Business Brainstorm: Failed Churches, Ozempic Hotline & Klout 2.0 (#492)
Klout 2.0, Ozempic, and Elite Nerd Recruiting - September 5, 2023 (over 1 year ago) • 01:15:56
Transcript:
| Start Time | Speaker | Text |
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Shaan Puri | Could turn off wi fi and do this idea | |
Sam Parr | I like that | |
Shaan Puri | So, what if I told you that in San Francisco, I discovered a business that does $31,000,000 in revenue locally here in San Francisco? On that $31,000,000 in revenue, it does about $11,000,000 in profit.
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Sam Parr | it's brick it's brick and mortar | |
Shaan Puri | Brick and mortar... wow! It has $100,000,000 of assets on the balance sheet. Do you want to take a guess on what kind of business this is?
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Sam Parr | Well, it's one of the things you have listed, but does it involve religion?
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Shaan Puri | it does not no | |
Sam Parr | oh what is it | |
Shaan Puri | it is | |
Sam Parr | alright we're live happy labor day we are celebrating by laboring | |
Shaan Puri | Yes, join me in this labor, Sam. Let's do a labor of love because...
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Sam Parr | it is a day of labor | |
Shaan Puri | Today's episode is all about **business ideas** and **opportunities**.
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Sam Parr | did you like preparing for this | |
Shaan Puri | I love preparing for this I bet you did not | |
Sam Parr | This is not my favorite thing to prepare for. It feels like a book report.
Whereas my favorite episodes are when I just find cool stuff throughout the week and I can say, "Have you seen this? This is cool!"
Versus this one, I was like, "Oh, I gotta go and find things that I have to seek out a little bit more."
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Shaan Puri | To me, this is like being in a relationship where it's just about doing things together. For example, "I gotta go to the grocery store, come with me to the grocery store." That's our date.
But you forget that you need to have a date night once in a while. You have to break out the rose petals and figure out a way to keep it spicy. To me, that's what these episodes are about.
When we started this podcast, it was very much focused on ideas and business opportunities for people. That's how we gained our initial momentum because no one else was doing that.
Over time, it's like, "Well, listen, we're doing 2 episodes a week." We can't be having 20 good ideas a week; that's not really how it works. So we started blending in just cool businesses we discovered and interesting things that are going on in our companies, whatever.
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Sam Parr | That's like the Costco pizza date night, you know what I'm saying? Like, "Oh, let's go to Costco, get some toilet paper, and we'll get a pizza."
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Sam Parr | that counts right which is which is great | |
Shaan Puri | So, this is a throwback. We sprayed some cologne, got a little hair gel, and I'm putting on pants for the first time in a while. Here we go! This is date night for MFM. Where do you want to start?
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Sam Parr | I'm actually very happy that we have one overlapping thing that makes me pumped. Also, a bunch of our things are big, which also makes me pumped. I do not like the small-time stuff. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, we're going to have a range, though. There are going to be a couple that are like simple, what I'll call more like simple side hustles. It's like, "Here's a way that you could replace a job." You're not really going to get rich doing it per se, but you could definitely get to, I don't know, $10K a month or $20K a month doing this.
Then we have a bunch of big ideas. So, I tried to stay away from complete moonshot ideas in this one.
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Sam Parr | I have a few big ones. What do you want to do? Can we actually start with the one that interests you and me? That is a big one. Do you want to talk about that one, or do you want to start small first? | |
Shaan Puri | yeah let's go | |
Sam Parr | Last episode, we gave a preview. There was one company we... I don't know if we've ever talked about it, but I could just read your mind and know that you thought this was cool.
In about 2012, or so, I think it started in 2008 but got popular in like 2012, there was a company called **Klout**. It was spelled with a "K": K-L-O-U-T. I remember I was just getting started on the internet, and I only had like 4,000 Facebook friends, which was considered big at the time.
This company called Klout came out, and basically, what you could do was log in with your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. I don't even know if Instagram existed in that way back then, or I guess it maybe did whenever it switched to Facebook.
It was really fascinating because what they would do is give you a Klout score. This score would range between 1 and 100. I think there was a time when I had like a 75 or something. Obama was like a 92, just to give you some perspective.
What would happen is it was a platform for companies like McDonald's. Well, at least that's who I got... I received like $5 McDonald's gift cards. For their new promotions, they would basically find out information about your background, what you're interested in, what you're posting, and how popular you are. Then, they would give you free stuff in hopes that you would go out and like the experience.
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Shaan Puri | share | |
Sam Parr | it that company was acquired they raised like $40,000,000 they were acquired in 2014 for $200,000,000 but I don't think that was a very successful exit I think that they probably just sold for the amount of money that they raised at however I've been thinking about this idea constantly and I think it's really really really cool so the way it got started was in 2017 the guy who started his name was joe fernandez he had some surgery on his jaw something was wrong with his jaw so his jaw was wired shut for 3 months and so he was like in this hospital bed laying around and he didn't have anything to do and so he said he he he he just got obsessed with can word-of-mouth be measurable and so he created this api or he created this program where you could pull from twitter's api and give a score out of a 100 based off of how influential the person was and he got obsessed with this and he started going around deeper and deeper and deeper on this and eventually it turned into a company where by like 2011 it was pretty popular and this one person said something amazing where they're trying to hate on clout and they said something like they took the clout took the entire spectrum of human interaction and condensed it into a two number a two digit number that you could use to bludgeon anyone who failed to adhere to its score they basically just said it's tacky it's basic it's cheap and they're like you you you can't just put someone's like give someone a score and that be their self worth and in my head I'm like well that's actually awesome that's a really cool service and so the company got quite popular it was bought in whatever I said 2014 by lithium which I don't even know what that is and it doesn't exist anymore and I was curious about it and I said joe I we dm'd him I go do you think that this could still exist today he goes this is something I'll never get over in so many ways we were just way too early the world still needs something like this like clout more than ever unfortunately I'm not sure if it's possible to pull out to pull it off and get all the data however the idea of clout for anyone in the in our era like just getting started in the 2010 2014 range this was awesome and I think a business like this 100% should still exist because when I'm we're sponsoring influencers and stuff for different companies it's really hard to know what's legit and what isn't so what do you think about clout what did you remember about I | |
Shaan Puri | Remember back then, I thought it was such a smart idea. I was like, "Oh, this is great!" Yeah, like everybody, you know, across all social media, you have followers. But we all kind of know followers aren't exactly it.
To layer on just another number, even if you thought it was stupid, you didn't want to be at the bottom. I was like, "Oh, that's a..." you did.
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Sam Parr | that one it's | |
Shaan Puri | A powerful draw, right? It's just like any other ratings or reviews. But I was like, "This is great because it doesn't require people to have ratings and reviews." It could just basically crawl the data or take the connected data and give you a score based off of it.
So, I really like that. On the other side, it was unclear to me exactly how this was going to be used. For example, you're saying when we're figuring out whether to pay, you know, which influencer the sponsor or how to pay them, something like this is useful.
I think that's the problem with this: it was more compelling to the Klout user who wanted to know their score and for it to go up than it was for the brands who needed to find influencers. So, I think it really had half of the problem.
I think the second half is that it wasn't a must-have. For example, you kind of know who influencers are for your brand, even if you don't know. You just look at the followers; you can look at their rough engagement and say, "Okay, how many likes to followers?" You get a very quick proxy for this.
You could use Klout, but I'm not going to pay Klout like $30 a year for that type of information. So, the question is: what type of information would be the right way to use that Klout score? What could they do with that Klout score?
I don't know what that answer is, but I think that's where you would have to start if you wanted to restart this idea. What do you think? What do you think people could do with this? Or do you agree with me that it's hard to charge a brand a lot of money for what's somewhat obvious, which is, you know, which influencers have pull?
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Sam Parr | I think you're thinking like a small and medium sized business owner and not mcdonald's and not | |
Shaan Puri | sick current | |
Sam Parr | like a huge company | |
Shaan Puri | dude there's a I gotta tell you something | |
Sam Parr | think of | |
Sam Parr | like a $50,000,000,000 a year business not a 1,000,000,000 what were | |
Shaan Puri | You said, "Funny story. I did an interview with Emmett, or I ended a podcast with Emmett the other day."
Emmett was the CEO and founder of Twitch, and Twitch had bought my company.
So, anyway, it went well overall. It's going to come out in a couple of days. But there was one really funny part where he just burned me so bad. I was so shook by it that it took me like 5 minutes mentally to recover from this. I was so embarrassed by it.
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Sam Parr | well you texted me you said he said something | |
Sam Parr | to me that stuck in | |
Sam Parr | my head and it almost ruined me | |
Shaan Puri | In a week, it was so hard. I was trying to set him up, like, "Dude, I learned so much from you." One of the things you taught me was this cool little model during our first one-on-one. You were like, "Oh hey, here's a good way to format these conversations. Here's a way to plug it in. If I was a piece of machinery, here's a manual on how to use it."
