The insane story of Blake Scholl: the high school dropout who’s building supersonic jets

Shaan Puri

Okay, I have an amazing story. If you're entrepreneurial, Sam, if you have a pulse in your body, if there is a single blood vessel in your body, you are going to be fired the fuck up after this. I don't know what you have scheduled after this, but cancel it.

Sam Parr

Alright, let's hear it. What is it?

Shaan Puri

Alright, so you've probably heard of this company, **Boom Supersonic**. Yes?

Sam Parr

Yeah, I had the opportunity to invest in this company years ago. I didn't have any money then, but even if I did, I would have passed on this. It's a ridiculous proposition.

Shaan Puri

I didn't have any courage then either. That was the real problem.

Sam Parr

Well, like a guy said, a guy at Silicon Valley said he's going to build a commercial airline. He's going to build a jet that can be a supersonic commercial airplane. Right? That sounds ridiculous.

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So, the thing that's going viral right now is a former Groupon product manager. He worked at Groupon, and his LinkedIn literally says "Groupon Product Manager" and then he created the first supersonic jet in, like, you know, whatever, fifty-six years. So, it's this insane jump on LinkedIn, and that's kind of going viral right now. It got me curious because I remember back in the day, this was 2016.

Sam Parr

Did you see the deal?

Shaan Puri

I wasn't... it's not like somebody sent it to me to invest. I could have if I chased it down. Then, actually, several times since then, I could have invested, but I didn't. Maybe it's not too late; maybe now's the time. But I remember watching Demo Day. Do you remember this story? Do you remember his Demo Day pitch at Y Combinator (YC) Demo Day?

Sam Parr

I didn't know he went through Y Combinator. I didn't pay that close attention to it, so he went through Y Combinator.

Shaan Puri

Exactly. I went through Y Combinator, and I remember the time it stood out. Now, YC does a lot more like moonshot-type companies. Back then, it was all apps. It was all software. You were making an iPhone app or a B2B SaaS tool.

Sam Parr

And this is 16.

Shaan Puri

16. There was this one guy there who was like, "We're creating supersonic air travel. You're going to be able to fly from New York to London in three and a half hours. That's what we're doing. Remember the Concorde? We're going to do that again." He gets on stage, and I remember thinking while he's pitching, "How is he going to have traction?" Because every YC pitch ends the same, where they show their user growth. "We're growing 30% week over week," but it's like going from, you know, three to six to nine. It's like they have some crazy growth rate, but it's on a very small customer base. But that's always the pitch. So I remember wondering, "What's this guy going to do?" At the very end of his pitch, he whips out a piece of paper and he goes, "And as of last night, we have $5 billion in preorders thanks to Virgin, thanks to Richard Branson and Virgin." And we were like, "What? $5 billion?" It was like, "Oh, he had an LOI." It wasn't actually a purchase order; it was an LOI.

Sam Parr

Which basically just says, "One day, if you can actually build a safe supersonic jet, we will definitely buy it."

Shaan Puri

We will maybe buy it. That is what it means, right? Like when somebody buys.

Sam Parr

Me to, like, get somebody.

Shaan Puri

I don't want to go to... I'm going to start sending LOIs because an LOI just means I'm generally interested, but I'm probably not going to do it. Alright, so, but still, it was impressive: $5,000,000,000. Still to this day, nobody's walked into YC Demo Day with $5,000,000,000 worth of letters of intent. So, okay, I remember seeing that. Then he disappeared for a while. Then he actually had to go do the work.

Sam Parr

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Shaan Puri

So, let me tell you this guy's story. Right now, in Silicon Valley, there is a buzzword. Actually, I would say it's kind of like an early buzzword. I would be buying stock in this buzzword because it's about to go mainstream. And that word is **high agency**. You've seen **high agency** floating around.

Sam Parr

No, but that is high agency. The dude is contrarian.

Shaan Puri

Oh, it is. I mean, it shits on contrarian, dude. There, like, we means where contrarian walked.

Sam Parr

We have to sell. **Democratize**. Democratize is...

Shaan Puri

Done. That was my grandfather.

Sam Parr

We have the short contrarian. We're going all in on high agency.

Shaan Puri

Long high agency.

Sam Parr

The man in the arena has just plummeted.

Shaan Puri

Had a moment... had a moment, but Chamath just butchered that one, so that was done. Alright, so check this out. **High agency** is this word, and there's our buddy George Mack, by the way, who is all in on high agency. I think he's writing a book about high agency right now. By the way, he bought the domain **highagency.com** and I was like, "How'd you get that?" He goes, "The guy let it expire after ten years and I sniped it right away." I was...

Sam Parr

Like, very low agency move.

Shaan Puri

Very low agency, high agency by him, low agency by the other. Right? It's like in football, the low man wins. No, no, in business, the high agency man wins. So, the classic meme, which we should put on the screen on YouTube, is a cartoon guy trapped on an island. He has these pieces of bark or wood, and he spells out "HELP." He's waiting for someone to come save him. That's the low agency guy. The high agency guy takes the wood, makes a boat, and rows away. Right? So that's like the gist of this. Okay, but this guy, this dude from Boom Supersonic, what's his name? Blake. He is just absolutely dripping with agency. Alright, so let's just sort this out. This guy is soaked. This guy is a... yeah, he's a buffalo wing, and he is tossed, hand-tossed in high agency. Alright, so here we go. The story starts. He drops out of high school. His parents sent him to a good high school, like a nice private school, and he doesn't feel like he fits in. He doesn't really look like he gets that interested in class. He drops out, and now he's a high school dropout. His parents are kind of concerned. He ends up finding something that he's really into, like science and math, in this after-school program or some shit like that. But forget that first high agency move. Once he started getting interested in science, math, and engineering, he's like, "Actually, I think I do like school. I just didn't know what I... I just didn't like my high school the way I was doing it. But now I found I actually do like to learn. I want to go to college." Well, how do you go to college if you don't have a high school degree? You're a high school dropout. He finds that at Carnegie Mellon, they have a special program for high school dropouts who want to go to Carnegie Mellon. So he applies as a junior and writes an essay about why he didn't finish high school. He writes, "High school had nothing left to teach me." He gets in. Not only does he get in, he gets the merit scholarship and graduates with a bachelor's in computer science. Okay, so what does he do next? His next move is that he's like, "I want to be an entrepreneur, but I don't know what idea I want to start yet." So why don't I go and work for who I think is the greatest entrepreneur right now? And that was Jeff Bezos in 2001. So Amazon is out, the dot-com crash just happened, and Amazon's stock is in the tank. I bet you're looking that up right now.

