How To Build A 100 Year Old Company (#469)

Sam Parr

Let's go outside of the tech world. Two brands that I am looking at that have lasted a long time are **Louis Vuitton** and **The New York Times**. Louis Vuitton has lasted maybe 250 years now, and when you think of Louis Vuitton, you know what you're getting. The same goes for The New York Times; it has been around for 250 years. Not everyone likes them, but you know what they're pursuing, which is their version of the truth. But then, let's go to **Raising Cane's**. Have you ever been to Raising Cane's? Of course!

Shaan Puri

I love raising canes I met the founder of raising canes once

Sam Parr

He is awesome! We're live. What's going on? What up? How are you?

Shaan Puri

I'm thriving

Sam Parr

Alright, good. So, I've been thinking about this conversation you and I had. We talked about outsourcing, and I'm actually going to put a lot of words in your mouth. You didn't actually say everything I'm implying; you said a lot of stuff which you didn't exactly say. So, you're kind of more of a representation. But Rob Dyrdek said something amazing on this podcast a few episodes ago. He said two amazing things. First, he goes, "If I just do these..." He was looking for these $20 to $30 million wins. Instead, he said, "I'm actually only going to do one or two things, and I'm going to hope that they're going to be big." Then he also mentioned this thing called "Forever Estates." Do you remember when he talked about Forever Estates? Afterwards, he sent me mock-ups of this, and I Googled the architect and everything. There was this really cool article that Rob and the architect wrote together. So, for Forever Estates, Rob said he wanted to build this home. Basically, he mentioned he had $12 million liquid at the time, and he went and bought this plot of land. He said, "I want to build the home I want. It's going to cost $30 million." At the time, he didn't have that, and it sounds like maybe he has it now. But he was like, "I want to build this home where the Dyrdek family for many generations can meet to discuss family planning and family issues and things like that." So, I'm going to build this home exactly how I want it, and we're going to call it Forever Estates because hopefully, it lives forever. I found that very inspiring. Did you find that inspiring?

Shaan Puri

I loved it! I love when people take an absurdly long view. More than anything, I love when people have a vision for their life and what they're doing. When somebody has a clear and compelling vision for their life, that is one of the most attractive traits to me. It doesn't even matter if I agree with that vision; it's that they have that vision and that they are committed to it that truly matters.

Sam Parr

I thought it was awesome! He sent me mock-ups of the home, and I was like, "Dude, this is so inspiring!" I got all hot and bothered about this. It was awesome to me. So, I started thinking about companies that can last a long time. I've been a little bit obsessed with this because with Hampton, things are going well. We're not a success yet, but it's very clear that, like I always tell our team, physics will allow this to work. There's demand, I've got a good audience for this, and we've got a good team. Physics allows us to exist. There's nothing that gets in the way of this. We're already somewhat successful. The only question is, how great will it become? I'm starting to think about how to create something that lasts 50 or 100 years, whatever it is. The word "brand" is something that I've been thinking about a lot. I think you and I, as well as our audience, get into this short-term thinking. We use words like "arbitrage" or certain terms that people actually don't think about when it comes to branding. They don't think about soul, and I've been thinking a lot about that lately. There's this book that I'm reading called "Lessons from the Century Companies Club." One woman studied companies that have lasted 100 years and asked, "What do they all have in common?" I've been thinking a lot about that. You brought up something; you said you invested in a company called Shepherd, which I think is awesome. I actually am starting to use them. I'll give you a plug. Is it Grow Shepherd or Support Shepherd?

Shaan Puri

shepherd.com yeah

Sam Parr

SupportShepherd.com. You talked about that investment in the company, and you're discussing outsourcing. It's basically where you hire people in the Philippines and, I think, also Latin America to do a bunch of odd jobs. But you said something like, "I want to hire tons of these people." I started thinking about that and realized I shouldn't do that. I actually should do it for some roles, but I had this off-site retreat in the Hamptons with a bunch of our employees. I realized you have to build a really strong company culture. You have to figure out how to keep employees for a long time, and that's one of the key elements to building a brand that can last a long time. I wanted to hear how you approach this. By the way, this topic is not that exciting for anyone who's in survival mode. This topic is more exciting for people who are in "thrive mode," where it's like, "I got this thing working."

