I Went To A Billionaire’s Dinner... Here Are 3 Things I Learned (#460)

Shaan Puri

AI is obviously all the rage. The entire menu was created by ChatGPT, so I basically just typed it in.

Sam Parr

I appreciate that I'm

Shaan Puri

Hosting a dinner for a bunch of tech people. [Insert number] of tech people. Create a menu for an epic dinner party, and it created a full menu.

Sam Parr

that's cool

Shaan Puri

And then it's like, "Cool, generate an image using DALL-E or whatever." It basically created the whole menu that way, and the chef had to cook whatever ChatGPT had created, which was pretty clever. What up? Before we go into this episode, I gotta say I'm doing a workshop with our boy Nick Hubert.

Sam Parr

do you see this just say the w words for me

Shaan Puri

it it's a workshop it's not a no well

Sam Parr

say that other w word

Shaan Puri

It's on the web. It might be a webinar. I might be doing a webinar similar to a seminar on the web. I didn't even realize that "webinar" is from... Yeah, I'm doing one of the lamest things one man can do with another, and that's a webinar. Alright, well, what's this webinar about? Basically, both of us are total... I don't know, nerds. We're just obsessed with hiring internationally for both of our companies. I think we both had a moment where we're like, "Wait, I'm pretty sure I could find somebody for 10 times less," you know, cost 10 times less. And the secret part that most people don't realize—everybody gets that if you hire somebody overseas, they're cheaper. What I found, I don't know how much you do this, but they're way less...

Sam Parr

Does "overseas" mean like... across, like the Mississippi River in Missouri?

Shaan Puri

across the mississippi river that would be line yeah yeah yeah it's oversee like

Sam Parr

The sea, like overseas, like for Buick to California, you're going to come into, you know, like Hannibal, Missouri.

Shaan Puri

No, basically I have... let's see. In my e-commerce business, I think I have 6 or 7 people in the Philippines, plus 2 in Latin America. So those are kind of the two hotspots. Latin America, you get the same time zone and they're good for certain types of roles. Like we have data analytics and stuff like that. And then in the Philippines, we have all of our customer support, plus anything that's like sales and outreach. So we'll just be like, "Hey, we want to go get every influencer on board." I'm not even gonna...

Sam Parr

talk to you just go go make that happen

Shaan Puri

And every morning, report how many influencers are on board. Show me the pipeline, show me the... Or, "Hey, we want this many wholesalers to start selling our stuff. Go make this happen." And they're just like an automated sales machine, which is pretty amazing. But anyways, we're doing this webinar because... yeah, we just want to give away kind of like... yeah.

Sam Parr

you gotta call it a a webinar yeah yeah we're gonna do it on the webinar

Shaan Puri

Anyways, we decided we'll do one. We'll teach anybody who wants to learn about delegation 101. If you want to join or whatever, it's on June 6th, I think.

Sam Parr

well how do people find it

Shaan Puri

Go to... Alright, we're going to put on the screen a giant link in the description. It'll be the top link in the podcast description and/or the YouTube notes. But if you don't see any of those places, you can just go to my website, **seanparee.com**. There'll be a little banner if you want to do it. Because if we're doing this thing, we might as well have as many people as we can sign up. If you sign up, even though you can't make it live, you'll just get the recording. So if you ever want to hire internationally, you'll have the recording and all of our "cheat codes." After doing this for, I don't know, 10 years, here's what works and here's what doesn't.

Sam Parr

Alright, so we've started on one end of the spectrum. Can we please go to the other end of the spectrum and tell me about a dinner you had? Yeah.

Shaan Puri

I had this dinner I I thought I already talked about it but I don't

Sam Parr

think billionaire dinner is a great way to go when we started with 11

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. See, what happens is you hire people for low cost, then you go to this billionaire dinner. That's basically what I did. So I went to a dinner at a billionaire's place, and I can't say exactly who, but I want to share three takeaways from this thing:

Sam Parr

are they a billionaire from being early at a tech company or for starting something amazing

Shaan Puri

starting their own tech companies

Sam Parr

so do they sell it or is it still sold yeah

Shaan Puri

At this dinner, there were some notable attendees I think I can mention: - The guy who created Figma was there. He recently sold his company for **$20 billion**. - There were people who were really internet OGs [Original Gangsters]. Their first internet companies dated back to '98 or something like that. That's the part I actually loved... I was talking to them. So that's...

Sam Parr

the story I wanna show you those people are the best they're the best

Shaan Puri

I would, because I was like, "What was it like back in the early days?" And I'm going to tell you one thing that you told me. But before I do that, a couple of interesting things. Now, I've done a couple of these dinners. Hold on.

Sam Parr

how did you get invited to this

Shaan Puri

I know one of the people there. What they do is host these dinners regularly with the same crew. Then, whoever is the host for that month gets to invite guests. They can invite 3 or 4 guests that are not in the main group to kind of spice up the dinner. The main group has been going for over 10 years, so it's kind of aspirational. I thought, "Oh, I'm going to start one of these too." It's a once-a-month dinner with a core crew, and then whoever's the host for that month gets to pick the food. I think you also do a special gift. For example, Reid Hoffman, who is the creator of LinkedIn, was in the group. When it was his turn to host, I remember he created his own board game. It was like an anti-Cards Against Trump, his own version of Cards Against Humanity but filled with Trump jokes. He gave one to every guest. Just baller stuff like that. So, anyway, I'm at this dinner, and I have three observations. I've been to a couple of these dinners, and somehow every dinner I go to in San Francisco has at least 30 to 50% of people talking about psychedelics. And yeah, I've never done psychedelics. I'm sober as a cat, not once. No, no, not once. I'm way too scared to do it. Have you ever done psychedelics? I don't even really know what would count as psychedelics. I think it's like LSD, MDMA, DMT... these are all the letters. But I don't partake in any acronyms like this.

Sam Parr

On one occasion, I met this girl, and we went out on what was either a first or maybe a second date. This was when I was still drinking, so we were a little drunk. We also took shrooms and a little bit of ecstasy, or molly, or MDMA—I don't even know if there was any of them. I definitely felt a little bit of Baldwin, but I was also pretty intoxicated too. So, it was, you know, a little bit... maybe 50% of the potency. That was the only time I've ever done it, and that was about 15 years ago.

Shaan Puri

The only acronym I have done is DARE, and that kept me off all of this. But I gotta say, I've done three of these dinners now in San Francisco with entrepreneurial types, successful Silicon Valley types, and it's crazy how much people talk about psychedelics. Like half the table are regular users of psychedelics. And by regular, I don't mean it wasn't like your story of "I did it once and it was cool but not for me" or whatever.

Sam Parr

dude I wasn't trying to like find myself I was just trying to like you know have a freaky night

Shaan Puri

find her

Sam Parr

yeah yeah we were trying to find something but it wasn't myself

Shaan Puri

I was trying to

Sam Parr

find myself like you know like with each other later that evening but that's about it

Shaan Puri

And so in these conversations, to me, there's what's coming up is not like... it's not "Bro, I got so drunk." It's not a brag like that. The conversation is like this weird intellectual thing where it's: 1. One-third talking about how psychedelics or LSD is cool 2. One-third talking about public policy like "I can't believe these are outlawed, it's crazy" 3. And one-third is science It's like there's... [unfinished thought]

Sam Parr

and I don't give a shit about any of those topics

Shaan Puri

There is so much research about how this can cure PTSD and... blah blah blah. It just keeps happening. Every dinner I've gone to in San Francisco—three in a row now—half the conversation is talking about this. Which tells me one of two things:

Sam Parr

Is that potpourri in the middle of the table like fart-flavored? Is that what those slices are like?