Sam Parr

In February 2001, it was... I mean, it was **$1**. Now it's **$273**.

Shaan Puri

Great! So, he joins Amazon in February 2001, and his goal is to learn as much as he can from Bezos. He's like, "Alright, I gotta build something that's of interest to Bezos." At the time, Bezos had an idea, which was, "Hey, we need Amazon products to show up number one in Google search results." So, Blake builds this automated system where he is buying Google ads for every single product on Amazon—like the entire catalog. He builds an auto bidder so that Amazon will bid not too much, but bid enough to be the top result on Amazon.

Sam Parr

Which is one of the reasons, by the way, that there are stories of like... there's a story that a company wants you to know, and then there's a story that actually happened. I've read a lot about Amazon, and one of the make-or-break moments was the fact that they were one of Google's biggest spenders. They crushed it and knocked it out of the park because Google was underpriced. They were able to get big fast because of that.

Shaan Puri

People think all these companies are competitors, but they're also co-conspirators. Right? Google pays Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine. Apple and Microsoft invested in Apple when they were big competitors. Bill Gates basically kind of saved Apple at a time when Steve Jobs needed investment. In this case, Amazon is the biggest spender on Google. Like, you know, I thought these guys were competitors.

Sam Parr

And Bezos was one of the angel investors in Google.

Shaan Puri

Something like that, exactly. So, he builds this system by age 24. Now he's 24 years old, three years in, and he was basically working under the direct view of Bezos. He had to give Bezos a report every three months on how they were doing. By the age of 24, he's running a $300,000,000 P&L inside of Amazon. He's the GM of that business. But even though he's learned a bunch and kind of cut his teeth there, he wanted to be an entrepreneur. So, he quits, even though he's a rising star at Amazon. He knows Amazon is a winner. If he had done nothing else but just stay at Amazon, get promoted as an exec, and keep getting stock options every year, he would have made hundreds of millions of dollars essentially risk-free. Yeah, but he quits. He and some guy decide to create a startup. They create a startup that kind of fails, then they create another startup. Eventually, they sell that startup to Groupon. This is where the LinkedIn part of Groupon comes in. There's a hilarious quote on his Groupon LinkedIn description. He says what he does, like "Senior whatever manager of this thing," and then in his description, he goes, "Nothing like working on internet coupons to make you yearn for doing something that you truly love." So, after two years at Groupon, he quits and decides, "You know what? I want to do a company. I don't know what I want to do it in." His whole life, he had been interested in flight. He talks about how, when he was a kid, he was always interested in model airplanes. His parents took him to a museum, and he was always obsessed with flight. One of the things on his bucket list was that, in his twenties, he wanted to go Mach 2. He got his pilot's license; he was always just interested in flight, but it was a hobby. Now, he's trying to think of startup ideas. His method for figuring this out is, "I'm going to write a list of all the ideas, starting with what would be the most awesome if I did it, down from there." Then, he thought he would probably cross out the first five because they're unrealistic or impractical, and he would probably do number five on the list. Number one was to create a supersonic jet, because, like Elon, the way Elon started SpaceX... you've heard the story where...

Sam Parr

He went into it thinking, "This is not gonna work."

Shaan Puri

Well, but even before that, he sold... you know, he sold PayPal. Elon now has $180,000,000. He leaves and he's just curious, like, "Okay, what else?" He's curious about what's the latest with NASA's Mars mission. Like, "I haven't heard about our Mars mission. Is it in progress and I just missed it? Is it launching soon? I can't wait to go see it. Maybe I'll fly there and go see it. I want to see the launch. I love rockets." He goes on the NASA website and there's no mention of Mars. He's like, "What? We went to the moon in whatever '73. How are we not... where's the next mission?" And it wasn't even on the website. He's like, "What?" He got so upset by that that the start of SpaceX was actually because he was going to privately fund a mission to send like a plant to Mars. Then it became like a turtle or jelly or something. It was like, you know, some living... some technically living thing. He was like, "I'm gonna spend $25,000,000 doing this." It was just like a stunt, just to kind of reinvigorate the interest. In the same way, this guy Blake puts on a Google alert for supersonic jets. He's like, "I just can't wait till there's a supersonic flight. I'll be the first guy to buy it." And he's waiting and he's waiting. He's like, "Is nobody working on this?" He's like, "Oh, it must be that the numbers don't... the math ain't mathing. That's gotta be the problem." So he creates a spreadsheet and in it, he writes down the assumptions. He's like, "Basically, like the engineering assumptions." He gives himself a few months to work on this. Where he's like, "Alright, let me just dig into this." So I think it was two weeks where he goes and buys a book because he's like, "I don't know anything about how airplanes fly." But he goes and buys a book and he creates an Excel spreadsheet. On one tab was the cost model. He's like, "Is it an economic problem?" Because the brief history is we had this thing called the Concorde back in the day.

Sam Parr

Have you ever seen the Concorde? Like, have you ever looked at photos of it? It looked great.

Shaan Puri

Photos... yeah, slick. It was inspiring, and everybody loved it. It was the same idea: you could get from, you know, New York to London in about three and a half hours.

Sam Parr

Yeah, it was like three and a half hours or three hours and forty-five minutes. That was the fastest time ever. What does that break down to in speed?