Shaan Puri

To be clear, the first phase of the company is just to build something that people want and figure out if you can get it to them. Don't worry about culture, don't worry about brand, don't worry about the forever plan, and don't worry about the 25-year vision. None of it’s going to matter if you can't do the first thing. Sam has done the first thing with Hampton. He has proven that he can create something that people actually want and sell it to them. So now he's thinking... and now you get what I call **progressive ambition**. I want to do a whole video on progressive ambition. I'm going to show people, if you go back and you watch Mark Zuckerberg's early interviews, people are like, "Where does this go from here? You're on 8 campuses now. Are you going to open this up to everybody? High schoolers, everything?" He goes...

Sam Parr

he's like 50 schools

Shaan Puri

He's like, "Well, you know, our goal is to get to all the major colleges." I'm not sure everyone keeps saying, "Why, you know, expand, expand, expand?" Some things are cooler when you don't expand. I don't think we have to open up to everybody. I'm not sure. I mean, some things are really... we could build something really, really useful for college students. Maybe we should just do that. And then now the guy's created hot air balloons that give internet to farmers in India so that they can use Facebook, right? It's like he got progressively more ambitious as he went along, and that's... which is...

Sam Parr

A crazy story in itself. By the way, Facebook—I think Sarah helped to work on this or something at Facebook—basically puts these planes over India so any Indian can access the internet. The issue with the growth of Facebook is they literally have everyone on the internet, so they have to create more internet for people.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, they gotta create a bit more time. Like, we're tanning it up right now. Hold on, we gotta give more people the internet so they can use our app.

Sam Parr

but that's cool that it started where that that's a great phrase progressive ambition

Shaan Puri

Very common for different companies, you can go back... Oh, I'm a forensic... Let's say I'm an archaeologist. I go back to study the early origins of these companies, and you find this very, very commonly: they start with a sort of humble ambition. Then, as things start to work, they snowball their ambition. They become more and more ambitious as they go, realizing the opportunity is wider and bigger than they had initially planned for. That one step of success earns the right to go for the next step of success. It is okay to ladder up because what most people do is look at them today and say, "Well, now they're trying to do A, B, C, and D." So, when I start, I need to also plan for A, B, C, and D. But it's actually like, no, you actually just start with A. You don't have to do anything else. Of course, there are exceptions. There's Elon Musk saying, "We're gonna..." But, you know, even Elon, for example, let's take one of the most ambitious companies in the world: SpaceX. Right? What's the goal? What's the mission statement? It's like, "Make the human species multiplanetary so we can survive when we ruin Earth or when Earth gets hit by an asteroid or whatever." And so, it's like, wow, what's more ambitious than creating a rocket? Literally, rocket science to create rockets that will eventually take us to live on Mars. Wow, that's like the biggest vision ever. When SpaceX started, his initial vision was to do a test demonstration, sending a plant in a rocket to a certain height. I don't remember exactly where it was, but it was to have the first living thing go out past the moon or wherever he was trying to take it. That's all he wanted to do: just take a plant out there. He thought, "Oh, I'll just fund this. You know, it'll take me $20 million, but it'll inspire people towards science, and hopefully NASA will then fund real Mars missions after that." Then, only along the way, he's like, "You know what? Screw this plant thing. Let's actually do it ourselves. We don't need to inspire NASA; let's just do the whole thing ourselves." He also got progressively more ambitious.

Sam Parr

And also, when he first started, he began a thing called Zip2, which I'm almost certain was basically like putting the Yellow Pages on the internet. I'm sure he had some cute way of spinning it, claiming it was a grand plan. But he made $20,000,000 off of it, which is a lot of money. In his head, he was like, "I gotta get my nut," you know what I'm saying?

