Wait, My Intern Became a 21-Year-Old Millionaire?? (#510)

Shaan Puri

I remember at one point, you were telling me in Slack, "These people just offered me $2,000,000 for this." I was like, "Holy shit, you did it!" We started the podcast, my first million, and you just made your first $2,000,000. Congrats! I can't believe this worked out. You said, "I'm not gonna sell though," and I was like, "Wow, this guy's insane." That's an insane story. I can't tell you how many times I hear this. People will DM me every single day and say, "Hey, I'm just calling my shot right now. Today, I'm a small boy, but in 3 years from now, I'm gonna be on MFM. I'm gonna be on My First Million. I'm gonna make my first million doing XYZ." Yep, every single day, I get a message like that. Here's somebody who actually did it: this is Ishan. He was my intern, a guy who made $1,000,000, lost $1,000,000, and had a crazy journey in between. You were the guy who I created this podcast with. You were the guy on the cover of our podcast; you created it. The intro song, the original intro song, you created it. You know, I didn't even know how to record audio at the time. This guy did all of it. You went from behind the scenes to now being on the stage here in my house, and we're gonna record this episode. So, I've made it, you've made it. That's the teaser. Alright, let's tell the story.

Ishan Haque

what's up man yeah what's up what's up

Shaan Puri

I... so people don't know this. So, you are Ishaan. Yeah, I've known you since you were 18 years old. You still are kind of like 18 years old. Yeah, yeah.

Ishan Haque

yeah I still look like yeah I'm 18

Shaan Puri

Years old? Yeah, you're 23 now. Yep. Alright, so I'm thinking this episode is kind of like your title was "An Intern," but it's going to be good for YouTube. So we're going to be like, "My intern became a millionaire."

Ishan Haque

Well, like, yeah, I was glorified. My top official title is "Chief of Stuff." I mean, just like, out of... and by the...

Shaan Puri

I have a good track record with this. I don't know if I'm doing anything special, but I'm good at picking people. I worked with you at age 18, yep, Steve Bartlett, 19 maybe 20 years old. There's another guy named Rishan who just tweeted out today that those four months he worked with me were super influential. He went from just a guy working someplace to now having an 8-figure agency. So that was cool. Danny Miranda worked with me for a little bit. People know him in the podcast game now. He was with us for a couple of months before he started creating content. So, I feel like...

Ishan Haque

those 2 are sean's and maybe yeah getting getting people that like sound similar to your name

Shaan Puri

Yeah, yeah, the closer the better actually. Alright, so you've had a crazy run, but let's do the history. So, how did we meet?

Ishan Haque

Well, I followed you on Twitter when I was like 12 or 13 years old. I was tweeting my whole strategy. Let me get my profile picture... yeah, I'm going to reintroduce the...

Shaan Puri

The one part which is... yeah, one thing that people don't know is this podcast was actually started not with me and Sam, but with you and me. I hit you up on Twitter DMs. Yes, yep! I saw that you were a podcast editor for somebody else. I knew my friend Corey, or AngelList or something like that—Corey Levy. So I had this idea: "Alright, I want to do a podcast." I hit you up. I didn't know how old you were, but I was like, "Hey, do you want to produce for me?" Then we got on a call, and I was like, "Oh man, this is like a kid summer." You were at school at the time, and I was like, "Do you know how audio works?" And you're like, "Yes, I got you." So if people see the cover art of the podcast, yeah, you made that. The initial, like, you know, 20 episodes or whatever—all those intros and all the audio—you made that. Then we started doing business experiments together. This was at a time when I was kind of like, "I think I want to build an audience," and I also wanted to just launch some businesses. We launched e-commerce businesses; we launched a bunch of stuff together. Then we all went our own ways, and then you had a crazy journey after that where you made a million dollars, lost a million dollars, and all the rest. So we're going to talk about all that. Let's start at the beginning. So I DM'd you, but you were actually on Twitter when you said we were, what, 13?

Hubspot

Years old... 13 years old, I followed you. I was trying to just get my face in front of all these people because I'm from Australia, right? There's no Silicon Valley, there's no VCs, and no cool angels. So I thought, "Let me use this as my avenue to get to these people." I started tweeting random things at you guys, even if it wasn't a lot of value added. If you go on my Twitter, you'll find tweets of me tweeting random stuff at Sean, and you'll respond here and there. Yes, that was when I was literally like 13 or 14. A couple of years later, when I was doing the podcast with Corey, you DM'd me, and I was like, "Yeah, I already know who you are. Let's do this." I think I found you because your name was also Sean, and I was like, "This is it for me." Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform that shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned—no out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot: grow better.

Shaan Puri

Talk about the start. So, when we were working together, tell me some of the things you remember. Because I remember, I only... everyone's got their own version of history. Yeah, I remember in my head, like, you know what we were thinking back then. But I'm curious, and this is our first time catching up in person because you live in Australia and you're just in town. So, I...

Ishan Haque

Wasn't it you who used to live where I lived? I was living in Brisbane. You also, like way back when, lived in Brisbane?

Shaan Puri

so what's your version of history what do you remember

Ishan Haque

The first thing I remember... Well, I think the first thing I remember is when we were doing the podcast cover art and stuff. I sent you over some options, like, "Here's version A, version B, blah blah blah." Then you were like, "Hold on a second, you should add your name to the cover." Yeah, and I thought that was really cool. That gave me a lot of confidence, like, "Oh, okay, yeah, that sounds good. I'm a part of this as well." I remember that was a cool thing you did because I think maybe there's some learning there for people that hire... Yeah, give it a thumbs up.

Shaan Puri

make them feel special yeah

Ishan Haque

Yeah, you make them feel so special. Do that! So, that was also a really cool thing. I remember the kind of craziness of like, "Let's start a crystal store today!" And then, a few weeks later, "Let's start this other D2C thing." Like, make up the store, 72 hours, go off and do it! It was like some variation of an incubator, but it's just like... so after you guys.

Shaan Puri

At this time, I'm working at Twitch. I'm earning out my deal; we sold to Twitch, and I'm now earning out. I know that in a year, I get this vesting check. But in the meantime, frankly, I was pretty bored inside of a big company. I knew that wasn't my long-term plan. I was thinking, "What can I do on the side to entertain myself?" The podcast was one cool thing I'd always wanted to do. Then, I would meet somebody and think, "Oh, this person's killing it in e-commerce." For example, I remember talking to Eshawn, who was making it in an e-commerce store. I also remember reading an article about crystals. I saw something in a magazine; I always try to look outside of the usual sources. I don't look at TechCrunch for tech ideas or business ideas. I remember reading in People magazine that Adele said she wouldn't go on stage unless she asked for rose quartz crystals. I thought, "What? That's insane! Who believes in this stuff?" Then I googled it and found out that after Kim Kardashian got mugged, she had a $4,000,000 ring. When asked how she recovered, she said, "Well, my crystals really grounded me." No problem! I noticed all these celebrities were into this, and I thought, "If all the celebrities are doing this, then there must be a bunch of other people who believe in it too." I remember calling you, and you said, "The best part about you is your game." That's my favorite thing. If you hire someone with no experience, there are a bunch of bad things that could happen. For example, I might say, "Dude, I haven't heard from you in two days. Where'd you go?" But on the good side, they don't know any better. I could just say, "Hey, we're doing this, and we're going to launch it in two days." And they might think, "I don't know, is that normal? Maybe that's normal."

Ishan Haque

Like, yeah, because besides this, I've never... I've always been working for internet people. I have never had a traditional job, like going to an office. I remember at the time thinking, "I'm going to finish university. Should I go and be a consultant for some bank or whatever?"

Shaan Puri

yeah you asked me that

Ishan Haque

I was like, "So, because yeah, I just didn't know what the other... I guess I was just gay because I didn't know what the other world was like." I was like, "Alright, this is kind of right, normal, and doing this." So, yeah, crazy stuff. Like just creating different e-commerce stores or different experiments. We did like a newsletter called "The Good, The Terrible, The Bad, Very Bad." Oh, that's all. And then do...

Shaan Puri

It out here, that was like that one top 5 before we came on Milk Road, right? Milk Road became a... yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Milk Road became a successful newsletter company. But I guess before that, I didn't even remember that we did launch a newsletter called "The No Good, Very Bad, Terrible Something Something Something Newsletter." I don't know why we called it that, but we basically were launching a bunch of experiments. I remember at the time, one of my takeaways from that is that with Crystal Store, for example, I didn't even know what winning looked like. So one problem with an experiment—because you need to use this word "experiment"—is that the way a science experiment works is you have a hypothesis. You're like, "I believe this," then you run the test, and it either confirms it or it doesn't. But I was using the word "experiment" wrong, which was like, "I'm just gonna try a bunch of stuff without actually knowing what the win condition is." What is the success or failure condition of this? Now that I actually have an eCommerce business, which is doing very well—it's an 8-figure eCommerce business—now that I know what an eCommerce business looks like, I can go back and think about our Crystal Store. Actually, it was doing very well; I just didn't know. For example, we were running Facebook ads, and the key metric for all eCommerce businesses is your ROAS, or Return on Ad Spend. I think we were getting like 1.7.

Ishan Haque

yeah well like the rucs yeah we were selling these rucs we're like 50 60 8

Shaan Puri

they're all they're all knocks they're crystals crystals yeah

Ishan Haque

Yeah, and I remember the first few hours we got that Shopify ding. That's amazing! I mean, most people start up a store and they don't have sales for like a couple of days or whatever, or even weeks. So, yeah, I think our problem was that we just didn't continue.

Shaan Puri

We didn't continue exactly because now that I look back, it was like 1.7 to 2x. I remember thinking, "Oh, it's supposed to be 3 or 4x." I think I had heard some... well, an idiot saying that somewhere, and I just thought that's what it is. So I was like, "I guess this is bad. Turn it like shut it down. Let's do the next thing." You know, in retrospect, maybe I'm glad I'm not running a crystal store. But at the same time, there is a lesson there. I mean, sticking to it is obviously important; you can't win without the stick-to-it-ness. But one of the things that makes you stick to it is not just willpower. It's like knowing your win condition. So, do you even know what to look at? Do you know what winning looks like? Do you know what the benchmark should be so that you can actually assess a successful versus unsuccessful experiment? That was one of my learnings, one of the things I remember from back then. The other one I remember is, with the pod, we kind of called our shot a little bit. We made this Google Doc of the plan, the one-page plan. Now I call that my kickoff doc, but it was like before we started it, I wrote this out. Do you remember that doc?

Ishan Haque

Yeah, I remember. The first thing that you hopped on was, "You need your 1,000 true fans." That was the very, very first thing you said. If we just got this, you can build a pretty big business just with 1,000 people. That was the first thing I remember. Then you had a few other points, like when you get to 100,000 listeners, and you mentioned building a bunch of other ancillary businesses adjacent to it. I mean, you did all that. I was like, that's one thing you just kind of step back and it's like, "I'll share."