Shaan Puri

So, it's a three-hour normal flight. The Concorde could fly twice as fast. The idea was that the Concorde was like this luxury item; it was priced really expensively. This was, you know, almost fifty years ago that it was invented, but it was priced at like $15,000 a ticket.

Sam Parr

And if you look at the inside of it, the photos... I think it was only like three seats by three, so it was like a... it.

Shaan Puri

It was like two or three seats, something like that, for passengers, I think.

Sam Parr

Yeah, so there weren't a lot of people at all. When you think about it, it's hard to make a lot of money.

Shaan Puri

High price, low volume. There were not a lot of routes, only a limited number of routes, but it had all these problems. If you go look up the problems with the Concorde, right? Like, yes, it was expensive. It also got really hot. There's this famous story where, when they first launched it to do a PR blitz or to sponsor it, they had Pepsi sponsor the Concorde. They painted it light blue, and the Concorde, before that, was this white reflective material to reflect heat and not store it. But the light blue paint made it so hot inside the cabin that, you know, the hour flight they could only do for twenty minutes because it was like cooking everything inside. So, heat was a problem, noise was a problem, price was a problem, and duration was a problem.

Sam Parr

I also think there was a really famous crash too where it was like...

Shaan Puri

That was the best now.

Sam Parr

And I don't remember if I... you know, this was years ago. I was a kid, or I don't even think I was alive actually. But I remember reading about it. What I read was that the reality is it could have worked or it could have been great, but the perception was that this thing is dangerous and it's too radical. It crashed. I'm never getting on that. Is that right?

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So, the last thing that kind of killed the Concorde was a flight where, during takeoff, the tire hit something on the runway. It ruptured the tire, and then the plane basically exploded, killing everybody on board. That was like, "Alright, we're done with this thing. It's too dangerous." So, it had safety problems, price problems, heat problems, and noise problems because it would shatter windows when it did its sonic boom. So, it was like, "Oh, whatever." I think in 2002 or 2003 was the last flight. So, in about twenty years, there have been no flights since. Nobody was even working on it. He has this spreadsheet, and he's like, "Look, am I just nuts? Because the way I'm penciling this out, we only need like a 30% improvement in fuel efficiency and a 30% improvement in this one other thing." He's like, "Dude, it's been fifty years! Our TVs got better, our phones got better, our computers got dramatically better—not 30% better; they got like 3000% better. I'm pretty sure we could make the plane 30% more efficient, and then this would work." So, he goes to this...

Sam Parr

And like, you can buy a TV. I can get a TCL 75-inch TV for literally $600, and it's delivered to my door the next day.

Shaan Puri

Right, exactly.

Sam Parr

If I can do that, we can make a chat.

Shaan Puri

So, he goes to the Stanford professor and he's like, "Hey, you know, we need a 30% fuel efficiency." My calculations show that when you have 30% fuel efficiency... and by the way, that Concorde was designed at a time when they used slide rules and wind tunnels to test things. I think we could do this. The professor was like, "Yeah, I think you can. The math is correct." He said, "You might have engineering problems, but the physics are fine." So, he gets encouraged. He's like, "I just thought I must not know something, and that's why this hasn't been done." But it's one of those classic things where the beginner's mind goes in, and they don't see the problems, and therefore they do it. Whereas all the experts just assume, "We tried that; it doesn't work." So, he decides to create an airplane company. Okay, what's the next move? How's he going to fund this thing? Is he going to build it? Because again, this dude just bought a textbook about flight. He doesn't know anything about this stuff. So, he's like, "Alright, I need to recruit a great team, and we need some money." He decides to take half of all of his life savings and fund the company bank account with it. He hires something like six to ten people, one of whom he poaches—the former chief engineer of Gulfstream. He's like, "I thought it would be hard to get talent because here I am, this Groupon kid, saying I'm going to build a supersonic jet. That's never been done in fifty years! The last new American airline company that worked was like eighty years ago or something." So, the business plan is a little crazy. It's probably going to cost a lot. I think it cost the Concorde like a billion dollars to make. It was like a billion-dollar project. They thought it would be $20 million, and they ended up spending a billion. He's like, "I think we'll need $200 million, but I don't know where I'm going to get all that, so let me just start by funding it myself."

Sam Parr

Did he say how much?

Shaan Puri

He hasn't said the amount, but at one point, he's like, "I realized I'm playing chicken with my own bank account here." He's like, "I want to go raise money." He ends up raising like a million bucks, still almost nothing, but he gets a few early believers in.

Sam Parr

I have one of my really close friends, Chris, who was in that round.

Shaan Puri

Oh wow, did he say what he saw or why?

Sam Parr

He's been telling me about it for years, and that's originally how I heard about this. He was like, "This guy is just magical." I just couldn't get it. I'm like a Silicon Valley software person starting a jet company. That just sounds really dumb, which is evidenced by the fact that dumb ideas can be potentially amazing, and how that's actually quite common.

Shaan Puri

And by the way, the airline market is super fragmented... oh wait, no it's not. There are two companies: one owns 51% and the other one owns 49%. It's just Airbus and Boeing—that's the whole market, right? So, you know, he's trying to go and basically break up this duopoly, in theory. Okay, so let's go back to the story. He hires a team, and one of the surprising things was that it was way easier to hire great talent. The bigger the mission, the better the pitch. He had a super exciting mission. He didn't have a lot of other things—he didn't have a lot of traction, and he didn't have a lot of funding—but he had a great mission. He had an exciting project that was basically like "nerd porn." So, any nerdy engineer who worked on airplanes could either go work at Boeing or Airbus, and their job would be to, you know, make sure that the cabin temperature goes down by two degrees so that they could sell more vodka tonics. They weren't trying to innovate at all. So, if you were somebody who wanted to innovate, this was like the only option. He recruits the right team, then he goes into Y Combinator. He was skeptical at first, thinking, "Isn't it just for software companies?" But Sam Altman is like, "No, no, no, we like hard stuff." Sam says, "I don't know if you're going to get in, but you should go talk to these four other guys who had hardware companies that kind of failed in YC. They'll tell you that they would have failed much worse had they not had YC." So, he goes and talks to them, and they're like, "Yeah, it was great. Let's do it." He joins, and he realizes something pretty quickly: YC is architected in this three-month program around Demo Day. In three months, you're going to stand on stage in front of all the investors, you're going to make your pitch, and you gotta raise money. That's the whole thing.

