The Simplest Way To Make $1M In 2026

- March 11, 2026 (4 days ago) • 01:10:15

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	We have this podcast called My First Million, where we're coming up with all these complicated schemes of how somebody can make their first million. Meanwhile, in their relationship, Sarah made her first million before Sam with the simplest scheme of all. Okay, so we invited our buddies from TPPN — John and Jordy — to do one of our favorite episodes that we do every year called "Sarah's List." It's called "Sarah's List" in honor of the queen herself: Sam's wife, Sarah. You know, it's a classic story. She just joined a great company that was clearly already great as, like, employee 3,000. And the math was like this: she got a job at Airbnb. I think, numbers aside, the general math is you get a job and they'll offer you maybe a $40K or $50K-a-year stock package in addition to your salary. So you get your salary, you get your health care, they have a kitchen where they're serving you lunch, they have oat milk in the fridge — so you're not sacrificing anything. She didn't have to come up with the idea of Airbnb. She joined it. She wasn't the first employee grinding like crazy; she was employee 3,000. But that stock package, which over a four-year... [transcript cuts off]
01:10	Shaan Puri	So, you know, you're granted about $200,000 worth of stock, it 5x'd, and she made a million bucks before either me or Sam. We kind of wanted to honor the brilliance that is joining companies that are already clear winners—especially in tech—because the winners can run so far. Every few years, Sam and I do this: we come up with our list. We call it "Sarah's List", which is the ten companies you would join right now. Because, as a person, your time is essentially your investment. When you join a company, that's an act of investment.
01:40	MFM	It's funny, because I know some investors who did—who made an investment in that unicorn round—and they had the exact same logic. They were like, "complete product-market fit, obvious runner; just pile money into this," like, "easy investment." And then it worked.
01:55	Sam Parr	She joined, I think, at an $18 million valuation—something like that.</FormattedResponse>
01:59	Shaan Puri	Okay.
01:59	Sam Parr	And then COVID happened, and we were like, "Well, sure—shit, that was a good idea." Sucks it didn't work. Then, obviously, everything changed in six months. I think it IPO'ed around $100 billion [initial public offering]. You guys remember that famous interview with Brian Chesky where, when he's told on air the share price and that it was worth $100 billion, he said, "I... I... I didn't know that until just now." Back then, in 2018 or 2019, when it was $18 billion, we were like, "This could be worth $30 billion," you know—if everything works. So anyway, that was her story and it worked out great because she worked a normal amount, had a great maternity/paternity package, had great benefits—all that stuff. We've done this for a few years, but, you know, we actually haven't done this in about eighteen months because it's been so hard these last twenty or twenty-four months with everything going on with AI. So you guys are pretty cool to have, because I think you'll know a lot more about some of the latest and greatest.
02:59	Shaan Puri	Yeah, we wanted you guys on because not only are you guys super smart, but part of your show is that you're talking to the CEOs of these companies in fifteen-minute interviews every single day. So you're getting a good sense for who's doing well, who you believe, and what companies excite you. We wanted to hear what you guys have to say. By the way, last time, Sam, I went back and checked. I think of the ten companies that we did in our last round—which was something like eighteen months ago, or two years ago—I think we got six out of ten that are already either there or pacing to be there. For example, when we did OpenAI, we were laughing. We were like, "hey, here's this shocker—OpenAI." It was a $100 billion valuation at the time; it's now close to $800 billion. > "Look, there's no bonus points for difficulty in life. In the game of business, sometimes the best companies are just hidden in plain sight. They're right in front of you." So I think we've done pretty well.
03:55	Sam Parr	The biggest one you've had was Androl. We did Androl in 2021, I think, and that was, yeah, 4,000,000,000 (four billion) at the time. And I think it's 90 or [unclear]. I don't remember.
04:05	Shaan Puri	And a lot of those.
04:05	MFM	Companies would stay on the list, honestly. I think, you know, even if you just did Andrew last year, the valuation has increased so much that it still makes sense to include them.
04:14	MFM	"The list — yeah. The biggest mistake that people make is not going with an obvious winner because it's already in the multiple billions, and it just looks like, 'Okay, what's the potential upside from here?' And that's been wrong so many times in the last ten years."
04:31	Shaan Puri	I've talked before about the way that I know how to make money, about how to build a money-making skill, and about how to leverage your time and energy. The team at HubSpot actually went through the video where I explained all that and turned it into a free downloadable cheat sheet on my four rules of how to make money. This is not, you know, "get rich quick" advice. It's core, foundational principles about building wealth — things I wish I knew when I was just getting started. If you want to download it, it's in the description below. It's totally free; you can go get it. Thanks to the folks at HubSpot for doing the research, making this document, and making it available to all you guys. Alright, back to this episode. Let's jump in. We each have roughly three picks; we're going to try to get to twelve, maybe some bonuses or some honorable mentions. Cool. My first pick — this is a company you guys might not even know about, which I like; I like to surprise you — but I'm just coming in strong here: Zuru Tech. Zuru Tech is a company that's based out of New Zealand, and they're the third-biggest toy company in the world. So they make, if you've ever seen Mini Brands — Sam's a big mini-food collector; he likes little mini toys — they make some of the most popular toys in the world: the bunch of balloons where you can fill up thirty water balloons at once, that type of stuff.
05:43	MFM	Yeah.
05:43	Shaan Puri	So the founder, Nick, came on the podcast. He's the wealthiest man in New Zealand and his story is insane — probably the craziest grind story I've ever heard. By the end of the episode I told him, "I think you're the closest thing to Elon Musk that I've ever seen. People just don't know about you because you live on the other side of the world and you were in the toy industry, so people overlook you." He’s got a new company — actually based there — and they're building homes with a factory. Basically, here's what you do: it's like ChatGPT. You drop a pin where you're going to put the home — no matter where in the world, any country, any city, any neighborhood — and it automatically downloads all the building codes, permitting, and the terrain. It knows if you're on an incline or if there's a hill or whatever. It has all of that built in, and it's called Dreamcatcher. You basically describe the home you want. For example: "I want something minimalist, 5,000 square feet, make it cool." It renders it all using something like Unreal Engine and creates an AI video walkthrough — kind of a MidJourney-type rendering — so you see the home in front of you. Then you literally build the home: you click it, and he's got a factory in China — like the iPhone-building factories — that actually builds all of the subcomponents for the home. It's insane. They even went and bought lots when the Palisades fire happened; they bought about $80,000,000 worth of lots in LA. He's basically going to "print" these — I say "print" — because it's built with robots.
07:23	MFM	Yep.
07:23	Shaan Puri	Like $50 million homes in Los Angeles. This guy — it was the most impressive demo I've ever seen: seeing the homes they're building, and it's real. This guy is basically a manufacturing genius. He and his brother have huge factories in China to be able to do this stuff. The crazy thing about home construction is that it's a space that's really never been touched—definitely not by AI. Really, most technology doesn't go into construction and home building. When you're selling multi-million-dollar homes, you don't have to sell many of them to be doing billions in revenue. So if there were one company I could empty the tank of my life savings into, I would pour it into this. Which means it's a contender for Sarah's list for me.
08:07	MFM	Love it. Wow.
08:08	MFM	Great case. Did he talk at all about why previous attempts in this category haven't worked? There's been—there's been a number. There's kind of a— I like this; I like this bet, because there's actually a graveyard of Silicon Valley companies that have made efforts.
