12 Startups Where Stock Grants Can Make You a Millionaire | My First Million #220

Sam Parr

Can nontechnical people apply there you think

Shaan Puri

Of course, every technical company definitely needs people in non-technical roles. Whether it's, again, marketing, community, sales, or whatever the roles end up being.

Sam Parr

Okay, this episode is going to be awesome! There's a story behind this. I don't know if I told you this story, Sean, but basically, my wife Sarah, about 4 or 5 years ago... So, my wife is pretty type A. She went to an Ivy League school, isn't particularly risk-averse, and doesn't like taking risks. She’s someone who's going to rise up in a big company and be an executive one day. She wanted to join a new company and make a lot of money. Sarah is going to be 29 next week, so she was about 25 at the time. She said, "I want to join a company where I can make some money." We made a list of a bunch of companies where we thought if she was given, let's say, $250,000 of stock that would vest over 4 years, we could identify places where that stock could potentially 10x. That's how she eventually applied and got a job at Airbnb. That was about 5 years ago. When she joined, their last valuation before going public was around $18 or $20 billion, I think. Now their valuation is around $100 billion. So, what's that? 5x, maybe? It did okay. You and I were talking...

Shaan Puri

I think you're underplaying it. It would be better than okay. Let's just frame this fully, right? So, I joined a multibillion-dollar company that already had 3,000-something employees.

Sam Parr

no it wasn't that big I think it had 1200 but yes it was big

Shaan Puri

Alright, so I have over 1,000 employees. So, you know, it's not joining a risky startup or buying a lottery ticket. She knew this was going to have some gain; it's just a question of how much value it would bring. She got a job, and she wasn't like an executive, so it was kind of an achievable thing. She came in as, I don't know, like a mid-level manager. Is that fair to say?

Sam Parr

mid level yeah I would say yeah lower low so like lower to mid

Shaan Puri

Right, lower to mid. So it didn't even come in as a hotshot. Before the age of 30, he was worth... he was a multimillionaire because of the stock that appreciated from this thing, right? From joining Airbnb. So, self-made multimillionaire. Self-made, self-made multimillionaire without eating shit as a startup founder. Right? Where you're stressed, making no money, and you might fail all the time. You have to make payroll and all that good stuff. And, you know, she had to kind of like... cushy, you know? Every day, she got to go in and pick which flavor of soy milk she liked from the company fridge. She had health benefits and all the things that you get—the good things you get at a company—and got to see it grow. Right? So, I thought...

Sam Parr

By the way, I cannot confirm or deny the multimillion-dollar... I can't completely pull up her spot or the soy milk spot. She didn't drink soy milk, but the idea is that Airbnb pays very well. They recruit people from Google and Facebook, so they offer competitive salaries. You get very competitive and wonderful benefits. You work really hard, but it's not a startup of 20 people where you don't have any resources. You have resources to get help. So, the idea with this is we're calling it "Sarah's List." We should come up with a cuter name one day. The idea here is that we made a list of companies that are cushier than a 20-person startup but still have wonderful upside. You can make a very competitive salary, have wonderful benefits, and there's like a 5, 10, or 15x upside.

Shaan Puri

So, low risk, great reward. You're not going to become a billionaire doing this, and that's okay. Most people don't really care about that. When I heard this, while we were talking, I thought, "Oh wow, I think of myself as the hustler, but this is the ultimate hustle." Not in a bad way. What I mean is that this was the hack. This was the lowest effort, low risk way to get a great outcome. You didn't have to work 120 hours a week. You didn't have to carry the whole company on your back. You didn't have to pick a winner, which is really hard to do with early-stage companies. It was pretty clear he was going to be a winner and still walked away with a great outcome. I just thought, "Wow, that's actually fantastic." I think there's a lot of people who would love that path. There are some people who want to be Elon Musk; they want to change the world. There are some people who want to make a billion dollars. Then, there are some people who just want to sit on a beach and do nothing. But there are a lot of people who would love this: "Hey, let me work at a great company with really smart people, working on a cool product, and let me build financial independence without risking it all like a degenerate gambler." To me, we have Craigslist, we have Angie's List, and what's the one with the child predators? I don't know what that one's called, like Molly's List or something. We have whatever Molly's List is, and now we have Sarah's List. Sarah's List is the companies that we think you could join today. They're already valued at over $250 million. They have, we think, a low risk profile. If you stayed there for four years and you came in as a mid-level person, and you got your grants, which is like $50,000 in stock every year or something like that, that could make you a self-made millionaire or multimillionaire. That's the...

Sam Parr

That's the fun! Before we get into this, everything that we're going to say is not financial advice or anything. All the information that we have is basically what we've just read online or rumors that we've heard amongst friends. None of it is concrete, so like everything is hearsay and a lot of predictions, right?

Shaan Puri

Yes, we could be wrong, but then we thought it would be fun. You know, we're not going to take these jobs, but there are a lot of people out there who would love to know, "Hey, what would y'all recommend?" We know it's not a guarantee. We know it's not set in stone. We know this is just a prediction, but hey, some prediction is better than nothing. So, we'll go on the record and we'll see how these play out. Alright, so we each did some research and we got five.

