I didn't really realize was that, you know, if you just kind of, even if you know nothing today, if you just give it six months of full focus, you'll be, you'll be good enough to be dangerous.

• 8:11Shaan Puri?

  And that's kind of all you need at, at one of the skills. You just got to stack two others. And it's the combination of the skills that's really valuable, not having to be world-class at any one thing. Is that, was that your experience or was it different?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would definitely agree with you. I mean, especially now, like coding is just becoming easier and easier with AI tools. And I'd say my skills now are being under, being able to code has really helped me understand how to lead a team. Like, I always think that the most important thing is the Pareto principle. Learn the 20% that gets you the 80% of results. And that's what's necessary to actually hire someone that's smarter than you and being able to manage the team. So I've, I've pretty much done that in all of these different areas. And it's allowed me to build great people around me and put in the systems.

• 8:56Sam Parr?

  I think your biggest skill is your audacity. I think that, uh, what Sean left out was maybe the most like, one of the more interesting things is that, uh, like when you were starting to build, I think you made a tweet or a video and you said, uh, in the next three years, I think you were 15. I'm gonna have an app that does 50 or 100 million in revenue. You said some audacious thing. And then I think you even tweeted that out. And so there's this like interesting combination of audacity to think that somehow you, a young kid, are good enough to like figure this out. And then also the tenacity and IQ and get after it-ness to make it happen.

• 9:33Shaan Puri?

  We found that video of you in your kitchen, basically when you're, I don't know, 13, 14 years old, saying, I will do this. Matty, you're sort of speaking the words into existence.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was honestly pretty crazy, like looking back that I did that. My plan was that I was gonna make a YouTube series out of it. But I just made that first video saying that I was gonna make a million dollars before graduating high school. That was my goal. And I always, I, I kind of from a young age, always believed in my heart I was going to do it. I just, I wanted it so badly that I needed it to be true. And I think self-belief has gotten me so far because it's helped me get over so many part, points of life where I could have just said like, oh, like, if no one, like, I have to go to college before I'm able to do this. Like, I have to take a class, I have to get a degree, like, no way I could do it before. But no, I always believed like, I can do it, I can do it now.

• 10:27Sam Parr?

  You forgot to add the, uh, per week. I wanna make a million dollars before I graduate high school, per week.

• 10:35Shaan Puri?

  So you said like, I always had that, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna question that for a sec. Cause you know, maybe some of it you were born with, maybe some of it you just kind of came out of nowhere. This is aura, natural auras, as you would say. But, but me and Sam, we've both been on our, our little motivational arc, right? Like I was a big Tony Robbins guy, went to the seminars, I used to listen to the audio tapes and go for walks. And he had this like walking series where you would walk and he'd be like, all right, every four steps, you're gonna say this thing, you're gonna believe this, I'm gonna ask you this question, whatever comes to your mind. And it's, you know, I got Tony Robbins in my ear. And Sam, I'm sure you had a similar sort of self-brainwashing where you worked on it. You practiced the muscle of self-belief. I'm curious, Zach, I don't know you very well, but I'm curious, did you work on the muscle of self-belief in any way?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Well, it's honestly a great question. I, of course I had doubts, like in my head, I was like, shit, like this is a crazy goal. Can I actually do this? And I remember there's this one story that, or like when I was really young, I was in the car with my mom. And I asked her, like, mom, if I'm rich when I'm older, I wanna do this. I said something along those lines. And then I was like, wait, and I changed it. I was like, when I'm rich, I'm gonna do this. And I think I've been always conscious about like shifting my language to a when, not an if, even though I, of course I had doubts, I was like, can I really do this? But yeah, I had those doubts and the motivation arc, dude, I used to be obsessed with motivational content. I still am, but not as much, but especially it was like the year before I started Call AI.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  I curated my TikTok for you page. I would only interact with videos of motivational speakers. And so my entire feed was just David Goggins yelling at me, get back to work, get back to work. And all these other people. And that's actually why I started my first app, which was a motivational alarm clock where you could choose people. Basically I identified by watching these TikToks, everyone in the comments was like, this got me so pumped up. I wanna make this my alarm clock. How can I do that? And there was no way to really easily do that. So then I was like, shit, I wanna build an app, cause I want this for myself too. And all these people clearly want it as well, that lets you set these motivational sounds as your alarm. And so that was the idea behind crying clock.

• 12:44Shaan Puri?

  And thus, Grind Clock was born.

• 12:46Sam Parr?

  So, so Zach?

• 12:48Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I would use that now, by the way.

• 12:50Sam Parr?

  So, you're rich. What, uh, how do you feel? When did the, when did the wire hit? It's March 4th, Wednesday. When did, I think you announced this, uh, a few days ago. How's it feel? When the wire hit?

• 13:02Speaker 01

  We announced it on Monday, but the sale actually took place in December. We couldn't speak about it until now. And so the wire hit, hit the same day it closed. And honestly, like, I'm just gonna be real. The excitement hit me like when they first made the offer, like over the phone. But then I was like, wait, but it didn't happen yet. We don't have anything signed, so quell the excitement, quell the excitement. And then it never felt as good as that did.

• 13:29Sam Parr?

  And how long did the process take? And was it miserable or was it all right? Was it smooth?

• 13:33Speaker 01

  It was honestly much faster than it would normally be. And some of that was like the timing. Like, part of the reason we didn't share anything until now is because peak season is January and February. And so we didn't want to really like influence anything.

• 13:46Shaan Puri?

  Rock the boat, yeah. So, so, uh, real quick, okay. So let's tell the story about the acquisition. And one of the reasons I want to do this is because the acquisition, the exit part of, of it, for any entrepreneur is such a huge deal, right? It's like, literally, it's probably the biggest deal you'll ever make in your life. Most people don't really talk about how it goes down. They don't talk about how it feels. They don't talk about what they did. They don't talk about the ups, the downs, the techniques that actually really made a difference. Um, right before we started this podcast, you were mentioning that you had watched, I'd made this video a long time ago, actually for Sam's conference. I was, Sam, you were like, you wanna come speak? And I was like, yeah. I gave a talk called How to Sell a Failing Company. Now, your company wasn't failing, but mine, I would say, was. Meaning, it wasn't achieving the goal I had for it.

• 14:28Shaan Puri?

  And there wasn't like, you know, just huge companies knocking at the door every day, offering me briefcases full of cash. I had to sell the company. I didn't get bought just passively. And I felt like every story I had ever heard about somebody selling was, everybody was knocking at our door, they wanted us, and we picked. And I was like, well, that shit, that ain't me. And so I had to run a process and essentially create an auction. And it had a good outcome, but nobody really talked about it.

• 14:52Sam Parr?

  I think the line, Sean, is- Is like a bunch of Silicon Valley, like big shots say companies are bought, not sold. And I remember hearing that and I'm like, oh, so people aren't hollering at me all the time. Then I'm a loser. And then the reality is that's not the reality. That is the reality.