08:27	Shaan Puri	Yeah, because he's not a Silicon Valley company. He's a guy—him and his brother have basically been building factories in China for the last twenty years, so they're a manufacturing powerhouse. For example, they were in the toy space and became the third-largest toy company in the world. They do over $1 billion of pure profit a year, just into the two brothers' pockets. It's crazy. Then they went into the diaper space. They were like, "Let's compete in one of the most difficult-to-compete-with categories, against Procter & Gamble." He built the fastest-growing diaper brand, and now I think—if it's not number one—it's basically right up there with Huggies and Pampers. Even though it's a brand-new diaper company, they're selling in Target and Walmart like crazy, and they manufacture their own diapers. The reason was he found that in China there was a different style of diaper manufacturing—different materials—and he basically brought that to market in the U.S. So he built the largest [diaper company]. Then they did the same thing in hair care; they have the fastest-growing hair-care brand on TikTok. Now they're doing it for homes. I think the big difference is like hardware is hard, and most software founders get a rude awakening when they go into hardware. These guys have been doing literally not just hardware but the building of the factory. The factory that makes the product is sort of secondary; building a highly automated factory is the number-one thing, and they've been building factories for a very, very long time. It's actually hilarious: when they went to China to start their toy company, he went there because he heard, "Oh, all the manufacturing happens in China." But what that usually means is you find a manufacturer, tell them what you want to make, and they make it. He went to China, didn't realize that—like a naive mistake—and built his own factory there, on the side of a river. He did it all from scratch because he didn't understand that when people say they manufacture in China, it doesn't mean they personally go manufacture in China; they find an existing manufacturer. He missed that part and just went the hard way from the beginning.
10:21	MFM	"That's funny."
10:22	MFM	That's great.
10:22	Sam Parr	Sean, sounds like you don't like this guy at all.
10:27	Shaan Puri	"Did I say I'm a fan?"
10:28	MFM	I'm a [incomplete sentence]
10:28	Shaan Puri	Fan of this guy.
10:30	Sam Parr	Do you guys think?
10:31	MFM	"Will this actually work as the bear case? Like... what — what? Unpack that a little bit."
10:35	Shaan Puri	Well, the demo is so insane... that you just have to ask the question: is this like many AI products that demo well but fail in production?
10:44	MFM	Sure, sure, sure.
10:45	Shaan Puri	And so, basically, the demo was so good.
10:48	MFM	Yeah.
10:49	Shaan Puri	That—you just kind of have to see a home first before you fully believe it. </FormattedResponse>
10:53	MFM	Well, I mean, I would put tariffs more as the bear case. If China–America relations degrade further, then it's going to be harder to get stuff across the border. It's going to get hard.
11:08	Shaan Puri	Part of the whole thing. Yeah, I thought, you know, you try to find cost savings when you do stuff like that—whether you do it in China or, yeah, using new technology. And so the question was: is it 10%? Is it 20%? What—how much is it? It's basically, like, more than an order of magnitude. So it's more than 10 times cheaper to build the homes this way, which I think is the exciting part. Because if you could bring the cost of building down, you know, that's actually very, very meaningful for, like, I don't know, progress in the world. </FormattedResponse>
11:35	Sam Parr	"But this breaks the whole list. This does not sound— I don't want to work with a person that sounds like Elon."
11:40	Shaan Puri	There was no caveat that said the founder is completely sane. I didn't — we didn't add that. We just said, "You join a company that's already got an existing—these guys have a hugely successful business already... but it has a chance to 5x because there's a—there's a pathway there." Alright. That's my what's next. That was my first company. Let's switch to somebody else.
11:56	Sam Parr	Yeah, let's let our guests go first.
11:57	Shaan Puri	Let the guests go first. You must be good at...
11:59	Sam Parr	Us. Okay.
12:00	MFM	Quick caveat: We were under the impression that we had to be picking companies under a billion-dollar valuation. It's a good kind of exercise. Yeah — and actually, that "early stage" today still means sub $1,000,000,000, basically.
12:15	Sam Parr	"Jordy, are you carrying, like, a $5,000 handbag in that photo?"
12:21	MFM	It's not—it's a duffel bag.
12:23	Shaan Puri	Can we do the origin of this?
12:24	MFM	Well... so, I mean, the origin of TBPN is—other people have described it as, you know, "ESPN for tech and business." What's funny is that John and I do not watch any of the traditional American sports: football, basketball, baseball, etcetera.
12:47	MFM	Anyway — first one: Varda Space Industries, helmed by Delian Asparouhov and Will Bruey (former SpaceX). Valuation: $726,000,000. This is one of those multi‑decade projects that could have a really, really large total addressable market (TAM). What do they do? They manufacture things in space. They do not build the rockets; they partner with SpaceX to launch a capsule. Inside that capsule they have effectively created a manufacturing environment where gravity is an off‑switch. For certain things — imagine trying to grow a crystal, grow a drug, grow heart tissue, or produce certain types of fiber — microgravity offers unique advantages. They're doing a lot of biomedical work right now. There are also defense applications: if you can get things up into space and get them down, there's a whole bunch of interesting possibilities. The company is maybe four or five years old at this point, with about 150 employees based in Los Angeles. It’s a very hardworking environment. Especially with the new NASA administration, things are moving much faster. SpaceX had a lot of uncertainty last year, but they started landing the Starships and launch costs are starting to tick down again, so access is getting easier and easier. The real question with a space company is: how long will it take them to actually do something in space? It used to be five to ten years. They got their first capsule up in just a few years and they're already on their fifth or sixth capsule.
14:32	MFM	People stopped selling. They got it back.
14:34	MFM	They got it back a lot.
14:34	MFM	A lot of space companies put stuff up into space, but that's kind of the end of the story. So I think our framework for Varda is: if you get a group of ultra-talented, ultra-hardworking people together who can develop the capability of putting stuff up into space and bringing it back down, it's going to have a really wide range of applications over the long run.
14:58	Sam Parr	"What's the founder like?"
15:00	MFM	Will Brewery is completely super-sharp—by-the-book, with a SpaceX engineer background. He has been able to talk to big pharma CEOs and get them to sign up. And then "Delians"—you know, "Delians." [unclear what "Delians" refers to]
15:16	MFM	Delians, who's obviously quite a character—very, very loud. But the company in general has been anti‑hype. There are a lot of companies in space that are just hype businesses. They will get all the way to the public markets without having accomplished much, if anything at all. Varda hasn't chased the hype. They weren't coming out this last year with a new pitch around data centers just because that would have gotten them [attention]. So, for a space company, they're extremely—I'd say—grounded, focused on developing capabilities that are going to be, like John said, very valuable in a wide variety of applications. </FormattedResponse>
15:58	MFM	There's, like, one... It's a very difficult space — capital-intensive. There are not a lot of—there are some. There are a decent number of companies that are sending stuff up to space, but there are many fewer that are bringing stuff back down. It hasn't been a hugely competitive space with, like, ten players.
16:19	Sam Parr	We had someone, Sean, on the pod, I think last year, explain this company. They went through this huge thing about why it was cool, and we were like, "Why do pharmaceutical companies need to make drugs in space? Like why?" They forgot to explain.
16:35	Shaan Puri	They didn't explain that part. They were like, "Oh, it's great because you can... man, like, you know... no."
16:39	MFM	No, ordinarily manufacturing is a thousand times more expensive than doing it on Earth, but there are just specific chemicals—very rare things.
16:45	MFM	Physics
16:46	MFM	But again, you have to view this as a multi-decade thing. If you believe in space, and you believe that launch costs are going to continue to fall—it's going to get cheaper and cheaper—then there's an interesting trend: you're on the frontier of it. Right now, the company's been very good at weathering storms, whether there's a slight sell-off in the market or the narrative changes. The company is well-managed. If you can keep getting through those periods and always be the best company that does things in space, basically, that's good.
17:18	Shaan Puri	You know, I do like—so I do like that you're riding the wave of basically, "Is Elon going to get better at doing rockets?" Yep. And if he does, the cost per—whatever—cost per gram to take something up into space is going to keep falling.
17:33	MFM	Yep. And you?
17:33	Shaan Puri	Just keep — you get to keep your business; it keeps getting better. Yep. The more hard work Elon does, I kinda like that in general.
17:39	MFM	As a thesis: last year, Blue Origin landed their heavy rocket. So now there's actually two companies, and that means real pricing pressure, which is very, very good.