Shaan Puri

I'll tell you about that in a second. The thing with these is I've had this experience once or twice before where a lot of people in Silicon Valley are talking about something that seems weird to me. Then, like 5 years later, it's the norm, or 7 years later, it's the total norm. There is this thing that Paul Graham says: "If you want to invent the future, you first just live in it." I think that's one of the things that Silicon Valley is pretty good at. People here will do things, whether it's like what you're doing with biohacking, where you're wearing continuous glucose monitors. Tim Ferriss was wearing a continuous glucose monitor back in like 2008 or something like that. A decade later, now it's like a thing that a lot of fitness people are doing. There are whole startups built around letting you do this, like Nutrisense or Levels or whatever. But it was very strange at the time. There was this small community of people doing it. The same thing happened with crypto. Back in 2012, there were people going to these meetups that were all about Bitcoin. They seemed like the biggest kind of freaks at the time, in 2011 and 2012. Then, a decade later, it's on CNBC every day. So, I've seen this a few times in Silicon Valley where they're somewhat ahead of the curve. But of course, it's like anything that's a little bit contrarian. Just because it's weird doesn't mean it's always going to be a thing.

Sam Parr

But the psychedelic conversation that was cool 10 years ago... now it's, I mean, you can go to... I mean, I see everyone on Facebook saying, "I just got back from some country where we did an ayahuasca retreat." I mean, like, that... that I...

Shaan Puri

I don't think that's normal for most people. I think that's like your circle and our circle a little bit more than it is for the average person. Alright, so that was one piece of it. Second, AI is obviously all the rage. The entire menu was created by ChatGPT, so the host basically just typed in...

Sam Parr

I appreciate that

Shaan Puri

I'm hosting a dinner for a bunch of tech people. I need to create a menu for an epic dinner party, and I have created a full menu.

Sam Parr

that's cool

Shaan Puri

And he goes, "Write the whole thing like a Shakespearean play." So I just translated the menu into a very flowery poem, basically. Then it's like, "Cool, generate an image using DALL-E," or whatever. I basically created the whole menu that way, and the chef had to cook whatever ChatGPT had created, which was pretty clever, including the drinks and whatever. I thought that was fun. The last thing I want to say is I was talking to one guy, and I didn't ask him if I could say this, so I don't want to say his name necessarily. But he was one of those internet OGs. I asked him, "So what's your story?" He said, "Well, I started a business back in..." and he mentioned the name of a company that I had heard of from the dot-com boom, which then disappeared after that. I was like, "Oh wow, that's interesting." I asked, "So what was it like back then, you know, doing a startup here?" He replied, "It was crazy. I knew every single person doing a startup." He continued, "We used to have meetups here in San Francisco. We would meet up once a month. It started out with just me and this one guy," who he named. I think I can name this guy—he's the one who started Nextdoor, Nirav Tolia. He said, "Me and Nirav were like, 'Hey, let's get together a bunch of anybody else who you know that's interested in this tech, like internet thing—our fellow nerds.'"

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

"If you know anybody doing internet stuff, let's invite them to this thing," and then they created this group. He's like, "Dude, the group was insane." He's like, "It was the guy who went to go... you know, like the guy who created Zynga, then the guy who created LinkedIn, the guy who created YouTube, the guy who created PayPal... like all of them." He's like, "We would just hang out." It was just like... you know, we used to do those mastermind dinners in San Francisco. He's like, "Yeah, it was like that." He's like, "At that time, you didn't know who any of these were. You didn't know who's special, who wasn't. You just knew we're all super rich due to the internet."

Sam Parr

they add 3 zeros to like our success and that was it was basically the same thing

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So, he's like, we would get together and it was just debates about like what's going on with the internet and what cool stuff you're seeing. He said we would just shoot the shit late into the night. Then afterwards, it started growing. He said it started growing, and we had too many people for one table, so we made two tables. I was the host of one, and the other guy was the host of the other table. We would lead that discussion, and then afterwards, we would compare notes and be like, "Who should we invite back?" He said the key was that the internet started growing in popularity like crazy. A lot of people wanted to do internet companies. The way we made the community work was we started pruning hardcore. He said the bigger the overall community gets, the more high-level this one needs to get. So, let's only invite back people that we think are the most dynamic, the people who are going to do the most interesting things. He said this would have been the best venture portfolio of all time. It was every internet company that's big now; they were there. Even the people who were like, you'll have a Jack Dorsey or something like that. It's like they hadn't even done their big thing yet, and they're kind of the junior guy at this thing hanging out. I don't know if he specifically was doing it, but he gave me some names of some examples of people that were there because I was like, "Who could you tell at that time was going to do something?"

Sam Parr

like who did he say

Shaan Puri

He's like, "It felt like half the group." He's like, "Basically, what we did was when somebody stood out as someone that really knew where the puck was going, we made them a table host. So they would host their own table." By the end, we had like 8-9 tables going, and they were all...

Sam Parr

Did he say of anyone? The question I would have asked is the opposite: Who's a mega success who you thought, "Oh, that doofus! I can't believe he turned into something?"

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and he did tell me a couple of stories in both directions. There were people he thought were just animals; they were going to do great things. Then there were others who were a little overrated. I don't want to say who, because if they figure it out, I don't want them to be upset or whatever. But I would say one of the things he told me was that it wasn't the people who were working on ideas that sounded big. All the people that ended up with a big thing were working on ideas that didn't sound like important businesses from day one.

Sam Parr

and and they became important they became important eventually iterated to the

Shaan Puri

**Important thing:** It was a bigger space than we all realized. It was basically the person that was kind of doing the thing that was most interesting to them, and not necessarily the "okay, the internet's gonna be a big deal, so therefore I'm gonna create this important-sounding real-world business on the internet." It wasn't that. It was like, "Okay, yeah, this is cool that people are doing this." At the time, social networking was not seen as a space that was going to yield $100,000,000,000 companies. That wasn't a thing. It sounded like the frivolous, fun thing. It's like, "Oh cool, you can create a profile, take a quiz, or write something silly on their wall." That didn't seem like the big ideas. All the big ideas seemed like... even things like breaking into three categories: things that you didn't think were gonna happen on the internet, like selling cars or booking travel. It wasn't like, "Are people gonna do that?" Or maybe they'll do home buying. It's like, "I don't know, maybe that seems like something you really want to do in the real world." Those seemed kind of fringe because I didn't know if people would do it. There was social networking that seemed fringe and small. That's fun, but not that interesting because it's free. How are we gonna make a big business out of this? What are you gonna do with all these free users that are just going on there and goofing off? Then there were the things that were actually important-sounding businesses. I thought that was kind of interesting too. It reminds me of... have you seen this clip? This is all my last thing on this: look up NFX on TikTok. NFX is an investment fund.

Sam Parr

nsx insights

Shaan Puri

insights that's exactly right

Sam Parr

yeah and now I'm on their page watch that

Shaan Puri

First, we'll put this in the YouTube video. But watch this first video real quick of James Couriers standing there.

Sam Parr

Alright, it says everyone in that setup is all in on generative AI. There's an underground sea of startups. This kind of revolution happens every 14 years, and builders are here to change the world. It's James Currier who's on a stage, or like... he's on a chair in a room.

Shaan Puri

full

Sam Parr

Of like 20 guys, share your key performance indicators with each other. He's saying to people, "Share your ideas." The speed at which you move is what gives you, and this town and this community, its advantage. It's 65% of all the money invested in AI is being invested in San Francisco right now. So he's giving this pump-up speech where he's trying to say, like, you know, years ago there were like the Facebooks, but just to let you know, this is happening right now with AI. He's in a room with people, giving this cool speech, and everyone's staring up at him. They seem like they're super into it.

