#94 - Is GPT-3 the Next Big Thing?

Joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. This episode Shaan and Sam talk: GPT-3, a business referral network, better company onboarding, and Shaan's experience working at Twitch. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:01Shaan Puri?

  All right. What's up everybody? It's July. The whole world is locked down or not locked down. We don't know what the hell is going on, but me and Sam just recorded this episode. We talked about a bunch of things. We talked about a project that one of the podcast listeners has launched. Erotic newsletter that's doing $6,000 a month very quickly, and I think he built the project in about a month. We talked about this crazy thing called GPT-3, which is this AI project that came out of OpenAI that everybody's losing their mind about. We talk about BNI, this old school business referral network. And then we talked a lot about, Sam asked me a bunch of questions about life at a big company, which we're not sure if it's interesting or not. So I think we're going to put it at the end of the episode. We're going to chop the episode out of order. We're going to toss that at the end. Maybe it's not interesting. Maybe it's interesting.

• 0:45Shaan Puri?

  It's up to you guys to decide. All right. Hope you enjoy this episode. As always, let's do it.

• 0:58Sam Parr?

  All right. What's going on?

• 1:01Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I had like a perfect day yesterday. I did everything that I'm supposed to do, which is great. Like a perfect in that my actions were perfect. So I feel good.

• 1:11Sam Parr?

  And where you are, I'm obsessed with weather. Where you are, high of 82 today, currently 72. You have nice Californian weather.

• 1:20Shaan Puri?

  I was just outside. I take all my calls by the pool. It feels fucking great. It's excellent. Can't complain.

• 1:25Sam Parr?

  So in San Francisco, San Francisco's been horrible weather lately. It's currently 60 degrees. So it's been like 60 and cloudy the past week. Do you think you're happier with the sun?

• 1:36Shaan Puri?

  For sure. Yeah, for sure. Greenery and the sun. You know, I'm a human. I think that works on humans.

• 1:43Sam Parr?

  So my wife is from Manhattan, like her mom and dad live in like the heart of Manhattan. And she's trying to convince me to move to New York and my down, so there's two, here's the pros and cons. The cons are New York's pretty like objectively horrible weather.

• 2:02Sam Parr?

  Like at least nine months of the year, it's just like cold and like kind of wet and gray.

• 2:09Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 2:10Sam Parr?

  And then taxes suck. And then like, it's pretty, it's fairly dirty.

• 2:13Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:14Sam Parr?

  And then the, and the pros and crowded and the pros are like you're, you're like if sometimes if you're in the hustle and bustle, it can make you more ambitious and it can be inspiring, but also wear you out. But so my question is where you've moved out to, there's way less people, it's more space. Do you think that the risk of getting fat and soft is worth the being happy with space and weather?

• 2:38Shaan Puri?

  Yes, given where I'm at. If I was 24, I'd be like, you know, this is not the right move. In fact, when I was 23, 24, I was living a sweet life in Australia and Australia is like sunny. You go to the beach, people don't work that hard. Uh, everyone in the country basically has a truce like, yo, I won't work hard if you don't work hard and we'll all stay, you know, at the top. And I was like, I gotta get the fuck out of here. Like I'm definitely going to become less ambitious, less motivated. Uh, I'm going to become less of a person because I'm not going to challenge myself. If I stay here, I'll be so comfortable. But now where I'm at, 32 years old, sideburns all gray, you know, got a kid, got a wife, got a dog.

• 3:18Shaan Puri?

  For now, that slowdown pace and being less in the hustle and bustle and having experienced it, I'm good. I'm ready for that next chapter now. So, so this is, I feel good about it, but then again, I'm human and we just justify whatever the fuck we do anyway. So, but I believe it. I don't, I don't think I'm talking myself into a, into a bad decision. I think I'm in a good decision here. Especially now that everything's online, dude. I, I actually believe this. Silicon Valley is on Twitter, like Silicon Valley moved to Twitter some number of years ago. And like San Francisco, you know, South Bay, New York, London, it doesn't matter. Twitter is where the heart of the action is actually. You can build a world-class network on Twitter.

• 3:59Shaan Puri?

  You can get access to great conversations. You can see ideas and get, you know, become a part of them. You can raise money through, you know, through the internet. Twitter is Silicon Valley. I'm pretty convinced of it.

• 4:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I agree. I I I've been getting sick of it lately. Uh, I'm like, I don't wanna. It it's been getting a little, uh, what's it called? Uh?

• 4:19Shaan Puri?

  You can say it on Twitter?

• 4:20Sam Parr?

  Homogenous. Uh, so I'm having to like, follow different stuff. I watched the um, this docu or this TV show where the Ford versus Ferrari thing. And they are in like racing cars. And I was like, this is way cooler than the internet. I need to surround myself with these people.

• 4:36Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I had a moment like that where yesterday I was listening to, I opened up Clubhouse, that app that's like still in beta, I think.

• 4:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I quit using it out of principle.

• 4:45Shaan Puri?

  It was like, you know, the notification was like Mark Andreessen is talking to, you know, whoever, you know, a bunch of people. And so I was like, oh, Mark Andreessen is on. I went in. And they were talking about like, if an asteroid was coming to the earth, what would be our mitigation strategy? Uh, and then it's like, you know, they'd all looked into it. And I was like, who looks into this? Um, you know, they look into this like I look into conspiracy theories and like I look into the the drama behind MTV's The Challenge. So, you know, they were like, oh, yeah, I've read about our, what we would do and here's what would happen. And then I like happened to like kind of swipe and just like miss, I like switched apps into Twitter. And then at the top of my feed was the guy from Barstool, Dave, doing a watermelon, watermelon eating challenge against this kid.

• 5:27Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, yeah, I'm gonna watch this instead. And I was just like, opted into like the mindless entertainment of that. And um, no regrets in that choice. That was the right choice for me.

• 5:37Sam Parr?

  And so I I I agree. A similar topic. Have you seen the TV show Peaky Blinders?

• 5:43Shaan Puri?

  I actually started it. I watched 15 seconds of it. I haven't gotten into it. I watched, yesterday I started it.

• 5:48Sam Parr?

  So I love that show and I love Boardwalk Empire. And uh, I started rewatching Peaky Blinders from the beginning. And the the, for anyone listening, it's uh, fiction, historical fiction. So it's mostly fake, but supposed to be based on real stuff. But I don't, it's.

• 6:07Shaan Puri?

  It's like a crime family or a mafia or something?

• 6:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. So they just like, it's these. This guy, Thomas Shelby, and he has this family of five or six family members and they start out mostly illegal, so gambling, selling liquor, fighting, betting, just like your traditional nineteen twenty gangsters.

• 6:25Shaan Puri?

  Story of me in your life, yes.

• 6:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, then they get a little bit legit, but they're always still kind of doing bad stuff. They just drink and smoke and fuck and fight and just all bad stuff, just not bad stuff, but love vices. And I was like, this guy's way cooler than like Mark Zuckerberg, like let's just like.

• 6:44Shaan Puri?

  Mark Zuckerberg on his surfboard with his white face and huge ass?

• 6:48Sam Parr?

  Yes, I'm like, dude, this guy, like this guy's a rock and roll star, whereas like.

• 6:53Shaan Puri?

  Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't survive a day in Peaky Blinders.

• 6:56Sam Parr?

  Right, but you know, who knows, maybe, I mean, he's pretty gangster, but in a dork way, but it was just like, let's, let's, let's, I need to figure out who I look up to.

• 7:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's a good point. You are who you admire and, and like, you know, whatever, no judgment. They just go through, you go through phases and I think both you and I are in a phase where it's like, I'll speak for myself. I went like pretty deep on the admiring the people who did great things in tech and startups and kind of modern day business. I don't know, you shifted to like, fuck modern day, historical business is where it's at, historical pioneers and settlers and shit like that, generals. And then, but it's cool to admire different things, but not get stuck in the admiration. And so, so yeah, I don't know, I don't know. It's a good question to ask yourself, who do I admire right now? And then should I, should I stay admiring them or do I need to switch it up?