17:51	Shaan Puri	By the way, this is my—I have two tangents. Yeah. I was reading the Elon biography, which I'm late to, but I kinda like it because... every, you know, everybody is out on it; everybody's done with it, and I'm the only guy, you know, still in there poking around. There's an amazing section.
18:04	MFM	"I don't."
18:05	Shaan Puri	Know you guys have read this, but it's about the tweets back and forth between Elon and Bezos — the sort of passive-aggressive rivalry around the launch thing. Sam, I don't know, have you seen this? </FormattedResponse>
18:15	MFM	Well, there's more recent ones. Basil just posted The Tortoise. He said, "I'm the tortoise." He's going...
18:19	MFM	Tortoise mode.
18:20	MFM	*He's going tortoise mode* — slow and steady.**
18:22	Sam Parr	"Who's the passive-aggressive one?"
18:23	Shaan Puri	Both of them. First, Blue Origin was the first to do a reusable launch, which Elon wanted badly. But Blue Origin's launch didn't go very high. Bezos posted a picture saying, "Oh my God, we did it. I'm standing next to one of the perhaps rarest items on Earth: a reusable rocket... a reused rocket." He was basically saying that it's so rare—you never see a reused rocket. Elon replied, "Congratulations, but perhaps not the rarest," because SpaceX has done that six times, if we're counting suborbital hops. It was basically like, "your rocket doesn't go high enough." Then, when Elon did it a month later, Bezos said, "Congratulations to Elon — a really excellent suborbital launch."
19:12	MFM	Yeah — one of the best.
19:13	Shaan Puri	Suborbital launches, and Elon was like...
19:15	MFM	"Fuck you, dude. It was..."
19:16	Shaan Puri	So high, but technically, yes — it was still suborbital.
19:19	MFM	That's funny.
19:19	Shaan Puri	They've basically been going back and forth with these "congratulations" — but I just kind of love it. I love it. I love it. The pettiness.
19:27	MFM	Yeah.
19:27	Shaan Puri	Alright, let's move on to the next one. What do we got?
19:30	MFM	Back to you, I think.
19:31	Shaan Puri	Okay, I'll do one. Okay, my next one is Suno. I've talked about Suno before. If you don't know, Suno is basically an app or website you go to where you can make music even if you've got no musical talent. You can just go on there, describe the type of song you want—maybe you bring your lyrics, maybe you don't; maybe you just give it a vibe—and you basically are "vibe-coding" music.
19:53	MFM	Mhmm.
19:54	Shaan Puri	It's amazing. I'm addicted to the app — I use it all the time. I've probably made, I don't know, 40 or 50 songs. I've burned tens of thousands of credits on this thing. It's crazy how addictive it is and how fun it is to use. I just think this company has a long way to run. Right now it's valued at $2.02 and a half billion, something like that. Yep — they have $200,000,000 in ARR [annual recurring revenue], so it's not like an AI app that's...
20:14	MFM	Like $300,000,000 in ARR now. $300,000,000. Alright — crazy.
20:18	Shaan Puri	Breaking news: We got 300 million.
20:20	MFM	Now.
20:20	Shaan Puri	I already met the founder. I really like what they're all about. They also just struck a deal with a licensing company and a music label, which is important. Basically, here's the upside. I was like, "Okay, this is already at $2.02 and a half billion—does this have that 5x potential?" I was doing some math. SoundCloud has 40 million music creators. That's 40 million people around the world who actually have musical talent and are publishing on the platform. Sudo's is only at 2 million users on their platform, and that's people who don't have to have the musical-talent part or the skill. So the market for the number of people who will make music but don't know how to make music is going to be something like ten, twenty, possibly more than that—possibly 50x the number of actual musicians who create music. So I...
21:11	MFM	"Just... I think this thing."
21:12	Shaan Puri	Has an incredible long way to run. I would not be surprised if there were hundreds of millions of weekly active users—people who are making music on this thing. When you do the math of what that turns into, because people are willing to pay, imagine not having to practice or take music lessons or any of that—you just pay $15 and, boom, you're a musician. It's a kind of an amazing trade to make. I think this thing has a long way to run. I think Suno becomes a $50 billion+ company. It would also be a really fun company to join if you joined right now, because you'd be doing something that's both on the frontier but not like manufacturing in space—it's not actual rocket science. You're just a part of culture; it's going to become a big part of culture, which is always fun if you're going to work.
21:51	MFM	Somewhere.
21:51	Sam Parr	What do you guys think about these companies? We were laughing — I think we said they were launched two years ago and they're at $300,000,000 in revenue. Does that have longevity?
21:59	Shaan Puri	You have to ask a couple of questions. One is: is it a fad? Do I think this is just—like, I don't know—Dubsmash or one of those things where everyone tries it once, like the yearbook photo trend, and then there's really no reason to come back again? I don't think this is a fad. I think people are going to want to keep creating stuff. The second thing is: is it going to have too much competition? I do think they're kind of on an island, where all the big model companies are probably not going to — this isn't the kind of primary war front. They have so many bigger battles that they're fighting right now. I kind of think Suno is going to go uncontested for a little while longer, where it's not the main thing that OpenAI or Anthropic are going to try to roll out and make mainstream. By focusing and specializing, they can go deeper. They already have a lot of other stuff built in: for example, if you make the song, they have an editor where you get the stems and you can actually remix the song. They have a discovery platform. There's a lot more depth they can go into. I think the reason it will be around is because it's not in the crosshairs of the highest-elo battle in the world—the "genius battle," which is what OpenAI, Grok, and Anthropic are all doing.
23:05	Sam Parr	"What—what are the bros?"
23:05	MFM	Yeah. I think what you're getting at is basically: Suno is the front door to AI music in the way that ChatGPT has been the front door to our large language models. That has a lot of value. I made a pretty similar case to a friend who has worked in the music industry for the last decade. He's a real musician and has gone on tour all over the world. He had the opportunity to join Suno at around the same valuation, and I said, you've worked in the music industry your whole career—where's the growth going to be over the next ten years? It's going to be in AI, whether or not people like it. I think what Suno has tapped into is the same thing that the vibe coding tools have tapped into: billions of people have an idea for an app, but very, very few people can actually build an app. Now with vibe coding, anybody can build an app. The same applies to music—everybody's had an idea for a song or could come up with an idea for a song, even in the most simple way. We've heard stories from people who, every single night, make a new bedtime song with their kids to motivate them to settle down or go to sleep. There are so many magical moments like that. It's the kind of thing that can have viral moments—people realize it's available, create all these songs, and memes can form. It has this sort of lasting appeal; I think people will continue to come back to it. So, I'm with you.
24:37	Sam Parr	What happens to Spotify's market cap, then?
24:41	MFM	Spotify's market cap should be resistant to this because it's a tool for creating music, and music will be distributed on Spotify. So Spotify never created an Ableton competitor or a Fruity Loops competitor. They never sold guitars; they never sold any tools to create music. They might wind up launching some competitor, but I...
25:01	MFM	I think Spotify is in kind of a tough spot, if you think about it. What would all the biggest artists on Spotify think if Spotify came out with an AI tool that competes for listening time with those artists? They're in a position where Spotify can't jump into this without infuriating a lot of the artists on the platform. So I think it's possible that Suno could eat into Spotify's listening time. Yeah, but it's hard to imagine a world where I subscribe to Suno and I don't subscribe...
25:35	MFM	I would just see it similar to Sora, Instagram Reels, VO3 from Google, and YouTube Shorts. People will be scrolling these feeds. Most people don't want any AI; some people are okay with just the best AI. They want one out of 100 reels to be actually great—AI-generated, funny, inspired. People on Spotify will want to listen to the hits and the songs that everyone knows. Then they might want to listen to that one breakout AI-generated song. It's just going to take one minute for whoever creates that banger on Suno to export it, upload it to Spotify, and Spotify will be able to instantly monetize it. So I wouldn't see it as a major threat to Spotify. There's also some interesting downside protection here. If you think about Suno at $2.5 billion, who could possibly acquire them if they don't make it to escape velocity? Spotify has the market cap, but also Amazon could put it in Amazon Echo devices. It could be an Apple thing, a Google thing, or an OpenAI thing. There are so many other companies with the market cap and scale to pick this up and make it a good outcome for everyone.