Shaan Puri

It's so cool! You can literally see a staircase coming down. He's somewhere downstairs in a basement, standing on a chair, and he's in a room full of people. He basically gives them a rally speech, saying, "Look, this is where the magic happens." He's like, "You're in this town, you're in this room, you're with a bunch of builders." What he says is that every 14 years or so, one of these waves happens, and they last somewhere between 24 to 36 months. He's talking about AI, saying, "We've seen this before with mobile." Mobile came out, but there was this 3-year window, kind of like 2009 to 2012. It happened with the internet too, around 1999 to 2000, lasting until about 2003 or 2004. He emphasizes that you get 36 to maybe 48 months max to take advantage of this moment. You're in this room with other people, and there's basically someone in this room right now who's building the next big thing. I hope it's you! You want to trade ideas, trade strategies, and share what you're doing. Finance people, work on projects with them, invest in each other. This is your time to focus. These windows only open up for a small group.

Shaan Puri

"Move as fast as you can." I thought it was pretty dope to see this kind of... I don't know, this rally cry. And it really does seem like that's what's happening with artificial intelligence right now. There's a window - the big shit's gonna get built right now. The next kind of Facebooks of the world are being built right now. It just kind of rehighlights the intensity of the moment if you're an entrepreneur.

Sam Parr

Have you heard that parable about the guy who is on a roof during a big flood? A guy in a boat comes by and says, "Hey, come on, get in my boat! I need to save you." The guy on the roof replies, "No, no, no. I'm praying to God. I'm a religious guy. God’s gonna save me." The boat guy says, "Alright, fine." Then another guy comes in a boat and says the same thing. Again, the guy on the roof refuses, saying, "No, no, no. I'm not gonna get in that boat. I'm gonna wait for a guy to come and save me." This happens two or three times, and eventually, the guy drowns and dies. When he gets to heaven, he asks God, "What the hell? Why didn't you come and save me?" God replies, "Dude, I had four boats come and get you! Why didn't you just hop in?" This video is similar to that story because there's this guy, James Carrey, who is wearing what looks like an ugly shirt. He's got a tucked-in T-shirt into blue jeans—kind of dad jeans. I mean, he looks like a dad. He's probably...

Shaan Puri

he is a dad

Sam Parr

He's 55, so he looks like he should, and he's wearing kind of an ugly shirt. He's just a normal-looking guy, I guess is what I mean. He's giving this really nice speech, but in a basement. It's that same thing where everyone's looking for some big opportunity or like a grand epiphany moment. It's like, no, just some guy who dresses like this, who's in a basement, and he's telling you like this.

Shaan Puri

Is happening. The message is here, and the message is clear. He's trying to shake you by the... he's trying to grab you by the collar and shake you and be like, "Hey, this... like playtime is over. The window is open. Go!" And I love it. I think that's... I think it's 100% true, and I want to leave with two controversial opinions.

Sam Parr

if a video with 6,000 views this is this is the man in the boat trying to save you from drowning

Shaan Puri

Yeah, by the way, the best stuff—the most insightful, meaningful content I consume—is all like this. It's got like 1,200 views on YouTube and, you know, 6,000 views on TikTok. The best stuff is not the most popular stuff when it comes to business. You used to host HustleCon, and people had to fly out to San Francisco, pay a couple hundred dollars for their tickets, and spend all day doing that. Not everybody could do that. Not everybody could afford the flight, the hotel, the ticket, or take a day off work, blah blah blah. You put all the talks up on YouTube. Every single one of them is on YouTube. In fact, it's on our channel on YouTube. If you just scroll back all the way to the oldest videos, all the talks are there, and all the talks have like 400 views. It's crazy! It's like, "Stop! Oh, you wanna be successful? Oh really?" Same thing with Harvard's whole curriculum being online. You can take any Harvard class you want online, and people will cry about not having the opportunities that the rich Harvard kids have. What are you talking about? All the classes are online! You can take everything you want. You have the same education that Gates had, that Zuckerberg had access to. You have access to all of it, and they'll have like 900 views. It just shows you that the real ones are gonna go do the thing. Those 900 views are from valuable people. I want to go meet all 900 people that are watching those videos because those are the people that are actually finding...

Sam Parr

so that's takeaway 1

Shaan Puri

that's oh no oh no

Sam Parr

you're too cut

Shaan Puri

My two controversial things: San Francisco is back, baby! The second thing is this whole idea of moving away to lower your taxes and being remote. The best teams are going to be working together; they're going to be in the room with each other, especially pre-product market fit. I would take any team that's co-located over a remote team any day. Just head-to-head, if it was a competition, I would choose the team that's going to be in there every day, having a bunch of serendipitous conversations, whiteboarding ideas, and getting to know each other better because they're spending an absurd amount of time together. I would rather have those people who are willing to commit and go all in like that over a distributed remote team where you're spending half your day walking your dog, taking care of your kids, and doing all that stuff. I think they're just going to outperform. I believe that San Francisco is going to outperform. I think that going to the dense city, as opposed to the people who care about the extra 10% in taxes or those who say, "Oh, I don't want to live here because I don't like the DA's policy on crime," is misguided. I just think it's insane that people in a game where the upside is like 1,000x returns would optimize for a 10% break in state income tax. That's crazy to me. Yeah, but bro, you know...

Sam Parr

you live in san francisco

Shaan Puri

Close enough! I'm a stone's throw away, as they say. I'm across the bridge. True, what person could throw?

Sam Parr

and rock that bar I I don't know like

Shaan Puri

"You got a catapult for that?" "Yeah, that's fine. I'm one easy pass away." "Cool. Yeah, I just... you're one easy 50-mile throw away."

Sam Parr

that's it

Shaan Puri

I agree

Sam Parr

with everything you're saying I can't find this client info

Hubspot

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Sam Parr

Alright, this next segment we're going to call it **"3 Killer Asians."** It's about three people; two of those people are a couple that you're going to talk about. But I'll go first. The reason I'm bringing this up is that this week—let me preface by saying I don't know anything about public markets. I'm an index investor; I don't do anything crazy, so I don't know much. But this week, I paid attention to my portfolio. Did you pay attention to yours? There was a nice little bump.

Shaan Puri

I have not

Sam Parr

Checked what's going on. So, stocks are doing well. The tech sector is doing well. I emailed my banker and texted him, "I go, Griffin, what's going on, man? Why do I have so much more money than I did the day before?" He said, "Nvidia just crushed their earnings." Like a lot of people out there, I know the name Nvidia. I know that Nvidia is a company, but I don't really know what they do. Do you know what Nvidia does?

Shaan Puri

They make chips. They make the chips that go into your gaming PC. The graphics processing unit (GPU) in there is going to be made by Nvidia. It's like Intel makes chips, and Nvidia makes chips, and AMD makes chips. There are like three companies that make chips.

Sam Parr

Okay, so do me a favor. Do you have Google up? Google "Gary Oldman." So the word Gary and then Oldman - O-L-D-M-A-N. You know, see who that is.

Shaan Puri

m a n

Sam Parr

old man like old man

Shaan Puri

you see it it's pulling up it's an actor gary old old man

Sam Parr

you see it you see it yeah you see you see gary alright you recognize gary

Shaan Puri

yeah I

Sam Parr

See this guy around? Yeah, okay. Type in another guy named Gary Cole. Do you see Gary Cole?

Shaan Puri

yeah another actor k

Sam Parr

and and what's your reaction when you see him

Shaan Puri

I have no reaction

Sam Parr

to this guy what what am I

Shaan Puri

supposed to be reacting to

Sam Parr

you just like seen him around right oh yeah

Shaan Puri

sure it looks like looks like a guy

Sam Parr

nvidia is like the garys the tech world

Shaan Puri

gary has a lot of idea where you're going with that so gary old man

Sam Parr

For those of you who aren't familiar with computers, Gary Oldman was the chief in *The Dark Knight*—like the cop in *The Dark Knight*.