Shaan Puri

The doc... I'll put the doc. If you're on YouTube, I'm going to put it on the screen so you can see literally, like, word for word what we wrote back then. It's not that it all happened, but it definitely didn't happen on the timeline. I remember thinking, "Yeah, we're gonna hit... let's get to 100,000 downloads per episode." So that's the thing—like, per episode, I wanted 100,000 downloads by the end of the year. So it was like 12 months. It took me 3 years. Now we do that, but it took 3 years for us to ever hit that mark. So it's kind of this old phrase: "Don't confuse a clear view for a short distance." I feel like we had a clear view; I just thought things would happen faster. I overestimated what could be done in 1 year. But with that one, because it's so fun, I just kept going. And sure enough, like you...

Ishan Haque

I know it all. That was like the right thing to keep going. There are a lot of other tiny things, and that was like the right one.

Shaan Puri

The one that was making no money was actually costing me money. One of the things I wrote in that document is that I plan to lose $10,000 a year doing that. Oh yeah, yeah, but it'll be worth it because I thought, you know, it creates some **serendipity**. Yeah, and you kind of talked about that too, like content creating **serendipity** or just being online and being in the mix. Yeah, this is why liking...

Ishan Haque

A post, or applying to something, or putting yourself out there... who cares if someone doesn't like it? I mean, it's difficult for you now. If you post, there are millions of people that look at it. But for a regular person, when you post a tweet and it says like "116 impressions," it's got no likes. That's still some people that have looked at it, and you don't know.

Shaan Puri

who it is

Ishan Haque

But you know, later down the line, that could come in handy. When we talk about some of the stuff I'm doing now, I can say I've gotten all my opportunities. Every single one of them has been through Twitter, or like through some LinkedIn connection, or some email or thing I've sent. And years later, down the track, it's all come to me.

Shaan Puri

well tell the story about the billionaire so what what happened there that's it you put it on twitter

Ishan Haque

Yeah, that was me just saying, "I need a... I just made this kick-ass investment, and I want more people to know about it." So, I was talking to journalists and stuff like that, like, "Hey, write about the story." No one was really taking the time, but there was one dude who was actually active on Twitter. I saw he wasn't responding to anything else, so I went on Twitter and noticed he was active there. I just kept liking his posts; I didn't actually say anything. Then, he checked out my LinkedIn profile, and we started talking. He was like, "Okay, yeah, let me write about the story."

Shaan Puri

and it

Ishan Haque

It wasn't like Forbes or anything; it was a pretty small news site. It's so weird that they posted that article, and a few days later, Billy there read that article and then reached out to you. Exactly, exactly.

Shaan Puri

And then, well, we'll tell that story in a sec. So, even that is like... there's this phrase that I read once. I think Mark Suster did a blog post about this called "Lines Not Dots." Basically, the idea is that a line is just a collection of dots. Mathematically, that's what a line is—multiple dots all connected. What he says is, you know, what people think happens is they see on TV that you go in, you meet this investor cold, and you blow their socks off with this pitch. Then they write you this check and say, "Here you go, son, go on." But that's not what happens. That's movies. That's Shark Tank. That's not real. The real thing is dots. Many interactions stack up, and when you look back later, it's a line. Investors invest in lines, not dots. This means they're not just going to invest after the very first interaction. Typically, it's about following the person, liking the post, replying to something they notice. This person said something smart—not the first time, but the third time. Yep. Then, after that, they follow you back. Because of that, they see this other blog post you wrote. You don't even realize that one of your 98 views was from this person who's actually legit. And then, you know, those dots stack up, and ultimately, that's how trust gets built. That's how the framework works.

Ishan Haque

this is the framework king at yeah

Shaan Puri

his action item watch me close baby that's what I do

Ishan Haque

yeah

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so that's, I think, you know what you've done really well. So, alright, let's get to the part where we break up. At some point, we break up. We worked together for a while, like for a year or so.

Ishan Haque

something I think it was actually a couple of years of like knowing each other and like doing something that I don't yeah

Shaan Puri

So, we get to a point where you come to me one day and say, "I want to day trade" or something. To be fair, you were actually kind of good at this. I remember one time we were on a call, and I was telling you some instructions or action items. Then, there was like no feedback, and I was like, "Yo, are you listening? What are you doing? What happened? Is this thing on?" You were like, "Oh, hang on, Bitcoin just crashed to $35,100." I'm like, "This motherfucker's looking at the Bitcoin price while we're supposed to be working on our very important crystal store or whatever we were doing, whatever scheme we were in at the time." I remember having two reactions: one, I was annoyed, thinking, "Dude, this guy's not paying attention." Two, I was like, "Wait, Bitcoin crashed? Shouldn't you be buying?" You were like, "Because you told me Bitcoin crashed, I'm trying to..."

Ishan Haque

I'm trying to place an order real quick. It was down like 60% on just that day. Everyone in crypto knows that day. It was very... like it.

Shaan Puri

was like in march

Ishan Haque

Or something, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was. And like, you just never see it happen. This is not some altcoin; this is like *the* coin. This is Bitcoin. So when that happened, I was like, "I've seen a few of these, and I just wasn't a part of it." I was like, "I'm sorry, I know I should be working and listening right now, but I need to act."

Shaan Puri

right now and so yeah

Ishan Haque

I mean, I grabbed all the money I had. It was a couple of thousand dollars. I didn't just buy Bitcoin; the degenerate in me was like, "Okay, let me try and maximize opportunity." So, I went on... people know BitMEX. I went leveraged long on Bitcoin. I took all my money and did that. When...

Shaan Puri

I went and leverage long means what here in this case

Ishan Haque

So, if you buy $1,000 worth of Bitcoin and you buy it with 20x leverage, that means you actually buy $20,000 worth.

Shaan Puri

but if it if it goes down by even a little bit yeah you'll you'll you'll

Ishan Haque

Getting wiped out, you'll experience a thing called liquidation. Right? So, getting liquidated is like...

Shaan Puri

your worst nightmare and I remember you were like what 4 5 grand

Ishan Haque

Your bills were just like $4,000. That was my collateral. I was 20x or 25x leveraged. When I clicked the button to buy, everything went frozen. I was thinking, "Oh shit, is it just me or am I kind of freaking out?" I went on Twitter; that's why I was not really talking. I went on Twitter and everyone else was saying, "BitMEX just froze." I was like, "Okay, it's not just me. It's the actual exchange." I was kind of freaking out because I thought, "Alright, it's gone. I've already clicked buy." When you're looking at the chart, if you look at the one-minute chart, it was just going down. It went down, down, down, and then it just stopped.

Shaan Puri

you made the decision

Ishan Haque

Yeah, you'd assume that when it unfreezes, it would have just kept going down because who knows? This was like a black swan event, right? So we don't know what's going on. That's why I was frozen for a while because I thought, "I'm an idiot, I just lost all my money." But when it unfroze, I saw I was up like $40,000, and I was like, "Oh!" My heart was pounding. And yeah, that's when I think you are a clone base. You'd be able to... I was like, when...

Shaan Puri

You told me, "I was like, come on man!" I was like, "But wait, what's the price?" I went and bought $25,000 that day too. Yeah, and so, which is actually an amazing trade. We made more money in that one minute than we did in, you know, six months of experiments together. You know, whatever, three months of experiments that we were working on at the time. There is a lesson there, which is like, you know, the best kind of ideas don't all just come from your head. You know, at the time, like intern chief of staff, but you were like, "This is a buy right now. I'm gonna do this." By following you, I kind of got the benefit of that at the time. And you know, Bitcoin would have traded up to like $70,000 or whatever since then, and then, you know, it's come back down to earth. But my takeaway from...

Ishan Haque

Full ten X, TEDx from that day. Yeah, my takeaway was that there are very few moments where you can make all the money versus trying to make a little bit of money every single time. I think, like, I'm not a day trader. I don't think I'd go back to being a day trader or whatever, but I think all the money is made when there are a few key decisions that happen maybe once a year, or once every few years, or once every few months, or whatever it is. You just have to act on it with... it's a bit degenerate. You have to... like, there wasn't a lot of thoughtful planning around, "I'm going to buy Bitcoin because of this mathematical equation." It was just, "This doesn't happen all the time, so let me act."

Shaan Puri

The moment I was like, "This guy's a fucking degenerate," right? I didn't even know exactly how an option trade worked. I was like, "Okay, this is crazy." But at the same time, you're right. If you go read that Buffett quote where he's like, "There are moments or seasons where the clouds fill the sky, and it's about to rain." In that moment, he says, "Let us not come out with spoons but bathtubs to sort of make hay." There's also, you know, Naval has a quote that's similar to this. He's talking about luck. He says, "One of the versions of luck is being able to recognize an opportunity." So, it's the version of luck. It's like he goes at level 2 or whatever. He's not the inventor of this; I just heard it from him. But you know, the original guy who wrote this basically says, "Luck favors the prepared mind." So, anybody could have seen that price. Most people, when they see something going down, they get scared. You were like, "This is Bitcoin." Yeah, Bitcoin flash crash. You made a blink decision that this is a good bet for me, like whatever risk-reward adjusted. And you know, you were correct in that. Later, I'm going to tell a story. So, you come to the States, we fly you out, and I remember we go to a restaurant. We invite my buddy Sully, and we're talking. So, he's like, "Okay, Sean, tell me what you’re excited about." And you go, "Oh, I'm excited about this company called Animoca." You had told me about this company three times at this point.

Shaan Puri

And you were like, "Oh, I love the stock, Animoca! I like the stock." It was like you were the GameStop guy, right? You were saying, "I like the stock." I was like, "Animoca? I've never heard of this. Sounds like a yogurt." Then I asked, "Why do you like it?" You told me something, but I didn't really ask for details. I was curious, "What does it do?" You replied, "Oh, they're making these bubble games or something like that." Okay, whatever. Later, when we were at this lunch, I said, "Hey, Sully built a mobile gaming company and sold it for whatever, $100 million or more. Tell him about that. What's that mobile gaming company?" You started telling him, and he was like, "Okay, interesting." I heard it like four times from you, but I never took action because, again, I was not listening the way I should have at that time. That's an investment you made a million dollars off of. Yeah, tell the story of how, after we stopped working together, you went from intern to multimillionaire in a very short time. Like, how long was that?

Ishan Haque

It's a very fair amount of time. So, I've known about Animoca; it was an Australian listed company, so it was on the stock market. I initially bought a few thousand dollars' worth, and it did well. It went up like 4x, something like that. So I was like, "Okay, great! I've done my thing here." I was looking at it as an investment, so I didn't sell it. Then the Australian Stock Exchange came after it and they were like, "You guys are dealing with this weird crypto stuff; we're going to have to delist you."

Shaan Puri

well they weren't crypto initially they pivoted to yeah

Ishan Haque

They pivoted. Yeah, so what about the time when I bought them? I bought them initially because they had an announcement. They were like, "We're going to do a thing called CryptoKitties, and we're gonna work with them." I saw that as a shift from a pretty boring robot company to a sexy crypto thing. It's like, how do you value a blockchain game? These are the kinds of things that are hard to value, which is what I like because nobody knows what the price is, right? As a degenerate, I like that. So, anyway, it did well, by the way.

Shaan Puri

None of this episode is financial advice. This is actually... yeah, NFA. It's just me laughing at the craziness of this story.

Ishan Haque

so so let's let's tell the story

Shaan Puri

so you you buy more so yeah so I bought it

Ishan Haque

it got delisted and so I'm like holy shit my money is gone

Shaan Puri

how much money are you in at that.