He said, "You can come in and say one of three things. You could be like, 'Hey, I'm doing this. FYI, here's my decision.' The second one is, 'Here's what I think we should do. Do I have your approval?' Maybe it's very risky and takes a lot of money to do it. The third one is, 'I don't know what to do. Could you help me?' And the last one is, 'Last time we talked about this, and here's where I'm at now.' That's the update."
I thought that was really useful. I asked him, "Is that something that you figured out? Where'd you learn that?" He replied, "Yeah, that's really good for mid-level managers." I was like, "Oh man." He continued, "If you're a super seasoned exec, I guess I would do it differently, but that's really good for someone who's not junior but not a super seasoned exec." I agreed, saying, "It's absolutely true. I'm not a super seasoned corporate executive. I've never..." | |
Sam Parr | I think that's where the where where the word mid has come from | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, but I was like, "I don't want to be mid-level anything." Like, you could be like, "Hey, what floor are you staying on?" and I'm like, "I'm on the 19th floor." They're like, "I thought your hotel key said 9th." I was like, "No, no, no. I don't stay in the mid-level of nothing. Don't ever put me there."
And so he burned me. I was like, he didn't even... he wasn't trying to burn me; he was trying to be totally nice. But in my head, I was like, "Oh my God, I just got burned." And then for the next 5 minutes, I don't even know what he said. Then I came back to the interview after that.
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Sam Parr | well you should have brought that up you're like look | |
Sam Parr | I can't get this out of my mouth | |
Sam Parr | should have did you hear that | |
Shaan Puri | You know when you have that compounding social awkwardness? It's like the thing happens. I'm checking into my flight, they say, "Have a nice flight," and I say, "You too." Yeah, and then I'm like, "Oh..." | |
Sam Parr | he doesn't wanna | |
Shaan Puri | Be screwed up and then you're like, "What I should just do is laugh it off right now, like a smooth guy." Instead, you just pause, you eat it, and now it's like, "Oh, now it's been too long." Then you're kind of in your own head about it. So that's what I did, at least.
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Sam Parr | you you you accidentally called emmet mom you had one of those moments | |
Shaan Puri | I was like, when I should've... it was like 55 minutes later. But, just circling back to that mid-level thing, I know you didn't mean that, right? Can you say that differently in a way that feels better to me?
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Sam Parr | is he like genius is is he like one of those yeah he definitely is | |
Shaan Puri | He definitely is. That's the other problem too. You can't even be like, "Ah, this idiot doesn't know what he's talking about." It's like, no, this genius knows exactly what he's talking about. | |
Sam Parr | is he working at twitch still | |
Shaan Puri | no he retired | |
Sam Parr | That's sick! Alright, well maybe Emmett will be the new CEO of Twitch or Clout or something like that. I don't know, what's he gonna do now? Like, go to Mars? I mean, he's pretty wealthy now, right?
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Shaan Puri | I think he's going to do, you know, other stuff in life. We talked about it a little bit on the podcast. I think he wants to write a lot, like essays and stuff like that. He was in the first Y Combinator (YC) batch, and I think he looks up to Paul Graham, who is sort of a mentor for him.
He really likes other people who have contributed to the intellectual discourse of the world, and I think that's what he wants to do for the next little while of his life. He doesn't want to go back and operate another company; he did that for 17 years, which is pretty intense.
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Sam Parr | Paul Graham lives, I think, like the ideal life as one can. He just goes... yeah, I think he lives in England now with his family. He just writes an essay once a month, and everyone just does what he says. You know what I mean? Like the whole YC Illuminati, they just say, "Yes, sir." So it works out well.
Alright, so cloud... I think is a cool idea, but what do you got?
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Shaan Puri | So, restarting cloud... Okay, I think that's good. I think I got a different version of an idea that was similar, sort of, to professional services.
Okay, so we've had Andrew Wilkinson on the podcast a bunch. Andrew is a fan favorite, and people, I think, like us, really respect what he's done with Tiny. It's like, "Oh, Tiny! We buy businesses. We buy wonderful businesses, beautiful businesses." Right? It's a great little shtick.
And he's got a portfolio of, I don't know, 30 companies now at this point. The whole thing is worth, I don't know, what's the stock worth today? Maybe $700 million or something like that. | |
Sam Parr | 6 to 800 on any day on on any given week | |
Shaan Puri | Amazing! So, it's an incredible bootstrapped venture. He bootstrapped it because two of the businesses out of the thirty are the real crown jewels: Metalab, which is his design agency, and the other one is Dribbble.
Dribbble is a business that's very, very simple. It is based on a simple insight: every career needs its online resume. Every job that you're going to do needs a way for you to show what you're all about and get more jobs.
For most jobs, we have the catch-all, the generic option, which is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is going to say, "Hey, just put a resume up here. Just say what you've done, and hopefully that's good enough."
But for some jobs, you need something more special. For example, if you're a designer, LinkedIn doesn't really help you stand out that much. But now, Dribbble allows you to post designs—design shots, like screenshots or images of what you're designing—as your portfolio. It became a portfolio site.
So, Dribbble itself is probably worth $250 million, I want to say. That's my estimate. | |
Sam Parr | Find the financials. I'm trying to find the financials, but it looks like in 2022, Dribbble did $8,000,000 in profit. But I'm pretty sure that it's...
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Shaan Puri | like 8 | |
Sam Parr | Here it is. In 2022, it did $60,200,000 in revenue with $8,000,000 in earnings. Because it's a network, it could definitely sell for 4 or 5 times revenue, depending on its growth rate. | |
Shaan Puri | yeah exactly | |
Sam Parr | so it's pretty valuable | |
Shaan Puri | So, I think Dribbble is worth around **$200,250,000,000** now. Another friend of the pod, Scott Belsky, did the same thing with Behance. He created Behance, which is a place for designers to post their work, serving as a sort of community for those designers to comment on each other's work.
But the business model was: if you want to hire a creative, come to Behance. So, Dribbble and Behance both did the same thing. I think he sold Behance for around **$100,000,000**, something like that.
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Sam Parr | No, I think it was $175, of which he owned 60 or 70% of it.
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Shaan Puri | Amazing! So where does that take me now? Okay, so where can you apply this dribbler-be-enhanced model that needs it today?
So, Zuckerberg, I think seven years ago, said something. He goes, "Video is a megatrend." And I was like, "What? What's a megatrend?" He's not the type to just say flowery words. When he says something, he's part of the "words mean things" team.
So, what's a megatrend? He's like, "Mobile is a megatrend. The internet was a megatrend, and now video is a megatrend." And he's like, basically, "Video is everything." | |
Sam Parr | else is on that team who's also on the role of the person mean things | |
Shaan Puri | Emmett calls it "words mean things." I saw him in many, many meetings derail the entire meeting because he was stuck. Like, you said this word, what does that word mean? And they're like, "I don't know." We all...
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Sam Parr | know kind of right he said I | |
Shaan Puri | Don't know, does it mean this or this? And then he's like, "Paint them." He's like, "No, because words mean things to me. If we're going to use words, they're going to mean things, and we're going to all agree on what those words mean so that we can have a productive conversation." I was like, wow.
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Sam Parr | Well, it's a... words mean things. Teams, otherwise known as serious people. You know, like, "Oh, he's a serious person." When they say a handful of words, you're like, "I know he or she specifically chose that word." I love those types of people.
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Shaan Puri | He calls it "words mean things" versus "team alliances," and I don't know what team alliances is. There's a longer explanation to that, but he's like, you know, there are sort of two ways people think. One is, "Oh, let's not get lost in semantics," and the other is, "Semantics is everything. That's how we're going to communicate. Let's not be weak about that. Words mean things; let's agree on that."
Anyways, so Zuck said this mega trend thing, and if you look at it, everything has shifted to video. So, entertainment—Netflix, streaming—all that has obviously gone to video. News is highly video-driven. Education has become driven a lot by video. E-commerce is driven by, let's say, video ads and how you're going to display your product. Communication? The stupid podcast with Zoom.
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Sam Parr | we've we've | |
Shaan Puri | all podcast we we audio has become video | |
Sam Parr | we now have to we now have to go to youtube and I have | |
Sam Parr | to wear like a nice shirt sometimes | |
Shaan Puri | yeah I did I wet my hair like you know I used to do | |
Sam Parr | in school in the water fountain | |
Shaan Puri | I wet my hair before the fives it was a quick little | |
Sam Parr | spruce up | |
Shaan Puri | So, videos are a megatrend, but where do you hire people who specialize in working with video? Where do you find video editors or even auxiliary roles like thumbnail artists or video strategists?