Shaan Puri

He's like, "You see, every human has a number, a phone number, and you can reach them. This is one of the most marvelous things in the world, and you need a way to reach them." It's information, you know? He'll make anything sound fancy, but actually, one of the interesting things is Elon is also credited as, you know, he created PayPal. He didn't actually create PayPal. The product was created by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel. But even then, when they merged with Elon's company, he had this big vision for X.com. He said, "X.com is gonna be everybody's full financial life. It's gonna be banking, it's gonna be mortgages, it's gonna be loans, it's gonna be sending money, it's gonna be savings accounts. It's gonna be all things to all people." That was the vision for X.com when they merged. Elon was the CEO of the merged company, and the plan was to create X.com. He had this big, audacious, crazy vision—his forever plan about how he was just gonna change the whole financial system. And actually, the only thing that worked was going back to the basics: "Let's make something that people actually want and see if we can get it to them." It was like, "Oh yeah, eBay sellers would love a way for people to pay the money when they send them the Beanie Babies." So literally, it was "send money via email" for small amounts. That was the actual use case that people wanted and needed. It was only when they essentially booted him out and focused on that small use case, that smaller vision, did PayPal actually take off. So, you know, sometimes you almost have the reverse where you start too audaciously, and actually, you skip the step of finding that initial foothold. And that's what PayPal actually did.

Sam Parr

And here's the rub, which is very similar to what I'm experiencing and trying to think about. How do you balance... So, in order to build a company that lasts a long time, you need a few things, which I could talk about. It starts with having a brand. It starts with having a very clearly defined purpose. You also need employees who you want to work with for a long time. There are a bunch of things, but how do you balance paying the bills, taking customers, and also having this mission that might be polarizing to people? I'm trying to figure out when that transition happens. Do you always have it? That's something that I'm constantly thinking about now. I don't think it's a switch; I think you have to have it embedded in your culture early on. But where do you make sacrifices? I'm not sure. I'm not sure how to go from short-term to long-term thinking, and that's something I've been thinking a lot about lately.

Shaan Puri

So, it's hard to kind of give advice without any specifics, but I'll do it anyway. I'll be the advice guy for a second. When I was doing my very first company, it was a stupid company. We were trying to create a restaurant chain—the Chipotle of sushi. We had all these micro-decisions to make, like any business does on a day-to-day basis. Should we use this packaging or that packaging for our product? Well, this one costs more and looks better, but the other one would give us better margins because it costs less. Then there's this other one that's eco-friendly, and blah, blah, blah. One of our mentors at Duke sat us down and said, "Guys, you're having the wrong conversation." We were like, "What do you mean?" She replied, "It's not about packaging." We asked, "What do you mean?" She said, "Well, let me ask you this: What decision can you make upstream of this that would make your packaging decision obvious?" I was like, "What? We don't really get it." She said, "You've got to know what you value."

Sam Parr

right

Shaan Puri

are you about ruthless efficiency and margins because if so then the choice is obvious there's no choice right you just choose the one with the the cheap packaging with the best margins are you about are you is your number one value the quality of the customer experience because if it's the quality of the customer experience you definitely not gonna choose a cheap one but you also won't choose the eco one that's gonna kinda melt you know the old paper straws problem it's not actually the best product but it is eco friendly so if you're all about product quality that's what you're gonna gonna go all in on that's your number one value then the packaging decision is obvious same thing with the other side if you're all about sustainability if that's your number one value then the decision is obvious she's like you don't know which packaging to pick because you don't know what you stand for you don't know your values and she's like what you wanna do is figure out your values number 1 so what are the things you value more than more than other things because there and and you only know what you value when you're choosing amongst good options it's obvious to value something when you have a good option and a bad option there's no you you didn't test your values there your values only get tested when you have multiple good options but they're good in different ways and that's when you need to know which one do we value the second thing that she said was jeff bezos has this great quote where he goes they're like oh you know amazon has been around forever and you guys have just kept growing and growing and growing and you know through every innovation cycle you know the internet mobile phones whatever amazon has been cloud you know amazon's done great how do you stay on top of the curve and he goes because we don't look for trends he goes we ask ourselves the opposite question instead of saying what's gonna change we say what's not gonna change so basically he's like good we're customer obsessed that's the number one value for them and then he's like number 2 we ask what's not gonna change oh peep are people ever gonna want less selection no are they ever gonna want higher prices no are they ever gonna want slower delivery no okay cool so now we know that those are the never the never changing things so all we gotta do is how to fig figure out how to give them more selection lower prices and faster delivery that's what they care about they're never gonna not care about those things they're always gonna care and all we gotta do is just continually find a way to do that so I think that gives you a sort of long term orientation like for hampton what would you say are the never gonna change things

Sam Parr

I've gotta figure that out. Frankly, when I started, it was the same thing as Zuckerberg, which is, "I just want to be around smart people." Do you know what I mean?