Ishan Haque

It wasn't a lot it was like 25,000 that it it became yeah

Shaan Puri

but to you that was a lot

Ishan Haque

that was oh that was yeah that was everything to me yeah so you put you

Shaan Puri

Put everything you have, which is $25 at a time. It gets delisted off the stock exchange because, like, "Shit, it was just like you guys. Now do crypto." We don't know, we don't like crypto. We don't know what crypto is. Yeah, now your liquid stock, you can't even sell.

Ishan Haque

yep I can't sell it and so

Shaan Puri

This was like... you tell me this, and I'm laughing at you. I'm like, "Dude, yeah, I remember you told me this." You're like, "Dude, I got screwed on Animoca, and it's delisted." I'm like, "Wow, I thought you'd probably just lose money because the stock goes down. I didn't think you would lose money because you just can't sell it anymore." Yeah, but you did something even crazier. You doubled down on it. So, Telstra, throughout that year, I did a...

Ishan Haque

A few things I learned about secondary markets. That's something I didn't... you know, I wasn't really exposed to before. I learned about that and did a lot more research into what they were doing. I've always been in the gaming space, and I was the perfect person for this because I had a Minecraft server when I was a kid, in high school. I understood how if you turn these in-game items into something that you could sell, it’s a win-win for everyone. So, there's that. I was a gamer at heart. I was in Bitcoin way, way long before, maybe 2016. So when you mix all of that together, I was like the perfect person to see the light. I was like, "Okay, what they're doing is actually something that I want to get more exposed to." You know, why buy a bunch of different tokens and companies when I can just buy and get exposed to the people that I think will be the overall winners here? Once I had that conviction, I was like, "Hey, how do I... I can't market by the stock," so I was like, "How do I actually buy this thing now?" This was like a year after it had been delisted. During that time, I was working for you, and I met another guy. I had a few other bets that did really well. Afterpay was one of them that you told me about.

Shaan Puri

That one too. Yeah, we were talking about "buy now, pay later." I had met Max Levchin from Affirm.

Ishan Haque

I

Shaan Puri

Oh, this was a great startup idea. And you go, "Oh, we have actually Afterpay. It's better."

Ishan Haque

and I

Shaan Puri

Was like, "Bro, your little Australian version is not better." You were like, "No, look at these numbers, it's better." And that stock just went that way, crazy. You told me like really early on that one, so I... yeah, yeah, so I did... yeah, so I.

Ishan Haque

Did really well with that. I also have a pretty crazy story where I followed one of the... I didn't have a level of edge being like a kid from Australia investing in a public stock. So, I followed all the C-suite people on Strava to see where they're at. One of them was near the Square offices, and they never... like, that's when they ended up acquiring. So, I got like a little edge there in brilliance. So, that was... that was like.

Shaan Puri

A little hack: you're like, "I don't have satellites to track cars," but you... that's legit. You follow the guy on the street. Yeah, then I follow the... he was at the Square offices. You're like, "They might get bought," so there's a...

Ishan Haque

The guy from Afterpay, the CEO, was in San Francisco and he was pretty close to Square. I was just doing my run and I felt like there might be something happening. I didn't know what was going to happen, but I felt like a partnership would occur. Then, you know, Square came in and bought them for like $30 billion or whatever, and it just stopped going crazy. But anyway, I made a bunch of stuff. I made money from doing trades like that and working for you guys. Alright, so how do I buy animal? I want to buy more. You know, the way I went to like Facebook groups initially, you told me...

Shaan Puri

You were like, "There's a Facebook group of people just like commiserating." It's like we're wailing... yeah, recovering Animoca stockholders. We're just there, bitching.

Ishan Haque

And moaning, like they were very disgruntled. They were talking about going like a class action against Animoca or whatever, like all this stuff. At the time when they were listed, they were worth like $80,000,000 or $100,000,000. I thought, "Okay, I could get a huge discount on that." So, I went to Facebook and got a few people. They were small trades, and I was like, "I need bigger. How do I get people that have the big money?" I got the list of the top shareholders. You can request it publicly in Australia; it might be the same here in the States. I went through each one of them to see which ones were disgruntled. There were a few that I still couldn't name. The Australian press wanted me to name these people. Yeah, I think one of them was Republic, but they were pretty big-time people. I mean, they were already smart money. They were already rich. They had this because they invested in some fund; they had some allocation, blah blah blah. So, they were just willing to get rid of it. They were like, "It's delisted." They probably don't know that they were in crypto or gaming. It's just one of the things in their portfolio, you know?

Shaan Puri

they were buying it for like what discount like 50% 80%

Ishan Haque

It was more like an 80-90% discount compared to the last transaction.

Shaan Puri

Told me, I have the Slack messages when you told me, "I'm buying it for like, you know, 10¢ on the dollar." Yeah, and I'm like, "Bro, you're just lighting money on fire. Like, you're going crazy." Like, yeah, what's gonna... like, that's an insane reaction to the bad news bears. Yeah, of course, I'm gonna like double down, but it worked, so I didn't.

Ishan Haque

I think I I more like the way

Shaan Puri

to drill down I as I yeah

Ishan Haque

I put everything I had. It was about $100,000 that I just thought, "This should work out." It's also like, if I lose all this money, alright, I'm in my twenties, I'll...

Shaan Puri

you told me this you go you're like I'm 20 years old

Ishan Haque

Yeah, I'm just gonna get a job and save up again. This is the time to take all these crazy bets. I don't have kids or anyone depending on me. So yes, I made the bet. I did all the transactions, and that itself was a bit of a crazy thing because they take some time to do private transfers in Australia. The documentation for that was lengthy, and the people handling the transactions were taking a long time. One of them, actually the biggest transaction, was after Animoca announced they were now worth $1,000,000,000 after their raise. I was like, "Do I even have these shares?" Because it would still take time to process. I put the money in the escrow account, and I obviously ended up getting the shares. But yeah, it was like this whole new world. I wasn't an angel investor before; I didn't understand how to do this. I had to just sort of claw and figure it out.

Shaan Puri

how to know you're like do these guys know what they're dealing with like a 20 year old counterparty

Ishan Haque

and these guys actually showed that they're like they had no clue that they were yeah yeah that was yeah it was pretty like these are these are like pretty serious legit guys that were I mean they thought they were you know shoveling dirt onto me and then right I was they're probably laughing yeah yeah their perspective was let me give dirt to this person and I thought I was buying a gold mine and so I was like alright let me let me do this but I remember I and it a lot of this there's a lot of luck involved obviously and so when I bought it you know I thought this was like a very long term play like after 5 years there might be something here but it was only after about 3 months so I bought it the valuation I bought it at was like 30 40,000,000 and a few months afterwards they raised it $1,000,000,000 and I remember getting a call there was like this hong kong fund that reached out to me and because I you know I've I've always I had to like flex a little bit to people and I put online that you know I bought this company so you're up 50 x yeah I'm up yeah it was it was worth like I think $2,000,000 and I was like holy shit let me like let me like I'm not let me like have a think of what to do here because people want to buy it and I had a hong kong fan that reached out and was like we'll buy all of it we'll give you $2,000,000,000 today you're 121 years old or something this was actually right before they actually announced they're raising it $1,000,000,000 some fund probably heard they were gonna raise it $1,000,000,000 then were trying to get it off me at a like at a discount so I was like I I think the the initial offer was like $1,000,000 or like whatever and I remember calling my dad I was like holy shit like this is worth $1,000,000 and I was like brown parents you know this is a $1,000,000 you took this to jared but they're like take the money like what are you doing take the money right now and so but you said I was like just wait a few months maybe this will be more I was like I was like I I don't think that like this is it here and especially because I was tracking all the numbers especially nft like volume like nft volume sales and I've been tracking this every single month and for like it was like a flat line it was like something was dead here and then in this month there was a little uptick so I'm like this these little upticks don't just like start and end here there's there's some like craze that goes on here so I was like if this is worth a $1,000,000,000 now and this this the hype is just starting now let me like ride

Shaan Puri

it this way at the peak animoca was worth what

Ishan Haque

at the peak they raised the latest round was 6,000,000,000 6,000,000,000

Shaan Puri

So, you were buying it effectively at a $20 to $30 million valuation. Then it runs up to $6 billion. I remember at one point, you were telling me in Slack, "These people just offered me $2 million for this." I was like, "Holy shit, you did it, dude! We started the podcast, my first $1 million, and you just made your first $2 million. Congrats! I can't believe this worked out." You're like, "I'm not gonna sell though," and I was like, "Wow, this guy's insane." That's an insane story. So, you held it.

Ishan Haque

what's it at now who knows no no one knows I mean

Shaan Puri

I was with so

Ishan Haque

I met Jan and I met the board a few weeks ago in Sydney. The real thing here is, I forgot who said it, but they were like, "Never count your winnings unless it's like cash in the bank; it's realized." So I was like, okay, you have to exit this. The way to exit is either I sell it privately. All these unicorns are at massive discounts right now, so it's like, I could do that. At its peak, it's worth 8 figures. Do I sell them now for 7 figures and cash it in? That's always a decision that plays on my mind. Otherwise, you know, they have plans to list and do an IPO. What you told me at...

Shaan Puri

The time, because I was like, "Dude, this is the same." I was like, "Hey man, listen, as your pseudo father figure here, you should sell this." You were like, "I see what you mean, but what do I need $2,000,000 for? I don't have something I'm gonna go do. I'm not gonna change; I don't want to change my lifestyle. I like my lifestyle." Yep, you were like, "I'm just gonna look to invest somewhere else. If I think this is still the best place to invest, I'm just gonna do that. And, you know, if I lose it, I'm so young that whatever, I get the story and I'll just keep going." The way you said it made my meter go from, "Oh my god, this guy's insane," to, "Honestly, I see his perspective." $2,000,000 changes most people's lives, but you're like, "I don't think that gets me where I'm trying to go." In fact, you know, if I still believe in this, I just want to see where this goes. For you, you know, crypto and NFTs became the thing that year. There was sort of a peak moment when it became worth more than $10,000,000, right? So it would have played out very well. Timing is always very, very tricky. Do you look at this as, "I was trying to time a bubble," or do you look at this as, "I believe in this company, and I still believe in this company, and that's why I have..."

Ishan Haque

The stock... I believe in the company. Also, I was kind of seeing this as like, there are a few people that have these "lifetime holds." It's like, you know, you hold these stocks as a lifetime hold. This isn't like you buy in, you sell out, whatever. So, I was convincing myself of that. It's like, "I'll buy this, and you know, when this becomes like the next 10 cents, I'll have a couple hundred million dollar stake." And that’s how... I didn't have to do it. This was like the only investment I had to make. I didn't have to make all these other investments. There's still some part of me that believes in that. I still see a pathway where, in the next 20 to 30 years, this could be a $100 billion, $200 billion, or even $300 billion company. And it's like, I've got a pretty decent stake in that. So yeah, that's what I was convincing myself of. That belief is a bit less now during times like this, but I still have something here where I'm like, "Okay."

Shaan Puri

In May, is it hard to not just get attached, identity-wise, to like... "I don't wanna be wrong"? Yeah, I've made that mistake before. Well, I think, you know, especially this is such an extreme case. It's one specific thing: you were so right, you were *boy genius*, yep. Then it crashes, but you're like, "Am I now boy idiot or am I boy genius? Is this the moment where I held through the tough times, or... did I just fuck up and I need to learn that lesson?" Like, really hard. Yeah, I... well, how do you deal with that?