Where is their Behance? Where is their Dribbble? Where can I go to see portfolios or a news feed of people who created really cool animations or edits to a video?
As someone who is hiring a lot of video professionals, I don't find this site. I think if someone created a Behance for video, that would be a big idea. Dribbble for video? I think that is a big idea too. | |
Sam Parr | I 100% agree, and I'll explain why. I actually had a very similar topic that I was going to bring up. I was going to call it "LinkedIn for X." The reason being is, I think you told me about this. It's called Dox... is it Doximity?
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Shaan Puri | doximity | |
Sam Parr | Doximity is basically LinkedIn for doctors. You told me about it, and I didn't realize it's publicly traded. It has a $4 to $5 billion valuation. It's a great business. So, it's basically... | |
Shaan Puri | By the way, let's look for that context. It has, I think, 2,000,000 doctors. LinkedIn probably has, I don't know, 300,000,000 people or something like that—hundreds of millions of users, fractions. LinkedIn sold for $20,000,000,000. Doximity, you said, is...
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Sam Parr | at 4,000,000,000 so it's no 5 4.8 | |
Shaan Puri | It's only 4 times less valuable than LinkedIn, with 100 times fewer customers, right? Because the value per customer is so much higher. | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, and so I was reading about it, and they had this term that I loved. They said, "We launched this because we are always looking for digitally under-indexed industries." I thought that was a beautiful word. | |
Shaan Puri | what's that | |
Sam Parr | digitally under indexed | |
Shaan Puri | some of that | |
Sam Parr |
And so what that means is basically communities of professionals who just aren't being catered to in a digital format. You could say lawyers... You could say... Well, actually, I don't even know what else. I mean, there's a lot of them.
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Sam Parr | you could there's one there's one | |
Sam Parr | For blue-collar workers, called Jobcase. The reason why this interests me is that at Hampton, what I'm noticing is that even though we didn't mean to do this, we're sort of becoming a little bit of a network. Not quite a social network, but I'm seeing... I'm like, if we wanted to, which I don't really want to, we could make this like... have you heard of Raya? You know what Raya is?
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Shaan Puri | yeah the dating app for hot people | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, it's like... well, I think they call it "elites" or something. But it's like a paid dating app for elites.
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Shaan Puri | so like the | |
Sam Parr | For the facially elite... yeah, or the bank elite, you know?
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Shaan Puri | Like, if you have... that's what I'm actually going to start saying. Instead of "socioeconomic underprivileged," I'm "facially underprivileged," and I've been able to overcome this adversity.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, well, this has gotten me really interested because I think that what you can do, which is basically... what do you call it? Doxity? Doximity? What does that mean? That's something... so you have to know how to say the word in order to even get in. It sounds like a drug.
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Shaan Puri | forget words mean things sounds don't even mean things | |
Sam Parr | But this company did, so they're growing quickly. They're doing like $400,000,000 in revenue and $150,000,000 in income. They've been profitable for years, and they've built this "LinkedIn for doctors." They think it's a really good business.
What I've been really fascinated about is what type of niches can you build professional networks in that are somewhat ignored. Do you go on to LinkedIn?
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Shaan Puri | yeah I I use linkedin | |
Sam Parr | what does your inbox on linkedin look like right now | |
Shaan Puri | oh I just ignore the inbox mostly | |
Sam Parr | exactly why do you do that | |
Shaan Puri | it's mostly mostly junk and it's too much yeah so it's | |
Sam Parr | Like crap, it's crap. The inbox of LinkedIn is horrible. No networking is happening there. People mostly use it for resume tracking and things like that.
But there's a bunch of jobs out there, like lawyers and doctors, where it's a relatively small community. I think there are about 2.5 million lawyers in America and 2.1 million doctors. These are relatively small groups where you could have small circles that know 80% of the population on the network.
Because I'm a friend with you, who's friends with someone else, and now I'm connected to you. It's small enough.
I've been really fascinated by this, very similar to the Dribbble thing. Dribbble is a little bit more about resumes and showing off portfolio work. This is a little bit more networking, but it's also about resumes.
I've been very fascinated by these businesses that do this. The hard part, I think, with any social network is the chicken and the egg problem. It's like, "It's not good unless we have users, but we don't have any users, and we need users."
What I've noticed is that there are so many young-ish people on TikTok who are professionals that are crushing it. There are a bunch of dentists, orthodontists, and tons of chiropractors. There are lots of professional services that are going viral on TikTok.
If I'm in this position, which I guess I kind of am, where I'm thinking, "What else can we do?" I was like, "Man, I could totally partner with some of these and create a Hampton for doctors."
But to do a social network, I was like, "That's not my skill set. I'm not good enough to do that." But I bet if I could convince some crazy person, like Nikita Bier or someone who knows about networking or network effects, I think you could actually build a substantial-sized business for niche professional communities.
Whether they're paying a small fee to be part of it or you build an ad network on it, I'm very fascinated by these niche communities for professional services that are more than communities, but like LinkedIn style. | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, I think these are super hard. When you do them, they're obviously very, very valuable. Any network is really, really valuable once you create it.
But I think these are very, very difficult. It's really hard to have one idea, which is why I don't think there are like 10 ideas like this. I think right now there might be 1 or 2 ideas of this that might work.
That's why for the video one, I got excited because I think that it's... not.
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Sam Parr | a winners take all | |
Shaan Puri | It's clear that there's an industry where you need this. Showing how good I am as a video editor through my paper resume is ineffective.
You need a paper resume that doesn't tell the story, and you also need a lot of people in that industry, along with many hiring opportunities. That's the combination you need.
That's why I think that this sort of "Dribbble" for video editors is a multi-hundred-million-dollar idea. Somebody would pull it off.
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Sam Parr | alright we kinda tag teamed that one a little bit what you wanna go next | |
Shaan Puri | Here's a different kind of idea. I think this idea would be great because it doesn't require the internet. You could turn off Wi-Fi and still do this idea.
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Sam Parr | I like that | |
Shaan Puri | It's not easy, but it's also not really impossible either. It's somewhere in the middle.
On the upside, I think it's also like on the low end you make $1,000,000 a year, and on the high end, you make tens of millions of dollars a year.
So, what if I told you that in San Francisco, I discovered a business that does $31,000,000 in revenue locally here in San Francisco? No revenue outside of San Francisco.
Out of that $31,000,000 in revenue, it does about $11,000,000 in profit.
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Sam Parr | it's brick it's brick and mortar | |
Shaan Puri | Brick and mortar... wow! It has $100,000,000 of assets on the balance sheet. Do you want to take a guess at what kind of business this is?
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Sam Parr | Well, it's one of the things you've had listed, but does it involve religion?
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Shaan Puri | it does not no | |
Sam Parr | oh what is it | |
Shaan Puri | it is a private elementary school | |
Sam Parr | so no way | |
Shaan Puri | There are private elementary schools in San Francisco. One of them, I looked at a bunch of them, and the one I think that does the best, or the one that I found that does the best, is called the Hamlin School. It's based in San Francisco and it's a nonprofit, so you can see all the financials online. You can see this for many of them.
It's just for girls; it's a girls-only school, K through 8, I think, and it has only 450 kids. So, 450 girls go to the school. You pay basically a college-level tuition. Parents pay $40,000 a year to send their kid to kindergarten or 1st grade. Goddamn!
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Sam Parr | forty grand | |
Shaan Puri | Are you gonna do that? I'm not gonna do that. I'm out of the city now, but there's a lot of people that do because they have a waitlist and a hardcore admissions process.
If you want your kindergartner to get into school, you have to dress up, go to the interview, and prep them. You have to be like, "Hey, don't make a fool out of us. We've been preparing you for 4 years for this. Come on, perform! Do the thing!"
And you send them in, and they do an interview with them. Your 4-year-old does an interview with them.
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Sam Parr | I know this school I used | |
Sam Parr | to play basketball and they have a sick basketball hoop overlooking the city | |
Shaan Puri | yeah yeah it's at the top of pack heights | |
Sam Parr | and yeah yeah yeah | |
Shaan Puri | And so, there's a waitlist of parents dying to get in. They own the buildings; they own the real estate that they operate out of, which is why they have so much value and assets on the balance sheet. They own huge properties in the prime spots of San Francisco.
I looked at a bunch of these. There's another one, Birx, and another one. There's a whole bunch of these that exist. They range from, like, you could see, okay, 2020 to 2021, how much revenue did they do? Okay, they did $15,000,000 or $20,000,000 in revenue. Some are more profitable than others.
So, Hamlet is particularly profitable, but the other ones would be like $15,000,000 to $20,000,000 in revenue and $2,000,000 in profit. Still not bad at all. They would have $25,000,000 in assets on the books.