• 7:50Sam Parr?

  Well, and also I read a lot of personal finance stuff, so I read a lot of subreddits around personal finance stuff. And some of it, it's like people who have high net worths and how they're doing personal finance. And they're like buying a three million dollar home and they're like making all these justifications and, or buying a fancy car. And every once in a while, I'm like, the only justification for me doing this is because it's fucking cool. And since like, we need to remember that, that doing something just because it's cool is oftentimes a wonderful reason why you should do anything and it's a life worth living. And like, I get, I'd get too caught up in like, well, you know, if we, if I annualize this out over fifteen years, like it's.

• 8:31Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:31Sam Parr?

  Like it would be cheaper. Yeah, and I'm like. Oh yeah, but also like rock and roll like let's just do stuff just because it's awesome that this is that's I guess it just makes me happy.

• 8:42Shaan Puri?

  There's um, you know, people say like, you know, what advice would you give to the 21 year old self? And like I asked that question too to when we have guests on here, if you were 21 again, what would you do? Um, and there's all this like, what would you tell the your younger you? But also good question is, what would 12 year old you or 21 year old you say to you now? If if if if 18 year old me or 21 year old me came out of a time machine and got to see 32 year old me? What would he say? He'd be like, dude, you got fat. What's up with that? Like, yeah, yeah, this is all cool, but like you got fat.

• 9:13Sam Parr?

  Aren't you lose, aren't you getting fit though?

• 9:15Shaan Puri?

  I'm getting fit, but like to 18 year old me or 21 year old me, this would be fat and he'd be like, wow, that's lame. Or it'd be like, dude, you're a millionaire? Like, okay, what are we doing with all this money? What is the cool shit we're doing? Like, are we going here? Are we gambling? Are we, are we taking our friends on trips? So and it's like, oh, you're buying equities like, all right, well, like, you know, so I actually like the other way. I want, I want in some ways 20 year old, I it's like, I think forward 20 years and I think backwards 20 years. Would 21 year old me um, be proud of the way I'm living my life? And then would 51 year old me be proud of the way I'm living my life? And these thought experiments help me make these adjustments and get out of the fog of like, just the, or just the routines that I'm in.

• 9:59Shaan Puri?

  Cause these routines are really fucking dangerous.

• 10:01Sam Parr?

  I I agree with all of that and the I think it's good questions to ask. It's I find myself asking that stuff all the time of like, it's just it's so easy to get caught to this optimization type of mentality. That's and this is what I told, we had a meeting today at my company. I was like, you guys, less optimizing, more innovating. Like, let's, let's remember, let's just do cool shit and not like worry as much about the click through rates.

• 10:25Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 10:28Sam Parr?

  Well, you want to bring up BNI?

• 10:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so, okay, two, two topics. Actually, I want to start with a different acronym, GPT-3.

• 10:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I, I've been talking to Sam about it and I've gotten access.

• 10:38Shaan Puri?

  Oh, nice. Okay, great. So, gi- give people the simple explanation. Sam, simple explanation.

• 10:43Sam Parr?

  Ah, man, I, i- i- there's a lot going on. Let's make it really simple, which, which is, do you, do you, do you remember Smarter Child when you were a kid? That, uh, that AOL, that AI bot where you could ask it the weather and you could ask it like, is God real? And it would come up with like things, it's like that on steroids. So from my understanding, it's a, it's an AI tool where you can u- a lot of people are using this thing. So the guy who was the leader of Y Combinator quit Y Combinator to become the CEO of this. And it's basically this, I think Elon Musk is considered a founder as well. Uh, it's basically this engine where you could tell this AI bot to do stuff and they do it.

• 11:26Sam Parr?

  For example, someone's like, create a website where there's the Google logo and a search engine. And somehow this bot like turns it into a search engine and it just so happens to look like Google.

• 11:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. So, um, I don't even know what GPT, GPT stands for, so, uh, that's how much I know about this. But basically you feed it little inputs of text, um, but you can also feed it actually images they've shown as well. But you can, most people, what they're doing with it right now, they feed it small snippets of text. So for example, somebody can feed it a snippet of, um, you can just say, you can just ask a question and it'll answer like Smarter Child. Then there's a, there's a website called learnfromanyoneithink.com. Someone built a little tool, which is you pick who you want to learn from. So you can learn, be like Einstein, and you can ask a physics question and it'll answer based on what Einstein would say to this. And it's like shockingly good. And so you can kind of like pick a teacher and then ask a question.

• 12:21Shaan Puri?

  And then you can get an answer from that teacher based off of whatever that teacher had put out into the public domain that this, this, uh, this algorithm has ingested all the, all this like raw text from the internet. And through it has found, okay, what would this person say? And so there's all these crazy use cases, like you said, like, um, I have a friend Sharif, who's the guy, his tweet went viral where he basically was like, just described what he wanted a webpage to be. And it spit out the HTML code or the JavaScript code to build that site. So he, he was like, Make a to do list where I can add a to do and then I can mark it to do as done. And then it actually built an app that was a to do list app just off of that description.

• 13:00Sam Parr?

  That was your buddy?

• 13:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and he did, he did the Google one too where he's like. Um, put the Google logo up top and then add a search bar and that two buttons, one says search, one says I'm feeling lucky. And then return, um, return the answer to whatever question is asked in the search bar. And he built like a Google competitor. It's been out of Google better.

• 13:20Sam Parr?

  So, but let's talk about like real, like, do you think that this is actually gonna be legit?

• 13:25Shaan Puri?

  We all know that AI is pretty transformative trans- technology. It's gonna be whenever. AI, you know, as AI progresses, it'll be the next big tech shift. You know, the previous tech shifts were from, um, you know, non-computers to computers, computers to the internet. From the internet to smartphones and now it's smartphones to, um, AI. And that AI is either really narrow, like it can only do a specific set of things, which is like. When you see an AI beat the best go player or chess players or poker players in the world. That's very narrow. It can only do that one thing. Or if you said, okay, this AI is gonna identify faces and it's like, cool facial recognition. That's a narrow AI. This seems a lot more general and the more general AI gets.

• 14:10Shaan Puri?

  Um, the more exciting things are because that means it can do a lot of different stuff that you can't really predict. And the, the kind of if you want to get real futuristic and crazy. General A AI or AGI as they call it is considered the last invention, the last human invention that will ever be needed. Cause once you have AGI, then AGI invents everything else.

• 14:30Sam Parr?

  What like, I, I think I'm a little bit of a normal, like a pretty normal, basic ass person when I think. Well, this is just like the end of everything I ever believe in. Right?

• 14:41Shaan Puri?

  Believe in meaning what? Like, I don't know what's manmade versus created by a robot.

• 14:45Sam Parr?

  There are, what is the point of a human being? Like we exist to do work. I, I think like we exist to like do stuff. And if this thing is doing everything, then what are we supposed to do?

• 14:56Shaan Puri?

  We're gonna consume it and we're gonna become entertainers and podcasters and artists. And we're gonna, in the, if you take the long view, when this gets really, really good. We're all just gonna be playing video games and making art.

• 15:09Sam Parr?

  Okay, uh, well, this thing can definitely do that already. Like, but do you think it's actually good?

• 15:17Shaan Puri?

  You mean, is that a good outcome?

• 15:19Sam Parr?

  No. Do you think that this technology is good at the? Yeah. Or is it still pretty basic and overhyped?

• 15:25Shaan Puri?

  It's not good enough, but it is shockingly good. Like when you're like, oh, it's like when you see your niece after like three months and they had a growth spurt and you're like, whoa, like you're now you're up to wait. Last time you were came up to my my hip and now you're like eye level with me somehow or whatever. Like now you're up to my shoulder. Like, that's crazy. You're still not a full grown adult, but like, damn, I didn't realize you grew this much. That's what happened with this project is there was a damn, I didn't realize it was this good. Um, where like, holy shit, these conversations seem very human like somebody put in like the first half of their um, blog post about how to run a board meeting. And then it spit out the second half and finished the blog post about how to run a startup board meeting. I was like, wait, how does it know that? How does it know what I would write in my blog post?