Ishan Haque

I think... Well, I went into "let me just do something." So I was still investing some money on behalf of other people, and I was going around meeting founders and stuff like that. That's why I'm like, "I'm doing something else right now," so...

Shaan Puri

well okay yeah you have other bets yeah

Ishan Haque

I've got other bets, so that's what got me through it. I was like, "If this goes away, I need to make sure that this is the next big bet." I don't need to be right on this one. Like, look, you know, if it ends up the way it's going, I could... I've got time to make more bets and be really right on something else.

Shaan Puri

yeah and also you had done so much degenerate trading that like you don't emotionally mood swing like

Ishan Haque

most yeah the money is all

Shaan Puri

act becomes plain money in a way

Ishan Haque

Well, aside from Animoca, I had a bunch of other token investments. Especially when Facebook renamed to Meta, I remember I was buying up all the metaverse coins: Decentraland, Axie, Sandbox. I experienced making $1,000,000 in liquid cash. I also learned a lot of lessons there. I lost a lot of that money when I didn't manage my risk post that. The numbers just became like... you're looking at the screen, and I had no attachment to it. There would be days where I'd be up a couple of $100,000, like, "Holy..." Obviously, I spent a lot of it. I was treating all my boys well.

Shaan Puri

we went out I when I eat we all eat yeah it was like

Ishan Haque

I was a pretty shy, nerdy guy, right? So, I didn't really know how to talk to girls. But if you want to learn how to talk to girls, get rich. I had... it's like a huge confidence boost. I was... yeah, I was.

Shaan Puri

I was like it just gives you the confidence it's just the confidence for you which yeah I think it

Ishan Haque

was the confidence it was like

Shaan Puri

even if she rejects me I'm still I can go look at my meta basket later and feel good about myself

Ishan Haque

Yeah, it was more like... for me, having $2,000,000 in the bank felt like $1,000,000,000. Of course! I'm spending a lot, and it's just like it's not going down because I don't have kids, I don't have family, I have no obligations whatsoever. So even a lot didn't put...

Shaan Puri

a big debt what did you what did you

Ishan Haque

I didn't do anything stupid, so yeah, I got an apartment. I got a Tesla. I spent like... there'd be weekends where I'd get limos out for me and my boys. We'd get a guy... like for my birthday, we got like 3 limos. We drove down to the Gold Coast, which is... you know what Gold Coast is in Australia? [Speaker changes] I'm so happy to hear that.

Shaan Puri

this because when I like I don't know what I was paying you back then it wasn't much it was like the the very first thing

Ishan Haque

was it was 30 k a year I think it was yeah it started

Shaan Puri

at 30 k I think it went up after that yeah yeah yeah yeah to maybe like 80 to a 100 yeah

Ishan Haque

yeah yeah

Shaan Puri

That's what I was paying you then. I remember at the time thinking, "Oh, this is not gonna work." This guy's getting super rich doing these crazy investments on the side. It just didn't make sense for him to have a job at some point. Which is great! My goal wasn't to have you work for me for 20 years. It was like, "Here's a young entrepreneurial guy. Come get some reps with me. Just get you off the traditional path." I hope you go do big things, and I could be your biggest fan. That's kind of what's happening, and I've had my popcorn, you know, watching you do this stuff. I've been totally entertained the whole way. Yeah, because you definitely had a roller coaster. You're kind of like those Wall Street Bets kids, basically.

Ishan Haque

I was on Wall Street Bets since I was in high school. I was always on that forum. There's an equivalent in Australia called Hot Copper, which is like the equivalent of Wall Street Bets. On there, I was the most active person. I got the nickname "Mister Silicon Valley" because I was just investing in tech stocks.

Shaan Puri

right

Ishan Haque

And I'm like, if you go on... everyone can look at my profile. It's like I'm tweeting about Animoca, I'm talking about Animoca on that platform. And there's another company called Brainship [that] ended up becoming like a multibillion-dollar [company] because of the AI craze and stuff like that. I was constantly looking at anything to do with what is like the next 100x stock because for me, it's stocks [that I'm] kind of invested [in].

Shaan Puri

He told me some story: A billionaire takes you out to lunch and is like, "What's the next stand of Mocha?" He reads the article and he's like, "I gotta meet this whiz kid." Takes you out, he's like, "What's the next one?" Yeah, yeah, yeah... You shit your pants immediately. You're like, "I don't fucking know."

Ishan Haque

Yeah, because during that time, like, I mean, this was the Zepp era, right? So I'm like, everything I'm telling people to invest in is going up and up and up.

Shaan Puri

know I'm a genius yeah

Ishan Haque

I'm a genius, and so I was like, "Oh shit." But I truly believe I was like, "Adam Oka just raised $1,000,000,000." I was like, "You should invest in Adam Oka. Adam Oka is the next big thing." And he was like, "Oh, okay, whatever, blah blah." In the next few days, I didn't start.

Shaan Puri

he's like goddamn I love that confidence

Ishan Haque

Yeah, in the next few days, he ended up becoming one of the top 10 shareholders in the company. He bought out tens of millions of all the stuff. Then, obviously, you know, Adam Ottomack didn't stop at $1 billion. Yeah, so he made over 9 figures in that. So then, did he?

Shaan Puri

tip you a little bit on the on the way out or tip the dealer or no

Ishan Haque

there's that comment fair enough

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so, alright. You go through that crazy journey. One of the things that comes out of that was you were then, on behalf of this guy and other people, doing other investments. Yep, one of them is Shuffle. Let's talk about Shuffle. You had slacked me a while back and you were like, "Hey, crazy story! I think on the pod I was like, can't say who told me this," right? Now it's all, now it's like way more public.

Ishan Haque

oh like

Shaan Puri

At that time, you were like, "Hey, there's a company called Stake." Yeah, that is making unbelievable amounts of money. You were like, "They had like a $800,000,000 dividend last year." Like, that's just the profits they took out. You're like, "This guy, one of the owners, I don't know how..."

Ishan Haque

old are they they're like they're in their like late twenties mid twenties yeah

Shaan Puri

Yeah, like, 27 years old, bought a $50,000,000 house in Australia. Yep. And then they got like whatever, a $100,000,000 house. It's like, that's how...

Ishan Haque

you know someone's like rich by the way when they're yeah buying like

Shaan Puri

oh look at the real estate

Ishan Haque

yeah that is like when they're buying an asset like that like

Shaan Puri

Because people didn't know it, the articles are basically like a mystery. You know, "Mega millionaire buys $50,000,000 home," and then it was like they had two companies. They had a software company that makes gaming software to play games, and then they have Stake, which is the casino—basically a crypto casino. These companies are intertwined or whatever. It's a little Alameda, you know, FTX-ish... getting some vibes here as I describe it all out. But either way, Stake has become huge. They have Drake playing and then whatever, gambling and stuff like that. So, you meet these guys who are doing a competitor to that in a way. How do you describe Shuffle? Tell us about this crazy space because I only know what you told me about the Stake thing at the time. Since then, a bunch of news has come out, kind of validating what you said. Tell me about the space and tell me about it.

Ishan Haque

the well at the time sir I was so I was traveling around just australia meeting other founders and I was at this dinner and at that dinner the guy there was a guy there that was like pretty good friends with the stake cofounders and he would like say these numbers this is before the articles and stuff like that so he would say some insane batshit crazy numbers and I'm like if these numbers are true this is the fastest growing tech startup in australia in history like this is maybe in the world like this is like very I mean they were founded in 2017 and they're going to do a couple $1,000,000,000 in revenue this is like some kids in their twenties right so initially heard of that I was like okay and then already at that time I I remember messaging you about I wanted to start like a crypto trading like let people do like I wanna start a I I I titled the document I wanna build like the world's largest casino right and I remember this document yeah and the way that that product is actually like a huge product now I don't know if you've heard of rollbit but they have like a cryptos trading thing I was looking to do that but that's like regulatory just like a nightmare it's like an unlicensed thing and and so I was like okay but I see this gambling stuff it's it's huge stake is you know they just did $1,000,000,000 in net profit in a in a single year how do I get some exposure to that and this going back to like how I find these opportunities I just remembered there was another like hidden uni that lived in a whole different city to me in australia that posted his research on afterpay and this was like a couple of years ago and I don't know why he popped out in my mind again so I went looking for that article I found his name and I hit him a a message on linkedin like hey like you know what are you doing these days let's catch up or whatever and yeah we caught up and then that's when he started telling me about like these other crypto kids in australia that have like made it pretty big doing all this degenerate stuff and they're starting a crypto casino and it's gonna be a competitor to not just stake but there's like that's the thing the market is so huge there's I could you know there's an there's a few other competitors that are also doing $1,000,000,000 and this is not really reported on right it's kind of like a yeah kind of shady industry so I was like okay for me you know coming from pretty small town in australia when when you meet other people that are kinda like you and we all had a like success in our own domain I'm like if we just come together we're gonna hit something big and I just wanted to be around those people right and so it was more like a bet on this group of

Shaan Puri

Yeah, just like, also ambitious, smart, slightly degenerate, or very degenerate, slightly autistic. Yeah, yeah, like 20-year-olds, basically. Yeah, and these old people.

Ishan Haque

We’ve all kind of been through the same thing of making a lot of money and losing a lot of money. So we can kind of lean on each other in that way. We understand each other in that.

Shaan Puri

The way this happens is similar to what occurred in online poker. I remember the rise of online poker and the kind of poker kids who all made it. They all lived in houses together and figured out how to beat the game collectively. The same thing happened with social media. For example, the TikTokers or the Viners who all went and lived in the same building in Los Angeles. They collaborated with each other, traded tips, and secured brand deals for one another. As a result, they all rose up much faster than those who were on their own or didn't have those kinds of connections.

Ishan Haque

This was my Jim Taugher. Yeah, you know what I'm saying? So, yeah, that's how I met them. We all kind of agreed on a lot of the background of the Shuffle team. They come from big exchanges; FTX is one of them, BitMEX, Crypto.com—that's all their backgrounds. So we all had...

Shaan Puri

the hard heard stanford of the of sketch world

Ishan Haque

And so I was like, we all... and you know, obviously, I've traded on all of them. We all just had, like, we all agreed on this macro thesis. Of every single cycle, there is like this one clear big winner, which is the exchanges. Their business model is that for every bet, every degenerate bet you take, they have a little fee. It's called a transaction fee for them.

Shaan Puri

for us

Ishan Haque

It's called Hazard, but it's the same exact thing. Same model. Yeah, the same model structure. The legal structure is actually really similar as well. They will get a license out in Seychelles or, you know, FTX was in the Bahamas. Triple Tuxinos is out in the Dutch Caribbean and Curacao. So, there are all these similarities.

Shaan Puri

What is that? There's like some place that's just made their business... some country, right? Yeah.

Ishan Haque

yeah yeah curacao yeah that's the that's the

Shaan Puri

where the hell is curacao what is curacao

Ishan Haque

In the Dutch [Caribbean], it's just a place where you can... I mean, anyone, if you want to get a license to do like an online crypto casino, you could probably spin one up in like 6 weeks. It's very easy.