You could see who goes there because they have to list who donates. So, you could see the donations from different families. Oh, that's the Facebook executive, and this person is a famous author, and a famous movie producer, and whatever, right? So, there's a whole bunch of...
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Sam Parr | do they donate like what what's a big donation to this | |
Shaan Puri | donations are like low 7 figures right now | |
Sam Parr | oh my god | |
Shaan Puri | You know, they did a renovation for the school and raised $50,000,000 to renovate it. That's donations outside of the tuition. So, it's just, "Please give us money so we can have a better building," and you get to renovate the library afterward, type of thing.
Pretty insane. There are a huge number of people involved because the public school system in San Francisco is not very good, or at least it's considered to be not very good. I have no idea what it actually is, but that's the reputation it has.
So, I think there's an opportunity to do the following. So, good for them. Now, what's the opportunity? The opportunity is, if you were ambitious enough, you could look at it... and if you cared.
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Sam Parr | about this topic if you cared about this topic you you really got to care about this shit because this is | |
Shaan Puri | It's going to be a bad time. I don't know... debatable. I think you have to care enough. I don't think you have to be born to educate. I don't think you have to be, you know, whatever, Mrs. Doubtfire here. I think you have to be a smart person who is going to hold a standard, just like you would for any other business. | |
Sam Parr | a man dressed as an elderly woman you you definitely don't have to be that | |
Shaan Puri | that's not that's not required | |
Sam Parr | in fact in fact you can't be that probably you can't be that | |
Shaan Puri | what the most ideal teacher is it's miss stalfire so | |
Sam Parr | a 40 year old recently divorced man | |
Shaan Puri |
And she'll take care... she'll take care of you both at the same time. So, there's all these... Commercial real estate is at like an all-time low in San Francisco. There are empty buildings everywhere. Why? Because of remote work. It was too expensive, and now these companies are basically just trying to get out of their leases.
So on one hand, you have huge office buildings that are going vacant, and on the other...
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Sam Parr | side totally dead down there right now | |
Shaan Puri |
No, it's not totally dead, but it's the lowest it's ever been. So, you know, buy low if that's your strategy. This is a good time to do it.
I think you could buy one of these commercial or industrial buildings and convert it into a private elementary school. Now, we're gonna need a couple things:
1. We're gonna need a name
2. [We're gonna need] a differentiator
On the name side, I got a few to throw at you. You tell me which one you like.
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Sam Parr | well but let's just go look at a bunch of old shipwrecks that | |
Shaan Puri | Would you like your child to attend Windsor Oaks? Would you like your child to attend the prestigious Carrington School? That one's nice.
And the other one is, oh yeah, our daughter got into Thatcher Derby. If your daughter gets into Thatcher Derby, you feel pretty good right now, right?
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Sam Parr | well are these just famous like streets in england | |
Shaan Puri | I just looked up "expensive last names"—that was my Google search. Then I found a list of a hundred names and started pairing two together, like Windsor Oakley and Thatcher Darby. I think I got some solid leads there.
The other thing is, we need to differentiate. I have some friends who have kids that go to these schools, and I asked them, "What would you wish was different?" They said, "Look, these are all going to be expensive." In fact, I'm fortunate; I did well. The number one thing I want to spend on is my kids' education. If there was a cheaper school, I don't think we would switch because we would feel like, "Are we really going to try to go for a lesser education?"
I don't know. This was a waitlist. The price is not the problem. I asked about the teacher-student ratio, and they said, "No, no, no. It's six teachers for every one kid." So, with 450 kids, they have 75 teachers to run this school that does $30,000,000 a year.
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Sam Parr | year you did it the wrong way six students per one teacher correct correct got it | |
Shaan Puri | yeah six teachers for one student would be insane | |
Sam Parr | that'd be weird | |
Shaan Puri | that'd be a little bit weird yeah they're surrounded | |
Sam Parr | weird so | |
Shaan Puri | The biggest pain? They go, "You know what? I hate to say this. I consider myself a liberal person—live and let live—but there's like an agenda in these schools, and the agenda is very woke."
So, you know, our kids in elementary school are being taught about gender. They could be a boy, but they're a girl. They just don't want their first grader to be thinking, "Oh, I could be a girl, but I could be a boy." They don't really want that in public schools.
And so they're like, "You know, there's just such a heavy influence." They said, "It's crazy. In our elementary school, there are clubs that sound like what you would have at a very liberal college." But it's like, "Yeah, I don't feel like that has a place in elementary school. Just let kids be kids."
So the differentiator is going to be, "Hey, what happened to schools teaching math and science? Let's do that!" That's what we're going to teach. We're not going to teach political stuff. We're not going to teach all these social issues. They're kids—let them be kids. We're going to be a hardcore math, science, STEM education school. We're the best.
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Sam Parr | that's what this one is | |
Shaan Puri | No, no, that's what this is. That's what Thatcher Darby's gonna be. I love it! Hardcore math and science.
We don't subscribe to all that. We keep the politics out of the school. That's our only promise. You're here to learn, and we're gonna learn these topics. We're not trying to shape your kids socially or politically in any way.
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Sam Parr | You and I have a friend who's just turned 13. He just became a teenager. I said, "Hey, Brian, how's school going? You know, it's about that age. You're liking girls, I bet. Do you have a crush on anyone?"
He replied, "No, it's not really working out."
I asked, "Why not?"
He goes, "They're all non-binary." And I was like...
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Shaan Puri | what what | |
Sam Parr | he goes | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, there's only one that's heterosexual and is cis or something like that. But the rest are non-binary, and the girl I like is non-binary. She said she can't be with me, and I... | |
Sam Parr | was like alright well that is a pain in the ass I don't know what to say to | |
Shaan Puri | that one no advice I have no idea what you're talking | |
Sam Parr | About... yeah, so what do you want to have for lunch? Like, it was like it...
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Sam Parr | It sounds really challenging, honestly. Most of the time, generations will say, "Oh, you have it so easy. I had it so much harder when I was your age." Right? Not true. I do not envy a 12 or 15-year-old at that age.
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Shaan Puri | It was just different, right? I don't know if it's better or worse; I'm not really saying that. But I do think there should be options in the market for what you want.
Some people really do want their kids to be exposed to a whole bunch of different issues and to be well-rounded human beings, well-versed in various topics. Other people are like, "You know, I don't really want my kid thinking about that. I just really want them to have a good education, learning about math, science, reading, and writing."
Those are the things I'd like the school to focus on, and I will handle the kind of outside education that falls outside of that curriculum. So I'm not saying one of the...
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Sam Parr | first things that would be like different well where well roundedness goes to die | |
Shaan Puri | Is that hard before science machines? Yeah, what did we create?
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Sam Parr | We don't like standardized testing. We love it! Yeah, so you've got something here.
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Shaan Puri | diversity here is javascript something like that | |
Sam Parr | alright that's cool but that's crazy that that school makes that much money | |
Shaan Puri |
Yeah, who would have thought? I didn't really think about it ever like, "Oh, could you create a school?" That school, if it's doing well... you know, any of those schools are basically like somewhere between $50 and $200 million in assets if you were to sell them. Maybe more. One of them has $100 million of assets on its balance sheet. These are very big businesses that are just one-location, brick-and-mortar schools with 400 customers. That's kind of amazing.
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Sam Parr | Did I ever tell you about the time I was a telemarketer?
No? So, at my high school, if you needed some money, the best job was to be a telemarketer.
And what were we selling?
For what?
Yeah, what were we selling, you ask? We were begging for money.
So, what they would do is you would get paid $10 an hour, but you'd also get a commission and pizza. I worked that job for a year, three nights a week.
Every time you'd sit down at your desk in the evening...
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Shaan Puri | but they pay commission salary and pizza dear diary | |
Sam Parr | yeah jack that was the thing | |
Sam Parr | I was like 16. That was the thing. We had dinner; they had soda and pizza. You'd sit down at your desk. I worked there from like 3 PM to 8 PM.
You sit down at your desk, and you have a phone. Then you just have a box of note cards. On the note cards, it says how much the person donated previously, what their resume is, where they worked, and what their age is.
What you would do—this is a little trick of the trade—you find the oldest person there who's got the best career or who has previously donated the most amount of money. You line those up and just start calling them.
You say, "Hey, Mister Smith, this is Sam at SLU, your alma mater. I know you graduated here in 1956, but look, things are going great here. We need some money in order to build this thing or that thing. Can I count you down for a $5,000 donation? You did $3,000 two years ago, but times have changed, my friend. We gotta step it up. You wanna be a man for others or not? Now is the time."
We had these scripts that we had to use to sell these guys on giving us money to build something. I would bring in—I don't remember the exact numbers—but like tens of thousands of dollars a month in donations from these alumni. That was my job: just to call these guys constantly.