Shaan Puri

Are people ever going to want to be around lower quality founders? No, they're always going to want that bar going up. They would look in their peer group and be in awe, thinking, "How did I get in this room?" I think that's going to be the first feeling you want to create: **holy shit**, all the other people in my group are awesome! I can't wait to talk to these people. That's going to be, I think, always the number one factor: the quality of the other members in their group to them.

Sam Parr

And then I think the thing I've been thinking about is they're always going to want their peers to be committed. So we've been considering, "What happens if you don't show up to a meeting?" It's like, "Well, we should just ban them. Let's ban them! You miss one meeting, you're done."

Shaan Puri

Both of those things we mentioned hurt revenue. If you want to increase revenue, widen the door. Let them all in! Now, let everybody who wants to pay the bill come in. However, you've ruined the quality of the member base. Long-term members will never want this to go in that direction. You're screwing that up for short-term profit. The same thing applies to people who don't show up. If you ban them, you also have to go ahead and remove that subscription revenue from the old Stripe account. You’re not going to want to do that either. But it will only happen if you take this long-term orientation and say, "No, no. The thing we value the most is people wanting a product where it's high quality, with members who show up and care about this community, about this group." Every decision has to be first and foremost from that point of view: Does this increase the quality of our members or decrease it? Does this increase the commitment levels or decrease it?

Sam Parr

And I also think that... so you were given the example of Facebook and Amazon, and I looked at those as examples as well. But let's go outside of the tech world. Two brands that I am looking at that have lasted a long time are **Louis Vuitton** and **The New York Times**. Louis Vuitton has lasted maybe 250 years now, and when you think of Louis Vuitton, you know what you're getting. The same goes for The New York Times. The New York Times has been around for 250 years. Not everyone likes them, but you know what they're pursuing, which is their version of the truth. But then let's go to **Raising Cane's**. Have you ever been to Raising Cane's? Of course!

Shaan Puri

I love raising canes I met the founder of raising canes once

Sam Parr

He is awesome! You guys got to... I don't know his name, but the founder of Google Raising Cane's. Watch talks with this guy; he's like a southern boy, I think from Louisiana. He started a chicken finger place, I think at LSU. If you go to Raising Cane's now, here's what you're gonna get: they only sell chicken fingers. You can basically get them deep breaded and deep fried, or not breaded and deep fried. I think they only sell fried.

Shaan Puri

or fried fried or obesity fried which one do you want

Sam Parr

Yeah, like there's only one option. You get it in a styrofoam, like a school lunchbox type of thing. They're not fancy, but you know what you're going to get every time. He's adamant; he's like, "We are going to perfect this. We're going to get this. It's going to be fried the exact same time every single time." It's not sophisticated, but you know what you're going to get. Another brand that I like is Dollar General. Have you ever been to a Dollar General?

Shaan Puri

yeah of course

Sam Parr

Dude, it's not sophisticated. It's not high-end, but you know what? They're just going to have a ton of stuff. It's going to be low quality, and it's going to be affordable. You know what you're going to get every time. So, I don't think you need this sophisticated approach. It's day one here at Amazon, and we're like, "No, you don't need that." You could have something like Fashion Nova—it's cheap apparel that you know you don't have to make a lot of money on, and you could buy it. We're always going to be on top of things. You don't need a lot of that high-end, sophisticated stuff. You can be anything, but it's just cool to see people who are adamant about what they are, and they just deliver value every time. Or at least, they're focused on the brand. So anyway, that's my spiel about that. The reason I was thinking about it was because you were talking about outsourcing stuff. I'm like, "Oh, that definitely seems cheaper." But is it cheaper for every role in the long term? Because you have to build in order to build a brand that lasts a long time. And let's be straight here, this is all about doing dope stuff. It's also about making more money. I think you can make more money if you drag out your Excel sheet and you're like, "Oh, this grows 30%, 20% every year." Yeah, drag that out for 50 years and get to see what's possible.