Shaan Puri

And so he's like, "What the hell am I gonna do in three months?" He realizes that during Y Combinator (YC), if he goes to them and says, "Hey, we reduced the drag coefficient by 30% and this engine design is really awesome," and that's our progress update, they're cooked. So he's like, "I gotta figure out something that I'm gonna do." He comes up with two plans. He's like, "Number one, I gotta sell the dream." He spends a good chunk of his time and money just building a model airplane that looks sick. He is like, "Alright, this is not gonna actually help us make the plane, but it is gonna help people see that we are making a plane, and it is gonna look awesome."

Sam Parr

How much does Y Combinator give you? Like $125,000.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, some play at the time.

Sam Parr

He probably just spent all like $100,000 hiring some firm to make a really great model.

Shaan Puri

So, he had a model... oh, he had a model, but then he also had a gnarly-looking engine. He said, "We just want to stand there with a big-ass engine, and then people will walk by and be like, 'Whoa, is that a jet engine?'" He was like, "Yeah, that's the jet engine we're going to use on our supersonic jet. Would you like to hear more?" So, he needed that eye candy. For him, the booth babe was the model and the engine. Smart, right? Because one of the commonalities of Elon and these other guys is that you can't just be an engineer in your little engineering hole. You have to know just enough about the rest—about marketing, capital raising, and all the other things to survive. The second thing he did was say, "I need these purchase orders." So, he made a list and thought, "Alright, how can I go get those?" He said, "Here's this quote: I realized I couldn't show up to demo day with no sales; otherwise, my goose was pretty cooked. So, I looked at my sales pipeline, and it was United, Delta, Lufthansa, Air China. We only had eight or nine weeks before demo day, and I thought to myself, 'There's no way I'm closing Lufthansa Airlines by demo day. It's not gonna happen. I'll be lucky if I close them in nine years, let alone nine weeks.'" So, I realized I actually only had two options: a startup airline or Virgin. He said, "I went all in and focused all of my sales efforts on startups and Virgin." He went to the startups that were currently operating and got one of them to do a Letter of Intent (LOI), but it was a company you've never heard of. It was the best he could do. Here he was, twenty-four hours before demo day, and the lucky break we got was that demo day was split into two days. If it had been demo day one, he would have stood up on stage and said, "We have a small LOI from this company you've never heard of." Luckily, we got randomly assigned to demo day two, so he had bought an extra twenty-four hours. In that extra twenty-four hours, he ended up getting an email from Virgin the night before demo day that said, "You're allowed to announce we'll take the first ten planes. We've got options on them, and through Virgin Galactic, we'll even help you build it." He said, "I fell off my chair. I almost screamed. I had to read the thing three times. I couldn't believe it. We went from being the biggest laughing stock on demo day to the company that showed up with $5,000,000,000 worth of LOIs—a record that won't be broken soon."

Sam Parr

Dude, that's so sick! What year is this? What year is this?

Shaan Puri

2016

Sam Parr

So, yeah, I was reading. I was looking up my email to try to figure out, "Did I ever talk to this person? How do I know him?" The earliest thing I could find was, I think, in February 2020. It says "The Hustle" actually wrote about him. It said United Airlines wants to buy 15 supersonic airliners from Boom Supersonic. So, it took him an additional two years to get the United Airlines deal.

Shaan Puri

The next LOI... So, okay, how did he get Richard Branson? High agency, baby! I told you, he's dripping in agency. Alright, so what does he do? He's like, "Alright, if I want to get to Richard Branson, I gotta go through somebody I trust." He goes, "I'm also not just gonna try one path to Branson. We gotta try multiple paths to Branson." So he's like, "If I get blocked over here, I got this other long shot going." He had this guy on their board who was an astronaut—this guy, Mark Kelly. You've probably heard of him. So that guy was on his advisory board. He's like, "He knows Branson." So I'm thinking, "Alright, we gotta find a way to get to Richard." We asked Mark, "What's the best way to get to Richard Branson? How do we make that happen?" He told me, "Hey, you can't get him interested in you, but go where he's interested in his own thing." So what do you mean? He goes, "Virgin Galactic has this big rollout for their spaceship. Richard's gotta be there, so you just gotta get there. Go where he is." And they're like, "Okay." So they get it. He's like, "Could you email him and say, 'Hey, these guys I'm advising from Boom Supersonic are gonna be in Mojave when you're doing your rollout. You should meet with them when you're there'?" Then he reaches out to the Virgin guys and says, "Hey, we're gonna be in town to see Richard. Can we come to the rollout?" And they're like, "Sure." So basically, they get invited to the rollout. They get there, and he's super busy. They end up getting fifteen minutes with him when he's at brunch with his mom. They go up to him, and he goes, "Richard," and they show him what they're doing. They're like, "We're building the first supersonic jet since the Concorde. We fixed these problems; we're making that happen." He goes, "Look, we're not asking you for your money. All we want to know is this: when this thing flies, do you want a Virgin logo on it?" He goes, "I think that was the key. You gotta ask for the right thing. When you do a deal that's probably gonna be hard to close, you gotta ask for what's really gonna help you." So they told Richard, "Look, if you're our customer, we will get money elsewhere. We don't need money from you." And that was crucial. Basically, like the first few babies of these that are in the air, do you want them with a Virgin logo or not? So that was the thing that got Richard Branson across the line: making the intelligent ask and hustling their way.

Sam Parr

Dude, this is a movie. This is a movie, and it works if it ends well. It's a movie.

Shaan Puri

Well, they just did their flight. They just completed their first demo flight.

Sam Parr

But it wasn't a... I think what the test was, if I remember correctly, was it the engine that they were testing? They got the engine because the plane is like a... it's a small plane, right?