26:43	MFM	The other thing is, I know the industry—like the traditional music industry—is using Suno.
26:48	MFM	Yeah.
26:49	MFM	But they don't want to talk about it because it's still controversial. I heard from a friend that their friend was a backup vocalist for different artists — like a studio vocalist. Their job would be to go into the studio and sing a song, and that sample would be taken around to artists who would effectively bid on it. The vocalist would sing it in the style of one artist, then in the style of another, to give people a feel for it. They said that person's revenue went from, you know, humming along for the last twenty years to, like, effectively zero. Now you can take the lyrics and generate them in the style of any artist, so the work is being replaced. The challenge for that individual in their career is that people don't hire backup vocalists the same way. A backup guitarist can go and tour with a band because people are there to see the frontman. But with a backup vocalist, there's not really touring demand. Imagine you buy a ticket to your favorite artist and there's just someone else singing — you're not getting your money's worth. So it's already disrupting certain corners of the industry, and I think part of what's holding Suno [an AI music generator] back right now is that the main artists will not talk about it because they know they're going to get blowback... but that'll eventually...
28:15	MFM	Works. Yeah, yeah. Alright.
28:18	MFM	"You guys."
28:18	Sam Parr	Going to do one.
28:18	MFM	Next pick — yeah, let's move on to TrueMed, because I think it relates to Hone Health. Interestingly, we have a couple of other hard-tech companies, but TrueMed is a fintech company founded by Justin Mares. I think we all know him.
28:31	MFM	Guest to the show.
28:32	Sam Parr	Right. I think we all have a—well, I don't want to speak for you guys, but he's in the man-crush category. He's kind of a...
28:38	MFM	Yeah, he's a pretty amazing killer, Chad. TruMed adds a compliant "pay with HSA" (Health Savings Account) or FSA button to online checkouts by handling eligibility through embedded telehealth. So when you go online—whether it's peptides that are going to be popular, Eight Sleep, supplements, or whatever you're doing to improve your health—there's an economic advantage: a tax savings from paying for it with pre-tax dollars through your HSA or FSA. And so TruMed is this layer on all of that, so you don't have as much individual trend risk. Like, "Oh, is protein more popular than creatine this month or this year?" As long as health continues to be a trend, you're sort of like the rising...
29:27	MFM	Yeah, and this Tide is like buying — like investing in an index fund for wellness, right? Exactly. They're going to be taking a cut of a huge amount of the volume going toward wellness products in the U.S. We — I started a company called Aurora with my friends Brian and Charlie, and we're a happy TrueMed customer. TrueMed has a very meaningful take rate — a bigger take rate than, say, a traditional payment provider. But it's a great trade because you're able to sell incremental product, since people are able to buy it in a tax-advantaged way. I'm just an incredibly firm believer in the entire mission.
30:06	MFM	Yeah.
30:07	MFM	Of the company, I think that prevention. We know that running is going to increase your health span and increase your lifespan. You should be able to let people purchase products like this. </FormattedResponse>
30:19	MFM	"Yeah."
30:20	MFM	As a form of preventative treatment: incredible founder, very, very strong tailwinds, and great experience as a customer.
30:32	Sam Parr	"What's your company, Jory?"
30:35	MFM	Rora. rorra.com </FormattedResponse>
30:38	Shaan Puri	"Is that the water filter?"
30:40	MFM	So, Huberman — Andrew Huberman — has kind of been an early partner there, which is awesome. And that was the... I didn't...
30:48	Shaan Puri	Know you helped start that.
30:49	MFM	Yeah, so I stumbled into the water crisis years ago and started looking at all the solutions in the category. I ultimately felt there needed to be a Dyson-type brand in the category — a brand that was incredibly focused on R&D and making products in a variety of different form factors. You're constantly interacting with water in your day-to-day life, whether it's in your shower, bath, drinking water, whole-home filters, etc. The market was new and exciting. It was something I was personally motivated by because my son kept getting eczema — I had a six-month-old with eczema — and I was trying to track down why it was happening. It ultimately turned out to be tap-water baths that we tracked. We were able to solve that and, realizing there was an opportunity, I partnered with Charlie and Brian to bring it to life. They've absolutely crushed it.
31:57	Sam Parr	Are you sort of... you know, I follow you online. I've followed your work for years—even before "Party Round." Are you the designer of the two, or the design guy of the two? Because you seem like you've had an eye for aesthetics for a while. </FormattedResponse>
32:14	MFM	Yeah, I would — I would generally say so. I mean, John has great taste and instinct around this stuff, but I've just loved advertising, marketing, and product design. I've been obsessed with it since I was a boy. I was super into skateboarding, surfing, and snowboarding growing up. From a very young age I was trying to figure out why there was a snowboard available for $100 when I really wanted the one that was $800. So I worked backwards from that, trying to understand design, brand, and advertising — all those things. Bringing that perspective... I mean, that's part of the reason TBPN's success is due in part to our obsession with brand, which is something podcasts historically would think about: "Okay, let's design our cover art."
33:09	MFM	That was the first thing Sean told me when we launched Technology Brothers, the original podcast. I was like, "You sent me a really nice message. You were like, 'I think this is gonna work. I think this is the thing. You gotta go full time on this — do it, do it.'" And I was like, "Yeah, it seems like the numbers are pretty good." I was being very wonky. And you're like, "No, no, no. This is a brand. You've actually broken through and created something that feels — it has feeling around it." Brand was like, "Yeah, that's, like, a lot. That's almost all Jordy. I helped as much as I could with it, but just the idea to actually create this world and this brand — we had a lot of fun with it."
33:40	MFM	Yeah—the fun, the thing that's addicting about media, is that you're doing basically product development, but the feedback loops are so rapid.
33:47	MFM	Every day.
33:47	MFM	So, with Aurora, we had this idea to build a water-filter company. The R&D process, however, took about 18 months or so from the idea to actually shipping a product.
33:57	MFM	Yeah.
33:57	MFM	And then, with media, it's like idea to product—in these really rapid, hour-long to twenty-four-hour cycles. That's something I think we love, because we'll be sitting here on a Friday and be like, "Okay..."
34:12	MFM	We should have a stock ticker on the bottom.
34:13	MFM	Boom. Monday is the same, yeah, so...
34:16	Sam Parr	Are you guys disciplined about sticking within your brand parameters? Or do you sometimes stray, because that can be hard and it requires—yeah, it does require discipline.
34:23	MFM	I think it has to constantly be evolving. Look back to the skate, surf, and snowboard brands: any brand that was stuck in its ways and didn't expand, evolve, or reflect culture ultimately didn't make it. These are brands you could now go back and buy and bring into the modern era, but it has to be flexible. The transition from being called "Technology Brothers" to "TBPN" was a big moment for us. A lot of people would have said "Technology Brothers" is a great brand. We had already kind of saturated X at the time, so we were small, but people knew about us. We knew that was going to be necessary to evolve into the kind of media company we wanted to be. You need a commitment to evolving. The Internet allows that: many of the ideas people had around brand and advertising were created in a world of long-term planning—print, television marketing, catalogs, and so on. Now, with the Internet, you can iterate on ideas so rapidly and evolve your brand quickly. It's a few clicks to fully update yourself. So the only consistent thing for our company is the feeling we're trying to create—what we want people to feel when interacting with the brand—and I think that has to
35:57	Sam Parr	That's awesome.
35:58	MFM	That has to stay consistent, because that is the brand. It's not necessarily whatever logo you have at any one given time.</FormattedResponse>
36:10	Shaan Puri	"Dude, that's great. You guys are... can we get back to the list?"