Shaan Puri

the guy who puts up the bat signal

Sam Parr

yeah yeah yeah he was also winston churchill in like that the darkest hour movie he plays all these roles where like you see him and you're like oh that guy's great he's awesome he's always there he always has a good performance and everything he's in is probably pretty good but like he's never like the guy and he's never like I can't tell you who he is I don't have to look it up same with like you know there's a bunch of these actors who are like that that's what nvidia is of of the tech world so basically and this is gonna sound like obvious to anyone who's like is in deep tech but for someone like me who's not I had to like figure out what nvidia is so basically the story is is that they create gpu is it gpu chips or just gpu they they invented it so prior to nvidia there was like these other chip companies and they like intel was one of them just like the big dogs who you have heard about the seventies eighties and and they just make chips that ran your computer whatever but then as computers got a little bit better jensen hung the founder he was like look we need to have a 3 d chip for 3 d or a chip for 3 d video and graphic process so basically like we can like our screens will be more interactive and and all that and so he events this chip and he runs the company now for 30 years so he's been ceo for of this company longer than any other like new ish tech company and he made this bet and it wasn't that big of a bet so when he launched in 1993 he raised a $2,000,000 round of funding at a $6,000,000 valuation mhmm so this wasn't like some like you're gonna crush this like it was just a normal startup at the time but he makes his bet that he thinks that that cpus which is what people used to use that that's gonna be like a little bit less popular gpus which is for graphics and like more general use that's gonna be like the thing and so the first people who start using it are gamers so in like different gaming pcs people start using it and then apple Microsoft whatever they're like oh man we actually also want some of these chips so we're gonna use that but now it's expanded way beyond that so like tesla uses their chips so like when you wanna like do self driving they've got an nvidia chip that helps them figure out like where people are you know the camera will will use the gpu chip and then it will put like you know when you're on a tesla you can see people walking across the street and then now they're even using it for artificial intelligence so anyone who's using like openai amazon web services things like that they're also using gpus and so this company it's one of those companies that you don't really think about because it's a b2b company but at this.

Sam Parr

And this is what shocked me: **NVIDIA** is now either the 7th or 8th largest company in the world. Is that insane? Wow! And so, like, this company... because their stock did well, the whole NASDAQ (which is like a tech-based index), the market cap is...

Shaan Puri

almost 1,000,000,000,000 it's 963,000,000,000 right now

Sam Parr

It's insane, right? So, because Nvidia topped the whole Nasdaq—the whole Nasdaq, which is a tech-based, tech-forward stock exchange—that's what I've been on. They're killing it because of that. I have no idea. I heard that name and I thought, "What is this little gaming company? How is this moving the stock market?" And that's what it is. This guy, the founder, has a really good episode on him. His name is Jensen. He's really interesting. He was a Taiwanese immigrant, and his parents didn't have any money, so they sent him to a boarding school, which was like a reform school for kids who had issues. His roommate was a guy who had just gotten out of prison at the age of 16 or 17. He had been stabbed like 60 times. So, the guy was like, "Hey, keep me out of your work computers, and I'll show you how to lift weights." If you look at Jensen now, he's a pretty buff guy. He also has the Nvidia logo tattooed on him. He says all these really wild things, like, "My will to survive is greater than almost anyone's will to kill me." He has all these phrases where he just says, "I'm all in, baby." He's a really interesting entrepreneur, but he's like the Gary Oldman of the world. We don't actually see him out there; we're not watching videos of him like Mark Zuckerberg doing jiu-jitsu because he's not a mainstream-facing guy. But now, I think it's going to change because they are absolutely crushing it, and I'm one of the many people who probably had no idea what they do.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, when the acquired guys came on our pod, I think you asked them, "Hey, you studied all these companies, you studied all these epic titans of business." I think you said, "Who would you not want to compete with, or who would you want to compete with the least?" They said this guy, Jensen Huang. They were like, "Jensen, the guy from NVIDIA, the leather jacket-wearing CEO. He's got the NVIDIA tattoo on his shoulder and has just been like, you know, a monster for like 20 years with this company." That was not the answer; I wouldn't have guessed that that's who they would have said.

Sam Parr

It was an unfulfilling answer because I was like, "Well, I don't know anything about this guy." And I bet most of our listeners were like, "Oh, I thought you would have said Mark Zuckerberg or someone famous." This guy is just quietly kind of behind the scenes. Although he has a loud personality, he doesn't seem obnoxious. He wears like a cool leather jacket and he looks very confident, but he's just been quietly behind the scenes, kind of killing it. I don't know what his net worth is now, but I bet you he's one of like the top 30 or 50 richest people in America or in the world at the moment.

Shaan Puri

And he just gave a talk at the Taiwanese National University or something like that. I haven't seen it yet, but it was his commencement speech. You remember the Steve Jobs speech at Stanford? It was incredible. He gave a talk, and while I haven't seen the whole thing, there are a couple of lessons that some people have tweeted out. I want to share a couple with you. So, he goes, "Lesson number 1: humility. Confront failure head-on and ask for help." He shares a story from the early days of NVIDIA. They got their first big chip contract with Sega, the video game console. After a year of development, they realized they had picked the wrong technical strategy to make the chip that would fulfill Sega's needs for the contract. He said, "We realized our architecture was the wrong strategy. We didn't know what to do. Should we scramble to try to make it work? Should we just deliver something that's not great? What should we do? Should we start over? We don't have time." So, he called the CEO of Sega and said, "Hey, I think you have to find another partner, but I also need you to keep paying us on the contract." The CEO was shocked and asked, "What?" He replied, "I hate to even ask this. I'm embarrassed. If you don't pay us, we're going to go out of business. Please pay out the rest of this contract. We need these six months to survive. We screwed up. I'll do everything in my power to help you, and I'll try to make it right after this. But if you don't pay this contract, it's over for us." The CEO of Sega agreed and actually paid it out, giving him six months to survive. He emphasized, "You have to confront your mistakes head-on with humility and ask for help. That saved NVIDIA." He noted that this is the hardest thing to learn for someone who's smart and successful. They often try to avoid failure, be in denial, or hide from it.

Sam Parr

what else did he say

Shaan Puri

He goes, "Second is lesson number 2: You have to endure the pain and suffering to realize your dream." So he goes on, "In 2007, we announced CUDA, this new way to program your GPUs." I think that's the real key for NVIDIA. They don't just make the chips, they make the... This CUDA thing is important. It's basically the way that developers can use GPUs and control the GPU to do what they want.

Sam Parr

So he's like, "By the way, they don't even make the chips. They design them and have a partnership with this other Taiwanese company." Which is why sometimes you'll hear things like, "Well, if Taiwan gets invaded by China, we're at risk." The 8th largest company in the world is going to be kind of screwed, which means X, Y, Z for the rest...