• 15:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe for some people, but for other people, that ain't it. It wasn't it for me. I had to figure out how to sell it and I shared some of the lessons. So you were saying real quick that you you would watch that. That was, you know, somewhat helpful for you, but can we talk about that? That's why I want to talk about the acquisition because I feel like it makes a huge difference. Founders get very few reps, you get very few chances to practice doing it. So it's kind of useful to hear stories of how it all went down.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, great point, honestly, on that because like going into this was my first time with everything. So it was honestly scary and stressful and I kept overthinking things, but hearing stories was helpful.

• 15:40Shaan Puri?

  By the way, you sold to a company that's owned by private equity. So it's your first time. It's there, you know, they're basically, you know, they're pros. It's like sitting down with Magnus Carlson for your first game, right? This is what they do, whereas this is your first time doing it.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, 100%. The process honestly started back in May of 2025. It was right before I was like a few months before going to college. And so I kind of was thinking like, you know what? Maybe there's a world where I can be a normal college student and get a normal freshman experience where I don't need to worry about a company at the same time. So let's just, let me just talk to some people and see what they're feeling, see if they're interested. So I kind of ran a sales cycle at that point. I made a list of the 10 companies that I felt were, made the most sense. And out of all of them, we were extremely undervalued, to be honest.

• 16:33Shaan Puri?

  And sorry, explain the details. You make the list, great. Now what do you do? You email them, call them, you, how do you, hey, just wanted to see if you maybe would want to do something, right? Who'd you do corp dev, who'd you talk to and how'd you talk to them?

• 16:47Speaker 01

  So I was recommended that, or I heard somewhere it's, you lose leverage if you're just cold outreach. So I made, I tried to get people that I knew to make warm intros, kind of saying something along the lines of like, hey, I think you guys should meet, this is a cool company. I just thought of this like as if it was his idea, not it was me asking him. And so he made all those intros, got on calls with a lot of the CEOs of these companies and. A lot of them immediately just kind of shut it down like, oh, nice meeting you, but we're not interested. Some even in the email were like, cool company, we're not interested. But then a few, we, they were interested, we did a few calls, just met some of the team. And honestly, I was surprised that like, only after a couple of meetings,

• 17:32Speaker 01

  it was like very quick to get an offer. It wasn't like, I imagined it would be like, I don't know, talking to the team, getting to know them for a long time, but like, you could just, they just, some of them, it's different for everyone, but like a few of the people we were talking to, they were like, this is the information we want to know. Okay, hop on two calls with the team. Okay, like, this is, you know, a number. What do you think?

• 17:53Shaan Puri?

  Right. And you said the offers at the first round were low. What were you, did you just have crazy expectations? Was it, was it, were they not actually low? Did you have crazy expectations? Or were they actually low? It's like, you know, uh, you know, 1X revenue or something like, what, what were they offering basically at that time? Uh, when you thought they were too low?

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Less than we would make in a year. And, and profit or revenue? It was like about what we would make in a year in profit.

• 18:16Shaan Puri?

  Okay, wow. So 1X profit type of thing. So you just politely turned them down? What'd you say? And by the way, did that ignite some rage in you? Did you get a little fuel from that?

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Well, after that, I guess we did kind of, I politely did turn them down. And after that, I was kind of like, wait, is my company just not sellable? And then I was looking at it, I was like, wait, Weight Watchers just declared bankruptcy. All of these companies, like, how much money do they really have in the bank? Are we just not going to be able to sell? Is this just going to be a cash flowing business forever? And I kind of spread to accept that idea in my head that we are just going to be a cash flowing company. And like, actually started to move some things in place, like looking for a potential CEO to bring on. So like, I could step away and move on to something else. And so like the next few months, that's really what I believed.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  And I think what changed was I spoke to another founder who sold his company. And he told me that will work for him. He basically explained how bankers work, M and A bankers. You go to them, they create a list of all these companies you've never even heard of before. And like these companies that are about to go public, they just want to roll up all these smaller companies into them. So they're willing to give you actually fair market value for your company anytime you want.

• 19:32Sam Parr?

  Dude, your experience is very similar to mine, except you're 10 years younger. And, uh, but I think it's, I think it's a similar experience to many entrepreneurs, which is you build a company. You have these huge aspirations of selling it. And I've talked to so many people have done this. You go through your first process, massive letdown. You think, oh, this company like they lowballed the offer and it's like, it's equity in a privately held company. That's overvalued, so it's basically worth nothing. Then you go through this process where you got, you got your hopes up, then you're defeated. You're defeated for 10 days and then you're like, all right, I have to go back to work and like, maybe I'm just going to own this for forever. So I might as well just like build the company to last for forever. Then months later, years later, sometime later, then you get the second round.

• 20:16Sam Parr?

  You care a little bit less and your company is a little bit better because you've just assumed it's going to last longer. And it's exactly like dating. The second you don't want to date someone or you don't really care, they start coming to you. And so that's the, this is like the exact same process I've gone through. I have probably five to 10 friends who have gone through this exact same emotional process. And, uh, and, and by the way, yours was actually faster. I think you said like, it was like a low stress. You kind of implied it was like, oh, it went pretty smoothly. It didn't feel smooth if I had to guess going through this, it felt kind of defeating. And this is the exact same process, except oftentimes that's like a five year process.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, like that's exactly what happened. And I, I just resonated with that fact. And then actually, and this goes into Sean, what I was saying before. So then the second time, so I was just, I was set on building the company into like a long-term enduring business. It's going to bootstrap, whatever, like let's just figure out how we make it endure long, long term.

• 21:13Sam Parr?

  Dude, you're just making, you're just making a potential buyer like weak at the knees by saying those things.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  On that note, we were thinking like, okay, we really want this company to last. We probably want to think about making it freemium. Because any company that's been around for 10 years, that's like really big in the app space that I could think of, they're all freemium. So that's what we started to work towards. And you know who's really good at freemium? My fitness pal. So I wanted to hop on a call with their CEO and squeeze whatever information about freemium I could out of him, pitch it as like catching up, but just try to ask him questions about freemium. Reached out, got on a call, and they did not answer a single question about freemium. And it makes sense. I mean, like, it would definitely be not in their interest at all to help us. But yeah, like, they

• 22:06Speaker 01

  they actually spun the conversation from talking about that to, okay, maybe something else makes sense. Maybe the company's, maybe a partnership or whatever. And that's how things really started. That's so, yeah, that's so great.

• 22:20Shaan Puri?

  There's a moment that in Ben Horowitz's book, The Hard Thing About the Hard Things, he talks about a few like kind of key moments that happen. It feels like when it's happening in your company, it's unique to you. But then you read these books and you realize, oh shit, every company goes through these moments. And so one of them, he calls like the we fo' moment, which is the we're effed, it's over. And it's like you, you'll hit a moment where you feel like you're just screwed. And, uh, yeah, but that's common. And what you realize is actually a pretty high survival rate from that moment when you feel like there's no survival. Uh, another one I would say is the no one's coming to save us moment. And, um, that's not from Ben, that's just from this conversation is all three of us basically had that. It's like, oh, so I guess we're not just going to get a magical offer and it's all just gonna work out.