Shaan Puri

going on over there

Sam Parr

Right, this is also rooted in adventure, fun, excitement, and greed, so I don't want to get that twisted. But anyway, you have people who want to work for you for 10, 20 years. It gets really interesting, and I think you can actually embed different things in the culture. Do you know White Castle? You ever heard of White Castle? You know what that is, right? Dude, I *fucking* love White Castle! I went and looked at their LinkedIn; I was trying to figure out their executive team. All of them have worked there for like 30 years. I used to make fun of them. I'm like, "Oh man, these *fucking* suits!" But no, no, no, no, no. They know who their customer is. They know what they're doing. You get the same shit every time, and it works because their people have worked there for *fucking* 30 years, and they know what the company's about. So anyway, that's my rant. Rant over. But it's something I'm thinking about. I'm glad we just discussed this publicly. I'm actually going to... I was taking notes.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, yeah, good. I think that's cool. I take the exact opposite view. For the record, I do not think about building things that are going to last 50 or 100 years. I think that's really hard and unnecessary. I want to be the thing that lasts 50 or 100 years, not an individual brand necessarily. Well, you are the brand if that's the case. The way I think about it is this: it depends on how you want your career to go. Some people get really excited about building something and being a part of something, working on it for 30 years. I get more excited about taking sort of 7-year chapter arcs of my life and saying, "Cool, I want to have 5." You know, I only get one life to live. I want to experience all the things; I want to ride all the rides. So, I did a tour of duty. I lived in Australia, Indonesia, and all these other places. That was fun; that was a great adventure. I moved to Silicon Valley, in the heart of San Francisco, and I tried to do the $1,000,000,000 startup thing. Now I'm doing this basically cash-flowing business side of things and podcasting, creating content. I'm a content creator now. That's interesting; that's fun in a new way. I'll shift at some point.

Shaan Puri

You know, seven years from now, I'm not going to be a content creator anymore. Or I'm going to shift the content. I'm going to create TV shows or a stand-up comedy set or something.

Sam Parr

Yeah, but you do realize that's all rooted... I'm gonna like jujitsu your ass. You realize this is all rooted in the same issue, which is like your... it is a consistent brand and you are changing the monetization.

Shaan Puri

I might not even put my name on everything. My name is not always going to be front and center. When you're a content creator, it is, but other times it's not. For me, the more important thing is that I'm not going to bank on people recognizing my brand in order to do something. I do want to accumulate enough financial freedom and runway so that I can pursue things that don't have to make money right away. But, you know, it's all about the vision you have for yourself. That's why I was talking about Rob Dyrdek; he has this vision for his house. You have a vision for Hampton, what you're trying to create as this long-term, enduring thing. I have a vision for my life and my career that is chapters and episodic. I want to have that variety and new challenges where I have to become uncomfortable and try to get good at something new. I want to learn the "dark arts" of a different area, a whole different industry, and become a beginner again. That's something I get excited about more so than creating one thing that's going to last a long time or being a part of something for a long time.

Sam Parr

is that a phrase we're gonna start using the dark arts

Shaan Puri

I mean that's what he feel on that's patent is so yeah we I have to send royalties to him for the saying that right now

Sam Parr

where do you wanna go

Shaan Puri

Let's move on. Okay, I have two quick ideas for you. In general, I want to say this: by the way, in this pod, I think we're going to make a shift in how we create the content. Right now, every episode is this mishmash of breaking down a business, talking about frameworks, and discussing a business idea here or there. I think what we're going to start to do is segment them better or chunk them better, and theme the episodes more effectively so you know what you're going to get. We will go really hard at one thing. So, we're going to do episodes that focus intensely on just ideas and business opportunities that we see. We're going to dive deep into certain topics, like one-man businesses or businesses that have very few people but just crush it. It’s going to be a lot harder for us to do the prep for that, but I think it will make for much better episodes. We've been talking a bit about that, and I think we should put it out there that we want to start doing that. But until then, let's mishmash a little bit. I have an idea for you. So, okay, if you made a grid of customers that are easy to acquire or hard to acquire on one side, and then customers that are not that valuable and super valuable on the other axis, one box that interests me is "hard to acquire, super valuable." The reason why is that those companies can become very defensible and very valuable. Your value as a company, or even as a person, is just based on how easy you are to replace. You want to be irreplaceable. That’s how you can actually make more money in the long term.

Sam Parr

So, what's on that in that quadrant? Like, a plane manufacturer or something like that?