Shaan Puri

especially all the companies that need chips like oh all of our cars need chips all of our computers need chips all of our phones need chips if we lose control of the chips it's like losing the nukes or it's like losing access to oil it's like a big deal so anyways so he goes he goes you know we basically we we tried to create this thing back in 2007 it was super hard super expensive our our profits took a huge hit and we had many years of poor performance and our shareholders were skeptical like dude why are you spending all this money on this stupid like gpus cuda thing like you need to improve profitability blah blah blah he's like but we just said no we're gonna keep doing this and basically it took like 3 or 4 years before there was even a market for this but by the time there was a market for this they were so far ahead he's like so then the phone comes out and the phone phones become a huge success now phones need gpus and by 2010 they had the lead in the mobile chip market so chips for phones he's like that was huge and oh no sorry I I screwed up this story the gpus thing becomes a big deal as gaming continues to to go that direction and like all the ai machine learning stuff but like that was it took like you know almost 10 years for that to come through but they like stuck to their guns and stuck with it even though the shareholders and the the public markets were punishing them for it and then the last one he's like you know we were in the mobile chip market we were the leader and he's like but it just became so competitive it was so many people fighting for the same pie they basically decided to like sacrifice sacrifice the mobile market and and leave that in order to do to to go for like you know a a different market this kind of ai machine learning market and again it seemed like a terrible strategic bet it's like you're leaving the biggest market cell phones in order to go for this like unknown like you know risky thing and that strategic bet paid off because they became you know the the by far the leader in this field and and now that became like you know the biggest market the market everybody's bullish about and the reason their stock is up so much is because they like gave guidance like they had like a revenue target or forecast or whatever there was a revenue forecast and they like just came out like actually we think we're gonna crush that by like 30% and they're like wait 30% on a number that's already in the multibillions and they're like yes so the stock took off after that

Sam Parr

Dude, it's awesome! So I'm a big fan, I'm a big fan of the Sky Soaps. Is it... or is this... I don't... the silent agent, they are always a challenge for me. But Mr. Jensen up in NVIDIA, you are today's **Killer Agent Number 1**. Sean, tell me who are Killer Agents Number 2 & 3?

Shaan Puri

Alright, we're going from a guy who makes GPUs and AI (artificial intelligence).

Sam Parr

To Orange GPU, I butchered the joke. It was too good. GPU or to MSC?

Shaan Puri

My favorite person! So, I met somebody who was a real estate person, and I asked, "How's the real estate thing going?" They replied, "Oh dude, it's going great! We're growing, growing, growing." I was curious, so I asked, "So you're still just doing this all with your own money?" They said, "Yeah, although there's one person who wants to put in money that I'll take." I was surprised and asked, "You've always said no to anybody's money. Why this one person, and why are you interested?" He explained, "It's the guy who started Panda Express. This guy's a multibillionaire, and he's got so much money—an unbelievable amount of money—that he doesn't know what to do with it. He needs a place to invest this money." I was intrigued and thought, "Panda Express? How much money are they making?" I kind of looked into it, so this segment is about Panda Express: the $10,000,000,000 mom-and-pop. I don't know how much you know about Panda Express, but...

Sam Parr

a bit

Shaan Puri

It does. I know you've tested the goods. So, basically, it's a privately owned company. It's owned by this husband and wife. They do about $5,000,000,000 a year in sales—$5,300,000,000 last year. There are no franchises of this thing, so they kind of independently own. I think almost all of them—there might be like 100 that are in international territories that they don't control. But for the most part, they have grown this thing to a huge international chain. I think it's the third biggest fast food chain or something like that, just behind the huge ones like McDonald's and Chick-fil-A. They are on track to become a $10,000,000,000 mom-and-pop company, which is just kind of insane. My friend, who was telling me...

Sam Parr

what are their names

Shaan Puri

what's that andrew it's andrew like churn

Sam Parr

I

Shaan Puri

I don't know how you say it exactly. It's like Cherng... it's C-H-E-R-N-G or something like that. It's him and his wife, and they've owned this thing, they've run this thing. So he started the first one, it was called like the Panda Inn back in the day. It was like a normal restaurant.

Sam Parr

I think he's

Shaan Puri

it was not fast food

Sam Parr

his dad yeah I think his dad had one his dad was the chef

Shaan Puri

So, his dad was a chef and he opened up Panda Inn. His dad was the chef of that restaurant. Then, fast food started taking off, and Andrew got pretty fascinated with this idea of fast food. He thought, "Okay, what if we did Chinese fast food?" So, their second or third location was this express-style, fast food place in California. Right?

Sam Parr

it's like where there was more agents and they and they start doing

Shaan Puri

A bunch of things that are smart... So, some of the strategic smart things that they did was they opened up a bunch of locations as they grew in airports and military bases, which a lot of people weren't doing at the time. But they were like, "Oh, this is a great way to build awareness." These are huge hubs that a lot of people come through. If we're here, we will become known and normal as a cuisine, basically. They did those even though those weren't the most profitable locations; they did it kind of for the brand. The second thing is that his wife was like a food engineer or something like that. She was one of the first people in Chinese restaurants to use a whole bunch of tech to monitor inventory or measure speed for operations. That's why they became so efficient. They call themselves the "McDonald's of the East" because they're as efficient as a McDonald's, even though almost every other kind of Chinese restaurant was a traditional mom-and-pop. They didn't write down the orders by hand; they tracked inventory by going and opening up the fridge and eyeballing everything, saying, "I think we need to order more eggs." Whereas they turned this into kind of like a machine. They would find things that were working in one store. For example, this guy in Hawaii who owned one of the stores, the chef there, created orange chicken. He thought, "Oh, I think I could take that one beef dish that's an appetizer that uses the orange peels. I think I could use that orange thing on the General Tso's chicken and combine the two." This resulted in fried chicken that's got the orange flavor.

Sam Parr

so panda express invented orange chicken

Shaan Puri

That's what it sounded like from my reading. Now, I don't know if there are others debating that, but that's how they frame it at least. They sell **$100 million** of orange chicken a year. It's like a crazy number. And so, yeah, just the same thing. I think they do almost like **$800 million** of EBITDA [Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization].

Sam Parr

and so I know someone

Shaan Puri

who knows him incredible amount of money

Sam Parr

I know someone who knows him and he told me the same number

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

He told me, "They're gonna knock on the door." He goes, "They're knocking on the door of $1,000,000,000 in EBITDA."

Shaan Puri

exactly that's how much cash

Sam Parr

they have

Shaan Puri

What do you do with all this money? People have asked him, "Are you going to take it public?" and the CFO is like, "Never. This is going to be a family business to pass down from generation to generation." Our job is to make this a multigenerational, family-owned business, and I think that's really cool. There are so few of those that refuse to go public. Why do they need to? They're rolling in profits, right? They don't need the liquidity of the markets, and they don't have investors that they need to pull off. I couldn't find if there were some angel investors early on; there probably were. I don't know if they owned literally 100%, but it seems like it's either 100% or close to it in terms of their ownership, which I think is kind of insane.

Sam Parr

He also does a few other things. If I remember correctly, I might get some of the details wrong, but I think that on the day you start working there, I believe he buys you the book *How to Win Friends and Influence People* by Dale Carnegie. He said that when he... I don't know if he is, but I think he might be an immigrant. His parents were for sure immigrants, and he was trying to figure out how to assimilate and be more likable and charismatic so he could get along with Americans. He read *How to Win Friends and Influence People*, and it changed his life. I also think he read *Think and Grow Rich*, and so he gives people these books. He also sponsors tons of his employees to go to Tony Robbins' events. So he's all about this self-help stuff, which is cool.

Shaan Puri

got a bunch of common

Sam Parr

We got a bunch of common interests, and he likes that for his employees. So, I think if I had to guess, when you get to be the size of a £100,000,000 orange chicken company, you're no longer just a product company or a restaurant company. You're about collecting people and making sure that they all behave in a very particular way, as well as being a logistics company. In terms of, you know, there's a reason why McDonald's, whenever they know something, it's like, "Oh, that's a huge announcement." Just because they have to make ribs, they have to go and get like £500 worth of pork in order to make this. That's a huge ordeal. But in terms of treating his people well and collecting people, he invests, I heard, into them a whole lot. So, he's kind of a really interesting guy. I don't know if this is like PR-spun stuff where, you know, he looks great all the time just from the outside, but he seems like he does a lot of really good things.

Shaan Puri

There's... I just asked ChatGPT for some fun facts. I said, "Give me some fun anecdotes about them," and they said the thing about the books. He said he buys thousands of copies of his favorite books. One is *Awakening the Buddha Within*, and he gives it to his employees. Another thing it says is, according to a Forbes article, staff members often start the day with affirmations like, "People are depending on me to be at my best. I believe in myself and my abilities. Opportunities are everywhere." I don't know if that's truly how they start the day, but it's a hell of a lot better than just saying the Pledge of Allegiance. I think we should put this in schools. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, 2,000+ stores as a kind of family-owned, private, and non-franchised business is a mind-boggling level of scale to reach.