• 23:04Shaan Puri?

  Like, I guess I have to actually make this company work for me. Um, and there's no, there's nobody coming to save us. All right, cool. And that actually just really strengthens your resolve. And so some of these things that seem bad in the moment are actually exactly the sort of dose of medicine that a founder needs, uh, when it happens.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:23Shaan Puri?

  Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book, but then tearing out four fifths of the pages. Point is, you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book, instead of just reading part of it, visit hubspot.com. Zach, you talked about you, so then the conversation picked up. Can you give us like, you know, Zach's acquisition corner here real quick? Like, what do you think if you're now advising the next you, the next 19 year old kid who's going through acquisition talks?

• 24:06Shaan Puri?

  What are sort of the do's and don'ts of how to do, how to have that conversation? Literally like, do you throw out a number? Do they? How do you react? How do you position yourself or present yourself well? Meeting in person versus doing it over the phone? You know, like, give us some things that you felt you learned out of this experience.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like Sam said, very similar to girls. Like you basically want to play hard to get kind of. You don't want to, you don't want to be too interested. You don't also not want to be, you don't not want to be interested at the same time. So it's kind of like the push and pull.

• 24:40Sam Parr?

  It's like, what I describe it as is you could let them know you're interested, but you let them also know that regardless if they get on board or not, I'm going some places.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's a great way to put it. What helped me the most was that I had a friend, I actually had a couple of people that have been through acquisitions who were, I was constantly getting on the phone with them and they were giving me advice throughout the whole process. So if you're trying to sell your company and you know someone that's, that has gone through an acquisition, just having them help you through this, I think is super valuable just to talk through things. Like, like you said, things are very similar along any company, even if you think they're not so like they've seen things that I'm going through right now and they would give me the right things to say.

• 25:27Shaan Puri?

  You, Sean, or?

• 25:30Sam Parr?

  Have you guys, Zach, have you seen Good Will Hunting?

• 25:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 25:34Sam Parr?

  You've seen that, Sean, of course. And there's this one scene where Ben Affleck, he's like talking to Matt Damon, who doesn't want to go work for the NSA and get this fancy job. And Ben Affleck is like, no, F that. You're not doing it for you. You're doing it for me. You're doing it because my favorite part of the day is that second when I honked the horn to pick you up to go to our construction job, I hope that you don't come to the car because you're off doing something amazing and fancy. You owe it to me. And when Zach was talking about, he was like, I just, I just want to go to college and have a normal experience. There's like all these people that are like, no, F that. You go build this company and you do that for me. You're not doing it for you. That's how I feel when I hear he's like, he has everything that, you know, in like to my twenties, thirties that I would have begged to have.

• 26:19Sam Parr?

  You had it at 18. It's so funny hearing you go through this experience because I remember when we were talking to you before, you were like, I want to go to college. I want to do this. And you're, you're the man, you're the best. But in our head, I imagine both Sean and I were like, but you have this gift. You're blowing it.

• 26:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think, actually, I think you did what we told you, which was like, go for the social life, but you know, this is your, your path. This is what you're good at. This is what you should do. Like, don't worry about the classes side of thing. Did you feel when you were in college, like you have two different lives? Like, were they separate? Did the professors all know what the hell's going on? Do they, do they put some respect on that name? Did the other kids know what's going on? Or did you just sort of have this dual life where you're trying to be a normal student and they treat you like a normal student? They don't really know what's going on?

• 27:03Speaker 01

  It was a pretty dual life. There were times when it was close together. So as I mentioned, I was living in a house with a bunch of my entrepreneur friends. And so when we were throwing parties, it was like all the entrepreneurs and then a bunch of college kids and like, we would invite our other entrepreneur friends too. So like the actual going out aspect, that was very cohesive, I would say, which was really interesting, actually. It was like one of the scariest things I've experienced.

• 27:31Shaan Puri?

  Zach, I got a question for you. You, um, you had what is I think pretty normal for a teenager, a college student. You had a little douchebag arc. So you, uh, you, you go and you, you, you're doing this amazing thing. You come on the pod, you're this upstanding guy, you're this, your self belief, work hard, build this app, doing well with his friends, trying to be a good student, good, good grades, all that good stuff. And then you're like, you launch a course, you release a video where you're standing on a Lamborghini, you're humping a Lamborghini, throwing money in the air. And we were like, oh, what is this? Where did he go? He went, he went Andrew Tate on us. What happened? Can he, can we talk about the, the douchebag arc?

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so the guys I started the house with, the entrepreneurs, we kind of decided at first, the idea was let's just get a house, live together. It's a beautiful city. It's Miami and we're going to all build our companies side by side and we'll share learnings. And that's going to be great. We'll all grow very quickly together. Then we were like, wait, we're all super talented individuals. Why don't we, and this is a really interesting thing that we're doing. We're all young, having fun and building companies. Let's record it. Let's make some content out of it. Then it became, oh, wait, hiring videographers and editors and all the backend systems in place. Actually is going to be pretty expensive and take some time. How can we monetize it?

• 28:53Speaker 01

  And so that's when the idea was like, okay, let's make a course to help other people learn how to make apps too. And then we could continue to do what we do, make cool content and we're at least breaking even. And a lot of people's criticism on that was like, you're already making so much money. Why do you need to make more? It's because we're business people at heart. We need to, we want to break even. But then when we were thinking about angles to like, launch this and everything, we decided to go the super controversial route. Like you said, the Andrew Tate, it was like, sell the dream, sell the lifestyle instead of sell the product. And It was, it was interesting. I don't think it's, it's definitely not a real representation of any of our characters. We very intentionally wanted to rage bait people.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  But yeah, definitely. I mean, it worked. It took over the Twitter timeline, but it definitely started a lot of beef with people that that have been great.

• 29:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Looking back now, are you like, good move, bad move? What, what, what's the postgame?

• 29:48Speaker 01

  I think that it makes the story more interesting, but if I were to do something again, I would definitely take a little bit of a different angle. I mean, to be honest, there was no reason to even launch on Twitter, given what we were trying to do. Like the Twitter view was not, were not who we were trying to make videos for. So that was kind of just like our native platforms. We decided to take over, but yeah, I don't think it was like the right strategy.

• 30:11Shaan Puri?

  What's, um, what's the first dumb purchase gonna be? Or have you already had your dumb purchases from the cash flow? I guess like, uh, you're 19 years old, you just sold your company. I'm, you, you can't say the number, but I'm just gonna, I think it probably was a number close to a hundred million dollars. That's my guess. Um, so I, I'll just make a guess for you because you're not allowed to say anything. What's the dumb purchase gonna be? You gotta do something dumb. What are you gonna do?

• 30:37Speaker 01

  So I, I already had the car, the dream car I was wanted. That was out of the way. Um, Lamborghini, the one in the video.

• 30:44Shaan Puri?

  Green, yellow? What, what'd you do? What, what color'd you go with?

• 30:47Speaker 01

  It's matte black.

• 30:48Shaan Puri?