Shaan Puri

And that's their model. They're like, "We're open for business for casinos, for online casinos, basically." Yeah, and like that's where everybody goes to get their... yeah.

Ishan Haque

Like, we're in the same structure at stake. You know, all the other guys are under the same license, and there's some risk to that, obviously. Like, what happens to that license? How long can you sort of play this game? You have to just calculate what amount of risk you want to take there. But yeah, it's exactly the same as these exchanges that are out in the Seychelles or Bahamas. We saw that and we're like, "Okay, here's a clear difference between exchanges and casinos." Though exchanges are raising tens of billions of dollars and they've got all the fame, if people just understood how profitable these casinos are and how they're very similar businesses to exchanges, then there would be some rerating or valuation for these casinos.

Shaan Puri

That was like... a lot of these investors and funds have a "no vice" clause, right? Yep, they do. They just can't invest in, like, gambling or porn or whatever, even though there's money to be made there. So I think that's one of the other reasons. Some people just either individually, morally, say that, or their fund's charter basically prohibits them from doing those things. So they're just out on it, yes. Even if they know it's a great business. I mean, who doesn't think a casino is an amazing business?

Ishan Haque

we we raised the seed round and that was like the hottest huge month

Shaan Puri

My biggest regret was not investing. I tried to invest in them... it was like, "Oh, it's like one entity here and here," and I was like, "Oh God." If I have other people's money... if it's my own money, fine, yeah. But when I have other people's money, I have to think twice. And just in that time, it closed or whatever.

Ishan Haque

Yeah, but anyway, like that's... we all agree that in this next cycle, whenever it is—could be 5 years down the line, who knows?—but in the next cycle for crypto, we believe that there will be 1, 2, or 3 casinos in the top 20 of all the coins. That's $1,000,000,000 of value that we think we could achieve. A big difference with us is, like, I am on this podcast right now. We're not anonymous; we're not like these people that... all these crypto casinos usually have very anonymous people. I mean, if you're putting your money into a platform, you want to know who's behind it, right? You want to know who these guys are. But yeah, how do...

Shaan Puri

You like all the... if that is you, follow all the FTX stuff going on right now? I'm really into this trial. It's like my soap opera right now that I'm paying attention to. It's your Roman Empire. That's my Roman Empire, exactly. Do you... I've been following it. Also, how do you feel about that? How do you think... because it seems like crypto is a casino, like risk times risk in that sense. Yeah, it's like... I don't know, something between, you know, malpractice to like... the craziness that comes with just that amount of money flowing through something. Yeah, and you said you have people that worked in some of those places. What did they... I guess, what stories have you heard? And I guess, I don't know, like... not like Ishan's spokesman, you know, like not you professionally. If we can just... like my friend, how do you think about that stuff?

Ishan Haque

Yeah, it's like... I mean, being in crypto already means you have an appetite for speculation. So anyone that's already in the industry is taking some risks. There is some regulatory risk; one day this license might close down and your business could be, you know, screwed up. You have to be kind of smart and calculated about that. It's like, "Okay, what are the other licenses we can start building out?" We had to build our entire platform in a modular way. So if something happens to one license, we can split off, let's say, our casino and then put a license for the sportsbook and offer it in the right different regions. So it's...

Shaan Puri

just like lost like we had to move the island yeah

Ishan Haque

Yeah, we had to lose it. He's like, "We moved it." So, there is some regulatory risk to some...

Shaan Puri

It's funny, like products have... most startups have product-market fit risk. Yep, like we don't know if anybody wants what we have. It just seems that you have no market risk. Then the second tier is technical risk. It's like, if we can make a self-driving car, right? People are gonna want it. There's no market risk, but there's technical risk. Can you even build a self-driving car? Yeah, but there's no technical risk either, right? It's like, I mean, obviously you have to do technical work, but that's not the risk in the business. It's all regulatory. It's all regulatory risk in this, which is so different than like 99% of the other startups I look at. Very few times do...

Ishan Haque

To just get regulatory risk, there's also actual risk that you have to manage with your book, like limits that you... We would sweat sometimes when we had to start upping the limits. You know, there's some high rollers that come and go. Like, "I want to do a $10k blackjack hand," "I want to do a $25k blackjack hand," and you're just like, "Okay, holy shit." We have to... well, you know, if they have a few good runs, it could suddenly be down a couple hundred thousand dollars. And SEO revenue is not always guaranteed. That's also like the biggest difference in this context.

Shaan Puri

with attraction so you guys launched

Ishan Haque

I don't know when in february of this year

Shaan Puri

yeah what's the what could you share attraction wise

Ishan Haque

So, you know, we're probably going to do half a billion in volume this month. This is generating a few million in revenue a month, and hopefully, this month will yield a few million in profit as well. Another thing to consider is that these businesses are built to strip out cash flow. You build the business, and then you pay this out. This is not like you're praying for some exit. We all went into it knowing that no one's going to buy a crypto casino. You build it to make a lot of money and then strip the money out to pay it out to all the holders of the business. So, right, that's also like... yeah, it's a very good problem to have. It's only been a couple of months, but yeah, we're probably at a $50 million run rate.

Shaan Puri

Right now, super impressive, crazy! Any good stories about, like, I don't know, how did you bootstrap it? Where did you go to get your first customers? How did you... because that was your job, yeah? Yep! So, you'd be like, "Oh, I'm in fucking Asia right now," you know, meeting people. I'm like, "What are you doing in Asia?" You're like, "I'm building the brand. I'm figuring out how to get this thing out there."

Ishan Haque

Well, this is like a really important point. I don't know why I didn't realize this before, but the people that come and play on your site, if they like to gamble, they probably also have some other vices. Some of them can get very angry very easily. The whole thing is about either making money or losing money. So when they make money, obviously they're happy. But when they lose money, especially beyond a certain point, it can escalate to threats like, "I'm going to find out where you live." So when you talk about your first-time customers, your first 10 customers can be pretty rough people to deal with. The first thing we did was gather a bunch of crypto kids who had made a lot of money and then gambled it themselves. We already had a lot of other crypto kids who liked to gamble, so we went to those guys first and said, "Hey, come play on our website and test it out." We also had some little tricks, like deposit bonuses and other incentives.

Shaan Puri

kind of yes standard kind of yeah standard like sports

Ishan Haque

To play motions and stuff like that, one thing that I think we did that was pretty interesting was, okay, we should stop spending so much time trying to get thousands of people who will deposit like $10 or $20 or whatever. They'll come on, they'll come on your site, and it's good for them to, you know, play. But they will lose $5 and then, you know, spend 48 hours in your support saying, "I'm going to kill you! Where do you guys live? I need my $5 back!" Versus like, okay, let's maybe try and find customers that are not like that. We got pretty lucky in some parts of Asia, especially Japan. They are people who bet really big, and they're very respectful. They don't waste any of our time; they will lose money and play with it.

Shaan Puri

an honor

Ishan Haque

Yeah, so it's like, "Okay, these are the customers we want." Now we know the customers that we want, and that's good for the business. We started making some pushes there and trying to find... you know, this is a pretty heavy affiliate business. You want to find other people to go out and do the work because you can't do Facebook [ads]. We can't do Facebook ads, we're prohibited from doing Google [ads], so you can't do PPC [Pay-Per-Click]. You have to find really creative ways of trying to acquire customers. And yeah, that was... well, this is...

Shaan Puri

Why, like, Stake, I think, bought or created Kik. Yep, and they're basically paying Twitch streamers, you know, gobs of money—reportedly like $50,000,000 to $100,000,000 contracts—to come play. Because they're like, "Oh, these are popular people." One of the things they'll play is, "We'll give them money to gamble on our platform." They gave Drake like tens of millions of dollars to go play and show people that he's doing a $20,000,000 bet. Yeah, or he's gambling $20,000,000 one night. It makes you look like a baller. It creates great content that's going to go viral and get you likes. All those people are going to see that gambling on Stake is fun, and Drake does it, right? Like, that's their... yeah. Is that accurate? That's my perspective.

Ishan Haque

So, Stake pioneered that model. They realized, "We can't bid on these other channels with all these other crypto casinos." So, they tried to find other ways. The streaming model, like they pioneered that. They worked seriously. The fierce genius about it is that instead of an influencer just posting a picture saying, "Hey, come play on Stake," they're actually playing the product. They're showing you how it works and sharing their reactions.

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah you're seeing their reaction picture yeah like the whole thing

Ishan Haque

So, not only are you educating people about how to play, but also about the next level in terms of, I guess, player value as well. They will deposit, and you know, they'll play, they'll lose, and then once they're watching their favorite streamer play again, they're like, "Alright, time for me to also deposit again." So, we found out that the affiliates or the influencers who really have a Discord channel or are constantly live streaming are the ones making the most.

Shaan Puri

Of it, something you said: rather than have you have 1,000,000 followers, we want you to have, you know, 2,000 people who are active in a Discord that you talk to all the time. That's more valuable, right? Like, I think this doesn't just...

Ishan Haque

This isn't just for casinos. I think it's also for e-commerce. There are people that do Facebook groups, and anywhere there's a concentration of, like, you have those 1,000 loyal fans or whatever, those customers are worth all the money.

Shaan Puri

We did an influencer campaign. We spent **$100,000** on influencers, probably the first paid influencer campaign we had done. So, we put it out and I was like, "Let's try it, $100,000," and we're going to spread that across these, like, I think we did **seven** influencers, right? These are people who have, you know, let's call it **250,000** to **3 or 4 million** followers on Instagram. I kid you not, some of those people who have a lot of followers literally had **zero conversion**. Like, dude, I could post on Facebook and get one conversion. It's crazy! Some people kicked ass, and I was like, "What's the difference?" I've noticed that Instagram has this one feature, which not everybody has, but you can broadcast. I don't know if you've seen this, but Instagram has this almost like one-to-many group chat. You can send a message, and they can only emoji react; they can't chat back. But it looks like a chat, right? I noticed that the people who have active versions of those will just be like, "Oh, you know, my favorite mug..."

Ishan Haque

yeah

Shaan Puri

It'll get like 3,000 likes, right? That's a way better signal for who can actually convert versus just a generic post, story, or follower count. Yeah, which is like, you know, neither here nor there. I think it's that really moved product. You can tell the difference in that.

Ishan Haque

It's also just about them being very high intent. So think about the people that would go into that broadcast channel in the first place. It'd be like a small percentage of that person's most loyal fans or whatever that are active. Alright, yeah. So I think that could be applied everywhere. Wherever you can get... who cares about trying to get, you know, 4,000,000 impressions? I just want to get my product in front of like the 1,000 most... I keep using the word "degenerate," but not degenerate. I'm not like, you know, whatever... the 1,000 people that are...