• 16:10Shaan Puri?

  It was like kind of indistinguishable. Um, the first half and the second half and the first half was written by a real VC. The second half was written by the robot who was just basically guessing what the next word should be. Uh, which is like kind of insane.

• 16:22Sam Parr?

  I almost want this to fail.

• 16:25Sam Parr?

  Like, I'm like nervous.

• 16:26Shaan Puri?

  That's not gonna happen. Yeah, that's the best inventions. They always say like the best technology seems like magic. Um, and when you see real magic or you see magic, you're like a little bit scared. Like when you see David Blaine do some crazy shit, you're like, whoa, hold on, hold on, what's what's going on here? How did the card end up in my boxers? Like, that doesn't make any sense. That's kind of how this feels. It's a little bit scary.

• 16:46Sam Parr?

  So, but that's my question. Do you do you think that what what your buddy did? Do you think that it's actually good? Or do you think it's like, do you think that it's still like a a a car in 1930?

• 16:58Shaan Puri?

  It's still like a car in 1930. And I don't know what those cars are like, but basically in a sandbox, if you can control the inputs and you can kind of play around with it, you can demonstrate, you can create really cool demos. Really cool, even prototypes. We're not at products yet. But we'll get there like this GPT GPT three is improving on GPT two. So it's like, fuck, how good is four gonna be and five? Like, it's like, you know, the original iPhone really wasn't that great either. Um, and then now it's like, if I can watch movies on my phone and you know, like, it's amazing. And like, things get amazing pretty quick. And so I think this is gonna get amazing pretty quick.

• 17:35Sam Parr?

  I, yeah, I'm, I'm a little in awe. So I, um, I've got, or I've applied to get access and I've talked to Sam about it. And he was like, yeah, are the person who gives access is, is, uh, on vacation for like two or three days, but they'll get back to you. Like, all right, well, I guess I'm waiting on her to reply, but I, I want to use it for writing articles on the.

• 17:52Shaan Puri?

  I was gonna say, you, you guys should write the news through a robot one day, you know, basically like one day we could just see what.

• 17:58Sam Parr?

  Well, that's what we're, yeah. So I'm waiting to get access for that. Um, we'll see.

• 18:03Shaan Puri?

  I wanted to run our transcripts for our podcast, uh, through it. I basically just wanted to be like, hey, it's Sean and Sam talking. What, what would we say if we talked about X? And I bet it could recreate our, you know, stupid conversations.

• 18:15Sam Parr?

  Well, can't you ask your buddy to set that up?

• 18:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I can. I, I just got, so I'm going to bring him on. So next week I want to do a segment where I'm going to bring on the guy who built that thing. As well as either Furcon, who's kind of my trusted tech, like, you know, a sounding board, because he's also realistic. He doesn't get caught up in the hype. Um, and then there's also this VC at Founders Fund who wants to come on and talk about it. Um, and so.

• 18:38Sam Parr?

  Who? The young guy?

• 18:39Shaan Puri?

  Dylan, yeah.

• 18:40Sam Parr?

  I don't know him. Um.

• 18:42Shaan Puri?

  He's kind of a troll on Twitter.

• 18:43Sam Parr?

  Good. I like that. Uh, well, I'm curious to learn more. I just feel like I'm not smart enough or educated enough to actually know what's legit and what's not. And I want to know, like with your buddy, was it as simple as you literally just type into Google Doc and you tell this thing what to do and it does it? Or does it require more? Is there more stuff to it?

• 19:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll ask him. So, yeah, we're noobs, but we know enough to know that, hey, this is inter, this is interesting. This is worth understanding more.

• 19:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but it's like, there's so, there's been so many things like that where, I mean, there's a lot of, I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing. This is everything. And then you dig.

• 19:18Shaan Puri?

  A lot of false starts. Yeah.

• 19:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So, all right, what's BNI?

• 19:21Shaan Puri?

  Okay, BNI. So let's go to the exact opposite end of the spectrum, the most fucking dumb down, old school thing that I discovered that I didn't know about. So BNI is a business referral network. I don't even know what BNI actually stands for either.

• 19:33Sam Parr?

  Is a company?

• 19:34Shaan Puri?

  BNI is a company. Go to bni.com. So these guys, um, I think are making about 50 million a year. And what they do is, let's say, you start a local chapter. So this is kind of like the Vistage model that both of us are interested in, like, so, so this is a little bit different, though. So what happens is they have 10,000 chapters and they have 270,000 members. Uh, so you can do the math on kind of how much they're making in their membership fees. But the way it works is in a local chapter, there'll be like one, let's say, financial advisor, one plumber, one, um, you know, whatever the other occupations are that people have, a whole bunch of like kind of self-employed people. And it's a referral network. So it's like, cool, I'm in this chapter, I meet you guys.

• 20:18Shaan Puri?

  You're my homie now. So now whenever I know a guy who needs a lawyer, I'm going to refer the lawyer in my circle to any of my customers. I'm a financial advisor. And whenever you're, hey lawyer, whenever your guys need a financial advisor, you refer them to me. And so it's a referral network for, uh, for basically tradespeople to swap customers. And super simple idea, obviously drives a lot of value in that if I'm, you know, every business wants more customers. And if this is a trusted way to do it, great. And it also has the kind of benefits of like, you meet other people who are kind of in similar buckets. And you're like, oh, cool. Like we're kind of brothers in arms, except for you do law and I do financial advising. And then this guy's a mechanic and then that guy's a whatever.

• 20:58Shaan Puri?

  Pretty cool. Been around for a while, hadn't heard of it.

• 21:01Sam Parr?

  Since 1985.

• 21:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 21:04Sam Parr?

  I'm looking it all up now. Is this a, the guy who is the chairman of it, he just, his photo, he looks like a slick. He looks like a.

• 21:13Shaan Puri?

  So we're looking at a photo. He's got his hands out. He's on stage. He's trying, he does the thing. We put a keynote speaking thing of his, which is always a tell that this guy's insecure. And then.

• 21:22Sam Parr?

  Well, I mean, he could be, he could be a great guy. I mean.

• 21:25Shaan Puri?

  Wearing a suit and tie, hair slicked back. So that's why Sam's saying what he's saying. We have to paint the picture. So people understand why you would just say that.

• 21:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And I'm not actually saying this guy.

• 21:34Shaan Puri?

  Nobody knows. We don't know this guy.

• 21:36Sam Parr?

  I don't know. But so is this a scam? Uh, this is so weird to me. Uh, the first, the top searches is B and I a pyramid scheme.

• 21:46Sam Parr?

  That's what the top search is like if you type in BNI.

• 21:50Shaan Puri?

  Yes, I believe that and.

• 21:52Sam Parr?

  You do think it's a pyramid scheme?

• 21:54Shaan Puri?

  No, I believe that people would be curious about that because it's organized like a MLM in a way. You become a local chapter owner, then you recruit members in your local network and then all of you paid dues to the mothership. And like that's, you know, whether it's affiliate or actual like, you know, MLM, like that's a similar model. And so I understand why people would be skeptical, but I found this really interesting. This is something, a business I had never heard of.

• 22:18Sam Parr?

  I'm looking at now it says they have over 270,000 members in 2019 members generated $16 billion in revenue through referral business. I just never would have thought that this many people would buy into this. You know what I mean? How big you, yeah, I'm a little flabbergasted. I'm looking at everything I can. I'm flabbergasted. How'd you find this?

• 22:37Shaan Puri?