Sam Parr

Yeah, so you go. We have five. I got more than five, but let's go. You go, I go, and then we'll go back and forth.

Shaan Puri

Okay, great! I'm going to save my best one for second. First, I'm going to jab and just feel you out to see how strong you're coming in. But my best one, my power punch, is coming second. For the first one that I'm going to present for Sarah's list, my nomination is **Flexport**.

Sam Parr

okay

Shaan Puri

Okay, what's Flexport? So, Flexport is a company that you use when you are shipping things. For example, my e-commerce company ships products, and we need to arrange shipping between an international supplier. We need our goods to go from their factory to our warehouse. Well, how do you do that? You have to go to a bunch of shipping carriers and say, "Hey, when do you have a boat leaving? My ready date is August 3rd. Do you have a boat on August 3rd? What's the price?" You get some quotes. So, what Flexport does is called freight forwarding. Flexport is basically software that handles this process, which used to be done pretty manually or with very old, clunky software. They made modern, slick software that does this freight forwarding thing. You go online, you can see all your quotes, you book your boat with a simple click, you pay the fees—it's all very nice. The notifications come through, and basically, it is modern freight forwarding software. Flexport's current valuation, based on the last public valuation, was about $3 billion. SoftBank put in $1 billion at a $3 billion valuation.

Shaan Puri

$3,200,000,000 valuation. It's got about 2,500 employees. These are approximate numbers, so you know, about 2,500 employees, and they're in a huge space. Global shipping is massive and it's only getting bigger as e-commerce grows. What they did was take all these small mom-and-pop freight forwarders and, like many great companies, they took a fragmented market with low Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and built a best-in-class product. This product is integrated, so you don't have to deal with the mom-and-pop telephone call game that you would have otherwise had to navigate.

Sam Parr

And the founder is pretty amazing. His name is Ryan Peterson. I've hung out with him once or twice, and I've read a lot of interviews with him. He's very charismatic. He once said that this company is either going to be worth $0 or $100,000,000,000 or something like that. You know, he's like, "This is going to be all or nothing," right? And he's pretty... he's very, very good.

Shaan Puri

We should compile an eBook of quotes like that. It's like "Talk Dirty to Me: The VC Edition." What are some offhand things you can say as a founder that just get every investor to salivate? They sometimes sound dumb, like, "Why would I say my company's either gonna be worth $0 or $100,000,000,000?" But that's exactly what a VC wants because that's how their economics work. So we should just cherry-pick these phrases. They're like pickup lines for VCs, and we should just make a little eBook out of those. But that's...

Sam Parr

a great one alright next one I'm gonna go first mine will be easy as well zapier so what they do it's always really hard for me to explain what this company does but once you use it you immediately get it and I'll give you a use case so basically what they do is they connect apis so for example when the hustle first started we had we didn't I didn't wanna buy like greenhouse or one of these like really $500 a month applicant tracking systems and so I created a Google form and then I used zapier to connect that to asana and so every time someone applied to a job the information was automatically film filled into an asana board and that's what we use to track our job applicants another example and this is like a really simple personal use case is I had a scale and every time I scale stepped on my smart scale it told zapier and zapier put my weight into a spreadsheet and I compared it to all my friends' weight and we had a competition now that's like a really simple use case but they do incredibly complicated ones where they'll attach loads of different so you can build an entire company using basically Google spreadsheets and zapier they're interesting for a few reasons first they bootstrapped it to like 60 to or $70,000,000 in recurring revenue and they did it very quickly they recently raised a little bit of funding at a $5,000,000,000 valuation by I believe sequoia they currently have 350 people my opinion is this is gonna end up very similar to atlassian so atlassian is an australian company that went public I think in 2014 and when they went public it was like a 15 or no maybe it was like a $6,000,000,000 valuation and they sold widgets to small businesses software to small businesses and people slept on them and it slowly scaled I think today atlassian is worth $100,000,000,000 I think zapier is gonna be similar wade foster the founder of zapier spoke at hustle con and I hung out with him and he was like everything I've he was just like perfect he was wonderful there is one downside I've heard through friends of friends that they don't they so their pay is they they're a remote team they've been remote from day 1 they all they pay against chicago market salaries so they don't pay san francisco salaries so that might be a downside but I would love to own zapier stock

Shaan Puri

Yeah, okay. So what you're saying is it's a **$5,000,000,000** company. And kind of amazingly, this was at **$1,300,000** in funding to get to that **$5,000,000,000** in value. Is that right?

Sam Parr

Yeah, they basically only raised $1,000,000 in funding, and they got that to $60,000,000 ARR. They're probably north of $100,000,000 ARR. They're probably valued at $5 million; they're probably worth $10 million at this point. I mean, it's like a crazy valuable company.

Shaan Puri

that's insane

Sam Parr

they're growing it's crazy

Shaan Puri

You would need them to become a $25 to $50 billion company, and you're betting that they can and will do that. I would say that's... yeah.