  Matte black. Okay, gotcha. The funny thing is you look like the guys who, um, walk up to a guy in a Lamborghini and say, hey, uh, you're on Tik Tok, you have a little fake microphone and you're like, hey, what do you do for work? And it's supposed to be an old real estate guy or like a shipping magnate and that, but you're also the guy in the car. It's crazy. It's like, uh, the Spider-Man meme.

• 31:07Sam Parr?

  Okay. So you got the car already. What do you want to get now?

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got.

• 31:10Sam Parr?

  You're a Long, you're a Long Island kid. You probably, you're a role, you're a watch guy if I had to guess.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  I mean, I didn't get in any like crazy watch yet. I'm, I'm, maybe I'd get a watch to be honest. Soon. Like I do have one, but I'm not like a huge collector of anything yet. However, what I did do, and I wanted to do this for a while, is I kind of threw out, or I'm gonna donate everything in my closet. And last week I went shopping with a stylist and I redid everything. So a whole new wardrobe. And honestly, it's been great. I feel like it's, it's awesome.

• 31:43Sam Parr?

  That's pretty cool.

• 31:43Shaan Puri?

  That's such a great move. And by the way, that costs so much less than people think um to, to do something. I did that when I was 24 years old. It didn't, yeah, I'm, I'm 15 years later. I don't wear any of that stuff anymore. But like, it was such a great move. I think at the time, I think I paid something like three grand or something for the stylist to come with me for a day or two. Maybe I found like, kind of, I don't know. I, I literally posted on Craigslist originally and got a bunch of applicants. Um, and I just told her, I was like, yo, I don't want to buy like a $500 belt. Like, I'm not trying to wear Gucci. Like, that's not the goal. Like, I just want to look good and have clothes that fit me right, uh, cause I don't really know how to do any of that stuff. Can you help me out? And she was, it was amazing. It was such a good process. Like, uh, I think every young guy who comes into a little bit of money,

• 32:23Shaan Puri?

  it's like one of those purchases that sounds a little silly. It's like, kind of don't want to say you did it, but actually is a, is a great move.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think it's definitely worth it.

• 32:34Sam Parr?

  So are you, are you working at MyFitnessPal now?

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Yes, I am. I'm still the CEO of Cali.

• 32:40Sam Parr?

  How long are you gonna work? Do you have, uh, an earn out or like a, like, are you there for two years?

• 32:45Speaker 01

  I can't say exactly on this, but there is a period where I'm staying before I leave.

• 32:51Sam Parr?

  Okay, okay.

• 32:55Shaan Puri?

  Do they, they bought 100% of the company though? Like, they own it now. You don't have to like, it's not like an investment that you then, it's not an investment. It's actually an acquisition.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:06Sam Parr?

  I looked up the, uh, MyFitnessPal CEO. Uh, it looks like Mike Fisher. He was at, um, Etsy. So, you know, huge company. And then I think if I had to get, my, uh, West Point, like, made an article on him. So I assume he graduated from West Point. I think that would be, that is gonna be really cool for you to learn from this guy. I, if I had to guess, he's an operator. He's probably pretty rigid and in a good way. And, uh, that's gonna be like, you'll probably learn a lot.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's been good so far. We catch up like about once a week and it's nice.

• 33:34Shaan Puri?

  Can you teach us some of the tactical? Good decisions that made a difference for you and actually building the app, right? We're kind of glossing over the fact that like you built this app. A lot of people build apps, but your app actually started to work and grew and scaled a lot. We talked about this a lot on the first episode about your TikTok strategy. How you basically, you know, would message tons of people, have them create content that would be talking about the app in an organic, native way. And then that would lead to awareness and downloads of the app.

• 34:05Shaan Puri?

  But are there like small things like, you know, either product decisions or like a marketing hook that you stumbled into that kind of changed the way you guys thought about things? Oh, we thought it should be X and then actually we, I remember one day we realized this other thing was the way to do it. Can you tell a story like that? I love those stories.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  There were two things here that I would say were crucial to the growth of the business. As I mentioned, the last time I came on influencer marketing is what started us and it took us really far. We got to about $2 million a month just from influencer marketing. The thing is after that, we kind of plateaued a little bit. And what really got us over the hump, the next step was running ads, performance ads on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook. And so invested a lot more time learning and scaling ads. And that's actually what's fueling most of the growth at this point. So there's a lot of learnings on that.

• 35:03Shaan Puri?

  How much, how much were you spending a month? Can you reveal that or no?

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Well, it's scaled over time. In January, we spent maybe

• 35:14Speaker 01

  a little over a million.

• 35:15Shaan Puri?

  Oh, wow. That's pretty efficient then. And I saw a post where you said that you bought like a $400,000 ad with Mr. Beast. And the guest or the host was like, was that profitable? And you were like, I don't know.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we did an ad with Mr. Beast. We paid him half a million dollars for him to put us in one of his videos. It was basically this contestant that was brought on. He was locked in a gym until he like lost a certain number of, a certain amount of weight.

• 35:41Sam Parr?

  We met him when he was filming the video.

• 35:43Shaan Puri?

  We met him while he was filming. We were at his, we were at his studio.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Really?

• 35:46Shaan Puri?

  He's like, "My friend has been locked in this gym for, you know, a hundred days now. He's got two hundred more to go." And so we went and visited like him in the zoo.

• 35:56Sam Parr?

  This was like, uh, sixteen months ago. It was like, that's how long they were planning this video.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, it's, that was a wild video. I think it was one of their best performing videos.

• 36:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Like, in a long time when it came out. And so they were making a second video on their second channel, which was like, did he maintain his body weight after the video, or did he just regress? And I, we were offered to sponsor that video. I knew someone that like was on the team, and so he helped us sponsor it. And so they let me fly out to actually see it happen. And then they offered me to do one of the takes, to come in and talk about the app. So it was cool. They ended up using that take in the video. I'd say that the results of that, that right away, definitely was a little bit unprofitable. It's always hard attribution because there's no way, like, most people are going to the app store directly and downloading.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Not many people are clicking a link, so you don't know exactly how many people went and downloaded. But looking at the time overlap, looking at promo code usage, and a few other metrics that we use to determine this stuff, we probably made three hundred fifty thousand dollars, maybe four hundred thousand dollars, just from that five hundred thousand dollar promo. And the rest of it, actually, I believe we were profitable long-term, and if we're not yet, we're going to be. Because you, having the brand name Mr. Beast saying we were in a video, we were able to do way more deals afterwards. We had way more credibility with our brand. And so the profit from those deals that's enabled for us has exceeded the total amount.

• 37:32Sam Parr?

  How big's the team?

• 37:34Speaker 01

  The team is about thirty people, a little more than that.

• 37:37Sam Parr?

  And how many hours a week are you spending going to class?

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Well, first semester, I took, I think it was four classes a week. So it wasn't that crazy of a schedule. It was like an hour and a half.

• 37:51Shaan Puri?

  What's your major? What are you studying? Are you like rocks for jocks type of schedule where you're like, I'm an art here?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Art history.

• 37:58Shaan Puri?

  And just, I need to pass. Or are you like, I'm trying to be a computer science major?