  I was talking to somebody like, so I run these mastermind groups, right? And I was talking to the guys and I was kind of like, yeah, I run three of these groups now. And they're like, oh, it's great. You know, you have so many people signing up. I want, you want to open up more. And I was like, yeah, but I don't know if I want to do this anymore. I kind of tired of these, like this is kind of a lot of work. And then I was like, you know, there's these interesting like, either I want to scale it up and make this a big deal. Or I want to wind it down and not do it at all. Like I don't want to be in this like little bucket where I'm like doing a few and it's kind of a time suck. But it's not making a shit ton of money.

• 23:11Shaan Puri?

  And so he, one of the guys in that, Ben, my one guy Ben, he told me about this and I was like, oh, interesting. I never heard of this. And then they were all, they were actually all aware of it, which I had never really, because they're all small business owners. So they had been contacted or, you know, offered to join this thing.

• 23:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah. What I've learned about those, so I, I've been investigating this, those, these like groups, they're, they, they do scale. It is hard work.

• 23:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 23:34Sam Parr?

  It is very hard work.

• 23:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this is your business. It's not like a, like, it's like everything. If this is your business, your business can be pretty hard work. And this is actually a pretty decent business. I think it's a good, I think it is a good, well-designed business. Uh, there are many worse businesses than, than this one or the Vistage YPO model also. And so, uh, but you'd have to make it your business, which I don't personally want to do.

• 23:55Sam Parr?

  Do you want to talk about, uh, one more thing?

• 23:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, sure.

• 23:59Sam Parr?

  Wait, did we talk about the erotic newsletter?

• 24:01Shaan Puri?

  I don't remember. Did we bring this up already?

• 24:04Speaker 02

  We did not, no.

• 24:05Sam Parr?

  Okay, it said, "A listener of the podcast launched an erotic newsletter two months ago that is currently making 6K a month and uses Pornhub as an acquisition channel." I don't know anything about this, but let me tell you guys some background here, which is, I've done tests by creating, like, audible for erotic novels. And in the process, I learned a few things. One, women are absolutely willing to buy this stuff. Two, erotic and like romance novels is like, I believe it's the largest category on Kindle. And it's the most engaged category. And I'm a man, so I think of this differently, but like, women, like, this is pretty much like porn to women.

• 24:45Sam Parr?

  Like, this audio, like, for a lot of women, they just love, like, these audiobooks and written texts that describe sex and all these types of... I don't even know how to discuss it, like, because it's so porn to me. But like, there's all these subreddits where it's like, where they just like, write erotic stories. And then there's like Wattpad and all these websites that get hundreds of millions of monthly unique visitors. And all they do is write erotic stories. It's just, yeah, it's totally new to me and so interesting.

• 25:17Shaan Puri?

  And Abreu, do you know more about this? Can you tell us more about what he did? So the guy's Latana, he's a cool member of the group. He's done other projects too. He's the one who launched that church tipping app as well, Alter. He seems to be a hustler. What's his story?

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was basically it. He had launched the church app. I think it launched, but I'm not sure if he's still working on it. He's got another business, which I think is growing. That's his main thing. And that's like, you can book...

• 25:43Shaan Puri?

  Influencer thing, right?

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, that seems to be doing well. It's like an influencer booker thing. And then he just did this as like a side thing. He has someone running it. He basically set it up in a few weeks and is using...

• 25:52Sam Parr?

  What is it?

• 25:52Speaker 02

  ...his customers.

• 25:53Sam Parr?

  What is it? You sign up and what do you get?

• 25:55Speaker 02

  It's like an erotic story, like, every week or however...

• 25:58Shaan Puri?

  Have you read any of them, Abreu?

• 26:00Speaker 02

  I have not, no. That is the truth.

• 26:02Shaan Puri?

  Dude, do your research.

• 26:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 26:07Shaan Puri?

  You know the name of it? What's the name of it?

• 26:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I talked to this kid.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  We have any to want hinge club.

• 26:13Sam Parr?

  I gotta go to now. Yeah, like hinge, like a dating app.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  Yes, hinge club. It's for uh it's erotica for uh black women specifically.

• 26:23Sam Parr?

  All right. Beautiful. hingeclub.com? I can't find the URL. Yeah, neither can I.

• 26:31Shaan Puri?

  We should bring him. We should bring him on for like a 10 minute segment. I want to hear how he did this. I also want to hear about using uh Pornhub as an acquisition channel, what that's like. I've never done. I've never done anything like that.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  It's club.substack.com.

• 26:44Sam Parr?

  Okay. Hingeclub dot.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  Substack.

• 26:48Shaan Puri?

  Okay, one quick idea and then one um one one one story. All right, quick idea, uh employee onboarding at a company. So every company onboards new employees. So prop pain point every company has. I I've hired somebody I need to onboard them. Uh every company kind of bakes their own little process and there's, you know, not really like a seamless way to do it. It's like, oh, okay, cool. You're gonna hey, talk to the IT guy. He's gonna get you hooked up with XYZ. Uh talk to the HR person. They're gonna get you hooked up with, you know, ABC. Uh talk to your manager. They'll tell you about this. Oh, this other thing you'll learn about it four weeks later because you we forgot to tell you about it. Um oh, you should get some swag or like a computer. Like there's all these different systems, right?

• 27:31Shaan Puri?

  I think Rippling is trying to do this um uh in one way, but I'm curious if there are other angles to it. Rippling seems a bit like the utility side of things like the uh the getting set up uh side on payroll with with your IT stuff. What about like the sort of human side of things? So how do you uh how do you welcome employees? How do they learn about your company culture? How do they? Is there like a a easy way to do these like kind of? Customer, uh, sorry, like company culture, like training indoctrination, welcome to the cult type of things. I think companies really care about culture. I think they care about like people learning like what it's like to work here, what the origin story is like of the company, all these good things.

• 28:13Shaan Puri?

  And there's a lot of like folklore that gets passed down and a lot of like tribal rituals that get done informally. Can you do that formally is a kind of a question mark. Can you do rippling but for the info for the non utility stuff?

• 28:24Sam Parr?

  Is that a question you think that people have? Or a problem that people have like?

• 28:29Shaan Puri?

  I think so, because like, for example, at Twitch, I know that one of the earliest employees, like, there's only a few OGs left now, or, you know, eight, nine years in or whatever. And one of the OGs was putting together like a kind of a, a little booklet that was like, here's the like history of Twitch, like all the cool crazy moments that have happened in the company's history.

• 28:45Sam Parr?

  I do like a, uh, I, I, I do that with.

• 28:48Shaan Puri?

  You do like a welcome thing, right?

• 28:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah, where I say like, here's like the history.

• 28:52Shaan Puri?

  That's hard to scale, right? Because it's like you're using the most valuable people's time, which is good. They get FaceTime with the CEO and whatnot. I think small companies deal with that that way. But as you get bigger and bigger, those become less less personal and also harder to do every Monday, you know? Um, because every Monday you're hiring new people as your company grows. Like, I don't, I don't know how many people you guys hired this Monday, but like, you probably had either, you know, between zero and one employees hired per week. Uh, max, right? And like, but at a bit, at a bigger company, they're hiring tens of employees or even hundreds of employees per week. And so how do you, um, get them in? So I, I think there's a service there. There's like a welcome week and you go through the, the bootcamp of the, of the company and you like,

• 29:33Shaan Puri?

  you get both the utility stuff and the, and the fun stuff, but they're all pretty lame. And, and as the world goes remote, I wonder, like, can you simplify this to being a link? And can that be a really well-designed page that tells your story?

• 29:45Sam Parr?

  Well, this is what we've discussed earlier, Sean, of like, like a high school newspaper, paper for your company.

• 29:52Shaan Puri?

  Right. But that's like with the recent stuff. I'm saying there's just like, this is more like a drip campaign, right? It's like, everybody needs to go through this sequence of getting this information. And you don't want to be the one retelling that joke manually every, every, every Monday.

• 30:04Sam Parr?