36:12	MFM	Let's do.
36:13	MFM	But Sam, my first-ever company was a skateboard company. This was the pivotal moment for me. At 12 years old, I realized I had found someone in the Midwest who would manufacture skateboard decks for me. That wasn't my first million, but it was my first $100—my first time making $100 from building a product. That was such an insane moment. I thought, "You make this, and then I get to put my logo on it and sell it. This is the most amazing thing ever." So that was my first experience building any type of brand: J Man Designs. It's still J Man—I still have a board in my home office. Once I realized you can just... that was my moment: everything you see in the world is a business, and there's no reason you can't build it yourself.
37:08	Sam Parr	We have to shred the gnar sometimes. I still skate.
37:11	MFM	"Yeah, I've seen you — you are incredible at skating in those videos."
37:13	MFM	And Instagram — I realized, by my teenage years, "this is a hobby that destroys your body." So I switched to surfing.
37:21	MFM	I can't believe you can still do that. Every time I see that video, it's insane. Anyway...
37:26	Sam Parr	Yeah... I still like to get after it. I want to be a 40-year-old man doing handrails still — it's crazy. Alright, alright. Should I do mine? You guys are gonna make fun of me.
37:35	Shaan Puri	My no.
37:35	Sam Parr	My next one is.
37:36	Shaan Puri	"I'm prepared."
37:37	Sam Parr	Self promote y.
37:38	MFM	"I love this."
37:39	Shaan Puri	No, this is amazing. It's just... Oh my God — I thought you might do this. I was gonna make fun of you, but no, love it. It just makes sense. Okay.
37:51	Sam Parr	So I picked HubSpot, but the reality is there's probably 30 or 50 or 100 companies that could go in this case here. The "saaspocalypse" — was that what we're calling it? Yep. Insane, insane to me. So, HubSpot — I think they peaked around $908,150 a share, then went down. I think the low recently was $200.
38:11	MFM	Mmm-hmm.
38:11	Sam Parr	I think that is insane. HubSpot — and again, substitute this with many different companies; it's probably the same story — HubSpot does $3 billion in revenue with a $14 billion market cap. Okay, I think that is insane. They're projecting to do $3.7 billion in 2026, so you're buying a subscription software company that I don't think people are going to tear out of their business at something like 3x revenue. Everyone talks about it — the "nerds on Twitter" (I'm one of them) — talking about building their own CRMs. Maybe the nerds are doing that, but a roofing company with 20 employees in Tennessee? They aren't going to be doing it anytime soon. So I do think this is overblown with them and however many companies. I think I saw Monday.com — I think they do $1 billion in revenue at a $2 billion market cap. I forget exactly, but I think that's insane. The bear case with some of these SaaS companies is the seat model. Do you guys remember just the other day that Subsec article went live, where it was basically a guy telling a story about how AI is going to be so good that people aren't going to work, and if they aren't going to work they aren't going to buy stuff? It does kind of beg the question: if software companies do pay-per-seat, and you have fewer employees — Square just laid off, I think it was roughly 40% of their staff — do they need to continue buying software at the same rate because of the seat model? That's the bear case. But I just think the SaaS apocalypse is totally overblown.
39:45	Shaan Puri	What do you guys think? Reaction?
39:47	MFM	Yeah, I mean—going back to this Sarah's List concept: the amazing thing about HubSpot equity is that it is liquid, right? So it's very real. There are a lot of companies in our industry where you might get a massive grant, but you have no… you're fully locked up.
40:08	MFM	And I think — to the tune of, like, can you get the 3x, 4x, 5x? Well, if the narrative flips and people are like, "Wait — actually, HubSpot has some real, significant moat, and that thing that we thought was going to kill them isn't going to kill them," well, it just pops right back up. So that's sort of the option value I see. I would actually...
40:28	MFM	"Say, say... like."
40:28	MFM	More pressure from—maybe—startups that are not doing the seat-based model; they're doing more of an outcome-based model. But a lot of those companies are just getting started, and it's going to be years until there's any real disruptive pressure.
40:43	MFM	Yeah. My general framework is that it's going to—even HubSpot will need to evolve in a way that it hasn't since inception. Just naturally. So we need great leadership. I don't believe that SaaS is going away, but it's going to require great leadership to help evolve and help the company actually build a lot of momentum in this new era. So I'm with you. I don't think the local roofing company is going to just be "vibe code" and kind of maintain their own software stack. Leadership is going to have to actually step up. It's moving from, "Hey, we can just compound at this rate annually forever,"—this easy-mode SaaS that we saw—into something that requires active evolution and direction.
41:27	MFM	Yeah. If they're going to bake off with a company that has some really crazy agentic features — and basically the CRM is cleaning itself up, adding stuff, and doing lead scoring even better — then they're going to need to invest a lot more. But in general, it's a very, very strong position to be in: system of record.
41:42	Sam Parr	What say you, Sean? You don't — it doesn't even have to be HubSpot. It could be any; it could be dozens.
41:46	MFM	Of companies.
41:47	Shaan Puri	I've been looking at this. I mean, I've been looking at it actually just as an investor, to say, "Okay—definitely seems like an overreaction, yeah."
41:55	MFM	You know... you know, Monish Pavaray came on the podcast. He...
41:57	Shaan Puri	He said a great thing: "risk and uncertainty are two different words," and most investors don't understand that. He explained how the stock market responds to uncertainty more than it does to risk. That's what is happening right now — there's just uncertainty. Uncertainty is very different from saying something bad is actually going to happen. It's that we don't know what future cash flows look like or what future growth rates will be, so you get a discount just for uncertainty. I've been looking at all these SaaS stocks — Figma, Salesforce, HubSpot — and they are all on sale. I'm asking myself, "Do I want to stock up while these are on sale?" I think these are pretty good companies, but they do have some level of uncertainty. So I've definitely been looking at this. I was joking, groaning at your pick, but I actually think it's a pretty good pick. Especially because, the way John said it: "you're going to be liquid the whole time if you [unclear phrase: 'sarah's list this company']." You're going to be working at a well—like, a company with 20 years of success under its belt: systems and all this good stuff — and it's basically at an all-time low for where it's at.
43:03	MFM	One thing you have to be aware of is AI. There's not going to be some announcement by the labs saying, "Hey guys, AI is actually reversed in progress and it's getting way worse — we think it's going to be much worse in the future," and then the stock's going to rock it up. Instead, it's more likely to be, "Hey, the AI is only going to get more capable; there are going to be new capabilities unlocked." So you have to make this thesis with that in mind. I think there's a way to do it. HubSpot serves an incredible number of small businesses. They're in a great position to actually deliver the value of AI to all those people. But that's what I'm saying: it's all going to come down to management and their ability to not just build a story around AI as a tailwind for the business, but actually show that we are delivering the power of AI to our customer base, and they are giving us more money every single month than they were the last… [sentence trails off] </FormattedResponse>
43:53	Shaan Puri	Your bold case, Sam. I think you wrote "AI features still suck," which is a funny bold case, but it's true. I think there have been a few companies—like Intercom and Zendesk—where they added AI to their existing product and said, "Oh yeah." I think Zendesk was at $200,000,000 or something in ARR [annual recurring revenue] off of their AI feature. Intercom is over $100 million on their AI. Intercom has been around forever with customer support, and you would think, "Oh, they're gonna get disrupted by AI," but they're like, "Well actually, the harder part is getting all these customer relationships." It's actually much easier to integrate an AI feature than it is to go get 100,000 small businesses to trust you and use you and integrate you. So the question is: can they do that? If they do, then the narrative is not just, "Oh, they're not getting disrupted," but actually, "Oh my god, look at all this extra growth they're getting because they have the..." </FormattedResponse>
44:37	Sam Parr	The AI thesis that I have been buying into for the past two or three years, since AI got really popular, was this: "There are going to be a lot of new entrants." But the vast majority — I think Jordy, or one of you guys, made this joke, and it's not a joke — the vast majority of value creation is going to be by big companies just getting bigger. I just think that it's much easier for Salesforce to get more efficient and launch new features than it is for a new company. At least, picking those new companies [that will succeed] is very hard. So, picking a company that already works and is going to get just a little bit better — it just makes so much more money.