Sam Parr

over the course of 4 or 5 years when all your stock would vest yes I think that

Shaan Puri

okay alright sounds good okay so

Sam Parr

do you agree or disagree

Shaan Puri

They've surprised me every step of the way so far. You know, when you first talk about it, it's like Zapier. I would be like, "Oh, cool indie hacker project." Then it's like, "Oh no, it actually got to like $1,000,000 ARR." It's like, "Oh, you know, that's a cool bootstrap software company. Maybe you can sell for $25 million to $30 million." Oh wow, they're doing $50 million in ARR. Okay, jeez, how many times again am I going to be wrong here? So I'm just debating, do I really want to bet against them again? I think the answer is no; I don't want to bet against them again. So I think I'm going to give you a thumbs up on your project here. I would include it in Sarah's list. Flexport, would you have given it a thumbs up or thumbs down to be included on Sarah's list?

Sam Parr

can it be worth 50 yeah definitely

Shaan Puri

okay good so we keep in

Sam Parr

mind we're keep in mind we're talking about like 5 years from today

Shaan Puri

Yeah, 5 years. 5 years exactly. So, okay, we have two successful nominations to the series list. I'd like to give you my next nomination. You're going to hate this one or roll your eyes or something. Okay, Uniswap. Do you know what Uniswap is? No? Oh my god, that's insane to me! Okay, so Uniswap, if you go to, like, I don't know, I think it's uniswap.org is how you get to the thing. So, Uniswap... what if I told you, let's just play this game, there is a company in the cryptocurrency space and I have an opportunity for you to join. Here are some of the things you need to know about this: it is bigger than Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, and State Street all combined. It has...

Sam Parr

bigger in terms of what current market cap

Shaan Puri

In terms of current market cap, okay, let me tell you some other things about it. Oh, is that just market cap? Is that just one of those crazy crypto market cap things? Hold on, let me just tell you a little bit more. What if I told you it has the trading volume of Coinbase with 50 times fewer employees? Would that be something you're interested in?

Sam Parr

yes

Shaan Puri

What if I told you that this company is doing **$10,000,000,000** a week in trading volume? And what if I told you it was doing that with less than **35 employees**? What if I told you that it took Coinbase **8 years** and **1,000 employees** to get to **$1,000,000,000** in revenue? And I told you that Uniswap is only **2 and a half years old**, has less than **50 employees**, and is on pace to do over **$1,000,000,000** in revenue this year? Would that be something you're interested in? Because that's Uniswap right now.

Sam Parr

in in in so what do they do

Shaan Puri

So, what do they do? Okay, let's say you've heard of all the different tokens that exist. Have you ever heard of, you know, DAI or Ethereum or whatever? There are thousands and thousands of different currencies. So, Coinbase, what they're really good at is saying, "You have US dollars. You want to go buy some Bitcoin or Ethereum? You want to buy some Solana? Great! We'll take your US dollars, we'll connect with your bank, and you can buy this crypto asset." What Uniswap does is say, "Thanks, Coinbase! We'll take it from here. You're kind of slow and expensive, and you have all these employees and all this red tape." From here, once you have a crypto token, Uniswap is how you trade any crypto token for any other crypto token. It lets you swap between any crypto asset instantaneously. It's what's called a **decentralized exchange**, which means there is no central company with a bunch of employees that owns the exchange. It's a protocol that they built. All it does is, if you go to the website, it just says, "What currency do you have? What currency do you want? Here's the exchange rate. Push go," and it'll exchange it for you right there. What they did was genius. Normally, for a centralized exchange like Coinbase, they have to be the market maker. They find buyers and sellers, match them together, and they have to have a certain amount of reserves themselves to facilitate and bring liquidity into the market. What decentralized exchanges do, or DEXs (that's what they're called), is you have a buyer, you have a seller, and then you have this group in the middle that can also come in and be a liquidity provider. So, I can just go give Uniswap some money, and I can earn a portion of the revenue that they make just by providing liquidity into the pool.

Sam Parr

oh cool

Shaan Puri

And so they have, it's like a three-sided market. They have over $5,000,000,000 of liquidity that users just locked up into their market to create the liquidity for their market.

Sam Parr

Yeah, it's like a... it's like a weird lending club type of thing. That's pretty sick! Only 30 people. What type of person would be a good fit? Wow, what type of personality would be good to work there?

Shaan Puri

I don't know, crazy, nut... I don't know what, but you know, these types of things are typically engineering-heavy life things. So you can come and be, you know, do all the other stuff. Let's say you're a community person, a marketing person, a PR person, or whatever. You can go and sort of say, "Look, I have this skill set that you probably need." But when you're at 35 people and at this much scale, they kind of need everything. They need more of everything, probably. So I think anybody could probably fit in; you just have to think.

Sam Parr

about how

Shaan Puri

to solve some of their problems do you

Sam Parr

think they give equity

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so basically, there's a company and then there's the protocol. The company owns some of the tokens using the protocol. So, the company raised a Series A from Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, and a bunch of others. They raised only a Series A, so I think they've only raised $11,000,000 to date. They've reached basically the same scale as Coinbase on $11,000,000, and Coinbase is what, an $80,000,000,000 company? So, I think this would be a very, very valuable group to be a part of. Now, the economics are different because it's crypto and everything's weird. It's like, what's the valuation? What's my equity worth? I don't know, it's all funky. You gotta figure it out yourself, but there's definitely enough value there. It's just growing super fast.