Shaan Puri

This was a smaller plane than the real plane that they're going to have. I don't think it was at full speed, but I believe they achieved supersonic flight. You could check me on that, but...

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah.

Shaan Puri

I believe they achieved the right... they crossed the threshold. They did it safely; they landed it. Is there like whatever XB-1 or whatever they're calling that thing? Okay, he's got some great startup advice. Here's the way he described his startup. I like the way he phrased this. He goes, "Here's my advice for startups: pick something that's going to be worth it to you personally." That is how you stack the deck in your favor. Stack the deck so that you will be motivated. When you look at what you're creating versus if you went to Google, Facebook, or Amazon, it should be a no contest. If you haven't found that, just don't even start a startup. I did that my first time. I just started a startup just because, and it was a horrible idea. You should start a startup when you're like, "I must make this happen." Something I've come to believe is that the bigger the idea, the easier it becomes because it motivates you and the people around you. You attract better people to come work on it. When we were brainstorming, most of the ideas we came up with were like, "No one's going to really appreciate this," blah, blah, blah. But for us, it was like the most exciting thing we could ever do. So that's all that mattered: stacking the deck in your favor and doing it as a must rather than a "we could do this." That's, I thought, one really great takeaway.

Sam Parr

I was reading this quote by the guy—I don't know how to say his last name—but the guy who wrote *Crime and Punishment*, you know, that famous novel. He said, "Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing." I just read that like an hour ago, and it's sat with me. What you've described is exactly that.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I love this guy. I don't know him, but I'm rooting for him. I want to invest now because, you know, why not? Let's get on the team.

Sam Parr

You know what they promise? There's been a lot of... I think there's been, well, there definitely has been. But there's been, I think, he wrote publicly about a lot of the downsides of all this, which is that it has not been clear. I think he had to take a huge down round, and he tweeted out about it, I believe. His most recent valuation was $2,000,000,000, which was down from the other amount. But didn't he tweet about the down round and how they basically almost ran out of money? How it's almost failed at a bunch of different times?

Shaan Puri

I don't know, I didn't see that. I also feel like I'm different than you. I feel like you love to know the downsides of things. Even when a guest comes on, that's one of the questions you tend to ask, which is interesting to me because I never really think about it. You're always like, "What are the honest downsides? It's not all peaches and cream." That's obviously an intelligent question, but I think there's something good about being delusional about it too. Just being like, I have a convenient hole in my memory and in my brain to not even really pay attention to or remember those things.

Sam Parr

The reason I asked that is because I have been a victim of this many times. I go and say, "Well, this guy did it. Why can't I do it?" Then I start doing it and I think to myself, "This is way harder than it looked. Why is this so hard?" So, I always look for those... I always ask those questions, not to say that someone shouldn't do something, but just to say that it is much more challenging than it appears. And that is okay and normal. I remember thinking on my journey, "This sucks. You know, this person never felt that way. Why do I feel that way? I'm full of shit. What the hell? I'm not good enough." Then I want to be reminded that this is a normal feeling. This is a normal problem I'm having. You gotta keep going. That's why I asked those questions.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, tell... I think it's totally helpful to have that. The one that helps me is Tony Robbins. He talks about dabblers versus stressors, achievers versus masters. I've talked about this a lot, but I won't do the whole thing. One of the things he says at the end is that anybody who's pursuing anything, no matter what, if you are in it, you're going to hit plateaus. So forget even downs, but just plateaus where it feels like it's not working. The progress is not happening. It's not happening as fast as you want. It's not growing. It's not working. Everyone's saying no, we don't have that investor, whatever it is, right? And the one thing that Tony said that just always stuck in my mind, almost like a jingle in a song or like a commercial, is: > "When that plateau comes, the dabbler quits, the stressor stresses, and the master says, 'Ah, I thought I'd be seeing you soon. Hello, my old friend. You're here. I was expecting you.'" We have this one company we started just a little over a year ago that's just been like up into the right. This company, I haven't announced it yet, but it's like almost a $10 million run rate, already profitable, bootstrapped in one year. It's like insanely, insanely successful. But we just hit our first plateau. I feel like when we called it out, it was almost like this kind of embarrassing down feeling of, "Oh man, we didn't have ridiculous growth this month." Whereas I was like, "Dude, I've been expecting you. Where is the plateau? I know it's coming. I almost don't even trust that it's happening until this is real, until we start to face some of these." So yeah.

Sam Parr

That's why I asked those questions. I don't want us, as a media or whatever we are, to be the ones who... I want to be realistic.

Shaan Puri

Biggest business influencers on iTunes.

Sam Parr

Well, yeah.

Shaan Puri

As Spotify's thirteenth biggest business influencer.

Sam Parr

I just want to say that it is a **pain in the ass**, and it's still worth it. Do you know what I mean?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. Speaking of insane agencies and insane downs on a way to a huge up, have you listened to this episode I did with Nick Mowbray?

Sam Parr

It came out this morning, and I hadn't listened to it yet. But I went and saw it pop up this morning, and I went and googled his company. I own a ton of the toys that he makes, and not just for my kid. He owns Mini Brands.

Shaan Puri

You bathe with the robofish.

Sam Parr

Well, I've... we have a Robofish, actually, but my daughter does. But you know, I told you about mini toys, right? And how, like, I...

Shaan Puri

Oh, that's his.

Sam Parr

Mini brands, you know? It's mini brands. So, like, my wife is *really* weird. When she was pregnant and not feeling well, I would go and surprise her by buying these mini toys, which is the stupidest thing ever. It's just like a ball full of miniature things, like a miniature can of Coke, a miniature KitKat, a miniature notebook... the weirdest stuff that people love! And then the other thing...

Shaan Puri

Loves those.

Sam Parr

Dude, I don't know why my wife loves these things.

Shaan Puri

32-year-old loves those.