Sam Parr

he also and the same

Shaan Puri

with his wife peggy that just like still kind of like own the thing

Sam Parr

And he does the total opposite of what you just said. Before he moved to Nevada, he... he now lives in Nebraska because he's making so much income. But yeah, I know that he... I think Nevada is now... it was like a big deal when he left California for Nevada. That's his... that's his problem statement now.

Shaan Puri

The thing about tech entrepreneurs is, if you're going to build a Silicon Valley-style venture startup, this is the place to be for that. I'm not saying everybody in the world should live in California. If you're slinging $100,000,000 of orange chicken, you live wherever the hell you want. That's rule number 3. I want you to tell me where we're gonna move.

Sam Parr

Into the last section here. I want you to tell me... You got a little ambitious here. You titled this section "Famous People Who Are Back With New Companies." I don't wanna call them famous. Maybe notable? Somewhat popular? Notable... notable... notable is a better one. Let's do notable. Tell me what you got.

Shaan Puri

I don't know if you've seen this, but there are a few people who are well-known in our industry for a bunch of reasons. They are doing interesting things, and I want to get your quick reaction to each of them. So, I don't know if you've seen all these, but we'll start with Naval. Naval is kind of like one of the godfathers of Silicon Valley. He's been here since the pre-dot-com boom days. He did a startup that went public, and then he famously had a big dispute with a bunch of people about it. He created a blog called "Venture Hacks" with his partner, Nivi. That eventually sort of led to AngelList, which is a multibillion-dollar startup that's like LinkedIn for the tech industry. He's known for having over a million followers on Twitter because he's a very insightful guy. So, Naval's awesome.

Sam Parr

He's got a new app. He turned into like a... he's like a self-appointed guru, which is brilliant, Brian.

Shaan Puri

He's actually the opposite. I think he's a non-self-appointed guru. I think other people appoint him a guru, and he's like, "That makes me a little uncomfortable, but I kinda like it."

Sam Parr

he leaned he leaned into it

Shaan Puri

He leaned into it really hard, but as somebody who's consumed, I think, every word that Naval has said—somehow, I've watched all his livestreams, his podcasts, all that stuff, right? I love his stuff. He many times will be like, "People, you know, why don't you do more or have your own things?" And he's like, "I don't want to. I don't like this playing this role of the guru thing. I don't like how much I like it, and I have to be very careful that I don't fall into that. I don't want that to be my life and my identity." He gets excited about learning something because he wants to learn it, not because he's going to go tell everybody about it and then have everybody think he's so smart. He's like, "No, I don't want that. I want to learn the thing because I like to learn it, and that's it." And he's like, "You know, it's like junk food. When I get on here and I give random advice to people, it's my junk food. It's not what I want to be eating."

Sam Parr

And people base their lives on it. I don't, but it is far. Yeah, Jensen's got the Nvidia tattoo. I got...

Shaan Puri

the naval tattoo on my arm

Sam Parr

okay so what's airchat's thing

Shaan Puri

have you seen it have you played with it

Sam Parr

Isn't it just like a little bit? But is it... it almost felt like an AI friend. Is that what it is?

Shaan Puri

No, not at all. So, it's an app. It's not like a social media app. You open it up, and there are these rooms. You can go into a room where people talk about AI. It's sort of like audio, but it's recorded. I could go on there and say, "You know, I was playing with this ChatGPT thing. One of the cool things I've been doing is... has anybody tried anything that's blown their mind? That blew my mind!" Then another person who follows me can just reply, "Dude, you're totally right! Here's what I did." You're hearing their voice, so it's like voice plus the transcription of it. It's kind of like a way to have almost a podcast-style conversation where it's open. Anyone can hop in that you allow into your room, and the conversation goes wherever it goes. I get a little bit of a dinner party vibe in a way. For example, one of the rooms I liked was the guy Nivi telling the origin story of AngelList, which I had never heard before. He was like, "Alright, I'm going to go back and tell you the origin story of AngelList," and it's actually not what I had thought. He said, "We had Venture Hacks, the blog..."

Sam Parr

that was kind of popular and then I was like I was trying to

Shaan Puri

figure out what to do like how do we turn this into a business and so I emailed naval naval had owned 10% of it and I was like alright naval hey I don't know what you think about this but like I'm thinking about selling this pdf like okay venture hacks a free blog but then here's this pdf like we're joking about like the webinar thing it's like dude even some of these awesome people did it and he's like I'm gonna sell this pdf that will like just give people like templates and naval's like okay that's cool you know for my 10% just keep it with how this oh that's not hot like this awesome pdf thing you're gonna try to do like go ahead and hold on to my 10% I I don't need it you need it more than I do and then he's like he's like and then we were driving home from some events after I had told him about the pdf thing I was like ready to go do that and naval had this like I you know like we were shooting the shit and we had this idea like oh you know what I really want is like I want a list of investors and just what they invest in what check size because people are always asking us due to venture hacks like hey do you know any investors that would invest in my start up he's like I just want a list that I can refer to as like here's all the investors I know here's what they invest in and here's a check size so when someone asks for an intro I can go look at the list and make the intro and then maybe he's like yeah that's cool I don't think that's a business like it's gonna that's gonna make less money than my pdf but like you're right that would be really useful for us so he's like so I went home that night he's like I made a form and I emailed it out to every investor I know that was like yo what do you invest in what's your average check size and what's your email address and like you know are you open to people contacting you about like for introductions for deals he's like and I sent it to people and they immediately filled it in it was the ugliest form I didn't even pay for the premium he's like just a reminder that like you know you just need to start you need to get it out there and then like get momentum going and he's like now I I with any project if I can't like launch some version of it in the first 24 hours it like kinda like it bothers me a lot like I don't really wanna do projects where I can't do that he's like so that was the fur that was v one of angellist we got this these people back and then we put it on a we put it on our website and then we like got some like press coverage because it was like oh here's a list of all the angels

Sam Parr

and then it was like and all their emails were there

Shaan Puri

So that was bad. We had to take that off and then hide their emails because people were just spamming them. He's like, and then that became like the precursor to what AngelList was, which is now this multi-billion dollar company. It was just this list of angel investors, and that was the simplest, most useful thing. He's telling the story in the air chat and he's like, "If you guys want, by the way, I could tell you the two other ideas that we looked at that turned out to not be good ideas, but you know, let me know." Then you could see that now I'm like, "Oh great, I'm going to follow along. I kind of want to hear this oral history of AngelList." So it's cool in that way, right? It's a cool new app. He's coming out with this and he's like, "I'm a co-founder of this." The other guy I think who's behind it is Brian Norgaard. I don't know how he says his last name exactly, but he's kind of well-respected in the tech scene as a product guy, product designer guy.

Sam Parr

and he like worked at tinder or something

Shaan Puri

Yeah, he basically started a couple of things that had a bunch of hype. They didn't fully pan out but were cool products. They didn't work, but were cool. Then he ended up with a product at the Match Group or something like that at IAC. So then he ran Tinder, and now he's doing this, I guess. That's kind of like one app. So, give me your... I don't... you haven't played with it, so it's hard to get your quick reaction.

Sam Parr

Well, I... yeah, you gotta sign up for a waitlist. It's also a flight only, right? Is this... mhmm, rub it in. Do you think that this is gonna be like a thing?