  I know, but if you build this product that we've discussed over and over again, which I think you can do it. Yeah. Like what you've just said is you need a drip campaign for a company that, so you need like a media company for it. It's quite, I mean, it is quite fascinating. I understand what you're saying. I haven't, I don't want to work on this because I think that that is kind of boring, but I understand the need and I totally get what you're saying and I bought it.

• 30:29Shaan Puri?

  So and also a bunch of people, I think three different teams have reached out to me since we got excited about that idea and are working on prototypes of it. So I'll show you when we, when somebody has one.

• 30:39Sam Parr?

  Well, I even have cool names.

• 30:41Shaan Puri?

  I don't even know if they have names yet. They're like, we're working on that thing you said. Here's the mockups. And I said, all right, send me a link when you have it, when you have a prototype.

• 30:49Sam Parr?

  I'm very interested.

• 30:51Shaan Puri?

  Okay. One other last, last little thing. So are you a basketball fan? You don't follow the NBA much, do you?

• 30:56Sam Parr?

  Uh, during like the playoffs, I'll, I'll pay attention a little bit. Why? What are you talking about the bubble?

• 31:01Shaan Puri?

  So the bubble started, uh, there's something interesting here. So in general, um, sports leagues are trying to come back. They're having great difficulties doing so. The NBA is trying like the most robust attempt at this. They're creating like a, a biological seal, a bubble, basically.

• 31:17Sam Parr?

  Aren't they like at Disneyland or something?

• 31:19Shaan Puri?

  It's in Disneyland or Disney World, sorry, uh, in Orlando. And, um, basically it's like a summer camp for rich NBA athletes. And so like.

• 31:28Sam Parr?

  And they're like complaining that they're like, they put them up in like a Marriott and they're like complaining. They're like, oh my God, this is only one room in this hotel.

• 31:34Shaan Puri?

  They're complaining about the room because at the beginning, when they come in, they have to quarantine for seven days. And, uh, so it's like seven days not leaving that room. And so anybody, even if you stay in a hotel room.

• 31:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I would hate that. Oh, I would, I would, I would retire.

• 31:47Shaan Puri?

  The food that gets delivered, they're showing the food looks like, you know, worse than my middle school lunch somehow. I don't know why they're serving these guys such horrible food. And then, um, they can't have like their side chicks come to the place because it's like a, a, it's a bubble. They can't have new people coming in. Uh, so like, you know, these guys who are used to being, you know, out there, you know, you know, popping bottles of the club. They can't do that anymore. So all these funny things are coming out, but what I thought was interesting, A, I'm just interested in can sports come back, you know, during COVID and I'm an NBA fan, so I'm into it. But the second cool thing that happened was a bunch of the players, because the only, there's only like two media members in the bubble.

• 32:23Shaan Puri?

  And so they're reporting on ESPN, but way more interesting is all these stories and vlogs that are coming out direct from the players inside the bubble, telling their story. So there's one guy, uh, this guy named, um. Um, Ma- Mathias, I don't know how to say his name, I think it's Mathias Thible. So he's just kind of like a rookie on the seventy sixers, not that great of a player, but he's, he's cool, he's interesting rookie. Uh, but he's doing vlogs like Casey Neistat.

• 32:46Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's pretty neat.

• 32:48Shaan Puri?

  He started his thing two weeks ago. Uh, when they entered the bubble, which was like ten days ago or so, he put up his first vlog, didn't even, he started his YouTube channel. He's already over two hundred thousand subscribers. Casey Neistat posted a comment on the first video being like, this is awesome, well made video. And like this guy was, this guy was like geeking out about Casey Neistat, he's like, dude, I love your videos, uh, yeah, I'm trying to emulate your style. And he's like a multimillionaire NBA, you know, athlete. And, um, so I think it's cool what's going on and these guys are telling, they're showing the food, they're showing what they're, you know, how the COVID testing works every morning, they're showing these little Disney magic bands at the buzz in, and if it's green, you can go into this area, if it's red, oh, you gotta go get tested again. And like, and I, it reminded me, the reason I'm bringing this up is because a lot of people ask me, oh, how do I get more customers, how do I market my business?

• 33:33Shaan Puri?

  I just want growth, could you have any marketing ideas for me? And this is like the universal marketing idea, and I saw this, uh, Heat and Shaw tweeted this out the other day, he goes, the timeless content marketing idea, show your work. And I was like, this is so fucking true. Um, and that's what these guys are doing, they're just showing their work. They're, they're going about their life as an NBA player and they're just showing it and that they're editing it into a good vlog, but like, it just works and this works for your company too, if you don't know how to market your company, just show how you're building your company. And trust me, that will bring you attention.

• 34:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah, uh, there's so many different words for this, it could be like document, don't create, there could be, uh, show your work, there can be, um, te- uh, learn then teach. Um, it's like, uh, it's the same thing though, it's just like, do everything out in public.

• 34:22Shaan Puri?

  Right, uh, Ryan Hoover always says work in public and I, I used to say that, I like show your work a little better because I remember taking math tests back in the day. And like you could get the wrong answer, but if you showed your work, you'd always get partial credit. And if you got the right answer without showing your work, the teacher would mark it down. And it's sort of the same thing in business. If you're showing your work along the way, even if your business is not successful yet. You will get a whole, a big halo effect of people want to work there. I mean, you guys do this. You guys put out a lot of content. Uh, you know, Barstool does this even more. They show the behind the scenes.

• 34:52Sam Parr?

  I like posted the job listing that we had. I got like 200 applicants in 24 hours.

• 34:56Shaan Puri?

  You've, you've shown your job listing. You've put out your writing, your writer's guide for your writers. You've put out like, um, what else you put out? Have you put out more stuff that you've worked in public?

• 35:05Sam Parr?

  A little bit. I'm gonna, I'm gonna create a newsletter course.

• 35:07Shaan Puri?

  Right. So there's like a whole bunch of things that you can do that are, but there's, there's more that are just like showing the life of, of

• 35:14Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 35:15Shaan Puri?

  You trying to do what you do.

• 35:17Sam Parr?

  And it's easy.

• 35:17Shaan Puri?

  It's, it's easy. It is. It does take time, but it's actually quite fun and it

• 35:21Sam Parr?

  Well, what I mean is it's simple.

• 35:22Shaan Puri?

  Right, right. It's in your control and you don't need to look for some other external genius idea. Hey, here's a simple idea that'll work for everybody and it works for some better than others. So like, for example, you, it'll work well for you because your customer is also business oriented and a business owner or an aspiring business owner. So you showing how you build your business, it brings you customers. Your customers are directly interested. For others, it's more niche, like a portion of your audience will care about that and a portion won't, but the portion who cares will like love you. And that's really ultimately what you want to do with marketing is get people to love you.

• 35:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah, most people are just really bad at creating content. Um, but this stuff definitely helps. Like you just write what you are learning and you post it on Hacker News and you do that 10 times and probably two of them, two of them might work.

• 36:12Shaan Puri?

  Right. And we should do that with this podcast. We should be like, cool. How we grew the podcast to a million downloads in six months. Like that's an easy thing I should be putting out there to, to work in public, to, to show our work about how we're building this podcast up. Um, that people would be interested in that I haven't done. So I gotta take this lesson for myself as well.

• 36:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, well, let's fucking do it.

• 36:32Shaan Puri?

  Great. Uh, I'm gonna write a book called a hundred great questions. And I'm gonna write the best questions that I've, that have helped me in my life. Either questions for yourself or questions you ask others. Hundred great questions. I'm gonna, I'm gonna commit to writing a book.

• 36:44Sam Parr?

  That's a great, that's a great one. A hundred great questions. When you, cause I feel like you already have like 15.

• 36:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I have a little note sheet on my little like, cause sometimes I'll hear somebody ask a question. I'm like, oh, great question. I'll give you a really simple example. This is not, this is not a great life question, but this is a great question.

• 37:02Shaan Puri?