Sam Parr

It's kind of for a person who's, I imagine, the personality type is someone who's okay with a little bit... a lot of chaos and some risk.

Shaan Puri

yeah and like nontraditional are we okay with something that's nontraditional

Sam Parr

Alright, I'm going to give you another nontraditional one. This might be one of my stronger ones. It's called "Andral." I think that's how you say it. Do you know what that is?

Shaan Puri

I had it on my list alright you stole it right off your

Sam Parr

andral list did you really did you really I didn't see it on yours

Shaan Puri

yes

Sam Parr

no it's not written up on here

Shaan Puri

oh so I didn't put my I have my own little cheat cheat sheet here that that you don't have

Sam Parr

Alright, great! So mine's called Anduril. I'll tell you a little bit of background, but you actually might know a bit more. Basically, it started with a guy named Palmer Luckey. The reason why this is interesting is that Palmer Luckey started Oculus when he was like 16 or 17, and then he sold it to Facebook for somewhat like $1,000,000,000—just a ton! It's interesting because Palmer Luckey is very controversial. He is a big supporter of Donald Trump, which is very atypical in Silicon Valley. He was fired from Facebook, and a lot of people think he was fired because he liked Trump. He even sued Facebook for $100,001. So regardless of whether you think that's cool or not, he is controversial among Silicon Valley folks. He started this company out of Orange County, and here's another controversial thing: they make stuff for the government. Their first product was an invisible wall, basically a way to build drones to keep illegal immigrants from crossing the Mexican-American border. Controversial, whatever—we can definitely agree on that. They've raised money and are worth about $4,600,000,000. They have 510 employees. This would not be good for a liberal person or someone who is basically moderate or right of center to want to work here. Palmer seems like a fine enough guy— a little quirky—but definitely, it's a right-leaning company, which is incredibly normal in Silicon Valley. I definitely think this could be a Palantir-esque company. The way that I describe what they do, if I'm correct, is basically if you ever see the movie "War Dogs," people or the government say, "We need blank," and then people bid to get it. For example, they might say, "We need some type of vehicle that can fly like a plane but land like a helicopter." Then people go out and build it. What Anduril does, I believe, is they build stuff that they think the government needs, and then the government buys it from them. It saves a bunch of time. Is that basically what they do?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so they... yeah, exactly. Their primary revenue source comes from the government. What they build is like pretty fancy hardware and software combinations. One of their products, if you go to their website, is the Century Tower. It's a solar-powered tower, a giant pole that is used to monitor a border or an area. It's autonomous, so there's basically the hardware to be able to do that. It's top-flight hardware mixed with software that makes it smart and intelligent. It works well, you know? It's like a Nest camera for the government. They have drones and different things like that. It's not a huge product line because these things are hard to make. They probably take tens of millions of dollars to produce each one. But they're basically trying to be the most technology-forward provider for the U.S. defense budget, which I think is around $700 billion a year.

Sam Parr

And the question is, can this company, which is currently worth a little bit over $4,000,000,000, be worth $20,000,000,000, $40,000,000,000, or even $50,000,000,000 in 5 years? 100% it definitely can. It definitely can! This guy already built a $1,000,000,000 company at the age of like 22. Definitely. Alright, your turn.

Shaan Puri

Okay, that's a good one. I had that one on my list, so I like that one a lot. Alright, Sarah's list is filling up. We got a thumbs up there. Okay, I'm going to do one that I invested in, actually. Okay, so disclaimer—it's not really a disclaimer or disclosure; this is actually a flex. Yes, I'm an investor. This company is called Replit. Have you ever seen Replit? Do you know what this does?

Sam Parr

only because you have been telling me for years it's gonna be the greatest

Shaan Puri

So, I'll tell you how I found them or how I kind of heard about them. I heard about them from two different places. Anytime these two people talk about something, you're like, "Oh wait, that's like a winning combination." The first is my teenage nephew. He's using this tool, Replit, to learn how to code. I'm like, "Oh, okay, never heard of it before." That's interesting stuff teenagers use. You should probably pay attention to things teenagers use because those tend to be big companies, you know? Whether it's Snapchat, Minecraft, or Roblox, or things like that. I was like, "Alright," so I stashed it away and didn't really pay too much attention to it. The second time I heard about it was from Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator. He tweeted something that I just thought was a product of a combination—a graph of a hockey stick. He said something like, "This is one of the fastest growing companies I've ever seen." He goes, "Yes, that's over 5,000,000 users." That may not sound like a lot, but when your users are all programmers, 5,000,000 is a hell of a lot. And that's so true; 5,000,000 programmers on a network is worth its weight in gold.

Sam Parr

like every programmer ever

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so, I can't share too much about it, but basically, the company's value is just under $1,000,000,000 right now. So if you're looking at this, you're like, "Okay, can this end up at $5,000,000,000 or more?"