Shaan Puri

I do not so I I think it's gonna be it's actually reminds me a lot of clubhouse in that early on clubhouse was awesome what was awesome because it was such a curated community and it was like they brute forced only dope people onto the platform because that's who their friend group was and so early on with clubhouse you would go into any room and it'd be like super interesting conversation you could just hop in and meet people and you could build and I I told my friend this there was a guy who used to work for me jason and I was like jason he was still at twitch after he got acquired and was kind of like you know spinning his wheels a little bit and I go jason you should just forget about twitch I said every night you should go on clubhouse and hang out there for like 5 hours you will build like the best network in silicon valley in the next 2 months if you just do that because I was like you're an awesome talker people love you when they meet you but it's just hard to go meet like the power players clubhouse is this place where all the power players are hanging out and they want to be talking to randos because that's what clubhouse is and that they're excited about clubhouse therefore they're excited about talking to randos I was like you can go in there and go from rando to friend in like 2 months and he did exactly that he went in there and he started hanging out he built this awesome friend group they still hang out in real life today he ended up raising a fund out of that group of people like dude you seem like you know a lot about crypto like can you invest some of my money in crypto and he's like I don't know and ended up raising like a few $1,000,000 fund invested it made these guys money triple I think he doubled or tripled their money and paid it all back and gave stopped the fund within like a year which is like incredible and yeah he just like had this awesome network experience so to me airchat's like that right now you go in there everybody's smart and awesome and like the who's who of of the tech world and so it's great for me as a user right now I don't think it'll stick like that and I also don't think it'll catch on to be a mainstream social media thing because for one reason audio is too slow people can like scroll and read I don't know some crazy like 3 or 5 times faster than audio and so there is it's too slow any social media you're now competing with tiktok it's like how do you compete with the entertainment per second that you rate that you get from an instagram or tiktok or even a twitter it's all short form bite sized just instant dopamine hits and it's like podcasts it's very hard to compete with that though it'll never be as like you know billions of people are just opening this thing up all the time because audio is too slow and you get too few like hits of awesomeness per per minute that you compared to your other options your other buttons on your phone so that's why I don't think it'll become like a mainstream thing tell me about this tradie thing okay so dom who was the founder of fast.com which was a funny story what's the

Sam Parr

what's the 30 second story of fast

Shaan Puri

30-second story: Fast guy gets his domain Fast.com. Comes out with crazy hype on Twitter of just "Fast is gonna be the next big thing." It's one-click instant checkout. What Amazon did with one-click checkout, we're gonna do for the rest of the internet. And they're just pumping on Twitter how Fast is gonna be awesome. They raised a bunch of money at a huge valuation, they're bragging about it.

Sam Parr

how hundreds of millions right

Shaan Puri

hundreds of millions

Sam Parr

hundreds of millions

Shaan Puri

Pre-launch... yeah, pre-pretraction basically. A few of us were kind of like, "I don't know, man. I'm not sure. Where are the customers? What's going on?" Sure enough, the bubble pops. People sort of realized that Fast.com has basically no traction. It had, I don't know, tens of thousands in revenue, yet it had almost a $1,000,000,000 valuation. The product doesn't really work that great, the team is... whatever. It all just falls apart. I don't remember the exact details of how it fell apart, but it fell apart. They were burning, I think, $10,000,000 a month of investor money at one point. Something like that. Between $3,000,000 and $10,000,000—I don't remember the exact numbers—but they were burning an absurd amount of money. He couldn't raise anymore because they had no traction. At a certain point, the investors want to see traction, and so Fast just combusts. Then it comes out that this guy, Dom, previously built a company in Australia called Tow.com, which was supposed to be like Uber for towing your car and tow truck drivers. Basically, that company also had a dope domain, Tow.com.au. It raised money, got a bunch of press, got some users, but not a lot. It ran up a bill that he couldn't pay—like a $13,000,000 bill or something like that. He's getting sued by the state, the government there, because of towing contracts that he couldn't fulfill. He ended up just leaving Australia and starting fresh. He used to be Dominic Holland and rebranded as Dom in the U.S. and did Fast.com. So it's kind of like, "Okay, this guy's track record." Now he's got Tradie.com, another quick domain name. Have you seen this thing, Tradie? Like, as in tradesmith?

Sam Parr

yeah and so explain what it is and I'll tell you what I heard about it

Shaan Puri

So, it kind of, on the surface, like most of Dom's ideas, sounds like a good idea. It says, "The fastest way to grow your trade business," and it just shows a bunch of, you know, blue-collar types. This guy does landscaping, and this guy's got a tractor. It's like, "Hey, we give you a website. We let your customers book you and pay for you online. We give you an easy way to do invoicing." You know, if you're a professional tradesperson, you should be using this service, right? That's the pitch. It's not a bad pitch; I think it's a good idea. Now, tell me what you heard about it because I think we heard the same thing.

Sam Parr

Okay, so here I'll read it. Someone tweeted: > "Looking at tradie.com so far, 80% of the businesses I've contacted from the site..." Meaning there's a bunch of businesses that were listed as testimonials, and I think he said...

Shaan Puri

it looks like dom's at it again right that's the frame

Sam Parr

Yeah, he goes, "Dom, he's at it again." He says, "80% of the companies that contacted me from the site don't seem to be real. They're shell companies with fake Yelp and Google listings." He also mentioned that 90% of them didn't pick up the phone. One tradie made their landing page without a permit. Oh, and one person who was listed on the website said that tradie made the landing page without that company's permission. So far, two companies seem to actually be using the product, but tradie is giving it to them for free and sponsoring them. Then he shows all the domain names that the same LLC that owns tradie has also bought, which were listed on the website of tradie.com.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, this is a guy Justin Mitchell - J.J. Mitch is the guy who tweeted this out. So, yeah, like straight off the bat... and now, by the way, I think all those are gone from the Tradie website. So he's at it again. My takeaway is: **run**.

Sam Parr

not I'm not I'm not touching this thing

Shaan Puri

it's the reaction

Sam Parr

alright and the next 2 tip top

Shaan Puri

And Bay Area Times... Yeah, let's skip that one. Let's do the Pump one. So Pump, friend of the pod, is doing something interesting. I don't know the full story. I haven't talked to him about this. Have you talked to him about this Bay Area Times thing?

Sam Parr

no not yet do

Shaan Puri

you know what I

Sam Parr

didn't even know about it I don't even know what it is

Shaan Puri

okay so go to bayareatimes.com it looks like

Sam Parr

So Pomp is famous for being one of the early guys who was very vocal about crypto. He started a podcast, YouTube channel, and now he's a whole personality. He's pivoted away a little bit from crypto, so now he talks about business, but also a little bit of politics, sports, and all types of topics.

Shaan Puri

Of stuff, his kind of relaunch. I want to talk to you about which is basically like, how do you think that's going to go? So, he was the Bitcoin bull. He popped off in terms of he's built his audience around Bitcoin and saying how amazing crypto is. Then people will note, like, you know, they kind of like the crypto haters basically will be like, "Dude, look at this! He removed the red laser eyes. He removed all mention of Bitcoin from his bio." Now, like, he hosted a real estate conference the other day. He's hosting, like, you know, startup events, just like normal startup things. His media stuff is not about crypto anymore. So, you know, I think he's diversifying and kind of shifting away from it.

Sam Parr

think it's working really well too

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and like, I would just say this: I think for most people, it's a very hard transition. I would not want to bet against Pump. I think he is a very formidable, smart person who is going to be successful in whatever he chooses to pursue. I think he's chosen to build my whole code to be about these things instead of just this one. I think it's a very hard pivot to make, and he's making it very well. He's doing it very well so far, from what I can tell. So, he...

Sam Parr

Basically, he owns right now, I think he owns an executive recruiting company and a research company.