  This is like more of a management tip, so probably wouldn't make the book, but I'm gonna say it anyways. You know, when you are talking to somebody, and this often happens with engineers, you're talking to an engineer and you're like, alright, when is this gonna happen by? And any leader is always asking their team, alright, I want this thing to happen, you want this thing to happen, you say you're doing it, when is it gonna happen? And like, you know, the problem is, people suck at forecasting and predicting things, and also, there's this weird like incentive, like first, like, I'm kind of overbearing when I say shit like this, I get like really, I'm excited, but it sounds aggressive, and so they're like, they don't wanna say too long, cuz they'll, they know I'll be like, what the fuck, like, we're planning to do this in six months, like, that's way too long.

• 37:41Shaan Puri?

  Um, also, they don't wanna say too short, and then not deliver that, cuz they, you know, they, they don't wanna be seen as somebody who missed it, so they don't, they kinda sandbag into like, some middle ground. Um, so I've always just like been like, fuck, people suck at predicting, this, this question is useless to ask, when are we gonna have this by? And I was in a meeting the other day, and Dan, who's my manager at my company, now, he's way more experienced than me, he's like kinda the, the gray haired guy at our company, super smart, and way better at managing people than I ever am. So he, he asked, so, so the CEO of Twitch asked this question, when are we gonna have this by? And I could see the person shrinking, and trying to like go through this, do I, do I underestimate, overestimate, I have no idea what the real estimate is. And then Dan came in and goes, let me ask you a different question.

• 38:27Shaan Puri?

  At what date would you be surprised that this hasn't happened by? And the person like relaxed, and they were like, well, you know, I'd be shocked if, if we didn't have this by Q3 or whatever. And they were able to like answer a different style, like just ask a better question, get a better answer, and so I was like, that's a different way of thinking about this.

• 38:43Sam Parr?

  What date would you be shocked that?

• 38:46Shaan Puri?

  That if, if we're sitting here, what, what date would we be sitting here? Would we be surprised that this hasn't happened by, or shocked that it hasn't happened by now? Um, that becomes the upper bound. Okay, cool, now I know that. And it's like, you know, what's the, and then he has another one, which is sort of like, what's the soonest you could expect us to start to see results from this? Like where we would look at it, and we would be, you know, we'd be smiles in this meeting, because we'd see some, some tangible result, and that became the lower bound. And I was like, dude, this motherfucker is a smooth operator, like, he knew how to get to the, and the crux of this answer I always want, without like the bullshit of the person's psychology getting in the way, so I like that little one.

• 39:26Sam Parr?

  This is not going to be about an idea, but something similar that people will like. And I'm just going to interview you a little bit, Sean. So I've never worked at a company really. I mean, I've worked at my companies and you up until recently worked mostly at your companies. But now you're working at Twitch with 2,000 people. You also interact, I imagine with a lot of Amazon people, which is supposed to be the best of the best. So I have a couple of questions. First, is your company, I think, was kind of similar to mine, which was mostly young people who were inexperienced but smart and kind of figuring it out.

• 40:00Shaan Puri?

  Very much so.

• 40:01Sam Parr?

  Now you're at a company that, does it have a lot more experienced people?

• 40:05Shaan Puri?

  Yes, very much so.

• 40:06Sam Parr?

  Okay. So what I want to ask is, does that matter that the people are experienced, do you think, or not? Like?

• 40:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know if it's experience, but there's a certain level of wisdom that comes over time. And also, I wouldn't say it's everybody, right? I would say everybody is more experienced or just like generally smarter, better resume, better talent than the people that we recruited for the most part. Cause we were recruiting these like kind of underdog, jack of all trades, non-specialists who had never done it before, but were hungry and were smart and could learn. And we were taking bets on people and we were.

• 40:42Sam Parr?

  But is that good?

• 40:44Shaan Puri?

  That was good for what we had. So now I realized, cause at some point I was like, dude, when do these people work? Cause my calendar became booked. Every 30 minutes was a meeting. And I was like, so when do I go work? Cause I was used to, you know, you probably did this with your company, less so now, I think. But.

• 40:58Sam Parr?

  I, we had a meeting today at our all hands and I go, well, we're gonna start, we gotta, you guys, let's innovate instead of optimize. And also like, uh, cancel all the, cancel all meetings and start over. There's way too many meetings.

• 41:10Shaan Puri?

  Right, so, so I used to do that where I'd have a couple of meetings a day, two, three, max. And then for the most part, I was working on something. I was looking at the data, I was trying to figure out what to do. I was working, sitting next to my designer and like working on a feature or sitting next to the marketing guy and working on a campaign or engineers, figuring out what the fuck's going on. And, um, I felt like I was in the work and I felt that that was real. And now I'm like, the schedule is just meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting. So when I first got here, I did the normal startup guy thing where you judge a big company. You're like, yeah, these fools, you just sit in meetings all day. Nobody here is doing any real work, blah, blah, blah. And then there's an element of that's true. But what I figured out was. Okay, what do you actually need at this, at the top of these companies, right? This exec team, like the top, like let's say 20 people of this company.

• 41:57Shaan Puri?

  That's like 1% of the workforce. And this 1%, their job is basically to be this like, uh, two things. One, they have to be the accountable party to everybody. So they need to be like, good cop or bad cop, depending on what's needed for their like, chain of command. And so, um, if, even if you didn't do any work, if you're the scary meeting of the day, for the next layer of leaders and the next layer of leaders below that, you become a forcing function that helps that whole org work. It's kind of abstract, but that's one job that you have. The other job that you have is basically to call bullshit and redirect when you think that resources are being wasted. And so you sit in meetings all day and you're like a computer. You're like, I feel like I don't use my hands anymore.

• 42:41Shaan Puri?

  I, my brain is just in a vat and it's in this like vat and, and basically I'm, I, I come into the meeting. There's a memo I read. So I'm ingesting all this information and then I make a decision at the end of it. Or I approve a decision at the end of it. That's all I do. I approve or I make a decision. Um, or sometimes I audit when I'm like, wait, this doesn't make any sense. Why is this, why does it have all these holes? And, um, that's the role of an executive, I think, in a big company. And like we, we try to say it's about all these other things, like it is about recruiting, sure. It is about strategy, sure. It is about setting up systems, sure. But like fundamentally on a day-to-day basis, I'm a brain in a meeting room. And then I get fed information and I either approve or I make a decision. Or I audit a decision that's being made. That's all I do.

• 43:25Sam Parr?

  So, do you like that?

• 43:29Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 43:30Sam Parr?

  Uh, and do you think that the people that Twitches needs to run their company, these high, highly paid, probably very wise, older folks?

• 43:40Shaan Puri?

  Basically, people with great judgment, whether you're great judgment because you're experienced, great judgment because you're a domain expert, or great judgment because you have awesome intuition on some shit, like whatever. It's a great judgment person, typically easiest way to get there is a bunch of experience.

• 43:54Sam Parr?

  So do you think that those folks actually make the company better? Or would, do you think it would be better if it was just like a bunch of startup-y people like you hired?

• 44:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think they make it better, but I think they are great with established systems. When you need to innovate, that brain in a vat doesn't work. Um, and so, but you know, a company of this size that's doing so, you know, so much revenue with so many, has so much users. For most of the company is just to make sure the ship keeps growing naturally and reducing risks like, oh. You know, like I, I bet, I was actually thinking about this the other day. I was sitting in like a two hour meeting that was about a topic that was like. There's a whole team called trust and safety. I bet at the hustle, you don't have a trust and safety team or like a, um. You know, Facebook, I, you know, I don't even know how many resources now, how many millions of dollars, how many thousands of people are just working on the like.

• 44:46Shaan Puri?