Sam Parr

I think this is what's it do though what's it do

Shaan Puri

so what does it do okay you wanna learn how to code it's kind of like a sandbox that does a few important things the first is if you ever have you ever like gone down path or like dude I'm gonna learn how to code I'm gonna I bought this udemy course I'm gonna learn python have you ever like gone down that path at all because one of the most confusing things that happens is you're like oh shit where do I type this you don't write your code in a Google doc right like you've gotta type your code in a code editor and like then it's like oh great but you need to install these like python packages you're like what the hell is that it's like you need to like install npm we're like what the hell is npm and then you're like it's like oh you need to deploy so now you need servers and you're like server what do we get into one of those and so it's all just very confusing just the environment which is basically like the equipment you need to code setting up that developer environment in itself is like for me it was very confusing now I'm like you know average person so like if an average person finds it confusing that means it's too confusing and so what repla did was the first they were like dude look it's just a website you go to it's already got all that stuff baked in you don't have to install anything you don't need 5 different programs just to be able to deploy code like you write the code here then you push run you test it here and then you push deploy and you deploy it here great all built into 1 so that was really useful for young hackers young engineers and hobbyists who wanted to like learn this stuff so the first thing was they made all the stuff you need to learn it then they were like okay cool but this is kinda like a social network because we got all these programmers all writing code it's kinda like if you've ever looked at github github is this big network it's probably the biggest network of developers and they all put their code here well what github did was like you could fork something so you put some code you make it publicly available I can read it and then I could fork it make my own version of it and you'll get notified that hey sean remix your thing so replit does that like on steroids so they basically it's almost like a game it's like all the different programmers can see what all the other programmers are doing they can get inspired by those they can literally take their code and remix it and make their own version of it or they can like contribute to each other and they could take little parts that somebody made somebody made this bouncing ball cool I'm gonna grab that I'll I don't have to remake it from scratch I'll just use their bouncing ball program you know code and I'll add that to my basketball hoop thing that I'm making and so it's like a multiplayer little like game almost for programmers to be able to like not just not just write their code not just deploy their code but also you know like find other pieces of code that they can interact with and monetize it so you can actually launch full apps full programs on here and make money it's like all built in so the bet here if you look at their graphs it's like everything is a hockey stick like crazy crazy upwards curve and alright

Sam Parr

I'm on board with that

Shaan Puri

Scale. So, I think that's... they do this side-by-side comparison. Like, "Here's our growth compared to GitHub's growth from year 0, year 1, year 2, year 3, or year 4." And they're like outpacing GitHub's growth.

Sam Parr

Alright, I'm on board with that. I think that's a good one. Can non-technical people apply there, you think?

Shaan Puri

Of course, right? Every technical company definitely needs people in non-technical roles, whether it's marketing, community, sales, or whatever the roles end up being. Yeah, for sure. In fact, usually those technical companies are built kind of like engineer-first, and so they actually need people that are non-technical to be able to join.

Sam Parr

Alright, that's a good one. I'm on board with that one. Alright, my turn. This one is similar to Zapier and Airtable. So, Airtable is a Microsoft Excel alternative; it's a Google Sheets alternative. When they first came out, I was like, "Why on earth would anyone need this? Google Sheets works great!" Then I used Airtable and realized they're kind of making it their own category. It's very sticky and very neat. Right now, they're valued since 2021; they raised money at a $5.7 billion valuation. I actually think they could be much larger. There's another company that I kind of compare them to. They're not quite the same, but I think they're a little bit similar in terms of stickiness, and they became popular around the same time. That's Monday.com, and they're worth... they went public at like $18 billion. I think Airtable could definitely do really great. They currently have 645 employees. The guy who started it, I think his name is Howard Liu, or Howie Liu. He's kind of like this prodigy genius guy; that's how they stereotype him in the media. But I've seen interviews with him.

Shaan Puri

to my school he went to duke

Sam Parr

Did he? Yeah, I saw interviews with him. He was definitely like a prodigy, a young genius, but he was very wise. He wasn't like a wacky weirdo; he was pretty well thought out and well spoken.

Shaan Puri

you you wanna know something funny

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

So, seven years ago, we were in a mastermind group. If you remember, it was you, me, and a couple of other guys. We used to get dinner every month or two, talking about startups. We would occasionally invite other people in. I have a DM where I messaged Howie back when Airtable was still a lot smaller. I think it had just raised money, maybe under a $100 million valuation at that time. I said, "Howie, yo! Love Airtable. I think it's great. I think it's going to be big. You're a fellow Duke guy; that's awesome! Hey, I host these mastermind dinners. You should come to one." He replied, "Oh, I'd love to!" We scheduled it, and you were supposed to go too. Then, I think you and one other person canceled. You were like, "Oh, I can't come," so I canceled the dinner. I never met him, and you know, who knows what could have been? We could have been homies by now. We could have been investing a long time ago, you know, under a $100 million if we had done it.

Sam Parr

you hang out with them

Shaan Puri

No, that was the excuse I had. I was like, I do these as excuses to hang out with people, right? I don't want to just say, "Hey, I'd love to meet you." It's like, "Yeah, great. I don't love to meet you." I don't want to ask him for coffee, but I was trying to invite him to something cool. It's like, "Hey, we do this founder thing. It's great."