• 38:01Speaker 01

  I first joined the business school or I applied into it, but I switched out and went undecided because I wanted to do more of, kind of what Steve Jobs always talked about, how he took like the calligraphy class that really enabled him to build the Macintosh operating system. So I was taking like a VR class, which was really cool. It was like all about the metaverse, a class on, a design class too, a business class. And the professor there was actually a really awesome guy.

• 38:25Sam Parr?

  Dude, you know how like China like raises like super athletes, like they get like two seven foot people and they like make them breed and like they like set them up to where at the age of twelve, the kid has everything they need? This is like you for business, uh, like you already have an exit, running a company, you're, you're downloading Steve Jobs ideas and like going through, going through, uh...

• 38:46Shaan Puri?

  I'm impressed with your decision making. Um, like even just that little thing of like, you know what, like business would be the kind of maybe obvious choice for you, but saying, I'm gonna go undecided so that I have freedom to take interesting classes that just spark my curiosity, maybe outside of my normal path of things I'm familiar with. Because long-term, that's actually gonna help me maybe, right? Like, I feel like so many of your decisions, um, have been good. In fact, probably that's the most impressive part about you, right? You're a well-spoken guy. You've obviously hustled, you built a cool app, like all of that's great, but, um, yeah, the decision making is actually what stands out to me in a way that like is not common amongst people in general, but definitely amongst younger people, right?

• 39:29Shaan Puri?

  Like I have friends that, I have friends that make terrible decisions and I, I see you and I'm like, this guy's kind of consistently making good decisions. Are you a big like mentors guy? Do you have like a person you call for a lot of questions? Are you just figuring the stuff out on your own? Are you a journaler? Like what, what's your, what's helping you here?

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Thank you, first of all. It really means a lot. I think, I definitely had mentors that supported me. One, my, someone who was my co-founder with Cal AI, Blake Anderson. He's, he's helped me a lot with so many things, not just business life, but personal life too. So I've learned a ton from him and I'd say that's, that's definitely helped me. He's, the biggest thing is, he's helped me shape a lot of decision-making frameworks. So how to analyze when to make certain decisions. Like he kind of taught me about like what EV is and all of these different principles to help make smarter decisions.

• 40:26Shaan Puri?

  Tell us some of those. I, I would like to learn, what are your, what are your frameworks for making good decisions? Like what, what comes top of mind?

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, EV is a good one. So like gamblers obviously know this, where it's like the percent chance of winning something and then the prize and you multiply them together. And then it's like, whatever you have a 100% chance of getting versus the chance of losing it all versus, versus the prize money you could have, whichever is greater, like that's which one you should often pick. And so using that was very helpful for when thinking about, okay, selling the company and what we think makes sense in terms of what we're willing to sell for. Like what do we think the EV is of? Like what's, what's the chance of us getting to this? What's the chance of it falling apart? What's the chance of this?

• 41:16Speaker 01

  And so that, that was helpful. It's like one good decision-making framework.

• 41:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's a, it's a great one, especially for selling. Because you, let's say, let's just pretend somebody offers you a hundred dollars for your, your business. So you have a hundred percent chance of the hundred dollars, or maybe not even a hundred, maybe 90, because it might not close. But okay. So yeah, you basically, the expected value of that, let's call it, is a hundred dollars, 100% times a hundred dollars. And then you say, but if we keep going, we could get to, what if we could get to 500? Okay, great. What if? Sure. Then you ask the question, well, what do you think are the chances you could get there? There's a 10% chance. Okay, so 10% times 500 gives you 50. So it's a better decision to take the 100 expected value over the 50, right? Or let's say you think it's a 20% chance. So now you're even. Okay, but what's the percent chance it all falls apart, goes to zero, right?

• 42:04Shaan Puri?

  There's gonna be, if you keep running it, you have some risk, ongoing risk of it falling apart. Even if you think that's a 10% chance, you have to factor that in. And so, once you do that, you get a more objective way of making a decision versus just going on pure emotion or your mood in the moment or fear and greed based on whatever, whatever day the weather is for you.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a perfect example.

• 42:26Sam Parr?

  And selling for, in my opinion, selling for you, that's just such a no brainer. It's a no brainer because the liquid money that you have is gonna compound. I mean, to have what you have, I don't know what you have, but seven or eight figures, I don't know, at that young age, it's gonna compound like crazy. And also, I think people underestimate the clout that comes with a sale.

• 42:44Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's true.

• 42:46Shaan Puri?

  He's like, I don't underestimate that. Okay, so where to from here? So you're just gonna go to college now? You're gonna like, eventually in the future, you wanna start something new? If you start something new, you're like, I have to go bigger? Are you gonna fall into that trap? Like, what's gonna be the mindset going forward now?

• 43:05Speaker 01

  I have so many ideas always. I'm very committed to making sure that Calais will endure long term. And so I wanna make sure that the transition is super smooth between the companies. And I likely in a few months will start. I don't know if I'm gonna be as open with this one as I was with Calais. I was so public about Calais, which I think was great, like so much upside, even though there was downside too, but way more upside. When the next one, I'll probably be a little more stealthy. And I think I know what I wanna build. I'm not gonna share just yet, but I'm definitely excited to like, work on something new. I have a ton of new ideas.

• 43:43Sam Parr?

  What were the top three ideas that you were interested in?

• 43:47Speaker 01

  I'd say the contenders, like, they don't really matter that much because I didn't believe in them enough to wanna start them. But there are, there are many good ideas. I mean, I just had this idea, like for other apps while building Kali AI, I just constantly add like, oh, this would be a cool million dollar idea. I could see this going super viral very easily and it's not hard to build. But at like, at this point, it doesn't really make sense for me to spend my time doing it. Cause I'm, I'm shooting for like a billion dollar company is my goal. And so, uh, one idea that I actually tweeted about two days ago is that someone should build a semantic search for your followers on either Instagram or X, wherever you want, so that you could

• 44:29Speaker 01

  look through. And this could be helpful for so many reasons. Let's say you're looking to date someone like Instagram, a lot of people don't realize, but like it's one of the, it's, it's one of the biggest dating apps. Like so many people are meeting from Instagram today. So being able to semantically search for your type through your followers and then going through, being able to semantically search for who are the entrepreneurs that follow me? Who are the cool people? I mean, my tweet just blew up and I had so many people follow me and I'm like, looking through it. I'm like, oh shit, this really cool person's following me. I had no idea. And like, I didn't get a special notification. So even being able to be alerted of stuff like that, that's definitely an easy, like few million dollar idea that someone could build. Pretty cool.