We would do, I don't know, maybe 100 calls or something like that a night, just trying to get this money. You would get like if you brought in $5, boom, you got $100. That's what we did, and it was the greatest racket. I don't remember the exact numbers, but we weren't making...
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Sam Parr | the money had to go to the school | |
Shaan Puri | Was this legal? Or was there, like, you know, a janitor overseeing you? What was going on here? Who was running this program? I can't believe they did this.
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Sam Parr | history teacher | |
Sam Parr | who do you | |
Sam Parr | Like, yeah, it was the history teacher that was... that was like his side job. His side hustle was running the boiler room. You know, he was the Jordan Belfort and I was like the little scrum.
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Sam Parr | the little scrum just like you know smiling and dialing | |
Shaan Puri | He's like, "You guys want some crackers?"
Yeah, yeah. A bit.
"Crackers are for closers. Get your hands on the phone, man."
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Sam Parr | get your | |
Shaan Puri | hands on the phone par | |
Sam Parr | yeah you're like walking behind you like sam is that a work call | |
Sam Parr | could you please could you please hang that up and | |
Shaan Puri | your finger's broken why don't you dial in par | |
Sam Parr | But that's what I did. It was awesome! I mean, don't you have that? Doesn't Duke people call you? Usually, what they do is, once you get old enough, they hire your friends to be the person. So, like, if we went to Duke together, I'm gonna call Sean and be like, "Hey Sean."
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Shaan Puri | you have a good minute what | |
Sam Parr | That's weird. So, like, my high school... now I'll get texts from people who I was acquainted with and I'm friends with. And here's the kicker: they'll say things like, "Hey, I know I follow you on social media. I know you're doing really well. How about we catch up?"
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Sam Parr | for 5,000 and I'm like you | |
Shaan Puri | had a baby on the way you know that that baby | |
Sam Parr | yeah like | |
Sam Parr | So, it's like, do I flex right now? I'm entirely driven by making my high school friends or my high school classmates see me as a big shot. That's right, because you know, I got made fun of. That's all I care about—bringing it back to them.
But I gotta give $5 to this school. They get me all the time. It's been working so effectively. But that's how these telemarketing things work. You don't get calls from Duke asking you to give money.
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Shaan Puri | Hey, it's Duke. Lose my number. You're barking up the wrong tree; it's never happening. I can't believe I gave you the money I gave you in the first place. *Click.*
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Sam Parr | yeah man it it's like a pretty funny thing I mean that's how | |
Shaan Puri | I have a multibillion dollar endowment you gotta lose my number you're not calling me for money | |
Sam Parr | that's not gonna | |
Shaan Puri |
What would happen if my high school or something called me? Alright, maybe... I hope they don't, but you know, I wouldn't really feel as aggressively upset as I do if Duke calls.
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Sam Parr | If your number could also be a country's GDP, or if your endowment could be confused with like a Caribbean...
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Sam Parr | country's gdp yeah yeah yeah yeah we're out like you | |
Sam Parr | should not call me yeah | |
Shaan Puri | that's too funny alright | |
Sam Parr | you wanna do wanna do a couple more what do you got | |
Shaan Puri | yeah I got some I got some good ones alright let me give you a quick wait | |
Sam Parr | what what by the way what is duke's endowment | |
Shaan Puri | It's in the bill. I don't know, multi-billions. Duke Endowment size: $12,000,000,000.
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Sam Parr | is it really 12,000,000,000 and duke's not even like a | |
Shaan Puri | company dare say mid level don't dare say mid level ivy | |
Sam Parr | it's a mid major it's definitely a mid major | |
Shaan Puri | it's not even a good school | |
Sam Parr | I mean is duke top 20 it's top 20 for sure right | |
Shaan Puri | yeah it is yeah | |
Sam Parr | is it but is it top 20 you think in terms of endowment | |
Shaan Puri | yeah I think so I think so | |
Sam Parr | That is insane! **$1,000,000,000** in endowment. They could basically just run the school off the investment income.
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Shaan Puri |
Oh yeah, totally. I'm surprised that more people... I'm surprised that anyone gives to these schools. I don't understand at all.
Alright, so the top... Yeah, it's in the top 20:
1. Harvard: $40 billion
2. Yale: $30 billion
3. Texas: $30 billion
4. Stanford: $27 billion
And then at the bottom of the top 20 is Cornell with $7 billion.
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Sam Parr | That's insane! That is insane! 7,000,000,000? That's ridiculous. Yeah, I don't know why those guys would be calling you, but I bet they do. They need your $50.
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Hubspot | Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot?
See, most CRMs are a cobbled-together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot: "Grow Better."
Well, did I tell you about one of the really smart ideas? There's this thing called... I forgot the name of the parent company. Ben, see if you could find it. They made this thing called Tower View Ventures.
So, one of the big streets on Duke's campus is Tower View, and it's like the name of some magazine there or something like that. It's a reference to something we remember from school.
Basically, Tower View Ventures is raising money for a venture fund to invest in alumni from Duke. It's like, "Oh yeah, Duke has really smart people, so we are going to invest in those companies." They've had these winners before, like Cameo and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
They basically do this for every single top school. It's called, I think, Alumni Ventures. They just spin up small funds for every single school, and then they run ads and call you to try to get you to donate or invest in their fund.
They're like, "Cool, we're just going to have Tower View Ventures." They started in 2019, and they're on fund 5 now for Duke. I don't know how big these funds are, but even if they're like $20,000,000 funds, you take 2% every year in management fees and 20% of carry across this times 50 other schools. It's a pretty genius way to pull up the hard straight of...
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Sam Parr | So, it's a real business school. But does the school give them permission to use their name?
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Shaan Puri | Well, they don't use the name. They say, "We're Tower of Adventures and we're investing in Duke alumni." So they're not saying... | |
Sam Parr | we're duke | |
Shaan Puri | Venture fund, but it may... they very much make it. Dude, that's shady though. All the colors match. It's like, "Here's all your school colors." Everything is like, you know, based off that.
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Sam Parr | that's a scheme that's a that's a hardcore scheme right | |
Shaan Puri | you could do that for belmont | |
Sam Parr | well I mean like a a $50,000 fund ain't gonna go far | |
Shaan Puri | do you think you're | |
Sam Parr | like | |
Shaan Puri | belmont's most successful alumni from your year | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, yeah, no, I got beat. You know who it was? It was Florida Georgia Line. What? You know that Florida Georgia Line, that band? No?
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Sam Parr | you've never heard of florida georgia line | |
Shaan Puri | territory that was annexed | |
Sam Parr | dude the florida florida georgia line is like if you | |
Sam Parr | Go to your Spotify right now and look at the top 100 songs. I bet most artists have 1 or 2 songs in the top 20. Yeah, you know that song "Cruise"? Even Nelly made an appearance. | |
Shaan Puri | I mean you're just do do | |
Sam Parr | you know who | |
Shaan Puri | Nelly, would you like to pants me right now in front of everybody? No, I don't know who any of these people are. I know Nelly, but yeah, it's like Mike Posner was in my ear and, you know...
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Sam Parr | no what did do you know morgan wallen do you know who that is yeah | |
Shaan Puri | he's the shit love that guy | |
Sam Parr | They're more famous than Morgan Wallen. Oh wow, so not to you, but they helped put Morgan Wallen on the map because Morgan Wallen appeared on one of their songs. Anyway, they're like a Morgan Wallen famous band, so they might be number one. I think I might be number two.
But you know what? They never called me. I got mad at them because here's why: My mom was going to come and watch me graduate, but I didn't finish school on time. I asked the teachers or whatever, "Can you guys just give me a fake diploma? Just let me come on stage and not tell her, and I'll finish it another time." And they're like, "No, it's a tradition. We have to literally hand you your diploma there." I'm like, "Just give me..." | |
Sam Parr | an empty folder I don't I don't just I literally just wanna be there | |
Sam Parr | On stage, just let me have that empty folder, and they wouldn't let me do it. So, forever, I'll hate Belmont because they wouldn't let me just walk on the stage, shake that guy's hand, and turn the stupid beret thing to the side. They wouldn't do it, so I will always be mad at Belmont for that reason.
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Shaan Puri | Wow, what a loss for them. Alright, I got a couple more. Let me see where I want to go.
Okay, can I just rapid-fire some ideas for you? Go! We don't even have to discuss them.
Okay, exporting... You know my import-export framework. My import framework and export framework is this: If you're at a company and you think, "Dude, we would totally pay for this," that's a business idea you would want to import. You're better off going and starting that business because there's probably a hundred other businesses like you that would pay for that.
Or export is: "We built this for ourselves and it's so useful." You're better off leaving the company and then rebuilding that on the outside of the walls and selling it to other companies.
So here's the... this is...