Shaan Puri

by the way I I use degenerate positively too when we were hiring we used to you know co companies have like corporate values yeah and it's like integrity yeah and honesty and like it was like everybody has the same values it's like don't tell somebody or something I don't know ours was degeneracy yeah and people were like why does it say you should be at degenerate to work here and we were like that's what it is like that's what we want we want people who who like when they work on some like there's just 2 types of people there's some people that like you know they work to live and some people live to work right like brett we are the types that when we do a project we go all in we love doing it yeah we obsess over making something fucking awesome that's gonna take a lot of work and the late nights we don't wanna feel like we're like asking for a favor every time we try to go above and beyond to do something cool like right and but it wasn't about working hours only that was just one aspect the other thing we used to say is like we noticed that the people who were the best earlier in their life had a degenerate like obsession with something that wasn't like the thing your parents would reward you for or the school would reward you for right so for a lot of people it was gaming it's like oh yeah I just spent like an ungodly amount of hours in in ultima 4 or like you know runescape or something like that that was such a strong signal to us that like this person is gonna be great now with us because they have that switch where once they get really into something they practice to like to master it and they get obsessed they wanna beat the game and like they're not doing it for the because people told them to do this they're they're doing it because they can't not do it yeah and so we found that people who had early obsessions in life were the best people that we wanted to work with you also want that in customers or an influencer who's got people that are die hard fans like why do people love taylor swift like swifties they just they identify in that tribe is what you want yeah and I think that like whether people like the idea of a crypto casino or that makes them feel like really crazy or whatever I think that the marketing lesson about how these guys market themselves is like one of the best like marketing hacks that created a multibillion dollar outcome was this one realization that hey let's pay these influencers and celebrities to specifically do live streaming on twitch which is not the main marketing channel right for 99% of other brands let's give them money to gamble so that people can watch the the sort of thrill of victory the agony of defeat yeah live in real time and that is the best marketing for our product

Ishan Haque

I also respect that. I think for those guys, they are really one of the most fascinating entrepreneurs to come out of Australia. For Kik, it's not just about that. I think the goal here is that they've now made this $5 to $10 billion crypto casino. It's like, where do they want to go from here? You know, Twitch was valued at $40 to $50 billion. I think these guys legitimately just want to go in and... you know, although they...

Shaan Puri

wanna use the money to beat twitch

Ishan Haque

They want to use money to... this is their next thing to get them to leverage. They were already working with all these streamers, paying them, you know, millions of dollars to gamble. It's like, "Well, let's actually just also pay you guys $1,000,000 to stream, but on our platform." I think they saw a sort of gap here. They came at the right time, but I... yeah, I don't think it's just for gambling. I think these guys truly, you know, love streaming.

Shaan Puri

Way that works because streaming doesn't make that much money... Yeah, there is no way that works in the sense that, you know, they would really have to be betting that they could... and you know... Okay, so I don't think it could work, but here's the case where maybe it could: So I remember, TikTok now is obviously massive. Do you remember when TikTok came out? So like...

Ishan Haque

yeah it was musically and then they did like a

Shaan Puri

Musically was doing well, but it didn't quite make it to the full mainstream. It was still seen as this "kiddy lip-syncing" kind of app. It wasn't like TikTok today, where you can learn things, make people laugh, promote your business, sell products, or do anything. Musically was literally just tween girls lip-syncing; that was all it was. Then they rebranded after being bought to TikTok. I remember laughing about the name, thinking, "What is that name?" They literally spent $1,000,000,000 marketing that app to ensure every teenager had it installed on their phone. We had a kid working for us at the time who was in high school. He would come and work at our office, and I asked him, "Dude, what do your friends think of TikTok?" He said, "Oh, it's like the joke," but then he added, "I gotta say, everybody knows TikTok. There's no one person in my school who doesn't know TikTok. We don't think it's cool yet, but I gotta give it to them—100% of every kid in my school is aware that there's a TikTok app that they want you to download."

Ishan Haque

yeah

Shaan Puri

And like, they actually brute-forced the network effect. I guess there's a world where Kik could do that.

Ishan Haque

But it's also, I think they're banking on maybe doing something where the friction to buy something on live streaming is lowered. Yeah, that's a whole new avenue. I think they know that the traditional model is not going to ever work. Let's just get all the eyeballs, and then maybe they can flick some switch somewhere. You know, like Instagram Reels makes $10,000,000,000 a year. I don't know how.

Shaan Puri

You've got some plugged into the world's greatest ad engine. Facebook's ad engine is the greatest ad engine, maybe Google's is just 1 or 2. But like, it's plugged into one of the greatest money makers ever.

Ishan Haque

Live streaming commerce is a pretty huge thing in Asia. If it can somehow work in Western markets, I think there's potential there. They could flick the switch and then, you know, this is how they go from being worth a couple of billion dollars to 10, 20, or even 50 billion. Maybe they don't care about how much they're worth, but what's the biggest hit game? What's the next big thing? They've already won one game, so how do we get to the next? I think more people should probably know about those guys. Are you like... I'm...

Shaan Puri

Are you gonna be a degenerate forever? Or if you're like, "You know, I'm just gonna do this for this," and then I'm gonna do something else?

Ishan Haque

Well, I'm just... I really wanted to be a part of something that could be huge and grow really fast. So, I want to do that with Shuffle and, you know, ride this wave. Will I do another thing in sports betting or gambling? I don't know, maybe not. But, like I mentioned to you earlier, it's like you make your nut and go to your noble mission. I'm like, I think I might just... a mayor's quote, yeah.

Shaan Puri

I love that quote. I love that quote not because I think it's right, but because so many people when they hear that, they're like, "That's what I'm doing!" Yeah, because it's such an easy out to... just [justify] anything that you're doing in the moment because you're like, "I'm gonna do the noble mission later." So I love it because it's hilarious how much people love that quote. I don't know if it's good wisdom or bad, but I can tell... By the way, what ideas do you have? So yeah, if you know MFM [likely referring to "My Favorite Murder" podcast], you know that's what we do here.

Ishan Haque

I'm going to get out my notes app really quick. We might have already talked about some of this, but just really quickly: There was a time when we were talking about kids who were playing RuneScape and stuff like that. I literally have one note in here about incubators around kids who are building businesses within games. I like that because I think every... Boston? Yeah, every... So, I guess during my era—I'm a bit older now—during my era, it was kids that were building Minecraft servers. Or, I know for the guys that did Stake, they were RuneScape kids. They built a casino in RuneScape first, then they did their own thing. So, it's like RuneScape and Minecraft. I think now it's like Roblox or maybe Fortnite creator maps and stuff like that. If you're building businesses within games, every single person I've met that's done that, they're all super successful millionaires. A hundred percent of your income.

Shaan Puri

I think I tweeted this out. I go, "What people think a success, like winners' backgrounds, looks like?" You know what the world tells you is like, you know, good grades, he goes to a good school, has good internships, and like, you know, after-school activities, runs for student council. But what I've seen is that the real winners are like the kid, the guy who's running his own gaming server when he's 14. Yeah, kind of because he just wants to be able to buy games. He's not even running it as a business, right? Like the sneakerhead, sneaker flippers basically. You know, people that are like hardcore gamers that become the best in the world at a video game that's super competitive. Yeah, that requires skills, strategy, communication, a ton of obsession. Those are pretty translatable skills. You know, speech and debate is another one. There are these unorthodox backgrounds. Runescape is one that's crazy. The Runescape mafia. A number of those rich young people I've met, the common denominator is, yeah, we used to be like... I didn't play Runescape, but they're like, "Yeah, Runescape has like the marketplace or the plaza or something." Yeah, and they were like, "Yeah, we used to run the plaza or the marketplace." And I was like, "Jeez, this is something." I have an idea around that, which is I want to create kind of like the outcast conference. So basically, what I want to do is be like, "These are actual hotbeds of talent that nobody's really talking about." I want to invite the people who do that. It's like your...

Shaan Puri

Of entry is like... you need to hit one of those criteria. You run a gaming server or, like, you're elite at this. I found this one called Mindsport. It's like a place you go that’s like the Olympics but for nerds. So you don't run; you play chess, then you play backgammon, and then you play like this advanced version of chess. You know, you play Go and all these games. Whoever's the best across these ten really hard strategy games is the Mindsport champion.

Ishan Haque

yep and you'd have that guy's a free you

Shaan Puri

Those guys are all gonna be amazing as soon as they decide, "Okay, it's time for me to have a career now." As long as they just get to funnel in the right place and don't just go be a McKinsey drone, you know those people are gonna kick ass. So I'm like, "Oh, I wanna make a thing where it's free for them to attend, but you gotta be the best of the best." I wanna just be able to curate that talent and be like, "I'm gonna place my bets on these people now." Like, "Hey, if any of you ever start a company, just remember this goodwill of me bringing you here, paying for all..."

Ishan Haque

of this because I wanna be

Shaan Puri

Your first investor... I genuinely think that's going to be one of the highest ROI (return on investment) things that I could do. Well, I think a lot.

Ishan Haque

Of them, so a lot of them get lost to like banking or something like that. And then there's a lot of them as well that they just don't have guidance coming out of [college]. The first thing that they do... and so they fuck around for maybe like a few years and then...

Shaan Puri

That's why I'm being an outcast because... they probably feel like, "Oh..." *[voice breaks slightly]* I wasn't doing all the stuff that the other achiever kids were doing. But it's like, no, no, no. Trust me, let me show you 10 other people that are like you, and then they're like, "Oh, I see myself in them. I can do it too."

Ishan Haque

this is yeah this is

Shaan Puri

The basis of a lot of sports is that you see a guy from your hometown, and now you start to believe you can do it too. Why do you like Australian entrepreneurs so much? Like, what do you care? It's because they're from Australia. I'm from Australia. If they made it, I can make it. That's cool. But had you never heard of any? Because you would probably also be banking somewhere, you know? And also, I think a...

Ishan Haque

A lot of them, when you spend your time or your childhood, whatever, in a room doing all this stuff—whether you're making money or learning business skills—start lacking in other areas. So then, that's setting yourself up for failure. You might waste some time, whether it's afterwards with girl troubles or not knowing how to do something with family, or whatever. But yeah, I think that’s why.

Shaan Puri

oh that's a great idea I'll I'll just gonna have

Ishan Haque

a kissing bit of it

Shaan Puri

I'm not gonna have a high girl. It's like, "Yo, if you haven't had your first kiss, let's just do it now." We're gonna get that all out of the way. We're gonna crush these lingering folds off.

Ishan Haque

of your head

Shaan Puri

yeah but yeah that

Ishan Haque

that was one of them I mean I but what

Shaan Puri

was your idea it was

Ishan Haque

I thought the idea was like, just giving these kids mentorship and creating an incubator. Yeah, I guess I was like, I might do a little Y Combinator thing for these weirdos. What else? I was just at a conference and I was really surprised. I mean, there's something about conferences where I think maybe more people should create conferences for cash-rich niches. Especially if you do the exhibitor model, where it's like, "Oh my God!" Some of these people at the conference I just attended were paying a couple of hundred thousand dollars for a boost. So maybe that starts off with your newsletter or whatever you do. Like, the low-effort thing first, the low-price layoff thing of newsletters. Build that audience and then just immediately go into a conference. I'm surprised you guys haven't done a conference yet because I feel like that would make like an MFM one. Yeah, like an MFM... just a lazy one. But yeah, another idea that’s actually kind of related, I think this is kind of boring, but like a CRM for cash-rich niches. So right now, we're looking for a new CRM platform. You know, everyone goes to Salesforce or whatever, but they operate in like a hundred different verticals. So who's going to get our $10,000 a month? It's going to be the one that is built specifically for iGaming, which is our niche. Right now, we're making the decision and we're going to go with some other smaller company. What I've done with Salesforce, we're going with this other one. They're going to get our $10 a month or whatever because they're specifically for iGaming. So that's like another idea that's a little bit boring, but it's like if you could just find some niche that...