• 45:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I've always wanted that. I would pay for that. Uh, same thing. I don't go through who follows. And so I'm like, I don't get alerted if somebody interesting follows me, somebody that I would want to know. And it's a hard thing to exactly say, well, who, who would you want to know about? Um, I don't know, but it's, it's, I can't give you one rule, but there's somebody who could figure, if you could figure that one problem out, there's a lot of people who would be interested in that, whether it's on the search side or the alert side. Uh, I'm a believer in that. Uh, what are some other cool ideas? So if there's somebody who's the, you know, sort of 17, 18, 19 year old version of you, are you guiding them to be like, build apps? Is that, is that the play you still see as the juiciest? Is it, um, is it, or is it specifically around AI? Is it, you know, what,

• 45:51Shaan Puri?

  what are the ideas you would brainstorm for kind of the next version of you who's sitting somewhere, listening to this episode right now?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  So if they are just trying to get started, it's like one of their first projects. They're not trying to swing too big. They're trying to swing to something reasonable, like build a million dollar company or make a few million dollars from it. Then I think apps is such a great space to build in right now. Because there are so many, so many apps that are just possible to build now, especially enabled by AI. But even without AI, for example, some that have spun up recently, my friend built an app called Quitter. It is an app that helps guys quit porn. Doesn't really use AI, it just kind of gamifies the process, gives you a streak, gives you a roadmap, rewards, like meditation guides. And that's been super helpful for a lot of people. And now it's making over five million dollars a year.

• 46:42Shaan Puri?

  Crazy. That's awesome. What are some other cool apps that we, not on our radar, but just people who are doing well, people who are crushing it, people have cool ideas?

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, did you guys see Claim?

• 46:51Sam Parr?

  No, how do you spell it?

• 46:52Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Okay, so it blew up on Twitter a little bit. It was made by one of my friends. It's basically an app that allows people to get into class action lawsuits. Where like, let's say you drank Pepsi and then there's a Pepsi class action lawsuit. You could sign up so that when it's settled, you get like 10 bucks or 15 bucks.

• 47:11Sam Parr?

  How do you, how do you spell it?

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Uh, C A, C L A I M. It actually got taken off the app store unfortunately, but they made like a million dollars in their first 30 days of launching.

• 47:24Shaan Puri?

  Playing make them pay is the.

• 47:26Sam Parr?

  When Charlie and I were like 22, there was a app that got released in San Francisco that was amazing. It was called Do Not Pay. And I don't know, is that still around? Uh, oh yeah, it is. But the, the, it was, it was magic. When it got released, basically in San Francisco, it was famous, like in New York, I imagine the same way, where if you get a, like getting parking tickets, sometimes you're like, I'll just get two parking tickets a month instead of paying for parking and it's gonna like be a better deal. And it would somehow automatically tell you before you even got back to your car that you got the parking ticket and it's gonna like fight it for you. And it was amazing.

• 48:01Shaan Puri?

  But it would, you, it would scan the ticket and be like, look, he wrote the number, but it went outside of the box that he, you know, the box where it was supposed to be in. Technically, you don't have to pay now, right? Or, uh, he didn't fill this in, or this, the visibility on that sign is low, so you don't have to pay.

• 48:16Sam Parr?

  And then I think the city like banned it and it went away. But apps like that were amazing. And this is the same thing as Claim, where it's like, just, just go, go and find me money or save me money. Go ahead and just do that for me.

• 48:28Shaan Puri?

  Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife. Very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC insured bank.

• 49:13Shaan Puri?

  Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and Callum N A. Members FDIC. What's your framework you used to think of? You sort of you used to filter good, bad idea here. Is it? I work backwards from the ad. You know, I think about what the Tik Tok would be. And if it makes for a juicy Tik Tok, then it's going to be a good app. It's going to be a good app. Or is it? I want an app that makes you money or helps you, you know, stop a problem or start a thing that you, a thing that you want to do. Like, I guess, walk us through how you think about these.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  That's a great question because I think a lot of people always ask like, oh, how do you come up with ideas? The first question I always get when I tell someone about Callie eyes, how do you come up with that? And everyone's trying to think like, I want to come up with these huge ideas. How can I do it? I think that a better, like learning how to come up with ideas, that is a skill, but I think the more important skill and the better skill is a framework to validate what is a good idea. Because you could come up with ideas all the time, but like you need to know, okay, which ones are good, which ones are bad. So you could filter through really quickly. And the way that I validate them, I think it needs to be a little bit different for everyone. Like, because it depends on your skill set. I validate good or bad ideas that are good or bad for me.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Like stuff I'm interested in, stuff I think I could kill and like really blow up. And so for me, I look for ideas that I know are very marketable. They can go super viral. And I look for things that I've personally experienced, have some firsthand experience with, or I know people that are experiencing it. So I, I know who I'm building for very specifically. And there are, um, and I, I've seen enough companies where I can have an idea like, okay, this company that's adjacent to this one, to the idea I have, the adjacent company is doing this much in revenue. So I think I can at least get to here, if not all the way or surpass it. And so it gives me a good, quick way of thinking, like, how far can this go?

• 51:06Speaker 01

  But before building that intuition, you could always analyze the TAM of a space. Um, you could analyze the competitive landscape and there are a few other metrics that you could look at that just help you kind of objectively assess, is this something worth pursuing?

• 51:23Shaan Puri?

  But what's your checklist now? So for TAM, what's your TAM size?

• 51:26Speaker 01

  To be honest, TAM is one of those things where I try, I kind of always look at my gut for this. I'm not like doing Google research. Okay. What's the, I didn't look up, what's the TAM of a calorie tracking app before starting Cal AI, but I kind of saw, okay, this other app is making $200 million a year. So I know that's like the, like the minimum ceiling, the lowest floor of what we could get to. And so that's how I validated building one. But I think a lot of people are detoured by seeing that another app or another product is doing what they do.

• 51:58Shaan Puri?

  It should be the opposite. It should say, that's proof.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's proof it works. And the market is so big that all of these apps can be successful. I mean, if a company is still growing, that means that there's still a gap. There's still people that are underserved and can use it. Like I hear all the time, I was in the entrepreneurship class, people were pitching their ideas. Everyone was like, wait, that already exists, that already exists. And it like deters them, but it shouldn't.

• 52:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's so funny. That is the first thing. Oh, that already exists.

• 52:27Shaan Puri?

  Okay. So we're looking for nonexistent business ideas. You know, you know how few ideas fall into that? I mean, there are some that are in that category, but that doesn't describe most. Uh, that's, that's a pretty crazy mistake that people make.

• 52:42Sam Parr?

  Are you, uh, I, I had a friend who was an out of state person and he was looking at University of Miami, uh, and it was a hundred thousand dollars a year to go. Are you, uh, are you spending, are you the one, are you paying for your own tuition?

• 52:54Speaker 01

  I am. I do have a scholarship. My parents actually paid for my first semester, which was nice, but now I am paying going forward if I do want to stay. Like I paid for this one and after this, I'll probably just honestly drop out. So it won't be an issue.

• 53:09Sam Parr?

  That's so funny. Are you, like, it wasn't until I was like 33, I got off my parents' cellphone bill. Like, it was just too much of a pain in the ass. He's still...

• 53:19Sam Parr?

  Sean, are you on your parents' family plan still?

• 53:21Shaan Puri?

  I think I was till literally last year.

• 53:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like...

• 53:25Shaan Puri?

  It was, by the way, it was exactly as much of a pain in the ass as I thought it would be. I was like four hours in the AT&T store with my three kids. It was terrible.