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Sam Parr | what slack did | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, exactly. Slack is a good example of this.
So, Paul Graham tweeted this out the other day that Y Combinator (YC) has its own directory internally about investors. Any startup founder can go look up any investor and read their reviews or kind of get the scoop on this person. Have they done anything messed up? Are they really helpful? What do we know about this person?
He's like, "This is one of the best products that YC has." And I'm like, "Why is that a product only YC has? This should be a product that anybody has."
So, I think somebody should export this out. It's like Yelp for investors, where investors have a reputation on this app. You can only write about them if you had, you know, like a verified interaction with them or something like that.
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Sam Parr | Dude, that's great! I think I wish I could have that for a variety of vendors. The things that people ask for most at Hampton are like, "Hey, who's a good lawyer? Who's a good accountant? Who's this? Who's that?" It's incredibly challenging to find reviews on vendors, including investors.
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Shaan Puri | It's super hard to start these types of businesses, but I think the startup community is so insulated that you could actually overcome the chicken-and-egg problem through brute force.
There aren't that many investors, and you can quickly see who's worked with them just by looking at their portfolio. You could cold email them and say, "Give me the scoop." I think you could manually collect the data to get this going.
Alright, here's another one: "Teacher's Pet" is what I'm calling this. So, this is my first AI idea for you.
Are you aware of Teachers Pay Teachers? It's a marketplace—it's like Etsy, but instead of buying and selling handcrafted goods, you buy and sell lesson plans and quizzes. It's not just things that teachers need. Have you ever heard of this?
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Sam Parr | we talked about it a while we talked about it a while ago right | |
Shaan Puri | It's a big business. It was doing about **$80,000,000** a year in revenue; that's their take, not the GMV. They get around **20,000,000** visits a month during the school year.
**300 teachers** on this network have made **$1,000,000** or more by selling lessons, quizzes, or classroom materials to other teachers.
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Sam Parr | so and like their new profile pictures like fuck them kids like I'm I'm a | |
Shaan Puri | I'm a creator, so these marketplaces are big. For the most part, marketplaces are pretty unassailable; it's very hard to compete with something that has a network effect. However, I think AI is one of those things that might be able to crack some network effects, and I believe it could crack this one.
You could train AI to crawl and learn from all of the materials on this network. You can probably buy all the materials for less than $500,000, and then use that as your training data. You could train AI to basically become ChatGPT for teachers.
So, any teacher should be able to come to this platform and instead of going through and finding a good geography lesson plan and then buying it for $14, they could just ask this AI, "Hey, I need a geography lesson plan for 4th grade. Make it fun and interesting." It should just create one for them.
If you create this, you could have a $20 a month subscription just for teachers to create lesson plans using AI, quizzes, teaching materials, or whatever. "Teacher's Pet" is a good name too.
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Sam Parr | yeah alright you wanna do you have one more | |
Shaan Puri | I'm big on providing a name with some of these ideas. I think that really turns it from like a "I don't know" to "where's the application form for Thatcher Darby?" | |
Sam Parr | How do I get in? What's this? You just have this funny phrase. It's funny to me that you call...
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Sam Parr | it an ozempic on ramp and then an ozempic off ramp | |
Shaan Puri |
Yeah, so these aren't fully baked ideas, but I'll just spitball it with you. Alright, so when I was thinking about this... you know, you want to surf on waves if you're starting a business. So what's a wave you could surf right now?
**Ozempic**. I think Ozempic is like... if video's a megatrend, guess what? Fat loss is a megatrend. Obesity is a megatrend too.
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Sam Parr | have you tried it yet | |
Shaan Puri | No, I haven't tried it, but I know a lot of people that want to be on it, or get off of it, or are on it. A guy...
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Sam Parr | if it's I got a guy I could refer him | |
Shaan Puri | no no | |
Sam Parr | it's expensive though it's expensive | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, I'm not interested, but I know a lot of people are. So I guess the question is: what could you build around this Ozempic megatrend?
My brain goes to on-ramps and hot frames. How do you sell something to people that makes it easier to get it or help people get off of it?
For getting it, if you Google something like "How do I take Ozempic?" or "Getting Ozempic near me," you get a bunch of sponsored links for telehealth services that are trying to sign you up for this. Here's the pills.
Basically, what I think somebody should do is go old school with it. I think someone needs to create an Ozempic hotline.
So, what's the Ozempic hotline? The Ozempic hotline is old school infomercial stuff. You're going to run ads on linear TV, like on Fox News. You're going to be the MyPillow guy. You'll just be everywhere that people who are, you know, 40 to 60 are clicking or watching.
You'll show people's transformations with Ozempic and say, "Call in now to get a free consultation. Are you eligible? What are the upsides? What are the downsides? How much does it cost? Where can you find it?"
It's so confusing. We are going to make it easy. We're going to give you a free consult, and you basically just become a lead generation provider for people who are trying to buy Ozempic.
But I think you gotta do like 1-800-GOT-ABS or something like that, right? Like 1-800... you know.
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Sam Parr | but that goes against all your principles since you hate which principles | |
Shaan Puri | as I like to say | |
Sam Parr | what values well we could | |
Sam Parr |
Find them somewhere deep in that closet, but I believe one or two of those principles... Besides, which is coming out of left field, the fact that you said that you don't want to kill animals to eat. That's such a curveball coming from you. But I think the other one was... I think you hate pharmaceuticals, no?
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Shaan Puri |
No, I don't hate pharmaceuticals. I don't personally try to take a lot of stuff. I try not to be dependent on anything, you know, as a general rule. Like caffeine... I don't drink coffee. I don't do a lot of stuff like that. A lot of people take, you know... I don't know. You love stuff, you're like, "Oh, I need nicotine, I need this, I need that."
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Sam Parr | I love carbonated waters and diet coke yeah | |
Shaan Puri |
So, I try not to be on any of that stuff, but people are... This is a business opportunity. I'm not doing this, I'm saying somebody could create a phone-based way to educate people and help onboard people. Or the other side: you could figure out an off-ramp.
A lot of people want to stop this, either:
- It's too expensive
- They're having side effects
- They just feel like they got the weight loss they wanted
They don't want to keep taking this forever. How do you off-ramp? I don't know the answer to that, but that's [an opportunity].
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Sam Parr | well I'll tell you | |
Shaan Puri | the answer place to go look what's the answer | |
Sam Parr | you just don't take it nothing bad happens you just don't take it | |
Shaan Puri |
Yeah, but don't a lot of people regain a bunch of weight right away? Or have like... I don't know. Nothing that's this effective has no cost when you stop. I don't believe that.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, so basically, the study they did involved 2,000 or 3,000 people. They had them do it for 6 months, and then after 6 months, they had half the people quit taking it.
What they found was that at the end of the 12-month study, the people who took it the whole time lost something like a third of their body weight. So, for example, a 300-pound person was down to 200 pounds. The people who quit taking it went from 200 pounds back up to like 230 or something like that. They gained weight back, but they weren't nearly as fat as they were when they started.
So, yeah, an off-ramp is fine, but I don't think you have withdrawals. That's not going to kill you. You're just going to feel like, "Oh, I'm hungry. I want to eat again."
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, and maybe it's just like peer groups or something. I don't know. Is there something you could provide to this large group of people that all have now one new experience? I don't know, there's gotta be auxiliary things around it.
So that's a place I would look for business ideas.
Alright, I got another one for you. I heard something the other day, and it just really caught my attention. I think it's a cool idea, but it's being done in the wrong way.
So I was listening to some podcasts, and the guy who was talking in it was like, "Yeah, I did mind sport," and blah blah blah. He started talking about mind sport, and I was like, "Mind sport? What a great name! What is that?"
He was a really smart guy, and he was talking about game theory, blah blah blah. I looked it up, and mind sport is essentially the nerd Olympics.
So mind sport is a place that you go if you're uber smart, and you compete with people in those games. Those games can range from chess to poker to Settlers of Catan, or Go, or whatever, or like Rubik's Cube.
Yeah, like, you know, if I was to tell you, "I could solve this cube in the next 90 seconds," you might not think I'm a genius, but you probably don't think I'm an idiot. Would that be fair?
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Sam Parr | are you gonna solve that right now is that gonna be part of the show because that would be great | |
Shaan Puri | I wish I could solve this. I have never even gotten close. I don't know what the hell you're supposed to do with this thing. I treat it like a fidget spinner. I just move it and I'm like, "Oh, that's cool! I got 2 blues and 3 yellows. That's awesome, good for me!" I tap myself on the back and I move on.
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Sam Parr | yeah this so there's the mind sports olympiad | |
Sam Parr | they you're in the you're in the special mind sports olympiad exactly | |
Shaan Puri | I'm in the mind jog; the mind's not moving that fast. So basically, you go to this thing and you compete in all these games. Or you can be in your game, but you can also compete in the Pentamined Championship, which is where you're going to play five of these games. I'm like, "Oh my God, I hit the magnet, nerd!"