Shaan Puri

How about these other cash-up niches? So, like, one for example, I think is farming, right? Yeah, yeah. Another one is real estate, right? And within that, you could even be like senior living or HVAC, you know, like things like that where you know that everybody there can spell EBITDA, right? Exactly.

Ishan Haque

Well, it's like... I think for anything where the interactions or the behaviors of your customer are high value, it's very high value. But it's also very different from, like, maybe an e-commerce platform or whatever, where it's just a transaction. In our case, you have a bunch of games that you like, and you spend... you know, we want to know exactly if you've lost this amount of money in the next few hours. We want to make some contact with you and stuff like that, right? We can't really do custom behaviors like that with a Salesforce server or whatever else CRM platform because it's very tailored to a very broad niche. So anything that...

Shaan Puri

Has, like, so you're saying high-value customers and then basically figure out, like, first principles. What should this look like for this niche?

Ishan Haque

yeah yeah I think something like that that's pretty good

Shaan Puri

I like that

Ishan Haque

that'd be a good idea

Shaan Puri

I think that's a very good sandbox for somebody that wants to explore. We just worked on this before it.

Ishan Haque

Could be someone that does, like, sort of in the gaming business. There's, you know, VIPs. VIPs make up your whole entire business that we're talking about. There's actually other verticals as well where VIPs are like your thing. It should actually be that every single business probably has VIPs that they're just not interacting with. So maybe like VIP medicine software for e-commerce, right? For whatever, you know, even for retail businesses or whatever. You probably have customers that will come in. Let's say I started getting into the hot and cold exposure therapy stuff. So nice! I started going, like, how tech bro have you? I was going into these places, like, you know, three to four times a week. But, you know, if these guys just would have known that I'm paying this much amount of money, right? Come upsell me on something else or do something else. I think that even retail businesses, like, if you were to focus less of your time on trying to broaden and getting re-pinged on these Facebook ads to get the next 1,000 customers, what about the 10 that are going to spend, like, you know, whatever, five to ten times more on the business? So that's probably, I think, some VIP management software for the guys that would be...

Shaan Puri

It could sit on top of whatever niche you choose. It could just sit on top of the current software and be like, "Yeah, but this one is all about your VIPs." We're just going to extract the data that we need and then give you the actions, recommendations, or triggers in order for you to... like when.

Ishan Haque

Should we reach out? What should we give them? What do they like? That could be one approach. This is probably not so unique, but I think... I don't know if you've used people like this, but there are agencies for content that provide full service, like thumbnails and editors. I don't know how hard it is to find people who really know their stuff about creating online content. It seems like every single person wants to be a personality or brand right now. A lot of these individuals are university students who know how to do this, but it's about exactly how to connect those middlemen for the uniqueness. It's like "done for you" or D.F.Y.

Shaan Puri

So, like, people are doing this with e-commerce now. Honestly, I think they're pretty scammy. They're like, "Hey, we will just hand you an e-commerce business that makes cash flow." Yeah, like anytime someone promises you passive income, just run away. But, like, that's what they're promising. A lot of people—I mean, these companies that are promising this are making a ton of money. One of the reasons why is it's tempting to say, "Here, we'll teach you Facebook ads," but now you gotta go figure out the rest: what product, what's the supply chain, what's Google ads. They're like, "We're just gonna give you the whole thing." Yeah, turkey. And so, you know, there's a version of that. Like, there are video editors and content creators, there are copywriters, but you kinda want the whole thing—the sort of like done-for-you package.

Ishan Haque

I think a full-service agency for all that sort of stuff might work out. I'm trying to think of what else... Let me see. This one's kind of related to maybe what you did with Shepard. So recently, we had to expand to Japan, right? Mhm. And none of us speak Japanese. We don't know how to scale in that country. So what we had to do is first research what other companies have done. I remember reading, I think maybe it was a Tamar video when he was at Facebook. He said, "We hired some MBAs, and they flew over to Japan. They came back, and you know, a few months went by, and we weren't growing. We're like, 'What's going on?' We fired those MBAs and got this young woman who was actually living in Japan. Within the first month, we were seeing growth." We were like, "Wait, what? Okay, what are you doing that these MBA people haven't done?" She said, "Well, you know, on the Facebook profile, we don't care about your relationship status; we care about your blood type." It's just stuff like that that you would only know.

Shaan Puri

right localization local translation

Ishan Haque

And to find those people was like... yeah, it's pretty hard to do that. So maybe if there's some agency where... like, we hired university students that speak native, fluent English so we can communicate with them. But also, they're fluent in Japanese. Doing that, our growth has been like TEDx. They know the market in terms of what people like. By the way, none of them knew anything about gambling. They don't need to know that; we can teach them that. They just need to know how to communicate with the people and how to localize all that content. We need to do everything to cater to this market. In certain markets, it's very important that you are respectful and that you appear like you're not a foreign company trying to attract customers. You need to appear like you were born out of that country. So, doing that whole process for me was very hard. I had to find the right people who spoke English, were native in Japanese, and knew all that. Maybe if there was some shepherd agency to help you, like, "Okay, you're expanding into this country. Here are your growth assistants that are native to that language and can do all these things."

Shaan Puri

That's cool! I like that. Yeah, there are two crazy things about that. 1. If you look at the Facebook growth chart, one of the key things for Facebook was getting the site translated and localized. They had to do some crazy Wikipedia-like stuff to get the whole site translated because it was quite complex at the time. I remember seeing that, and it was very impressive to me. 2. There's a subversion of this, which is that to do business in certain places, you have to establish an office. For example, in China, you can't do business there unless you have a local office. You can't pay local people unless you have a local entity, and that can take like a year. I remember when we were at Twitch, it was like, "Oh yeah, we're trying to put our servers here, we're trying to do this there." We had to use Amazon's people to do international expansion. Even as a multi-billion dollar company, Twitch didn't have that expertise in-house. They would say, "Yeah, it's going to be 12 months," and then finally, we would be live in whatever country with our office. I was like, "What?" They would say, "This has been a year of effort." I'm like, "That's insane! Can we turn that into software somehow? Like the way that Stripe Atlas did for company incorporation? Is there a Stripe Atlas for the world in that way?"

Ishan Haque

A bit of a funny story about the localization stuff. So, like, everyone probably listening is thinking, "Oh, but why don't you just get AI to translate your stuff?" It's not there yet. Because we were using just ChatGPT with a bunch of guys who were non-Japanese speakers. We were talking to very high-value customers, right? And, you know, their AI hasn't really caught up in terms of tone or certain nuances. So apparently, we were talking to a VIP, and we were treating them like a kid. We were saying things like "good boy" and stuff like that.

Shaan Puri

and yeah it was yeah I'm not sure people are into that shit

Ishan Haque

I'm excited! Yeah, these people were like... and then, you know, yeah, definitely. These people definitely were... they stopped playing with us. They were like, "Okay, yeah," and they were disrespecting me, blah blah blah. So, yeah, getting like native to the market that way... yeah, getting like, especially languages like that, getting native people to know how to speak.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, no worries. So, one of the big projects I worked on when I was at Twitch was trying to grow like crazy in Brazil. Luckily, we had a group of people—there were four people in our office in Brazil—that no one was even talking to really. They were so at arm's length from headquarters. I was like, "Hey, I'm here and you guys are my key people." They were like, "Oh, awesome! We have so many ideas. Can you help us do them?" I was like, "Yeah, but what sorts of ideas?" They were like, "Well, you know, everybody here uses YouTube. On YouTube, 'subscribe' is how you follow people. But on Twitch, 'subscribe' costs money. So if everybody here opens the Twitch app and they click 'subscribe' to follow someone they find interesting, it says, 'Pay $5.'" And they're like, "First of all, $5 is a week's worth of groceries. And secondly, this site, you have to pay to watch people? Screw this! They don't even know that it's free to watch." So, they said, "Can you just change the text on that button?" I was like, "Oh damn, how many more of those are there inside this app?" Another idea was that we were trying to come up with these marketing campaigns. Our marketing experts were coming up with these ideas, and I asked the local team, "Hey, can you buy the... can you just give me your credit card? I want to buy five iPhones." I was like, "iPhones? Why?" He said, "In Brazil, an iPhone is like a gold bar. We're just going to give these away. Trust me, you'll get like 20,000 people watching the stream." I was like, "What?" And he said, "This is a gold bar! Imagine somebody just giving out golden bars." He just kept saying that, and he did it. It was exactly that. All of a sudden, he was the number one most-watched guy on Twitch that day.

Ishan Haque

right

Shaan Puri

The guy was giving away one iPhone, and he milked it for like four hours. He's like, "I'm not giving it away until we get like 30,000 people in here." Yeah, and he's like...

Ishan Haque

And it worked! It was insane. Yeah, there's stuff like that that we find out like every week, like, "Oh shit, you guys actually do it this way." And by us...

Shaan Puri

have you heard about what mr beast does with this yeah is

Ishan Haque

it like the dubbing of videos

Shaan Puri

What is that? So first, he exploded his growth by being one of the few American YouTubers to create his Brazil page, his Philippines page, and his Indonesia page. He created separate accounts for all those, localized them, and hired somebody who speaks the language. When we were hanging out with a lady speaking Portuguese, I was like, "What the hell is going on?" He said, "Oh yeah, she manages my whole page for Brazil." You have to have somebody who speaks the language and knows it. Then I asked, "So do you dub it?" He replied, "Yeah, we dub it, but we hire voice actors." I was like, "Why don't you use AI?" I was excited to suggest it. He said, "Yeah, I'm sure you can, but what we do is find the guy who did the Spider-Man voice in Brazil, and he does my dub for pretty cheap." Every comment is, "Holy shit, it's Spider-Man!" He's getting crazy engagement because they're like, "That's Spider-Man!" He said, "Yeah, it cost me an extra $5, but look at what it did to my page."

Ishan Haque

I think they turned that into an agency where they do it for other people as well. It's... yeah.

Shaan Puri

They do the "done for you" thing. They're like, "Yeah, if we do this for growth, we should do this for 20 other YouTubers." I was like, "Dude, of all your businesses, like Feast of Bulls or whatever, this is like the most underrated one." I'm like, "This is genius! It's selling your sawdust, your byproduct. It's stuff you've already built in-house; you're just making it available for others." That's a no-brainer. And you're Mr. Beast! If you just said, "Hey, every YouTuber, you can use what I use," they'll all sign up, right? So it's like instant customer acquisition. Ping! And they take like, "Dude, you don't even have a page in the Philippines. We're gonna create it, we're gonna run it for you. We get half or whatever; we get 30 to 50%." So it's like they don't just take a monthly fee; they own a huge chunk of that channel. I'm like, "That's a really good model."

Ishan Haque

Yeah, I wonder if anyone's done like a roll-up of YouTube channels and brands or whatever. That seems like... seems like every niche ends up being like, "You gotta get it rolled up." I don't know if they have.

Shaan Puri

you ever heard of this spotter

Ishan Haque

no I haven't noticed

Shaan Puri

So, they're kind of doing it. What they're doing is they go to the creators and they say, "We'll buy your back catalog." So, they say, "We'll give you $2,000,000 a day. You can invest that in your videos now to make better videos." And they're like, "We can just see with AdSense we'll make our money back in 2 years, and then after that, like forever, we profit off your back catalog." That's like...