• 53:32Sam Parr?

  It was horrible.

• 53:34Shaan Puri?

  Zach, I got a question for you. Where, um, what are you curious about right now? Like, what's exciting to you? You probably are, you know, you're young and you're kind of technology forward and you hang out with different people that are, you know, kind of people who do shit that are young. So I'm always interested in what kind of your generation is more, is, is interested in, like, are there certain types of businesses that you admire? Are there certain technologies that you're playing with? Like you'd mentioned VR, for example. Are there companies you think are really cool? Are there spaces, you know, white papers you're reading, you know, research you're reading that, that's kind of got your interest? Let's just play a game of like, what's been interesting to you lately?

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, something interesting, which honestly, it's a little bit scary too, is that people like Elon Musk are saying all the time that we're gonna have so much abundance that, like, it seems like the need for entrepreneurs is kind of going to go away pretty soon. And that money won't matter anymore. Like, he's saying you shouldn't save for your retirement. And so that's like a super interesting concept. I already feel like the world I live in now, since when I was like, maybe 10 or 11, I feel like it's completely different. A lot of that is just like a lot of the beliefs that I held, that I was taught in school. They're just completely flipped on their head and now I believe the opposite.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  But it really seems like we are going to experience an entirely new world pretty soon. If these AI labs reach the goals that they're setting out to achieve. And that's a little scary, but exciting at the same time.

• 55:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So what, what do you do? Cause that's paralyzing, right? I flip-flop between, um... Oh my God, there's so much opportunity, I'm gonna make so much money, then an hour later, oh, I'm obsolete. Then the next one, wait, money's actually obsolete? Right? Like, I'm just flopping between these different extreme, like, where's the puck going? And it's very hard to figure out, well, what do I actually do with my time and my, my energy and my talent now? Like, what's gonna matter if you believe that it is gonna be a whole new world? Okay, so do you just wait? Like, what do you do?

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's honestly a great question. I was actually at dinner with Steve Cohen last night, and he was, he was kind of saying that-

• 55:50Shaan Puri?

  Steve Cohen, the, uh, like, fifty billion dollar owner of the Mets, Steve Cohen?

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Yes. It was, it was very cool, very nice, great to meet him in person, but the most interesting thing he was saying was that right now, he's just trying to figure out how to kind of invest or extend the timeline of his companies, or ones that he's looking at investing in, like, three years, just survive three years and then figure it out after that. Like, no one knows where the future's heading, so you just have to figure out how to survive in the intermediate period, and then after that, figure out, okay, what do we do next?

• 56:23Shaan Puri?

  Did you learn anything else at that dinner? He's a pretty, uh, I mean, he's kind of, he, he-

• 56:27Speaker 01

  It was super interesting.

• 56:28Shaan Puri?

  Up there with Elon and a few of these other guys, his insights are probably as, uh, wide.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  We had very interesting discussions on kind of where society's heading with all this different possibilities and like, the timeline, the chance of it getting there. It seems like it may take, well, what's interesting is a lot of people are thinking about the, the AI part, like, okay, we solve AGI, then overnight, everything changes, that's kind of what people are assuming, but the software is one problem, software is one small problem, the hardware, like, building out these humanoid robots that are going to execute these tasks, that's a whole nother problem. And so there are cool companies like Physical Intelligence that are trying to solve this, but that is potentially just as hard, and so- People are underestimating.

• 57:18Sam Parr?

  Do you, are you interested in getting in to some of these like really, really big ideas that require a lot of venture capital and can be tens of billions, hundreds of billions of companies? Or do you prefer to stay in the consumer space and kind of stay in the same industry that you're into now? A bootstrappable thing?

• 57:38Speaker 01

  I really enjoy building products for consumers. I just love, it's the biggest compliment to me, hearing that someone else uses something that I built, especially when they love it. Like with Cal AI, it's, it's actually pretty, every once in a while now, someone's like, oh yeah, I use that when they hear that I built it. And it's so awesome to see. So I definitely want to keep that. I think that whether that's hardware or software though, both are cool. I do definitely want to build a company that does have a hardware component to it. Maybe not exclusively hardware, but something that can be either software or hardware, like both that we sell.

• 58:13Sam Parr?

  Sean, do you have a take on what he was talking about with AI and like, like, so where do you generally land of when you oscillate from, I'm gonna make a ton of money and money doesn't matter?

• 58:26Shaan Puri?

  Um, all right. That's a complicated question. So I, I do think both of the first parts are true of what I said, meaning there's never been more opportunity and also there's going to be a ton of creative destruction. So meaning, oh my God, there's so much opportunity. Also, man, some of these things I own or operate could get wiped out. I think so. I think both of those are true. Similarly, oh my God, I'm all powerful. I can do so much now with AI. Also, I might be obsolete. Also, that's also both true if I don't actually build up skills to use AI well. If I just think that, oh, I'm, I'll be in my little bubble here and I'll just keep doing things the way I've been doing them for the past 10 years when this like new super weapon came out, that's also a little bit silly, right?

• 59:10Shaan Puri?

  That'd be like having an army with like muskets or something like that and, uh, you know, tanks and, and whatnot, just got, got invented. So I think both of those are true. Now, the question that Zach's asking, which is like, so what do you do if kind of AGI is around the corner? And that corner is, depending on who you believe, one to 15 years away. And, you know, and so what do you do in that situation? Well, there's kind of two approaches. One is you join the AGI race, right? So you go and join one of the labs, you try to build something in that space. Another thing you do is you build something that will be be in like, it'll that'll be wind in the sails. Right? So there's some companies that every time the model gets smarter, their product gets better.

• 59:54Shaan Puri?

  Right? So they're building tools for lawyers, let's say. And every time the models get smarter, they're just better at build, they're better at building things for lawyers. Like their, their tool for lawyers got more useful. And then there's things that AI can't touch, right? And you're like, okay, so what are things that AI is not really going to touch in the near term? So this is like, you know, real world things, community, religion, you know, gyms, you know, things that are like exercise, right? Like, what are going to be the things that people will do? Are kind of the last man standing in a world where AI gets smarter and smarter, smarter, better at doing digital work.

• 1:00:29Shaan Puri?

  And so you could go in that direction, right? Like I famously, not famously, but I have a friend who talked to a famous investor. And he was like, oh, man, AI is going to be crazy. We're going to do this and this and this and this. What do you think I should do? He goes, I think you should buy railroads. And he is basically saying like, not literally railroads, but basically what's something that won't get touched by AI? Sounds like you don't know what the hell is going to happen. You should go find something physical. That's, that is going to be like, you know, the farthest end away from AI. So you have time to adjust to it versus doing something that's just going to like here today, gone tomorrow type of idea.

• 1:01:02Sam Parr?