Sam Parr

my bad howie I'm sorry dude

Shaan Puri

alright so I have one last person

Sam Parr

yay or nay yay or nay

Shaan Puri

Yeah, yay! Because Excel is like... there's this great quote which is, "Every SaaS company, you actually compete with Excel. You don't compete with other SaaS companies; you compete with Excel." People just use Excel for everything. And so, yeah, I think that... I don't know what Excel's market cap would be, but I think Excel's... I don't know what it would be, but if...

Sam Parr

Excel is like AirPods to Apple. The AirPods would be a $100 billion company on their own. That's what Excel is.

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So, if Excel is a $100 billion company, I think that the best threat to Excel is going to end up being worth, you know, $20 to $30 billion. I think there's a pretty good chance of that. I liked this a lot more when it was recently at $1 or $2 billion. I liked it a lot more there than at $5.7 billion. But, you know, we didn't do the episode then; we did it now. So, okay, I'll give you one that's very, very similar, real quick: Figma. So, Figma's...

Sam Parr

I have that one too I have that one too

Shaan Puri

Instead of, you know, I'll do it quick because people already know Figma. But I would put it on the list. You know the way Airtable is doing for Excel, Figma is doing for Photoshop. So, it's the younger, slicker, cloud-based, sexier version of design software, and it's kind of eating Photoshop's lunch. I don't know what it's worth now. What is it? $7,000,000,000 now? It's like...

Sam Parr

No, it's... so in July of 2021, they raised $200,000,000 at a $10,000,000,000 valuation. But here's the thing: that sounds like a lot, but to the listeners and to you, Sean, how much is Adobe's market cap? So Adobe, I believe, almost all the revenue at this point is from Photoshop, right?

Shaan Puri

Well, it's the Creative Cloud, which is basically a bundle. You're like, "I want Photoshop," but you also buy Fireworks and, you know, all this other stuff that we bundle in with Creative Cloud.

Sam Parr

okay so tell tell me what you think it is

Shaan Puri

I would have guessed Adobe's market cap is, I don't know, around $150 billion or something like that. What is it?

Sam Parr

It is 3:15, and if I'm not mistaken, that might be one of the... let's look it up. It might be one of the 50th. Let's see, Adobe would be... it's one of the biggest companies in the world. So, Adobe is the 30th largest company in the world. When you think about how big this can be, you think $10,000,000,000—that's so much money! Well, Adobe's one of the biggest companies in the world, and Figma's going after it. It totally should be on this list.

Shaan Puri

And it's like, all the business trends... It's like, first unbundling. It's like, "Well, Creative Cloud brings in $12,000,000,000 a year. Well, let's unbundle the most valuable part of it, Photoshop, and let's do it differently." Okay, what's different? Second trend: cloud-based. Third trend: multiplayer. Right? Like when I'm using Figma, my mouse is moving around, and your mouse... I'll also see what you're doing on the same canvas. That's really cool, right? So they're piggybacking off all these macro shifts and doing it right. Just so, like, by the way, if you think, "Oh, it's already at $10,000,000,000, is it really gonna 5x?" Last 5 years, Adobe has 6x'd. So Adobe was trading at $100 a share; it's now at $6.60 a share in 5 years. That's Adobe's large thing, you know? That's their growth rate. Figma's growth rate should be, in the next 5 years, much faster than Adobe's was in the last 5. And so I think there's a fairly good chance of that. In fact, I should just go invest in all these companies that are on this list. This is a great, great list to be on.

Sam Parr

Alright, my turn. So, I agree. I had to think about mine, so I completely agree. We're batting a 100%. So, **Rippling**—that's my next one. Rippling is a very boring company. I used it; it's a payroll software provider, but it also manages devices and gives you permissions to different stuff. Basically, if you're a small startup and people sign up to work at your company, I can easily track which person has which computer. I can pay for software through there, and I can do HR management and issue healthcare stuff to people. Why it's interesting? The founder, his name's Parker Conrad. He has a controversial past. He started **Zenefits**, which was at the time one of the fastest-growing companies ever. He got fired because the culture was kind of crazy. People were like having sex in the hallways and kind of being bro-y and stuff like that. And so, this is kind of it.

Shaan Puri

He was like, "Oh, you know, in order to do this HR thing, you have to have this compliance training. It takes 60 hours." Well, cool! Here, I just created a macro that will go through the training for you. Just push the enter key every, you know, 5 minutes or something like that, and you'll be done in 6 hours instead of 60. Like, shit like that was a little bit like, "Oh, that's actually slightly illegal, I think."

Sam Parr

Yeah, but the good news is he has experience. The also good news is that he messed up. You would think that he’d learn because he got ousted. I kind of like that. I always like it in a company where someone is on their second time around and they’ve already been mildly successful. I think that’s actually a good thing. Here’s why I think this company is interesting: they were last valued at $1,000,000,000 to $1,300,000,000. I use them, and they’re amazing. I’ve used them for years.