Sam Parr

Dude, you know what I did? I went and bought like literally $300 worth of stuff and I hid it in my drawer. Whenever she had a bad pregnancy day, when she was sick or something, I would go and get one and be like, "I got something for you." It was like I had a secret stash. Also, he makes these electric water guns that I bought last summer. I would shoot them at my daughter, just messing around. Have you seen the electric water guns?

Shaan Puri

Dov, I think it's hilarious how into the toys you are right now. Could I tell you the biggest "oh holy shit" moment from the whole thing?

Sam Parr

Well, you gotta tell the background. From what I know, it's two brothers in New Zealand that have a toy company that does like three or four...

Shaan Puri

We have interviewed, I don't know how many, 200 guests on this podcast. Two hundred fifty, maybe.

Sam Parr

Hundreds.

Shaan Puri

**Billionaires.** Young, old, man, woman, whatever.

Sam Parr

Criminals... not criminals.

Shaan Puri

Criminals, non-criminals... guys you don't want to hang out with. Right? There's a lot of people we've had on this podcast. He is yet at the top of the mountain.

Sam Parr

He's number one.

Shaan Puri

My number one most impressive entrepreneur of all of them... I was blown away. He has the scrappiest hustle story. His bottom was literally living on a dollar a day for years. This is how funny this guy is. So, okay, now I'll zoom out and give you the context that you wanted. But I just needed to say that out of every guest I've ever had on this podcast, he is the number one most impressive founder that I've ever had on the podcast.

Sam Parr

Okay, and we've had some cool people.

Shaan Puri

No offense to everybody else, alright? So, but sort of a story... yeah, but know your place.

Sam Parr

With all due respect, you **suck**.

Shaan Puri

Okay, Robins, I found Batman. This guy, I would say, is the wealthiest man in New Zealand. He's got a company that he and his brother started. It's family-owned, bootstrapped, and he's a self-made billionaire. They do a few billion dollars a year in revenue and a billion dollars a year in just profit.

Sam Parr

I like that.

Shaan Puri

They've been doing that. It's nice to meet you. He has never had outside investors. He has dominated the toy industry. He built the most profitable toy company in the world. He then built the fastest growing diaper company in the world. Have you ever heard of Rascals Diapers or Million Moon at Target?

Sam Parr

Yeah, so he's...

Shaan Puri

Got the fastest growing diaper company in the world, doing hundreds of millions. By the way, he made that while he was on sick leave. He had his intestine removed because he got Crohn's disease. While he was on his sick bed, laying there, he thought, "Oh, I guess I'll just dominate diapers now." So, he created the fastest growing diaper company. He also created the fastest growing hair care company on TikTok, called Monday Hair Care. Not only that, he is now building the largest factory in the world—bigger than the Tesla factory—where robots are going to build houses autonomously. And that's what he's doing: building houses with robots. He's self-funding the whole thing, by the way. I asked him, "Is that just gotta be hundreds of millions of dollars of self-funding?" and he just laughed. So, take that for what it's worth. Now, let me tell you some of the just "holy shit" stories from this thing.

Sam Parr

Yeah.

Shaan Puri

Alright, so the dude's 18 years old. After selling door to door in New Zealand, where they live, he tried to sell a hot air balloon toy that his brother invented at a science fair. His older brother put him to work and was like, "Yo, you need to go sell this door to door." The dude that they were there with said, "You know what? We need a factory." And they were like, "Oh, all the manufacturing is in China." So, they moved to China. But the hilarious thing is...

Sam Parr

At 19.

Shaan Puri

At 18, I think 18 or 19, they went to China. That's the story where they slept in the bush outside the airport because the airport lights were too bright. So, they left the airport, slept in a bush, and got bitten by mosquitoes. They had no money, so they were just on their own. I was like, "Oh, so you found a manufacturer in China, then you scaled up?" He goes, "What if you found a manufacturer? We went to China and then built a factory on the side of a river. We just went with wood and a hammer and built a factory." I was like, "What was the point of going to China? You know, you go to China because their factories are already there." He's like, "Yeah, we didn't understand that. We just went there and built our own factory on the side of a river. We found this mom to make us food for 2 RMB a day, 30 cents a day, and then she had some people that could come work in the factory. We just had our own production line." It sounds like a shed. Yeah, they literally built a line.

Sam Parr

And then it sounds like a shed.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, they literally built a shed and then they just kept scaling up the shed. He's like, "My brother didn't come back home for like eight or nine years. He just slept on the floor of the factory, and I slept on the floor too, except for when I had to go sell." Alright, so how did they win? He's like, "Our product sucked, by the way." This is one of my favorite things. It's like everybody who makes it says, "The key is just to have a great product." Then, if you're a founder, you're like, "Dude, what? Okay, I've made a great product. Now what? Nothing's happening." And you know, people tend to leave out the manual work it took and the lucky breaks it took to get the thing to start working.

Sam Parr

What was the product? It was a hot... it was like a plastic hot air balloon toy or what?

Shaan Puri

Even worse, it starts with a hot air balloon. Quickly, we... he's like, "We didn't know anything about anything." So we go, we build a shed by the river in China, and we're making our hot air balloons. Then we've learned you can't even export a hot air balloon. He's like, "Literally, it's a fire in a tiny can. We can't sell that." So he's like, "We realized that was a waste. We got to come up with a new toy." And again, everybody tries to say we're so innovative. So we innovated. Innovation is great, and then we made a great product. He is the opposite. He's like, "So we found that this other toy was selling, so we copied it. We ruthlessly copied that toy, and we made a shitty version of it because we didn't know anything about manufacturing."

Sam Parr

Dude, so this white guy moved to China and out-Chinese the Chinese. Exactly.

Shaan Puri

Exactly! It was like, "Dude, we lived on a dollar a day." I was like, "So, I heard the story. You ate McDonald's every day?" And he's like, "Every day! I wish McDonald's was our Christmas treat. We would go to McDonald's." He's like, "For years, I just remember saying, 'Merry Christmas, bro.' He's like, 'Merry Christmas, bro.' We would cheers our fries." He's like, "I used to eat half the fries and take it back and be like, 'Hey, there's only half the fries in here. You guys jipped me!' and get like the second serving of fries." And he's like, "That was the treat, dude. I used to do that."