Ishan Haque

the equivalent of like taylor swift selling

Shaan Puri

Exactly. Exact losses or whatever. So this company has raised a lot of money. I don't know if they correctly underwrite these deals or not. Yeah, but like Mr. Beast sold a bunch of his back catalog. A bunch of other people have too. I think they've either raised at a $1,000,000,000 valuation or are close to doing that for YouTube.

Ishan Haque

I have a friend that I work with who manages Speed. You know, the kid? Yeah, he manages his IP. I don't know what to call it, but whenever there's a video of Speed that goes viral on YouTube or TikTok, they will claim it and then make revenue off of it. They'll actually run ads on it. Oh, so I think very quickly, like just Speed alone has generated around $1,000,000 so far. He's like, "We should just be doing this for not just Speed, but for all these different creators." Yeah, they'll put it down as a... you know, create like a big business. So that might be also like another idea within this.

Shaan Puri

That niche, because the way that works is if your video, if your IP is being played by somebody else, you can claim it. They can either take it down or you get all the ad revenue.

Ishan Haque

Yep, exactly. I think you should just do the latter. They found that for creators, a lot of the eyeballs on him are not on his videos; it's on the millions of compilations and stuff that are going unclaimed. You're just missing out on easy money that you could be claiming and getting. So, yeah, that's probably another thing that people should look into.

Shaan Puri

yeah they're so good this is great

Ishan Haque

these are yeah some some

Shaan Puri

These are fun ideas! I'm glad we did this, man. This is awesome. Yeah, Sean, where should they call you or go? What can they do?

Ishan Haque

Yeah, you can follow me just like on Twitter. It's Sean Sean Hart, but the last few letters of my name are cut off. So this is H A Q. So you're S H A A N. Yeah, I'm I S H A N H A Q. That's my Twitter. Nobody else has an H in America.

Shaan Puri

h exactly h

Ishan Haque

but yeah follow me on twitter if you're on linkedin it's look me up put it in the

Shaan Puri

In the description, dude, amazing! I'm proud of you. Yeah, this has been... that's amazing too.

Ishan Haque

done the validation yeah yeah

Shaan Puri

You know, I'll say it: I am super impressed. I'm so glad you’ve taken the ball and just run with it. You're taking such interesting shots on goal. Whether any of these work or not right now is pretty secondary. By the time you're 30, your scoreboard is going to be filled up. You're going to have made all the successes, whether it was this or that—I don't know which one. By the time you're 30, you're going to have it all done in terms of the achievement side, but you're also just going to have had so much fun. These lessons you're learning about hiring these kids in Japan—those are the real lessons of business. I'm so glad you're getting them, man. This is so cool to see.

Ishan Haque

Thanks, I appreciate it. I've got one last question for you. Yeah, Ira, you said... I felt like your one life goal was, like, I think it was to educate 1% of the world or whatever.

Shaan Puri

And what I said at the time was, "I want to be, for 1% of the world, their favorite teacher." Yeah, like, you know, which was at the time, I think, like 60 million people or something like that. I was like, if 60 million people thought... because, for me, I'm like, "Oh, I learned so much from Tony Robbins, or Tim Ferriss, or Naval, or these people." I'd love to just be that for people. I think that's like... yeah, I know what they kind of have done for me. That would be so cool if I was that for other people. That would, I think, be like the highest calling for me.

Ishan Haque

Yeah, and do you think so? Is that still the case? And then, do you still want to do that? What do you think will be the avenue through which you achieve that? Is it because you're already in the ears of, you know, all these people? Whatever those stats are now, they’re very different from what the stats were. Do you think you'll be podcasting?

Shaan Puri

it's not actually that goal that goal I think was arbitrary like who cares if it's $60 who cares if it's 1% it was ambitious it like it's a gambling headline yeah it sounded good but I'm like I only need to say this to myself like I don't I I need to believe it for myself what this what this actually means and that's not something I like needed to die to do you know like I didn't I didn't like feel like it was do or die to do to be able to pull that off it was something that like sounded better than what I really meant it was also kind of virtue signaling like you know I don't even know if like teacher is the right word but I guess the thing that I think about now is almost like the d I stripped the ambition out of that and just made it really simple but more true for me which was I want to be somebody that if I was 21 I would look up to this person like I'd be like that is what I wanna be that guy is awesome and that's a combination of things so for example part of it is making content being out there otherwise I wouldn't have even known that this guy existed part of it is do cool shit so that like stuff that like I respect or I think is cool in some way some of it is like build a cool business some of it is like you know this outkast conference like that's cool I'm like I like his reasoning behind that I like that he went and did it or like you know you know just giving somebody you know a bunch of money because you believe in them and like my version of philanthropy it's not like donating to the cause and going and sitting on the board of some nonprofit but like if you see someone who's got a dream like fund it and like make that happen so I wanna do cool shit that like I would respect and the last part is the way you come across like I I know that my favorite people were charismatic storytellers they were funny they were likable yeah they didn't feel like they were bullshitting you they had moments where they were honest and like they could have just not shared that or they could have said a sanitized version but they chose to just be real right so I'm like those became my like scoreboard it's like would I at age 18 to 24 like would I have thought this guy's the man and like I know even at that time I would like if I saw someone that was awesome like elon musk oh he's amazing I remember watching some documentary about him on the plane before he even started like tesla I think it was like long time ago and I remember thinking this guy is awesome but he had like had 4 marriages at that.

Shaan Puri

I was like, "That's not winning to me." Yep, I like that he's an outlier in this one domain, but I didn't want to replicate these other three. To me, the thing I would have respected is somebody who's just a really great dad. For example, one of the things I want to do instead of starting another business or writing a check is to coach a high school basketball team, like *Mighty Ducks* style, for a year or two or something like that. If I remember correctly, if old me, or young me, had heard that some rich guy was doing that, I would have been like, "I don't care if he's not the richest or most successful; that guy's awesome." That guy's cool.

Ishan Haque

and so

Shaan Puri

I just kinda wanna be the person... you know, what's that quote? Like, "Be who you needed when you were younger." Yeah, not needed, but like, "Be who you would have admired when you were younger," right? And that's the goal. Yeah, not the exact goal I had before, which I don't know if it's better or worse, but like, it's more true for me.

Ishan Haque

So, I know I remember, I think you said on some podcast, you went to LA or something and met a bunch of rich people. Now, I've met a bunch of billionaires and other cool people. For the most part, a lot of rich people are miserable. As we mentioned before about the kids that stay in their room and build their businesses, they lack other important components of life. I see that reflected throughout all these people. Yeah, they've made a bunch of money or they've done this one cool thing, but they've neglected every other part of their life. It's like, okay, I wouldn't want to be in those shoes. Similar to what I forgot who it was, but some guy talked to the Instacart CEO and he was like, "How old are you?" and he said, "I'm 33." The guy, who is worth a billion dollars, said, "I'd do anything to be 33 again." He would trade all his money. I see that a lot more now, and I'm hopefully maturing. Before, I was like, "Yeah, I just want to get all this and get the money and stuff like that." But I think that's something cool. One of the probably most important, not important but effective things that I learned working under you was... I remember maybe it was you talking to Suri or Suri taught you this: aggression. Just being aggressive in getting things done and getting what you want. I think most people don't do that. They don't follow up, or they don't try to be annoying. When I started applying that, I was like, "Okay, things are moving way, way, way faster."

Shaan Puri

I remember, probably... because I used to kind of... you were like my dear diary. It's like I'd come home and I'd be like, "I don't even know what time it was your time." You know, I'd be like at 3 AM... Yeah, it'd be at 3 AM and I'd be like, "Hey, I'm ready to work!" And I'd be like, "I met this guy" or "I noticed this thing," and I would kind of use you as my sounding board to play some of these lessons back. So it's cool to hear what...

Ishan Haque

like stuck but yeah that

Shaan Puri

That idea of **intensity** is the strategy. Meaning, like, yeah, this guy's not smarter than me. He's not more knowledgeable than me about this. There's no special aura around this person. What is it that's made this person so successful? And what is the difference between me and them? I just noticed, I was like, "Oh, he doesn't have these imaginary walls where it's like, 'You stop here.'" He was just like, "No, okay, we want to do this." I remember one time we wanted to do a deal with a guy who we wanted to invest in this company. He was like, "Dude, I was kind of on the fence." I was like, "This guy's insane." We had another moment like that where we were working on one of the founders. He was like, "Oh, I really need to raise this round." They were telling us this urgency: "I really gotta do this. We're running out of money. The pitches are not going well. The first few pitches didn't go well. Can you guys help?" We were like, "Yeah, we can help. We can help right now." It sounded like an emergency update. So, oh, well, we got a thing. And we're like, "You got a thing? You just said this is like so important." Okay, whenever you can, they get on a call with us. We go through the deck before we said, "Send the deck in advance." It's like 40 minutes before the call. What do most people do 40 minutes before the call? They say, "We'll talk about it in 40 minutes." Yeah, no, no, no. So Lee was like, by the time the call happened, he'd already emailed back: "Slides 9 through 13 suck, eliminate them. Slide 4 is backwards, put it in slide 1. Slide 1 needs to say this." He'd already given him the full first round of feedback. They were like, "What?"

Ishan Haque

the hell so they were

Shaan Puri

Like looking at it, we were like, "Cool, let's just make these changes right now." And they're like, "No, no, we don't want to. We want to be respectful of your time." He's like, "The thing that's respectful of my time is showing that you're full force going for this, not that you're not going to use my time. I'm here to help, but let's do the thing. If you want to make this awesome, let's make it awesome." So they started working on it and they're like, "Okay, we know what we need to do next because we need to go pull some data and do whatever. We'll check back in with you whenever." And he's like, "You know, it was like noon. He was like, 'Cool, let's check in at 6 PM today.'" And they're like, "Two calls in a day?" Even I was like, "Two calls in a day? I've never done that with somebody." Yeah, have you ever scheduled two calls in one day with somebody? It never happens. It's not that it's so crazy; it's not like running into a burning building, but it's kind of the business equivalent of running into it. It's like, "Whoa, that's unusual. That's a highly intense way to do this." Yeah, and you could tell they were kind of shocked by it. Then they did it, and at 6 PM, it was still not exactly where we needed it to be, or we realized something. We were like, "Cool, 9 AM tomorrow, let's do it again." By the third day, we were like, "This deck is in great shape," but these guys were worn out. I was like, "Dude, I'm just getting warmed up. This is great! This is what I live for: finding the thing, laser in, and just go for it." And like, who says we can't meet twice in a day? Who says that? They said no to the first proposal. Well, what if there is some number they'll do this at? What's that number? He'll just think about it differently. Yeah, that stuck with me. I'm glad that idea kind of stuck with you. I say it out loud so that somebody out there listening will realize, like, "Yo, my intensity knob is stuck at 6." Yeah, like 10 isn't more hours; it's just more focus and more intensity on the main issue, not self-limiting and solved by fake imaginary walls that don't exist.

Ishan Haque

yeah yeah you gotta bring the energy no small boy stuff that's what

Shaan Puri

I there we go alright that's it that's the pod