45:12	Shaan Puri	Right — love it. Alright, let's move to the next pick. Let's get one from the TPPM guys: what do we got?
45:18	MFM	We should do Semi Analysis. This is so interesting. Semi Analysis looks like a Substack. If you go to the website [it might even be hosted on Substack], they have a website that breaks down semiconductor and AI infrastructure build-outs. They have a model for how data centers are progressing, how much it costs to inference different AI models, and how the different chips are doing. They'll do a review of the latest Google TPU and they'll explain how the latest NVIDIA chip works. They're doing — it's a great business because...
45:52	Sam Parr	Wait — so it's like Wirecutter? It's like a... it's like a... it's like a publication. </FormattedResponse>
45:56	MFM	But, but, Wirecutter for the richest people in the world, because they run trillion-dollar companies — yeah — and institutions. Institutions like hedge funds and banks, and also the actual hyperscalers themselves. So if you're AMD, you want to know what NVIDIA is doing. If you're NVIDIA, you want to know what AMD is doing. And semi-analysis [semiconductor analysis] is going to talk to everyone, do a ton of research, and put together a whole bunch of data into a cleanly organized spreadsheet that you can import into your valuation model to determine whether or not Microsoft is going to beat earnings. So they sell those models.
46:29	Sam Parr	It's a publication, or it's a...</FormattedResponse>
46:31	Shaan Puri	It's a puzzle, dude. It's like your company.
46:34	MFM	Right, it's a publication, so think of...
46:35	MFM	I think of it as "subscribe."
46:37	MFM	You can subscribe to...</FormattedResponse>
46:38	Shaan Puri	Like, as a newsletter.
46:40	Sam Parr	Like, at the newsletter, but you...
46:41	MFM	You can also buy models that are prebuilt, like Excel models with data in them. Those are very expensive. So, yes.
46:50	Shaan Puri	"Sam, have you seen this guy, Dylan Patel?"
46:52	Sam Parr	No is by way great.
46:54	Shaan Puri	I've never met an Indian guy named Dylan, but love it — love it. When he goes on podcasts, this guy is so knowledgeable about what's going on with CPUs and GPUs. I don't know if you've ever seen the Louis C.K. bit where he talks about how he sometimes likes to use the n-word "in a positive way." He describes going to a coffee shop and ordering a coffee; if the barista foams and froths it and makes it perfect, he'll say: > "That n-word made the shit out of my coffee." [Contains offensive language.] That's how I feel watching Dilla Patel talk about GPUs and infrastructure. He'll be talking about the new Colossus thing, and he knows the megawatts under the FLOPS — everything.
47:32	MFM	What cables they're using, and he knows everything. He's like... </FormattedResponse>
47:36	Shaan Puri	We got satellites watching the parking lots, and we figured out this is how bad they're scaling. This guy knows—he knows so much. It's incredible how knowledgeable this one person is about GPUs.
47:47	Sam Parr	"Is he writing all of this because it looks like an AI blog?" </FormattedResponse>
47:51	MFM	They use AI imagery, but all the text is written by their staff of analysts. They have about 50 people working there. On a particular deep dive, they might have five to six authors attached. Dylan might write something; other folks might write something. Doug O'Laughlin is also over there.
48:08	Shaan Puri	And how much money are they making? Do you guys have— is this like a $5,000,000 company? 50? 500? Like, what's going on with this?
48:14	MFM	"I would put it at tens of millions." </FormattedResponse>
48:15	MFM	I would put it in the tens of millions. But here's the interesting bull case: right now they have a very respected analysis group, and they're also launching a fund—allegedly, according to the information—to invest in both semiconductor stocks and startups. They're already doing angel investing, and they're also going to do credit ratings. The real model to think about is Moody's. If you're familiar with Moody's, they do credit ratings. Moody's got started during the railroad build-out because the railroad expansion was so capital-intensive that there was a huge secondary market asking, "Is this person that's going to build this railroad from Chicago to Atlanta good for it? Do they have the money?" Moody's is now an $80 billion business. If you look at the stock, Moody's has not moved much during the sell-off; it's doing fine. Yes, this is very indexed to the AI boom, but the actual business can be very stable, very high-margin, and much bigger than people think when they think of just publishing analysis.
49:23	Sam Parr	This one's the best. This is the best — awesome. This is super cool.
49:27	MFM	Yeah. One of our teammate's brothers just got a job here, and John and I were so excited for him. Because if you want—if you're excited about AI and you're not a researcher, product designer, product manager, or a founder, but you want to be at the center of the action and actually understand what's happening, this is fantastic—it's...</FormattedResponse>
49:51	MFM	A super interesting job with a lot of upside.
49:53	Sam Parr	Are they—do they have offices? It looks like the founder lives in San Francisco. Is it like in real life?
49:57	MFM	Yes, they have a West Coast and an East Coast.
50:00	MFM	Yeah, but it's a lot of — it's a lot of time with, like, hedge funds and banks and managers, this guy. Also, Dylan Patel is very young; I believe he's in his twenties. I like your description of his "encyclopedic knowledge" of the semiconductor industry — that's correct. I think if you just look at what that compounds to over two decades, you're already seeing one of the most important voices in the most important industry. It just compounds.
50:29	Sam Parr	Have you guys ever read this book called How to Get Rich? It's by an author called Felix Dennis — Felix Dennis, guys.
50:36	MFM	Have the magazine guy, right?
50:37	Sam Parr	The magazine guy — you should Google Felix Dennis. Felix Dennis was that kind of person: a combination of Richard Branson and Mick Jagger. He was kind of vulgar but had this British aristocrat vibe. He was really funny. He died from cancer and used to joke that he was a crackhead — literally a cocaine and crack addict — and he spent a lot of his money doing it. He wrote about it, and he was funny when he wrote about it. Anyway, he got rich because he created this thing called Dennis Publications. Dennis Publications was a computer magazine started in the late 1970s/early 1980s, and it made him a fortune. When he passed away he was probably worth $800–900 million, and this was in 2008, so he was very, very wealthy. There have been like ten different guys — a guy named Pat McGovern who became a multi‑billionaire because of computer magazines in the 1990s, Ziff Davis — have you heard of Bill Ziff? — there have been so many of these. What you are explaining right now, with what Dylan Patel does, is this exact same B2B publication play in a technology boom: owning a very small niche and just kicking ass, using the same playbook of research, media, and events. It has created many billionaires.
51:46	MFM	Yeah. One way to look at semi analysis is that it's what they're doing to sell-side research firms. It's like, "Hey, wait — you're a Substack; you can't do..." You can't do advanced research on semis [semiconductors], you know, or you can't compete with us. You guys are... yeah.
52:01	MFM	You have the aesthetics of a Goldman Sachs equity research or Morgan Stanley report, but the data's just as good, if not better.
52:09	MFM	And, of course, with TBPN it's like, "Wait — you guys don't have a cable network? Like... you can't interview this person on the day they're IPO-ing," and it's like, "You can just..."
52:19	MFM	You can just do things.
52:21	Sam Parr	This is the—it's the same thing. I, as someone who is a little bit of a media historian nerd, see the same story over and over and over again. This is a great find, Sean. "You wanna bring us home? What do you got?"