  Abuse, spam, porn, fake news and like account takeovers, fraud. Like there's just a huge amount of that at any big company because when you get big, you become a target. And, um, so you, you have a huge amount of your emphasis is just on that. And that's just making sure the, the ship doesn't sink. It doesn't make the ship faster. It actually makes it slower. It doesn't make it like go to new destinations. It's just making sure this valuable thing doesn't sink due to the, all the vectors of possible attack. And I was sitting through these meetings and I hate those meetings because I'm not good at that. My brain doesn't help there and I get super impatient and, uh, but now it's sitting there. I recognize like, holy shit. I didn't even know this was a problem that big companies have. I, you know, if you had said it, I would have agreed, but I didn't understand. I didn't really understand.

• 45:30Shaan Puri?

  How much time and energy goes into shit like that?

• 45:33Sam Parr?

  At what point did Twitch become this thing where it no longer required innovate? And maybe like innovate, like you're saying, they no longer innovate, innovate. I'm sure they would disagree. So we, and, and, and they're probably. It could be argued, they're like, well, we do innovate and they're right. So that's maybe not the best word, but basically. Huge drastic changes kind of is what you're saying.

• 45:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I, I think the first three, three years, three to four years were more of the scrappy. Innovation, hustle, throw shit at the wall. Oh, there's something broken. Uh, I don't have time to fix it right now. I gotta work. I'm, I'm going to keep growing this thing and like, yeah, we're, we'll deal with that later, you know? Um, I think that was first three or four years. That's my guess.

• 46:18Shaan Puri?

  And we'll bring Emmet on. I gotta bring Emmet on. He's got a shit ton of business ideas too.

• 46:21Sam Parr?

  How will they innovate? You know, Amazon has kinda definitely innovated even after, I mean, you know, Amazon had like 2,000 employees, I think, after three years. How do you think that they were able to continue to innovate? And how do you think Twitch will be able to continue doing that?

• 46:37Shaan Puri?

  So I got put on basically the core, like one of the core like innovation or like big, like new things at Twitch. Cause basically Emmet was like, okay, this guy's like good at that. He's a startup guy. He's good at the zero to one phase. Most of our company, the people we hire are not the zero one. They're the one to N. They're about growing an existing thing that's working and making it work better. This guy's good at making something that's not working or doesn't even exist today, exist or work. And so he put me on that. And basically what he did was he carved out a team, called it a strike team. Other companies call it a tiger team, a SWAT team, or whatever. And so he carved out a strike team. He said, what do you need? Name my resources? He's like, boom, here's your resources. So I have basically a team of 30 something people and um, and I actually wanted less. He was like, don't you need more?

• 47:22Shaan Puri?

  I was like, no, no, no, less. In fact, even 30 is way too many. I actually think I need less initially. And so we started smaller.

• 47:28Sam Parr?

  So, yeah.

• 47:29Shaan Puri?

  We started with smaller than that, but, but it quickly adds up. And so um, and he was like, okay, you know, you guys are going to operate over here. You don't have to do these traditional processes. You're going to report directly to me and you have a clear mission and you have a blank check. And um, break all the rules. Actually, you're new here. You don't even know the rules. Good. Go. And so that's what he did. And we've made like amazing progress to date because he was able to carve out a system like that. And I think other companies um, frequently do that. Now, this was in response to like a risk to the company. So companies are good at like, oh shit, there's a risk. Boom. Assemble the SWAT team. Facebook always had this thing called lockdown. We'll go into lockdown and nobody leaves till we solve this problem type of thing.

• 48:12Shaan Puri?

  And so that's as a risk. Then there's other areas where it's like more opportunistic. It's like, eh, it'd be nice if like, we should be innovating. I think that's harder for big companies. Big companies are pretty good at responding to like existential threats and risks. At least more so than just continued innovation driven by their own motivation, you know?

• 48:30Sam Parr?

  And Emmett, when Emmett started the company, he was a college kid. Uh, and it started as one thing. And then after six or eight years or something, I mean, a while it evolved into Twitch. Uh, how do you think he has done going from being a college kid who's just like creating some stupid thing in his dorm room to now running a massive?

• 48:51Shaan Puri?

  I think he's great, but I, I didn't know him before. So I only know him, I've only known the guy for a year. And in that year, I'm like, this guy's great. He does all these, you know, I can see he still has the entrepreneurial edge. And the like, in the meetings, he'll be like, cut the bullshit. Like, we need to go fast. And like, why are we not going fast? And then we'll be like, oh, excuse, excuse, excuse. He's like, okay, cool. Let's kill all those excuses and let's do it. Uh, and he has those moments. But, um, there's all the other shit you have to do to run a large company that's managing a P and L and trying to get profitable and is mature. And you have to deal with these trust and safety issues. And like, I know that wasn't his base strengths, like his strengths are, he's super strategic. He's super smart. He used to be a programmer and now he's not programming. He does strategy stuff, but he's not the product person anymore.

• 49:34Shaan Puri?

  And he's got all these people in his company. And so I think he first surrounded himself with other people. So he hired Sarah, who was the CEO of Pandora. She's the CEO of Twitch now. And she's a great operational, like kind of, she can whip an organization into shape. Then he brought in Dan. Dan was at Google. He ran YouTube's engineering and product. And then he was at Nextdoor as the CPO. So now he's the chief product officer essentially of Twitch. And Dan knows how to also run an organization. So what Emmett didn't know, he brought in people to do it. And then he just kind of kept doing the thing he's good at, which I think is the right way to be. And like, you know, I said that thing about a brain and a vat, like he, he literally just sits in a meeting room essentially all day. And a different team comes in and then they have a memo. His, his job is to read the memo and respond in a way that like helps the team be better in some way.

• 50:19Shaan Puri?

  And this dude, like within five minutes, the memo is digested. He's figured out the like, he's found the one inaccuracy of the memo and called that out. And he's found the two like important things of the memo and he'll focus the discussion on that. He does that better than anyone. I think he does it better than anyone because he's probably been doing that, that one exercise for five years straight. And plus his brain already had like very high horsepower. So it's pretty impressive.

• 50:43Sam Parr?

  I like, I, I enjoy talking about this because I think that when people who are listening and me included are building companies. You forget that you can build your own reality and you can kind of make it what you want to make it. And I enjoy hearing about this because sometimes I'm wondering, I'm like, which, which reality would I enjoy? And so I like hearing about other people's reality.

• 51:04Shaan Puri?

  I also looked at his life now and I was like, I would not want that life. And I thought that's what I wanted, which is really actually important, right? When you realize your dream is actually a nightmare, not a dream, and it's not that extreme, but like, the dream of what if I built a big company like a Twitter or YouTube or a Twitch? And I was a CEO and we had this really unique, we were the market leader with this cool company culture and all this bullshit. When I see what his day to day is like, I'm like, okay, I think it'd be cool to build a thing like Twitch, but I wouldn't want to be the CEO of this. I don't want this headache. This headache is not a fun lifestyle for me.

• 51:35Sam Parr?

  Well, I think people don't realize is that A, it's shockingly boring. And B, you actually have to just do a lot of negative stuff all the time.

• 51:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the, the amount of time that he's thinking about what is the future of Twitch? How do, what's our strategy? How do we get there? How do we build an awesome culture? Is small on the pie chart compared to dealing with headache of the day, headache of the week, headache of the month, and then like recurring headache of the year. And like those are, it's mostly dealing with pain in the asses, either people or problems. And that's what he gets paid the big bucks to do, right? But I realized, whoa shit, that's not what I would want as my lifestyle. Uh, which is good to know because that's what I was shooting for before. So it's good to see it and be like, oh, swerve.

• 52:19Sam Parr?

  I love hearing, I love hearing this stuff.

• 52:22Shaan Puri?