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Sam Parr | what pentamined means | |
Shaan Puri | You know, Coachella for nerds. I was like, "This is amazing!" I just cannot tell you, Sampar, how all in I am on the Mindsport Olympiad.
I want to go. I want to watch it live, like I watched the Spelling Bee live on ESPN. I want to watch the Hard Knocks documentary about, you know, following five of these people behind the scenes and watching them stress out about this.
I want to adopt one of the kids in this and just have him be like, you know, my 17-year-old child. And most of all, I want to hire all these kids. This is so awesome!
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Sam Parr | grooming them | |
Shaan Puri | I think they have | |
Sam Parr | a so it's a groomer | |
Shaan Puri | Complete wrong business model! This is not a tournament with prize money. Thanks to our sponsors, Wendy's—no, no, no, no, no—you've got this all wrong.
This is a recruiting event for the elite minds under 25 years old. I was like, this is bait to bring together the smartest nerds. In five years, these kids are not going to be playing professional Settlers of Catan; they're going to be starting companies or working inside companies. And guess where I want them to work? My companies.
So, I think that you should take this idea and create a version of this, but it needs to be an elite recruiting service, job fair, and demo day for nerds. When they attend, they need to somehow sign over the rights for you to send them job offers for the next five years or, you know, get to invest in them or something like that.
Because I can't think of a more valuable talent pool than the Mindsport Olympics. I think you could do this for gamers in general. I love investing. One of my secrets of investing is I invest in former competitive gamers—people who were elite level at, you know, Starcraft or things like that. Those people just tend to do really, really well at whatever next game you throw in front of them. And once you throw the money game in front of them, guess what? They solve it. They figure it out. Mhmm. | |
Sam Parr | And so, there's this... yeah, listen, there's this thing called the World Memory Championships. Have you heard of this?
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Shaan Puri | no sign me up | |
Sam Parr | and if yeah and so they've been doing | |
Sam Parr | This has been going on since 1991, and there's a different game.
So basically, we're going to give you thousands of numbers, and you have 5 minutes to tell us those numbers in order. The record for that is 600 numbers, and they only had 5 minutes to do it. The 1-hour number is the same thing, except you have 1 hour to do it. The guy who won that did 46,100 numbers in a row; he remembered that.
They do these 10 different games, and in the same way that the UFC used to be like a bunch of thugs fighting—like barbarians—now it's like half WWE and WWF, where it's like, "You slept with my wife, now I'm going to beat you up."
It's the other half like martial arts. Your movement is magical; look at his movement, it's so smooth. This is peak physical performance. We need Dana White or Vince McMahon to buy the World Memory Championships and make that great.
I'm looking up the guy who won it, Alex Mullen. He's a kid—or I guess when he won it, he was 28. You know what he does for work now? He's an x-ray technician at a hospital.
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Shaan Puri | x-ray tech | |
Sam Parr | x-ray tech | |
Shaan Puri | he's memorized all the x rays | |
Sam Parr | why is this guy not working | |
Shaan Puri | for like brain is hipaa compliant what are we talking about yeah why is | |
Sam Parr | This guy is not working for, like, you know, BlackRock or Blackstone. He's just like Rain Man on his way to, like, you know, corporate buyouts.
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Shaan Puri |
What I'm saying, baby, undervalued assets. These are hidden gems. I'm not all in on memory because I think memory is like the club version of the Olympiad. Like, these other guys are strategists, but memory is... you know, any rube can do memory, really, but...
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Sam Parr | but if you're I can't even remember 7 numbers let alone 600 | |
Shaan Puri | I can remember two-thirds of any phone number. That's all I can do.
Alright, yeah, so that's one idea. Okay, I got a couple of others for you. Let me hit you with one more, maybe.
But we are out of time here. I'm going to go into overtime and give you one more. Let's do one around churches.
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Sam Parr | okay so something you know a lot about | |
Shaan Puri | Another area that I'm completely unversed in, but I know that other people do it, is the topic of church closures. Michael Girdley tweeted this out the other day. He said, "35,100 churches are closing every year." I thought, "What's that about? What is that?" It's a big number, and it's not exactly right.
Actually, what happens is that 4,000 churches closed last year, but another 3,000 or 2,000 opened. So, it's like a net change of 1,500 churches, but still towards the negative. There are a bunch of stats about this.
In traditional Christian churches, attendance is down **65%** in the last 20 years. When the pews are empty, there are fewer donations, which leads to these churches having to close down.
There's a trend where they ask, "Are you Christian? Are you Jewish? Are you Muslim? What are you?" There's a group called the "nones." They're just "none." I don't know why they're calling them "nones" instead of something like atheists or whatever.
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Sam Parr | wait nuns like n u n or n o n e | |
Shaan Puri | yeah | |
Sam Parr | that's all that's that's also confusing when you said nuns that's like a bunch of ladies in like hobbits | |
Shaan Puri | honestly big slip up on their part | |
Sam Parr | yeah they could be the zeros they did they did they did survey them | |
Shaan Puri | And for Gen Z, I guess 45% would count as "none of the above" essentially for religion. This guy who studies searches or whatever said that of the 33,150,000 Christian congregations in the United States, one third are vulnerable, on the brink of collapse. Basically, one third are in the red zone and over the next 10 years will likely close. That's a huge number.
What are the opportunities? I think you could approach this from multiple angles. So again, not a specific idea, but I do think you could look at this. When you hear a stat like that, it's just one that gets your attention. Like when Jeff Bezos heard the stat that the internet is growing at 12,000% a year, he thought, "I better go start Amazon."
Basically, I think you could do that around stats like this. So how are these churches going to close down? That in itself, the sort of "vulture business" or the cleanup, the funeral business for churches, I think is kind of interesting. How are they... forget saving them?
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Sam Parr | it might | |
Shaan Puri | help them help them die with grace | |
Sam Parr | In my neighborhood, one block from my house in Saint Louis, they turned a church into a condo, right?
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, exactly. So then I found there's this group called **Niagara Consulting Group**. They're basically like, "We help you restructure your church."
What do they mean by that? It's basically, look, there's a lot of developers that are chomping at the bit to turn this into luxury condos. They say, "We help you try to succeed, but if you don't, we'll get you an offer from one of these developers to turn this into luxury condos." I was like, "Oh, interesting."
But in a lot of places, they can't even do that because it's in low-income areas where there’s not much demand. They just sit there empty. So I think there's a lot of opportunity to figure out how to deal with this.
I think there's opportunity if I'm a company like Calm. Could I take $50,000,000 and just buy physical locations across the country in one year through these searches? I could just have a weekly service for meditation and whatever.
Like, even to have local chapters, basically franchisees that are going to run them. So I think there's something to be done here, whether it's trying to save them, trying to help them fail gracefully, or figuring out what's a pivot you could do for a lot of these.
I saw you just put a Zillow link in here. What you got?
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Sam Parr | So, that's 10 doors down from my childhood home where my mom and dad still live. It's a beautiful church. They turned it into a 7,000 to 8,000 square foot house. As a house, it doesn't look that cool, but as a meditation area, it does look cool. | |
Shaan Puri | as an airbnb fantastic you know | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, but look, it's **$1,200,000** and it's an **8,000 square foot** property. I mean, it's in **St. Louis, Missouri**, where I'm from, which isn't that nice. But this company renovated this church into a livable house.
Then I met these other guys who turned one into a skate park. They turned an old church into a skate park. So it's like, it is pretty fascinating because a lot of these buildings are kind of cool. But to have like the "Church of Calm," that's kind of dope.
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Shaan Puri | And then, if you're going to help them, I think this is going to be a side hustle.
The church near us actually has awesome events all the time, and I love to take our kids to them because they put on great, wholesome fun events for families and kids.
But it's so hard to even know what's happening. Literally, the only way I know is if I drive by. They have a little sign they put in the front, like a for sale sign, but it'll say something like, "We're doing something this Saturday. It's going to have popcorn and a bouncy house." I'm like, "Oh, I'm in!"
But I only catch it while driving by. I'm like, these guys just don't know social media. I had to call them to be like, "Hey, if I'm an Indian dude who's not a member of the church, can I still come get the free popcorn? You know, what's the deal around this? Are your doors open?"
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Sam Parr | gonna have like a color swatch | |
Shaan Puri | They come in like, "You're not white enough." Exactly! Do you need to have recognized me? You know, like, "Oh, how does this work?"
I couldn't even get a hold of them because they just have one old Facebook page with, you know, an event from 2014. I'm like, "Dude, churches need better social media!"