Shaan Puri

It's an every company problem. Every company onboards new employees and needs to get their computer set up. They need to get them connected to all the systems. It's an every person's problem, and that's why it's kind of genius.

Sam Parr

And there, so Workday, which is in the space, is worth $67 billion. Paychex, which is just a payroll provider, is worth $40 billion. So, I don't think that their valuation is still true.

Shaan Puri

Their own category, which is why it's even better. Like, if you said, "Does Rippling end up...?" I think Rippling, if it's at a $1,000,000,000 valuation now, is maybe one of the best candidates to like 50x on this list, right? It's one of those that, like, you know when Square went public. Square went public at like, I think, a $3,000,000,000 or $2,000,000,000 valuation, something like that.

Sam Parr

like that 150

Shaan Puri

Now it's like $100 per share after it IPO'd, which was again about de-risking. Now it's liquid, and it's already had like a 30 to 40x increase since then. So that's like, wow, you can get some insane appreciation on your stock. I think Rippling is one that, if you told me this would 30 to 50x, I'd say of the things we've mentioned on this list, that might be the number one candidate so far.

Sam Parr

Alright, so then we've got a hit. When I use the product, it did everything well, but it was still pretty clunky. I think a lot of your product designers, if you're in customer support or sales, I think these guys are hiring for a bunch of different stuff. So that's my pick. Alright, your turn.

Shaan Puri

okay I'm gonna do one that's a little

Sam Parr

bit frustrating we're fucking these are hits I think

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think so too. Alright, so here's one: Open Store. You know what Open Store is?

Sam Parr

it's new isn't it

Shaan Puri

it's new okay so keith

Sam Parr

This might not... well, no, this might hit, but this might be too early. But go ahead.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so, okay, what is this? First, let me say who the founders are. The founders are two kind of powerhouses. Now, I don't know how much of their time they're spending on this, but one is **Keith Rabois**, who was the COO at Square. He was part of the PayPal mafia. He's a big-time VC and a total jerk on Twitter. He's an entertaining dude; I enjoy him. He's very smart and an asshole on Twitter, which I find to be hilarious. Then there's this other guy, **Jack Abraham**. Jack Abraham was kind of like a wonder kid. He built a company and sold it to eBay pretty early on. He was a hotshot at PayPal, spun out, and now he has his own studio. So, together, they created **OpenStore**, which is a riff off of Keith Rabois' previous company, **Opendoor**, that's now worth $5 billion. What Opendoor did was say, "You want to sell your house? Don't go through the whole dog and pony show. I will buy your house now. You don't have to stage it, you don't have to fix it up, you don't have to hire an agent. You don't have to do anything. Just sell me the home, and I'll give you a price right now." This provides liquidity in the housing market with instantaneous sales. OpenStore is the same thing for e-commerce. They're saying, "You want to sell your e-commerce company? I'll buy your Shopify store right now. You don't have to go through the whole banker process, make a tag, do all this stuff. I'll just plug into your data and give you an offer right now." So, what they're trying to do is roll up Shopify stores. They raised, I think, their first round at a $250 million valuation. To get your 5x here, you have to bet that it becomes a $1 billion company. With this guy's track record at Square and Opendoor, and with Jack Abraham's track record, there's a very good shot that this ends up being worth more than $1 billion. This space is very hot. Do you know about **Thrasio**? We've talked about them before. They were the first hot company rolling up Amazon businesses—businesses that sell products only on Amazon. They're called FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) companies, and they rolled them all up. Do you know what Thrasio is valued at right now?

Sam Parr

what it's like 5 or 10

Shaan Puri

They're going to go public at a **$10 billion** valuation. I think they might be the fastest company to a **$10 billion** exit ever. I think they're up there.

Sam Parr

3 years old or 4 years old

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it's 3 years old and, you know, very capital efficient in how they went there because they used a lot of debt to buy these companies. The companies are already profitable or producing a lot of revenue, so they're able to use big debt to do this. Open Store is doing the same thing, but without the Amazon style; it's for Shopify. I think that this model, the Open Store model, is one of the fastest and easiest ways to build a $1,000,000,000 company. I see a lot of value in this pick here at $250,000,000. Yes, it could go to $0; this could also not work. This has higher risk than the other stuff on this list, so that's the disclaimer. It's much higher risk, but I think the reward is a lot higher here too.

Sam Parr

Okay, so this... I agree, this could 10x. This borderline wouldn't be considered part of the list because they just launched. It's a year or less, right? It's July 15, 2021. So this wouldn't fit in the category of being like a cushy gig. But I'm cool with adding it.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think it might be on the... like, "Hey, you're on... you're in the... the batter's box." No, you're not in the batter's box. Say you're in the on-deck circle, right? We're just waiting for you to mature. You gotta season up a little bit in order to be on this list, given the criteria of the list.

Sam Parr

Also, we could swap it. So, Keith or Boi has another company that's incredibly interesting. I believe it's called Fair (F-A-I-R-E).

Shaan Puri

I didn't he's just an investor in that one

Sam Parr

Yeah, I didn't add it to the list, but it's in a wholesale marketplace for retailers and brands. So you could just basically... it's almost... it's a little...