  So I did one smart thing and I recommend anyone does this. So I, I, I think I mentioned this before, but I asked Emmett, I said, hey, he sent me the earliest pitch decks, memos, meeting notes, anything you got from the early days of Twitch. Just go to your email, sort by earliest and just forward me anything with an attachment. And, uh, he did, he sent me a bunch of stuff. And so I saw the first slide decks when they're pivoting from Justin TV to Twitch. Or his user interview notes when he called a hundred streamers and was like, hey, how do I get you to switch to Twitch? You're on this other platform today and how they became the market leader. And just seeing the way he, and then now it's funny because like now everything's so structured. It's six page memos formatted in a certain way, like you have to say, You don't say like, growth is really strong. You have to say, we grew from X percent to Y percent,

• 53:07Shaan Puri?

  which is plus or minus this percent month over month, which is plus or minus our quarterly goal. And that's the format. And if you ever say something like, you know, um, things are going well, or this is a big risk, or whatever, like you need to back everything up in this formatted way. But back then, like his, obviously his person is like a startup, right? Like it's just, you know.

• 53:26Sam Parr?

  Shoot from the hip.

• 53:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, shoot from the hip. Alright, so then I went to this guy, Ethan, who's become kind of a cool little mentor of mine. Ethan is like, uh, uh, L10, which is like one of the top levels but under Bezos, um, at Amazon and he's, he runs the prime division. And so I asked him, I said, so here's my email to Ethan. I said, AWS Origins, that's the subject line. So I said, were you involved at the birth of AWS? Such an incredible business. I said, was this a high profile, big bet that they knew, oh, this could pay off big, let's bet big? Or was this like some unassuming little project with modest aspirations that happened to become a monster? I said, did this start with one of those six page memos? Is that memo now framed and hung on the Hall of Fame walls? I've read some articles, but I want to know from the inside what actually went down. And so, um,

• 54:11Shaan Puri?

  this is great. And so then he was like, he's like, I was around, I wasn't directly involved. And so then he answered question by question. He goes, it started small as far as I know. He goes, there's three, three little services, you know, simple DB, S3, EC2, a database, storage and compute. It started with a small team of engineers, um, which is like the Amazon two pizza team. I don't know if you've ever heard that, like, they want every team to be small enough where you're going to be fed by two pizzas.

• 54:35Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, you know, S3 came out first, it worked, uh, it was, you know, modest fanfare when it launched. But then EC2 came out, it was an instant hit, hockey stick growth, no looking back. We all realized, holy shit, this is actually going to be pretty big. We started adding the services and then, um, those services we added were just, we just looked at what people were doing on top of EC2. And, oh, they're hacking that together. Let's build a really good service that everyone can use that does exactly that. Or hey, they're using the service in a way that's in a breaking it. Let's quickly protect the service and make sure it can't break in that way. Um, so he's like, if you think about like a VC portfolio, AWS was three bets. One was a, we can get our money back with a little bit of profit acquisition exit like S3 was like a small win.

• 55:18Shaan Puri?

  EC2 was like a unicorn IP that went to IPO. And one was a small loss, which was simple DB. But you know, you know how it goes, the unicorn pays for all the other losses that you had. Um, so it ended up working out. How does this match with the, with the public lore, the public story? And then he lastly came and I, I came back and I said, you know, this all kind of is interesting, matches up. I said, how come AWS didn't do payments? You know, it seems like payments is a core infrastructural service. Stripe did that. Stripe was basically AWS payments and built like a $25 billion company. What happened? You guys launched payments early on. Why didn't it work? And he was like, you know, our failure in payments was due to us like wanting to narrowly control them. Um, rather than our old playbook, which was give up margin and, and use that to get to mass adoption.

• 56:03Shaan Puri?

  Um, every, every payment thing we ever done is flopped. We overthink it always. Um, Stripe was a big win, but we didn't catch it. And, um, and then he was, he was looking for the memo to send me, the original memo to send me. And I was like, I love being a internet historian in this way. I don't know if other people like this stuff, but.

• 56:19Sam Parr?

  I love hearing that. Another thing is that, um, I was listening to a venture, Metona, or I forget whichever guy gave Bezos their seed money. And apparently he was telling a story when he interviewed him, he was like, Bezos was like, yeah, man, I think, I think this might be a hundred million dollar business.

• 56:38Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 56:39Sam Parr?

  And I, I just love hearing those stories like that.

• 56:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And there's, there's people who tell these other folk stories, like so, for example, and you gotta know that a lot of this is bullshit. So Chris Sacca is pretty famous for this. He tells stories. He's like, the greatest entrepreneurs I know, from the first conversations, it's like they could see in the future. They knew. He's like, I remember I bumped into Kevin Systrom from Instagram in a coworking space. And he was telling me like, you know, he was showing me his little app that nobody would even use it. It was just on his phone. And he's like, yeah, like when we get to five million members, we'll do this feature. When we get to 50 million, we'll roll out this feature. And he's like, I remember thinking, 50 million, dude, you're smoking crack. Like nobody even knows what the hell your app is. Um, he's like, but he knew. And so there's like, it becomes a story. He's telling this on CNBC. And then I've heard Peter Thiel tell the story of like,

• 57:26Shaan Puri?

  You know, I'm on the, I was the first investor in Facebook and Facebook was doing well and then Yahoo or whoever, I think Yahoo, offered them a billion dollars to sell. And Mark came into the, the board meeting and was like, hey, you know, this shouldn't take long, maybe five, six minutes, just a formality, but yeah, we've received this offer. We're obviously not gonna take it. And, and then so Peter Thiel's telling the story to make Zuck seem like this, like, you know, this monster who just kind of always knew this like, this omniscient person who just knew what the future was gonna be and was so courageous to just turn it down, no brainer. And, you know, us mere mortals would never do that. We would be like so excited to get a billion dollar offer. But then you hear the real stories behind these things. And apparently, um, and I'm gonna have, uh, Josh Elman come on and confirm this story, but from what I know,

• 58:10Shaan Puri?

  Zuck did say no to the initial offer and then Facebook started doing kind of like, had like kind of a down year, um, it growth was kind of low. They took a down round. But before they took that, Zuck actually went back and actually agreed to a deal to sell to Yahoo for, I think, a billion dollars or nine hundred million. And it was gonna happen. And then like, uh, a week later or so, uh, Yahoo came back and tried to renegotiate the deal down to six fifty or seven fifty or something like that. Ends up like, all right, fuck this. Like, no, we're not taking that deal. And they went back to independent. But like, let's not forget, he was gonna take that deal. And like, same thing with all these other, you know, famous stories of like, oh, you know, Chris Saka talks about Uber. He's like, Travis Kalanick, he would come to my house in Tahoe, sit in my hot tub and we'd talk about we're gonna destroy the taxi industry and all this shit.

• 58:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but also Travis Kalanick didn't think this was a big enough project to be CEO of and like recruited a random CEO of Twitter to kind of run his pet project. Until he realizes things are gonna be big and then he took over. So like, let's not pretend like these things don't have humble origins and really humble beginnings. And, you know, Zuck was like, you know, there's interviews of him on a college couch being like, why does this have to expand past colleges? It's just a cool college thing. It doesn't have to be more. And like, now he's putting satellites on, you know, above the earth to give people in India internet access so they can use Facebook. Like, these things start humble.

• 59:24Sam Parr?

  I think that like, there are occasions, like I, I've been reading Henry Ford's book where it's like, there's definitely people like him and Edison who are visionaries and it's like, oh, everyone in America should have lights. That those people exist, but then there are also people who are described as visionaries and it originally started out as like, isn't this neat? This little widget I made?

• 59:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Google, they wanted to sell for a million dollars. They were hap- they were happy to take a million dollar offer and they just didn't get it. So they kept going.

• 59:50Sam Parr?

  So I, I love hearing those stories.

• 59:52Shaan Puri?

  Uh, okay. That's all I got. This is a long episode. Tell us how this was. I think this was my, maybe a C minus episode. Give us, give us a grade. Just throw a letter at us on Twitter. Uh, our Twitter handles will be in the description. Just tweet at us. A letter grade or go on our Facebook group and give us a letter grade. I want to, I want to know what you guys thought of this.

• 1:00:09Sam Parr?

  I guess we'll find out.

• 1:00:10Shaan Puri?

  But yeah, hope you enjoy this episode. As always, um, cool. See ya.