I think you could create "done-for-you" social media services for churches if you wanted to get like a $10,000 to $20,000 a month side hustle. You could just go to every single church, walk in, and be like, "Hey, your social media is not very good. I can make it look like this."
Then, you basically go on Shepherd, hire somebody for $800 a month, and that person is going to manage 20 churches' social media for you. All the churches do the same thing: it's the same schedule every Sunday, same templates. You just need their color, their name, and you need to know what's going on for them.
You know, just manage all of their Instagram and social media accounts for them. I think that's one area where it's not that nobody's doing it, but there are plenty of churches that are not on board with that. If you just wanted to sign up a bunch of clients for $300 to $400 a month, you could do that. | |
Sam Parr | Did you remember this? Have you heard of Hillsong? Love Hillsong. When I... it's like Hillsong Church. Yeah, when I was living in Tennessee, I've been an atheist forever, but I was just like, a lot of cute girls are going to this.
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Sam Parr | I guess I guess that's the price to be that's the price I gotta pay so I'll go to | |
Sam Parr | This thing... So, I went to this event to meet some people, and that's how I kind of learned about it.
But in the later 2000s, there was this guy who somehow infiltrated Justin Bieber's camp. He became Justin Bieber's mentor, Carl Lentz. There's a new Netflix show about him.
Basically, I've watched it, and he's like a smoking hot guy. Yo, he looks basically like Justin Bieber in his forties. He looks great.
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Shaan Puri | I don't know if you meet most men as babes but he's a babe well he's a babe | |
Sam Parr | I mean like objectively like you know like you | |
Sam Parr | you you're either 7 foot tall or | |
Sam Parr | you're not like he's 7 feet tall | |
Shaan Puri | He's tall. I think I messaged you once about him, and you were like, "Dude, he's got the thing." You know, like the diagonal lines that just go to your crotch? It's like an ab line that you only have if you're super ripped. He's got those. What kind of pastor has those?
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Sam Parr | Yeah, if you're a pastor and you have that "v," it's bad news. As one could just look at his "v" and guess he did some... I don't know if he... | |
Sam Parr | did any illegal things I don't even I I didn't frankly I didn't watch the documentary I don't know I don't think it was rape | |
Shaan Puri | I think it was cheated on his wife and | |
Sam Parr | yeah I think he just had sex with just everyone so | |
Sam Parr | I think I think that as one as one with all the power in the might do | |
Shaan Puri |
He's also super charismatic, super good-looking, has a huge following from being on stage in front of 10,000 people every week or whatever. You know, he's a mega celebrity. He was...
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Sam Parr | Yeah, he's a mega celebrity, but he made Hillsong cool. I even went to one of those events because this girl I was trying to date was like, "Come to this thing."
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Shaan Puri | I love | |
Sam Parr | those like their | |
Shaan Puri | music is great | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, so I went to that thing just to be with this girl, and it wasn't worth it. It didn't work out, but...
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Sam Parr | but yeah that's how I learned about some | |
Sam Parr | Of this religion stuff, dude. Where I'm from, Saint Louis, all the Catholic churches are dying, man. All the Catholic schools are going by the wayside.
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Sam Parr | one one of the | |
Shaan Puri | More useful things that I learned when I moved to Silicon Valley was a new way of looking at businesses that I hadn't really ever heard before outside of Silicon Valley.
Most products are actually a bundle, not just a product. Most things are a bundle, and once you can identify what's in the bundle, you can figure out how to unbundle that service and make something better.
For example, Peter Thiel went on a spree where he was talking about how universities are a bubble and how the university system is overrated. He was going to launch the Thiel Fellowship, which would pay you $200,000 to drop out of school and do something useful with your life.
That's where Figma came from, and that's where Oyo Rooms came from. That's where, you know, Vitalik, the creator of Ethereum, was a Thiel Fellow.
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Sam Parr | there's been $10,000,000,000 companies so far have come from it | |
Shaan Puri | actually a very impressive track record and so one of the things he said was that they're like how can you you know it was it was sort of like taboo to say like you know who says like anything against school right like everybody's mess message is basically stay in school kids and he's saying drop out of school kids and so they're like how dare you and he's like well the university is a bundle he's like it's partially education so there are there is education it's partially socialization so you know you go there to learn how to like party and be with other kids and date and get drunk and all that stuff it's partly babysitting so it's basically my kid's not old enough they're not mature enough to get to the real world yet like 4 years over here let let them simmer a little bit then they'll be ready he's like it's partly insurance which is like a societal insurance like look I don't care what you do just get a degree get a college degree because that label that stamp is gonna be whatever he's like it's partly accreditation so like I don't care if you're the top student at harvard but if you got into harvard that's a signal that's strong enough for me as an employer to know that you're smart right like if I know you went to harvard it's a signaling thing so he's like you're actually buying all of these things when you buy into university when you pay the crazy cost of university and we have to ask ourselves what part of that bundle is actually important what part of the bundle is failing is it actually a weak part of the bundle that could be unbundled and so what he did was he switched the accreditation one he's like cool what if I created something I have a brand peter thiel I invest in facebook I created paypal what if I handpicked you know 40 of the most promising college kids and paid them 200 grand to leave school now I've instead of having just like some normal school badge which is good you get the teal handpicked badge which is even more elite so I'm gonna like unbundle the university give you a more elite badge and then I'm gonna get rid of all the rest I don't care about the socialization I don't care about the rest I'm gonna be 10 x better at this badge and you know like y c is 10 x better at university in certain things than in others and so | |
Sam Parr | that's brilliant yeah | |
Shaan Puri | So the question is: what is the church bundle?
The church bundle is a combination of a lecture for learning, a community, and a place to gather and congregate every week. It's just a peaceful place. I like going to church. I used to go to church not just for the sermon—I kind of liked it—but I just loved the feeling of being inside a church. The aura inside a church was very peaceful and grounding to me.
So, it's a peaceful place. It's also therapy or confession—a place to get things off your chest. With that comes the idea of being absolved of your sins, like just getting a clean slate. I was like, "Oh, okay, I feel less guilty."
You know, there's music. Some people go for the music vibes. Some people go for the food. Indian temples all have free food. I don't know if churches have that or not, but a lot of people go to Indian temples because they actually love the meal. But it's also a good thing; you show your loyalty to God.
If you take this bundle of a bunch of things... oh, also dating! I put this on there. I know a bunch of people who kind of want to meet someone who shares their values or is right for them, you know? For sure, yeah. It's like a better option than trying to approach someone in a bar where it's noisy and you're getting rejected. What if this is a new sort of social scene where I can go approach somebody?
Alright, so I think one big idea... the small version of this idea is like social media for churches. The medium version of this is to restructure these churches into condos or figure out some lead generation where you help them as they wind down to sell off assets or something.
The big version of this idea is to figure out how you're going to replace the value that churches gave people but do it in a new way. For example, could you create a new brand in these same venues that focuses on manifestation or something like that? Or meditation or yoga? Could you create a yoga franchise that only operates out of churches?
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Sam Parr | that's cool | |
Shaan Puri |
Religion and churches... Sorry, religion and yoga. I think those are the big ideas, which is: replace the function of one of those, like be 10x better on one of those bundles. Like 10x better on food, or music, or the sermon, or absolving you of your sins. You know, try to be better at... 10x better on one of those, and then use the physical locations of churches to build that new franchise.
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Sam Parr | that's a very that was a good that was a good speech you did good on that one | |
Shaan Puri | thank you | |
Sam Parr | We're going to have a bunch of SoulCycles on the altar, which is a lot cooler than how it is now. But that was a good... yeah, that was a very compelling argument.
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Shaan Puri | Thank you. I sort of ventured into "drunk ideas" territory there, but I feel like I grounded it, you know, a little bit.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, that was a good one. That was a good one. I'll let you... that's the winner. Or "Dribble the Dribbleshit" is the winner.
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Shaan Puri | Alright, there we go. That's it! That's the idea episode. You know what to do. Do they just get all these ideas for free, Sam?
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Sam Parr | Well, they don't have to pay money. Oh, but it's not for free. So, they don't have to pull out their wallet, but what do they have to do?
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Shaan Puri |
Well, I think what they've got to do is go to YouTube, go to your podcast app, search "My First Million," and you've got to click subscribe. You've got to click that button for us because we're out here churning out million-dollar ideas, billion-dollar ideas, side hustle ideas for you.
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Sam Parr | all on a labor day no less | |
Shaan Puri | I don't... I mean, there's only one right move. There's only one way to pay us back, if that's what it is: go subscribe to the channel that is called "The Gentleman's Agreement."
We're not gonna go check. We're not gonna verify this, alright? It's an honor code. This is a gentleman's agreement. We did our part, now you do yours. That's all.
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Sam Parr | alright thank you that's the part |