52:33	Shaan Puri	Alright, I got one for you guys. This is a name a lot of people know but I hadn't really put too much thought into: Harvey. Harvey is basically very simple — it's an AI lawyer. It's AI software for law firms. More specifically, they've been raising rounds. If I did this episode six months ago, I would've said they were a $2 billion company, then $5 billion, and now they're an $8 billion company. I might be getting priced out as it goes, but I do love the space. They're doing about $200 million in revenue off just roughly 1,000 customers. I think about half of the top 100 law firms in America are using them in some capacity. I like to do bottoms-up math to make my own case for these things. In the U.S., there are about 500,000 law firms, and right now Harvey's average contract value is about $190,000, which means they're basically getting paid like they're a lawyer who works at the firm. I don't think that price point will be there for smaller law firms; there will obviously be a lower price for them.
53:41	Shaan Puri	But just in general, legal work is a perfect candidate for AI work because it's mostly text documents—mostly writing, reading, and summarizing. There are also really bespoke workflows that a law firm needs: compliance, security, validation—those are things you have to build specifically for a law firm. Would a lawyer rather just upload everything into ChatGPT? I don't think so. I think there will be purpose-built tools for law firms. Harvey is one, Legora is another. They're both companies in the same space, kind of competing for this. The cool part is that if you can add leverage into the legal system, that will transform the economics of how law firms work. Right now they bill by "billable hours": you add more bodies, and there's an incentive to spend more time on something. I think that's going to change. More and more law firms will use AI and realize they don't need as many people to do the same amount of work, and their billing model will change. Harvey is a perfect example: as AI happens right now, there will be winners. Remember all those companies that got started when AI happened? The big ones are OpenAI and Anthropic and others. Then there will be vertical ones, and the legal vertical is a clear-cut, obvious example that will be pretty big. If you do the math—every law firm using AI—depending on the market share they capture, multiply that times 100,000 per firm and you very quickly get into the tens of billions in revenue available.
55:24	MFM	The thesis for Harvey has been: there haven't been a lot of big outcomes from just building software for lawyers. So when investors have backed Harvey, the general thesis was that they're going to capture some of the current labor spend — which is a much, much bigger market than enterprise software. I have a friend at one of the big law firms. He got an early demo of Harvey when I first talked to him about it. He was like, "Oh, it's cool." Then, about a year later — somewhere in early Q4 of last year — his eyes were wide open and he said, "It's a real, real deal now." They've made a lot of progress; the product gets better as the models get better. The question is how much the labs actually care to build out the more enterprise functionality that Harvey has already built. There will naturally be some competition there over time. We had John Quinn from Quinn Emanuel on our show today — the most feared lawyer in the world. Really cool guy. You guys would have a fun conversation with him.
56:35	MFM	"Is that Elon's lawyer?"
56:37	MFM	Yeah, yeah, and I was—I asked, "Was..."
56:40	Sam Parr	He is nice.
56:41	MFM	"Do you think?"
56:41	MFM	Oh, super nice.
56:42	MFM	Oh, he's a sweetheart. Yeah, he's so nice, but not the kind you'd want on your bad side.
56:48	MFM	He's not in.</FormattedResponse>
56:49	MFM	But I asked him: AI is really good at generating legal docs already. It might make some errors, but it can make them really fast. I was like, "Do you think we'll potentially have 100× more litigation?" He was like, "Yeah, possibly." But he also said that that's kind of the bull case for lawyers still being at full employment: a lawyer might be way more effective, but there could just be way more cases. So that would be kind of a very American outcome.
57:18	Shaan Puri	It's like—what's that story in India where they said, "There are too many pythons; we'll pay a bounty"? The idea was, "Bring us a dead python; you get [an unspecified monetary reward]." Then the python population boomed because people started breeding pythons.
57:29	MFM	Yep.
57:29	Shaan Puri	"That's basically what you're saying is going to happen: we're just going to breed more of this—like, useless litigation. Love it."
57:34	MFM	Well, this already happened in legal [legal department]. There was a piece of software that would help lawyers write down their billable hours, and it would sort of pad it out. Then there was software on the client side that would automatically scan it and say, "That's not work I'm paying for — get that out of there, get that out of there." It became like a bot-on-bot war. Very fun.
57:55	Sam Parr	Did you guys see the episode we did with John Morgan?
57:58	MFM	No. Oh, Morgan and Morgan.
58:00	Sam Parr	Yeah, so we had John Morgan on. So, for the listener, Jordy — I don't know if you saw his... [unclear]. I don't know if he's in California or not.
58:05	MFM	I've seen John Morgan's. He has—yeah, I watched the episode.
58:08	Sam Parr	I think it might be the largest type of his law firm. What is he? He is a...
58:13	MFM	Injury law.
58:14	Sam Parr	Law, yeah.
58:15	MFM	Yeah... he's so...
58:15	Sam Parr	He has commercials everywhere, and he comes off as sweet. He's older—he's in his seventies. He almost comes off like a grandpa; you want to trust him.
58:24	MFM	Yeah.
58:24	Sam Parr	He comes off like a very PC, soft guy, but, you know... whatever — he's a lawyer. We had him on the pod [podcast]. I swear to God, the very first sentence he says to us: I say to him, "John, I hear that you own a museum on crime and punishment. That's really unique." Verbatim. He replies, "Oh, that thing — that thing prints." That's the first line, I swear to God, that he said to us, word for word.
58:55	MFM	Makes a lot of money — that's because...
58:57	Sam Parr	He owns—he owns an amusement park business. He also owns seven museums called "Alcatraz of the East," I think he calls it.
59:07	MFM	Oh, okay.
59:08	Sam Parr	And, oh—we were like, "How do..."
59:10	Shaan Puri	You have time to do this. You have a $5 billion law firm. Yeah, and he was like, "I don't hunt deer. I hunt money." We're like, "This guy's incredible." That's—"I'm from John Morgan." </FormattedResponse>
59:22	MFM	That's amazing, it...
59:23	Sam Parr	"That was one of the craziest interviews, I think we've ever done. It was the most different."
59:28	Shaan Puri	It was awesome.
59:29	Sam Parr	The commercial versus the reality: it was way different.
59:33	MFM	There's a number of Harveys for personal-injury people that are making software specifically to qualify these types of cases. Right, it'll naturally be controversial because some people don't like the whole category. But that's just an area. There's going to be, like, vertical Harveys. That's terrible.
59:54	Shaan Puri	Just send me your deck. I just gotta take a look. I can't believe you guys are doing that, but just send it over... yeah, yeah.
01:00:00	MFM	Yeah, we got one more for you guys that I think you'll like. Have you guys heard of Send Cut Send?
01:00:08	Sam Parr	No. What is?
01:00:09	Shaan Puri	That? What is that?
01:00:10	MFM	Okay, so: fun name for a pretty serious company.
01:00:14	Sam Parr	It was cool.
01:00:14	MFM	They let engineers upload CAD files and quickly get custom parts made using software automation, making quoting and production fast and frictionless. [CAD = computer-aided design]</FormattedResponse>
01:00:22	Sam Parr	So you've done that down a little bit.
01:00:25	MFM	What's a CAD file? You send in, like, a 3D file that says, "I want— you know — a cube milled out of aluminum and it's gotta have a cylinder." Let's put...
01:00:37	MFM	In skateboard terms—yeah—let's say you want to design your own pair of trucks.
01:00:40	MFM	Yeah, your own truck.
01:00:41	MFM	Yeah. Design the trucks on a computer. Then you take this file and send it to them.
01:00:46	MFM	They cut it, and then they send it to you.
01:00:50	MFM	We send them the file. They cut it up, they cut up the metal, and they send it back to you. This one's cool because it's fully aligned with everything you hear about reindustrialization—the kind of things that America used to do but forgot how to do. We ship these capabilities overseas, but SendCutSend is a bootstrapped company. Founder Jim has been on our show. They've scaled over $100,000,000 in annualized revenue completely independently and have thousands and thousands of happy customers all over the U.S. People talk about "why entrepreneurs end up manufacturing in Asia." One reason is cost, but another is speed. Every person who's manufactured something here will tell you: "I reached out to this shop, I asked them to make a part, they didn't get back to me for a week; when they did, they said they could do it in two months." SendCutSend is really focused on awesome speed and ease of use. They've scaled up organically, and the founder Jim is just amazing.