Shaan Puri

job board what else a job like a yeah

Sam Parr

a job board

Shaan Puri

and like a course that trains you to get jobs in crypto

Sam Parr

and then what and then maybe like 2 more his meeting comes in at all

Shaan Puri

And then I think he's investing beyond that. So here's what he said: "Introducing the Bay Area Times. This is a new product that uses data and visuals to analyze what's happening across business, finance, and tech on a daily basis. So you go to bayareatimes.com." He basically says, "Narrative dominates the headlines on other platforms. Writers spend paragraphs regurgitating the same points over and over again. These legacy products take too long to read; they bury the data deep in the paragraphs, and it's hard to recall the information. But what if you just want cold hard facts? What if you want to see the data in a single chart? What if you don't have 10 minutes to read every morning? That's what we built this for." So every morning, they send out an email that has five big stories. It's got a visual, which is like a chart or a graph, along with a few bullet points. No hidden agenda, no choice of facts, no biased narrative. That's his claim. He says he's been testing this with 20,000 readers, and the feedback has been phenomenal. Go for it, right? And so you could see it looks like it's built on Substack.

Sam Parr

be have

Shaan Puri

Like, oh yeah, sorry, this is... oh yeah, this is behave. So we go to the first one. Alright, so like the one that he sent out 3 days ago, it's basically, "Here's the data." It's like what's going on in the stock market, what's going on with Bitcoin, gold, Ethereum, etc. Then it'll be like, "Here's a chart on life expectancy." It says life expectancy has been stagnant for the past 20 years. After the COVID drop, it's at 77 years old, which is the same level as 2003. Right, so that's like the one big chart, and then to put bullet points underneath it.

Sam Parr

So he's basically using visuals and data to explain what's going on in the news. I think it's cool. I think the worst-case scenario here for him is that this makes like $2 or $3 million a year, and it's very, very profitable. The best case? It becomes [like] Hustle, Morning Brew, whatever... it gets millions of subscribers and makes tens of millions, you know, or however much more. I think it's cool. What do you think?

Shaan Puri

I kinda wish this was an actual printed thing. I like people that are going into newspapers and magazines right now. I think those are very interesting.

Sam Parr

So, there's Agora, the newsletter company I always talk about. They would say that they would charge like $2 a year, and they would send you a newsletter. But it was a financial newsletter. Except when they say "newsletter," they would literally mail it to you, and they still do that. It was just printed on printer paper, and it was kind of cool for that reason. I actually agree with you; I think that could be cool where you just literally mail someone something, and it comes in one of those tan envelopes. It looks almost like a presidential briefing. You know, like, "Here's what you need to know." Oftentimes, I'm like, "Just give me that," but at my house. Totally! I actually do think that would be cool.

Shaan Puri

did we talk about this jumbo mail marketing thing

Sam Parr

what's that

Shaan Puri

So, I saw this on Twitter, and it's pretty cool. Basically, the tagline is: "Have you ever received a package in the mail and thrown it away without opening it? Neither have we." They're saying that over 90% of people who receive a stuffed envelope or package will rip it open. If you go to Twitter, it's at @MailJumbo. The icon is an elephant, and their message is: "We create jumbo chunky mail that's guaranteed to reach your audience." It's good for real estate investors, home services, and business buyers. What they do is direct mail, kind of like the spam we get in the mail, like, "Oh, we want to buy your business," or "We're a real estate agent." But they do it in these jumbo packages to increase your response rate. So, they're like, "Yeah, it costs more, but you're actually going to get more people to read your thing." I thought this was a brilliant, simple side hustle-style business that could reach mid-seven figures in revenue and be a profitable bootstrap business focused on jumbo mail marketing. There's this guy named Sam Ovens, who we've talked about, but about 10 years ago, he had...

Sam Parr

This course is called Consulting.com, and it teaches you how to become a consultant. Whether it's about how to do SEO for companies or other services, the course covers how to start a consultancy business. One big thing that he... I don't know if he says he invented it, but he goes, "This is like my shtick." He does this thing called **lumpy mail**, where he sends just a normal envelope but puts something lumpy in it. I forget what he would put, but it could be a figurine or a pen—whatever it was, it made the envelope feel like it had a little bit of weight to it. He explains that the reason he does this is because lumpy mail gets opened way more often, and it captures your attention much better. What these guys are doing now is that they used to call it lumpy, but they're calling it **jumbo**. I thought they learned about it from him, but he claims that it was amazing.

Shaan Puri

Well, the guy who's behind it, one of the guys who's behind it, is the same guy that does the mobile home park business on Twitter. He also runs like nine other businesses and is a complete madman. It's like if somebody downloaded a podcast into their brain and then their brain said, "Let's do all of them." He's doing like nine ideas at once at all times. But this is one of his ideas. He did it because when he was trying to buy businesses, like the mobile home parks, he needed to do mass outreach. He wanted to increase his response rate to see if they were actually even seeing my offer or if they wanted to sell their business. So, I think this was part of the inspiration for that.

Sam Parr

I think we should wrap up here, but before we do, I want to give you kudos. You said something last podcast that was very insightful that totally flew under the radar. And what...

Shaan Puri

was it

Sam Parr

If you made it this far, 60 minutes in, I'm gonna give you a piece of gold that you can... obviously a joke that you're gonna tell your friends. We said something about like breaking up with someone, maybe it was like breaking up with a business relationship, I don't remember. But I said something like, "It's not you, it's me," and you said: > "Yeah, it's not you, it's me... in that I think you're horrible." And I regurgitated that joke this weekend.

Shaan Puri

killed it the re

Sam Parr

The roof! They loved it. I looked so funny. It was such a... You said that line and it totally flew under the radar. It's like, "Look, it's not you, it's me." And I think you're the...

Shaan Puri

worst so that is like a free joke

Sam Parr

I have just given you something alright

Shaan Puri

there you go

Sam Parr

I've given you the listener something what do they

Shaan Puri

give us when we give them something right you you nobody just takes right you don't wanna be a taker that would be

Sam Parr

Yes, that would go against our agreement that we have with our listeners. I've just given you something, Sean gave you something that I now gifted to you. Now I want you to go to our YouTube page and our... I always call it the iTunes page, and it just shows how old I am.

Shaan Puri

I don't

Sam Parr

Know what? The podcast app, like the Apple Podcast app, go to both of them and click "subscribe." Because if you've listened to this, we've given you that.

Shaan Puri

By the way, drop comments on the YouTube. That is now my favorite part of the podcast because... for we did this for 2 years with no YouTube and there's no feedback loop. You don't get any comments on the podcast app, but on YouTube people leave comments. And now we get, I don't know, I don't know how many it is... like maybe 30-40 comments per video. I love it. I read every single one of them, every single time. Like, no joke. Because it's... it's like my only way to kind of interact with you [the audience].

Sam Parr

they're all saying they're all saying you look rich no

Shaan Puri

I do like that part of the comments, not gonna lie. That is a good feeling. They're like, "Wow!" But it's also one of those... what do you call it? The "I had a before" ... before, and now I'm a before photo.

Sam Parr

you had a you had a way before picture

Shaan Puri

Yes, exactly. I used to be that way before, and now I'm just a "before." I think people recognize that. I appreciate them for that.

Sam Parr

You can see you definitely have some definition in your biceps and triceps. You’ve got the separation.

Shaan Puri

I got sepsis over here, but I'm going to start commenting back to anybody that says something interesting. And to that spammer out there that keeps trying to trick all of our people into a WhatsApp group, I'm hunting you. I'm coming for you because the YouTube algorithm can't get you. I will get you. I will find you.

Sam Parr

it's hard

Shaan Puri

I have a unique set of skills that have prepared me for this moment: to find you on every single video and remove your comments.

Sam Parr

Yeah, 10 years of Googling has prepared you to reverse image search and figure out where they've made their mistake.

Shaan Puri

we're out of it

Sam Parr

that's the pod we'll see you all soon