Sam Parr

That all the time at bars, I would order an iced tea and be like, "You made the Long Island iced tea wrong. You forgot the liquor!"

Shaan Puri

And by the way, he was not saying.

Sam Parr

That he's not.

Shaan Puri

He was like, "I was almost like a therapist" because this guy had never done a podcast before. This was the first podcast that I think he's ever done, and there are no stories you could find about this guy. I went to do the research, and there was no, "Oh, him..." You know, normally we do research; you go watch the three most-watched podcasts that they've done and you pick up a bunch of stuff. He had zero. He had to download Google Chrome to do the interview. He's like, "It's not letting me do this," and we're like, "What?" We're like, "Just open Chrome." He's like, "What's Chrome?" I was like, "You're a billionaire, you don't know Google? What do you use?" He's like, "Oh, I think I have Chrome. Hold on." He's like, "I got Chrome. Okay, got it, got it. Let me switch to my laptop. This is gonna work."

Sam Parr

Take a look. Was he messing with you?

Shaan Puri

No, he was that serious. So I was like, "Dude, why don't you do any podcasts? Tell your stories." He said, "I don't know, I just never did."

Sam Parr

What motivates this guy?

Shaan Puri

He's just a maniac, dude. He's like, "I..."

Sam Parr

Was he calm? Was he calm?

Shaan Puri

Very calm. I felt like it was almost like a therapy session because I'm asking him about these times back in the day. He's almost like, "Yeah, I don't know what we were doing or why we were thinking."

Sam Parr

About that... just doesn't think about that.

Shaan Puri

And he was like, "Not... he's like, yeah, we were super scrappy, but we were also a little mentally ill. We just were." He goes, "We were so naive that naive is not even the right word." For example, he said, "We got sued for millions of dollars because, again, we copied someone's toy. So it's like a $2,000,000 lawsuit. It's either going to bankrupt the company because we don't have $2,000,000, or we have to fight it. But the lawyers that we talked to were like, 'It's going to cost you a million dollars to fight this.' He's like, 'Dude, we had like a few thousand dollars.' So I go to Colorado and I find this lawyer. He's like, "This guy eventually got disbarred, but I find this guy Chad, and I tell him, 'Hey, I'm gonna do all the legal work. You put your name on this, and we're gonna fight this this way.' I paid him $50 to put his name on it, and I did all the lawsuit stuff myself, just like Googling. We fought the lawsuit that way, and then Chad got disbarred later for other reasons." He told the story of how he sold the toys. I asked, "How did you sell these toys? You're saying the product sucked and you were copying somebody else, so why would anybody buy this?" He goes, "I emailed. I made a list of every retail buyer of every store in every region of the world, and I emailed or called them every single day." He remembered the name of every buyer from like fifteen years ago because he would call or email them every day. He said, "The Walmart buyer is like, I would call her or email her every day. I never forgot her." One day, she emailed him saying, "Nick, I do not need your daily email about your product." He replied, "Well, listen, Jen, I'm sorry. It's just a great product, and I just had to tell you about it because we've really got some exciting things with the pipe." He just didn't let up. Finally, he said, "She just sent me the two most beautiful words in the English language: 'Send sample.' He's like, 'We're in!' And he gets this Walmart order. By the way, actually before that, someone was like, "Hey, do you have your showroom in Hong Kong? I'll send one of my buyers." He goes, "Of course, of course! Showroom in Hong Kong? Yeah, yeah, we got one of those." It's like, "What's a showroom in Hong Kong?" So he goes to Hong Kong, rents this little cubicle where they put like escorts in, you know? It's like the red light district, and it's enough for one human body. He just sleeps in there because he doesn't have enough money for a hotel. He sleeps in there, and when a buyer shows up, he just pops out and he's like, "Hey, hey, it's me! Whatever you would like to see, our showroom!" They're like, "Yeah, what is this? This is a dressing room for like one person to change clothes in." He's like, "Yeah, yeah, toys are inside. Here you go." He ends up getting this order from Walmart for 2,000,000 units. He's like, "Oh my God, that's $30,000,000! This is amazing!" At that time, the revenue was like $150,000 a year. He tells this story about how he learned two words of Chinese: "Too slow" and "Go faster." Because our little old factory by the river had never produced 2,000,000 units of anything. So we had to produce 2,000,000 units of this thing. I come home, I take over the factory because I'm just like, "My brother's not working fast enough." Then he's like, "Walmart basically cancels the order after he's super deep in it." He took a loan from a contract manufacturer to help him build the 2,000,000 units. Then he goes and harasses the Walmart buyer to hold up to the end of the bargain. By the way, the product doesn't sell. Not a single one. He said, "It retails at $30, then discounted to $25, then $20, then $15." He goes, "It ends up selling for 50 cents." He's like, "It was like concrete on the shelf."

Sam Parr

How'd you find this guy?

Shaan Puri

I don't know. I must have heard or read something because a few years ago we talked about him on the podcast, and then since...

Sam Parr

Then, that was like three years ago.

Shaan Puri

Ben has emailed him, no joke. He showed me 17 times over the next eighteen months to get him to come on the podcast, dude.

Sam Parr

It's a...

Shaan Puri

The lead singer, this guy.

Sam Parr

Sounds awesome! I need to go and watch this. What? You gotta listen.

Shaan Puri

To this episode, it's not like, you know, he's not like Mr. Super Storyteller or Mr. Suave. I mean, he's a great guy, but he just tells it like it is. If you listen to this thing, I don't know how long it is—like ninety minutes or something like that. I mean, it is one of the most incredible entrepreneurial stories I've ever heard.

Sam Parr

By the way, alright, so let me tell you a story now. This is Chinese-related, but we're just telling stories about interesting people. I gotta tell you about someone I just read about. Have you ever been to New York? Have you ever been to New York, like Manhattan?