01:02:02	Sam Parr	How'd you guys find this? This doesn't appear to be in your wheelhouse.
01:02:06	MFM	Well, we love having companies come on the show that don't... you know, every single day there's probably $500,000 to $1 billion worth of fundraising rounds that get announced on TBPN. But we love having founders on that have never raised a dollar.
01:02:23	MFM	I met him through Jason Carmen, because Jason Carmen profiles a lot of hard-tech companies. He is a supplier to many of those hard-tech companies. You can kind of think of him as the index on all of those somewhat more risky reindustrialization bets. For example: is this drone company going to work? Is that drone company going to work? Well, they're both going to be buying parts from "sendcutsigned" [unclear name].
01:02:46	Sam Parr	Great find, man. This is a really cool one. He used to—so this guy owns... I, when you described it, was thinking more of a blue-collar-looking guy. He owned a landing-page company and then went into... yeah. </FormattedResponse>
01:02:59	MFM	He's just a hacker who decided to make stuff in the real world.
01:03:06	MFM	Yeah, but he's very... I mean, the bootstrap thing is, I think, important because it's a capital-intensive business. He's been thinking about profitability and scalability from day one, setting up a very healthy business that's not going to collapse at any point.
01:03:21	Shaan Puri	Time.
01:03:22	MFM	And we joked with him when he was on our show. We said, "If you were venture-backed, you'd be valued at $5 to $10 billion." You'd be getting some insane multiple. But he's happy to just build a great business and compound every single. We hope that he scales up dramatically and enters a bunch of different verticals over time, because Lord knows we need it.
01:03:45	Sam Parr	"Dude, there's been so many times where Sean and I talked to someone and I'm like, 'What am I doing—podcasting? This sounds so much cooler.' Do you guys... do you guys feel like that all the time, talking to all these amazing people?"
01:03:57	MFM	I think most of the people we talk to—we know we have no business being in their business. So I feel like—I wouldn't compete with Peter Rahal in selling protein bars, even though I could go make a protein bar, right?
01:04:14	MFM	Yeah, yeah. I think.
01:04:15	Shaan Puri	I'm missing that common sense, because every time I talk to these guys I'm like, "We're so similar—me and you." I think, "I should just be doing what you're doing; this is great." Somehow I think I have to do all of this.
01:04:25	Sam Parr	Halfway through the interview, Sean acts like I'm interviewing him. He gets on—Sean's like, "You know, Sam, guys like us... we're just here to do amazing things and build great products." He'll sign off by saying, "Thanks, thanks for having us, Sam."
01:04:38	MFM	Become the guest on your own show—it's elite. I love it.
01:04:42	Shaan Puri	I do like the bootstrap side because, I mean, one of the things with Sarah's List is you don't want to be taking a ton of dilution, right? Because even if the stock price is going up, you don't want a company that keeps requiring more and more capital, has a bigger cap stack—all that stuff. I had one on mine that was—we don't have to go into it too much—but it's Column Bank. It's kind of like this. Don't know if you guys saw the story; it came out just the other day. The founder of Plaid—his new company called Column—is basically a fintech company. It's a bank. He actually bought a bank for $60 million of his own money and then he started this. He basically uses it as the underlying bank under Mercury, under Ramp, under Brex, under all these companies. I think their numbers are out of date, but in 2026 they're doing $200 million in revenue. And he owns all of it—he never raised any money. Wow. It's like you said: it's an index into all the new fintech shit. If you think Ramp's going to keep growing and you think Mercury's going to keep growing, well, guess what—Column will keep doing well. They're doing extremely well, and here you've got a founder who owns the whole thing. So now you go work there—you're not going to take dilution the same way, because it's a profitable company.
01:05:49	MFM	That's awesome. Yeah, and they're competing with all the Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) providers because historically you'd have the fintech—like a neobank such as Mercury—and then there'd be a Banking-as-a-Service provider, and then there would be the actual chartered bank underneath it. So Column is like eating up the bottom two layers of the stack and saying, "Hey, build the consumer-facing financial services company, but we'll handle all the different API layers, down to the actual..." [The original sentence trails off.]
01:06:20	Sam Parr	I'm just browsing. It looks... so, we started this. I feel embarrassed. "Plaid or plate?" I know what it is: plaid. It's one of the—yeah, it's one of these words where I read "never say". </FormattedResponse>
01:06:31	MFM	The column was started due to his experience building Plaid, right? Because Plaid is like the...
01:06:36	MFM	Yeah, the rails.
01:06:37	MFM	"Allows, you know, is basically created in large part—helped create the overall fintech boom." That's a good example when you're picking companies. There's this belief in Silicon Valley that a founder with no experience can just come in and dominate the industry based on sheer willpower. But sometimes it's better to attach yourself to a team led by somebody who has deep, deep, deep experience and a vision grounded in having worked in the industry for a long time. Sometimes you don't need to overthink it. If you're going to join a company, go work for somebody who has done it before at massive scale.
01:07:24	Shaan Puri	What an unfair advantage. Not only do you see the problem, like you said, but how many meetings can you get with fintech companies if you're like, "Oh, by the way, I started Plaid," right? You get it—you can get every single meeting. You walk in with incredible credibility. And then you own the underlying bank. For whatever reason—I'm not a developer—but having great, easy-to-use APIs is a really big competitive advantage. It seems like every company should do it, because it sounds like... [unclear: "handwriting"]. It sounds like something so simple: a well-documented, well-designed API. But apparently it's a pretty big competitive advantage when you go into a space that historically didn't have that. And, you know, it's no surprise that a company like this is kicking ass.
01:08:05	Sam Parr	What a boss, man. We gotta get him on — amazing person. Looks like he's only 35, 36 years old. Hey, the bros: you guys are the best, man.
01:08:15	MFM	"It's been real."
01:08:16	Sam Parr	"Thank you so much for doing this."
01:08:17	Shaan Puri	Of course they're not brothers anymore.</FormattedResponse>
01:08:19	MFM	We're not.
01:08:19	Shaan Puri	By the way, John, I texted you when you changed the name to TBPN, and I was like, "Oh no — not gonna work. 'Technology Brothers' — that's the one." Yep, but I was wrong. You guys made TBPN work in an incredible way.
01:08:31	MFM	"No, I mean, it still is a mouthful. But online, people just type it out, and having four-letter domains, four-letter handles, like..."
01:08:39	MFM	You know, the other reason we did it is that we were shifting from just the two of us talking to doing guests. We wanted the aesthetics of being like a cable network because we wanted to go and get these public-company CEOs on. If you're trying to get a public-company CEO, some of them—the really founder‑mode ones—you can just DM them and they jump on. But a lot of them have layers of people in the communications department that you're going to need to gain the trust of. So, by having the optics of being like a network, even though we are just a podcast, we were able to end up getting a lot of those guests. And that's the funny nuance.
01:09:20	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I love that. It's like, "Oh yeah — the folks from TBPN have reached out." Exactly. It feels very different than, "You wanna come hang with the technology brothers." Exactly.
01:09:30	Sam Parr	It's like Jordan Belfort is calling it "Stratman Oakmont."
01:09:33	MFM	Stratman Oakmont. There we go. </FormattedResponse>
01:09:35	Sam Parr	He's like, "It's just a made-up name; it just sounded official." Yeah, thank you, guys. This is awesome. Awesome. You're welcome anytime. </FormattedResponse>
01:09:42	MFM	And we appreciate you. Thanks for having us.
01:09:44	Shaan Puri	We did their sign-on. Maybe we should let them do our sign-off. So we basically asked you, "Is that it?" "That's it." And then you say, "That's the pod." So could you give us a — "We'll set you up." Is that it? We're done.
01:09:55	MFM	"That's the pod."
01:09:56	MFM	That's the pod.

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The Simplest Way To Make $1M In 2026

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