Shaan Puri

A bit of a big idea, dude. I used it recently for my brand. I was like, "Oh yeah, we should sell wholesale too." I thought, "Okay, so what am I going to do? Go contact every brick-and-mortar store and say, 'Hey, would you like to carry my brand, my online brand, in your store? It's a good brand. Here are the details, here's my catalog.' I made it in Excel and I have to update it weekly. Then here's my pricing, and just go to my Shopify store and buy some stuff." It's like you have to string together five tools to set up wholesale. Fair is basically like, you want wholesale? List yourself as a company. The brick-and-mortar stores can all choose to buy from you. Your catalog is stored here. It just takes care of that whole problem. I think it's like a $15 billion company.

Sam Parr

Yeah, I don't know if that can 10x, but it's doing really well. I didn't do research on it for this project, but I tell people if they want to look... Whenever people ask me this question of where they should join, I'd say that company sounds incredibly interesting. Alright, we'll do maybe one or...

Shaan Puri

2 more yeah one last

Sam Parr

One on your side. Alright, I'm going to do one that I also invest in, so there's a disclosure. It's called Next Health, and the reason why I think it's cool is that it's basically a very simple, dumbed-down version of "Shopify for doctors." When you go to a doctor, you have to fill out a form. They've automated the form so you can fill it out online. If every other doctor uses the same platform, Next Health, all your information is on that platform. This makes it much easier, as you have basically one medical record. They've also opened it up to third-party developers who can build apps using your health data and your entire health record. You can see interesting stuff. For example, if you're on SmileDirectClub and you want to find out where an orthodontist is nearby who could fit you for your orthodontics, they say, "Hey Next, here are all the doctors in Next Health that are in that network. Just click here, you're good to go." That's like a third-party app. Whatever they are worth, $500 million, their CEO is young, around 26 or 27. I've had dinner with him, and he basically told me, although I don't exactly remember how he said it, that he kind of wants to take over the world. He mentioned that he thought about being blind. He said, "Well, I think his parents are from Bangladesh, and Bangladesh is an interesting country because it has a really large male population and a low unemployment rate. So if I wanted to take over the world, I think I could go there, rally the young men, and we could build our own army." I thought that was well thought out, and I was like, "You're nuts! I love you!" So, Next Health is interesting to me. They've raised $150 million, I think, or maybe only $50 million. It's big enough that it's a little bit settled, and they can pay well.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

alright you wanna bring it home you bring it home with 1 last one

Shaan Puri

With one that’s a little bit unorthodox, I think we mentioned a lot of popular names. Here’s an unpopular name: OneTrust. So, OneTrust is a company that specializes in making your company GDPR compliant.

Sam Parr

and oh my god the most boring shit on earth

Shaan Puri

Valued at **$5,000,000,000**, you know, you have to sort of endlessly keep up with privacy laws. They are different in all these various countries. You have **GDPR** for Europe, and the U.S. is going to have their own version of this. Other countries are going to have their own versions as well, and they're always going to evolve. They have the customers, and they're going to basically continue to service these customers. For the companies, you have huge, huge risk because if you're not compliant with **GDPR**, the fines can be exorbitant. It's like fines that are multiplied per user or something like that. Nobody wants to deal with this. Nobody wants to become an expert in this area. Nobody wants to throw huge amounts of engineering, design, and policy headcount towards doing this. It's going to be much easier to buy a solution and pay for somebody else as your "cover your ass" insurance to take care of your **GDPR** needs. I think it's one of the fastest-growing companies in the country right now. It's called **OneTrust**. I think they're based in Atlanta, if I'm right. I might be mixing them up with another one. There are actually two companies that are both **$1,000,000,000** companies in this space. I love these companies, and I want to invest in them. If I were going to send somebody to work at a company that has this profile, this would be one of them. So, I think it's a good contender for Sarah's list.

Sam Parr

Alright, I think that's the list. I believe this could be one of the most life-changing episodes for a listener applying to jobs. Yeah, this is good. I think this is a really interesting idea. I used to have this product called "Just Jobs," where I would write about companies that do this, and I would pay users to have access to it. This is going to become maybe a recurring segment. We'll see. This is pretty interesting.

Shaan Puri

Well, I told you the thing I wanted to do with this was curate 50 companies that meet this criteria. I'm going to basically create a job board from this. The thing with the job board is you can't just be a company that wants to come list on here. No, only these 50 curated companies can post on this job board. They have to pay to do it, but if they don't pay, they're just on the list and no jobs will show up. So, I want to have a running job board. We take this segment idea, but basically, the reason I had a bunch of these companies listed is because Ben and I have been cooking up the idea of launching a job board. When we launch a job board, what would add some value? Well, if I could curate companies that I think people should work for. This is not an original idea. I think you did something like this. A bunch of people have done things like this—curated companies that you think are cool and turned that into a product. So, we're going to do that with a job board pretty soon. We're going to launch that pretty soon with Pallet.

Sam Parr

sick well that's freaking awesome good episode

Shaan Puri

alright man I gotta run