Shaan Puri

Yes, I have.

Sam Parr

Okay, when you were here, did you see these crazy guys on electric bikes? They're called electric bikes, but they're basically motorcycles. They're like the Uber Eats and DoorDash drivers.

Shaan Puri

No, I don't think those happen even.

Sam Parr

Dude, so in New York, like four years ago, it just popped up that all of these Uber Eats and DoorDash people... There are 70,000 Uber Eats and DoorDash drivers in New York City, in the Manhattan and Brooklyn area. It's like, they're all riding these electric bikes that fly. They look like normal bicycles, but these things literally go 60 miles an hour. I ride my bike everywhere when I'm in New York City, and these guys have almost killed me tons of times. They're really dangerous. What you'll notice is that they all have these gloves on. Have you ever seen these DoorDash drivers in the winter?

Shaan Puri

I've seen that.

Sam Parr

Well, they keep them there in the wind in the summertime too. The reason they do that is because underneath those gloves, they have a motorcycle-style acceleration, like a twisty thing on the grip, which is illegal. You can't have that because, you know, at what point do you go from being a bicycle to being a motorcycle? There have to be rules. So, there's this weird thing where I'd be walking around, and I even asked these guys, "What is this bike?" They don't speak English, so they couldn't tell me. But I was like, "I want to know what this bike is that goes 60 miles an hour and has a twisty throttle thing because this is sick! I want one." I started doing research around it, and I think I talked about it in the podcast. I couldn't find out what it was. Well, two or three days ago, an article came out that told the story about what this thing was, and it's pretty ridiculous. Basically, there's a guy who comes from China. He's got a name that's too hard to pronounce, but his American name is Andy. He came in February 2011, and when he arrived, he basically admitted that he paid a guy $45 to smuggle him in from Mexico. He came illegally. In this article, they even linked to a rap video he did when he was broke and poor, where he said, "I decided to come to America to make it rich." That was like the Chinese lyrics of this video. It turns out the first thing he did was notice that there were all these Uber Eats bike riders. They get punished if they don't deliver quickly; if you don't show up in time, you get docked and don't receive the full rate. So, he starts importing these electric bikes from China. I think he borrowed $12 from someone, and he opened up a shop. One of these shops was right by my house where I used to stay in Brooklyn years ago, and I would always see these guys hanging out outside the shop. What I didn't realize was that he scaled this thing so fast that he started having literally 30 different stores all around Manhattan, where he's selling these things. It's called Fly eBikes. He's selling these eBikes that go like 40 to 50 miles an hour, and they're only $1,000. It's incredible, and they're incredibly illegal. They literally just don't follow any of the laws. If you look underneath, when you order these bikes, there's a metal plate that says, "This meets this USA standard," and in the article, someone was like, "Nobody checks that." It's basically an honor system, and we hope that you do it, but there's no one actually checking these things. The guy, Andy, ends up selling 70,000 bikes in four years. A few months ago, I think it was in September, he had the audacity to take the company public. It goes public on the NASDAQ, and I think the ticker is FLY. You could see the ticker, and I put all their financials in this document. The year before they went public, they were doing like $30 million in revenue and $2 to $3 million in profit. But they're getting sued like crazy because one of their bikes caught on fire. They follow no rules. He basically admits that he's like, "Yeah, we're cowboys. We build first and ask questions later." Homes have burned down, and people have actually died from the batteries catching on fire in someone's apartment and burning the apartment down. They're getting sued, and one of the lawyers suing them has this quote where he's like, "Dude, six years ago, these guys were busboys serving dishes or cleaning dishes in restaurants. Now they're running a publicly traded company. They know nothing about building bikes. They're just getting the cheapest stuff they can over here." It's all true, by the way. They're insane, but I cannot believe they went public. I went and listened to one of their reports, or when investors were interviewing the CEO, Andy, before he took it public. They asked him, "Why did you decide to take it public?" He said he was inspired by the movie "Wolf of Wall Street," and that's why he decided to take the company public. He says that in a YouTube video. Now, because of all these lawsuits and because the company is just like... it's just breaking so many laws, they do whatever the hell they want, and the stock has crashed.

Shaan Puri

We need a spin-off podcast of just absolutely renegade Chinese founders doing things that we would never dream of. I would subscribe to that instantaneously.

Sam Parr

Well, he's like the real-life Jin Yang from *Silicon Valley*, where he's just sitting there smoking cigars and cigarettes. And someone's like, "You know, you really need safety stuff." And he's like, "Who says?" You know what I mean? Like, he...

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it's like the deep founder.

Sam Parr

Right, right now.

Shaan Puri

The DeepSeek founder is going to go out of public for the same reason.

Sam Parr

It's just... this guy's hilarious, but it is actually inspiring that all these dorks are like, "We gotta do this! We gotta do this! We gotta have this process!" Meanwhile, you've got this guy, Nick, moving to China and not knowing anything. Then we have those Chinese guys moving to New York and not knowing anything. And it still works! His company, by the way, is an electric bike company. It does $30,000,000 in revenue and $3,000,000 in income. So, it's not nothing! He started with $12,000. It's pretty badass, though, besides the fact that it's incredibly illegal and dangerous, and people are dying. But besides that, it's kind of an interesting story because I've always wondered where these freaking bikes have come from. I gotta give a shout out to *Curb*. They have an article called "The Moped King: How an Ex-Delivery Worker Upended the Streets of New York City for Better and for Worse," and it's about Fly E-Bot eBike.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just need the spin-off. Somebody needs to make the... not the right way to do it, but still an impressive version of it.

Sam Parr

Yeah, we went from being inspiring, like "who cares about money, we're going to make travel better," to hardcore, "shark does whatever it takes." But still ethical, like "I'm going to get rich and just conquer the world," to "forget everyone, get paid."

Shaan Puri

The full journey. Exactly. Yeah, alright, that's it. That's the pod.

Sam Parr

Is that it? That's it. That's the pod. Alright.