  I think I'm like a huge history nerd, Zach, as Sean and many listeners, listeners know. I love history. I don't know much about AI, though. And what I've learned through history is that humans have thought the same things about their period of time as every other person in that particular, at a different period of time has thought. And so there's this like famous story of Winston Churchill, who was the leader of England during World War II. They thought the Nazis were going to take over the world. They thought that, he thought the world was going to end. He wrote, he's like, I think the world actually might end and this is going to be bad. And that's where the famous quote, he has this famous quote, he goes, if you're going through hell, keep on walking. Like you gotta keep on going. If you're in the middle of hell, you know, you can't stop, you can't stop moving. And generally speaking,

• 1:01:47Sam Parr?

  Great, smart people who are titans of industry and world leaders. Every decade think that something bad is gonna happen and we've mostly have been fine. There's been a lot of blips in the, in the story, but we've mostly been fine. And I tend to think, I tend to be blindly optimistic just because I have faith in human beings that like, it's probably gonna be fine. It's just gonna be like, it will be maybe a decade or two of uncertainty and perhaps pain for particular types of people, but in general, it's probably gonna work out.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's a very valid take, honestly.

• 1:02:20Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, if it doesn't end up fine, doesn't matter then. Didn't matter for you, it's over.

• 1:02:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's why I, that's like why I invest my money in Chase Bank because of like, I had all the bank runs a few years ago. Freaked me out and I was like, I'm gonna invest all my money in Chase because if, I don't think it's gonna fail. And if it does, money doesn't matter.

• 1:02:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, it's all, it's all over that much. I don't, I'm not even talking about like the world ending stuff. It's just kinda like, what do you do with your time and your talents in a highly rapidly changing world? And I, again, I think you either lean way into it, meaning you join the frontier. You do something adjacent where the more the frontier work advances, your cause benefits, you know, your, your, your specific utility benefits. Or you go the exact opposite direction and you say, well, that stuff's gonna get so abundant, what's gonna be scarce? And you go figure out what will still be scarce if that becomes really abundant. If intelligence becomes super abundant, if the ability to get work done, you know, on a computer becomes super easy, that any, you know, your AI is gonna do better than you, right?

• 1:03:21Shaan Puri?

  If, um, if, if drivers are obsolete because the cars drive themselves, okay, cool. What's, what's left, what's still scarce, uh, you know, at the end of the day? And just go in that direction. I think that's a pretty reasonable take.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  The things that stay scarce seem to be, like, human connection is one that will stay scarce. And then also, like, what, like entertainment, so like sports games, um, live events. These are, these are things that will be more scarce. Especially when like AI is making like your feed on Instagram and everything you see is just hyper dopamine optimized content.

• 1:03:58Shaan Puri?

  Right, if everything's fake, then real becomes scarce. And truth becomes scarce. You're right, like with the sports things, because there's already chess bots that play chess better than all the chess players. But we still like to play chess and watch people play chess. Watch humans play chess specifically. Nobody's watching the AI play chess. But we will watch Magnus Carlsen or whoever. As just a specific example, and the same thing is true for sports, right? Like running, well, there's machines that run way faster than than humans. But people will still tune into a human running and not a machine running. Or even if it's a car, it's, you know, it's a car being driven by a human and not drone racing. Which is, you know, more automated. And so those have been kind of almost proven to be AI proof in a way.

• 1:04:43Shaan Puri?

  And so it's like, it's got some immunity. And you're like, oh, okay, they're they're kind of immune to that. Okay. It seems like owning a sports team is probably a good, a good type of investment. Whereas owning a call center is probably not an investment you want to be in anymore.

• 1:04:57Sam Parr?

  Zach, a question that we ask a lot of people who make a lot of money overnight. We say, well, what did you do with it? What did, where did you invest your money? So I'm curious, you don't have to say numbers, you could say percentages. Do you have a, do you have a strategy?

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  So my strategy is essentially that I want to take. I don't like investing in other people, frankly. I like to invest in myself. I don't want to rely on someone else to multiply my money. Like trusting their CEO to make the right decisions to grow their company. I want to invest in myself. So I am putting most of it in the S and P 500. But generally, the strategy is I want to take more outsized risks on my own. Like putting the funds into my ventures. So that's my plan. I'm going to take money out and put them into my own as I start things.

• 1:05:53Sam Parr?

  Okay, so you have 100% of a sum. What percent are you going to keep in the S and P? And what percent are you gonna put into your own company?

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  So right now, I believe it's 75 or 70%, something like that. In the S and P, something like 25% that's in the money market or.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Bonds, actually, and then a few percentage points like within those that are like scattered, like a tiny bit of Bitcoin, a tiny bit of gold. I believe that's it, really, just those four places. And then I'm going to be pulling out of mostly the, or I guess everything when I need to invest in my companies.

• 1:06:30Sam Parr?

  So wait, wait, 100% you're going to put in your own company?

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Not 100%, because I think for the next venture, I will most likely raise money just because now this is kind of like my nest egg. I never need to worry about it. I'm definitely willing to like take risks.

• 1:06:46Sam Parr?

  But how much? What percent? Like in your head, you're thinking, let's say hypothetically, you have $10 million. What percent do you want to put in your new company?

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, maybe this goes to the EV question a little bit because it really depends how confident I am in the idea. Like that Elon story of, um, he, he like, he almost went bankrupt because he split up his wealth and gave half to Tesla, half to SpaceX, and that saved both companies. So if that's what it takes at some point and I'm confident, then maybe, maybe that's what it will take.

• 1:07:17Sam Parr?

  You're an impressive young guy. Is there anything you want to get back? You're like, oh, I suck at this today. I'm really poor at this area. I need to figure this out. What's, what's an area you're trying to grow in?

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Hmm. That's a great question. I want to understand the full picture of the world much better. I'm not someone who really understands economic policy. Well, I don't really understand like GDPs of the world and how that influences things. And building a company like Cal AI, it doesn't really influence it. But if I'm trying to build like a massive company, if I'm trying to build the next Meta or the next OpenAI, the next Apple, the next Google, I think it is important to understand the general trends of where the world is heading.

• 1:07:59Sam Parr?

  Crazy dude. Where this is like, um, you know, like there's like that story or that video where Obama makes fun of Donald Trump at like, uh, the press dinner and like, there's a meme where it's like, this is when Trump became the villain or this is when he decided to like run for president. It's so funny, uh, that we get to have you on here because we saw your come up. We've now are talking to you when you've definitely have made. If you accomplish nothing further from here on out, you're going to be a 10 out of 10 massive success. But like we're hearing you where you're at this like fork in a road, where it's like, is this going to be Sean and Sam talking to Elon when he is 20 years old? Because it definitely could be and you're saying things where it definitely indicates where I'm like,

• 1:08:42Sam Parr?

  this is going to be a very cool thing to look back on in 20 years or 10 years that we've been able to catch you so, so early.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm very ambitious.

• 1:08:54Shaan Puri?

  You should end every conversation with that.

• 1:08:59Shaan Puri?

  Goodbye. I'm very ambitious.

• 1:09:02Shaan Puri?

  That's awesome. Zach, thanks for coming on, man. Appreciate you making the time.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. It's always fun.

• 1:09:09Sam Parr?

  Thanks. That's it. That's the pod.

• 1:09:21Sam Parr?

  All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit and it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Camayo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out Content is Profit wherever you get your podcasts.