Shaan Puri

Something that sells to the government means you go after government contracts. It's not easy; it might be hard to do and could be boring in the long term. Government contracts can be expensive and it might take you years to secure one. However, when you do get one, it is very valuable and defensible. I was thinking about this because I invested in a drone company called Volancy a long time ago. I invested many years ago and I have no idea how they're doing now. I was a small investor, so I don't even get the updates. At the time, they were doing pretty well. I thought, "Okay, this valuation's a little bit rich for where you're at," but I asked, "Why do you think this is the right valuation?" They responded that they were about to secure a government contract worth $100,000,000 a year. One customer would now become worth more than all their customers combined.

Sam Parr

and what's the term length of that contract

Shaan Puri

I think there was a couple that they were up for. I think they were like sort of 3 to 5 year deals, something like that. So it's like, okay, these are huge deals that you can get. Once you get one government contract, you're sort of derisked. You've done all the clearance and all that stuff. You basically have to get your company to a spot where you could get a government contract. Once you have one, being able to get the next one becomes more likely because you're sort of in the trusted vendor circle. I was like, oh, that's pretty valuable. I was just thinking about one the other day. You know, with this whole COVID pandemic, somebody out there has got to be selling some kind of pandemic modeling software or detection software to every government in every country of the world. This also has a network effect. As soon as you provide this product to one government, it's actually something that all governments would then choose you for. The more governments you get, the more compelling your case becomes. So I wonder who's building something like what Palantir did for national security type stuff. Somebody's got to be doing it for biosecurity. Who is creating the pandemic monitoring, detection, modeling, and awareness program that you can then go sell to every single government on Earth as an indefinite ongoing contract? Hey, these things happen once every 100 years. We had the Spanish flu, we got COVID. Alright, I'm just going to go. I'll be your provider because, hey, they're devastating when they happen. I can be this for you for the next 100 years. I think that's a 100-year company that is probably quite defensible and quite valuable if you can do it.

Sam Parr

I'll talk to some of my friends who work at Palantir. I'm like, "Hey, what'd you guys do today?" And they're like, "Oh, just stopped a terrorist attack in France. How about you?" So I wrote a blog post, you know what I mean?

Shaan Puri

out 5 tweet tuesday today

Sam Parr

yeah where I

Shaan Puri

my 5 favorite tweets in my newsletter it's cool

Sam Parr

Have you ever looked at those network calculators? You know, the ones where you're like, "Where will I be in 50 years?" For example, if you were to start in 1884, this is where you'd be. If you started in 1995, this is where you'd be. You can see that, well, because this 50-year period or this 30-year period actually had slow growth, while this 10-year period had fast growth. You can see all the different scenarios. So if we take the average, it's this, but if this happens, then that. So you're kind of talking about that, but with potential illnesses. Who have you researched out there?

Shaan Puri

I haven't researched any of this, but I'm sure it already exists. These sorts of models, you know, because people have been worried about viral outbreaks, but obviously, they were insufficient. Whatever existed obviously didn't work because we didn't detect it. We had no plan for it, and we had no idea how fast the thing was spreading. Literally, the best pandemic model I saw was made as a side project by Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram, just for fun. He was like, "Oh, look, I can break down by state the R-naught, the viral coefficient, basically of this virus based off of this public data I'm getting about hospitals and hospitalizations." I can use that to show which states are flattening the curve versus which states are about to go exponential, and they should really consider doing something. It's like somebody's gotta be doing this. This has gotta be the easiest sales pitch of all time right now. If you're sitting at MIT or one of these places, just wear a sign that says, "I went to MIT," and then walk into a government building. Open up the fanciest MATLAB model you can find and say, "You need to pay for this," and just see what happens. I feel like you can get pretty far right now with this pitch of, "Hey, we'll help you keep track of these viruses."

Sam Parr

Do you remember about two years ago, you and I were both interested in people who are trying to detect forest fires? Do you remember that?

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah we did it we did this on the pod

Sam Parr

Right, there were probably like one or two college kids fooling around with it. But then there were, I think, two different companies that raised money. I think from Founders Fund, and actually they were ex-Palantir guys. I forget the name of the company; it's a four-letter word. It was like "Gelt" or I forget what it was. But I tried to invest in them, and they weren't having it because they were getting big and they didn't need any money. But do you know what happened to those guys? "Felt"? Maybe it was "Felt" (F-E-L-T).

Shaan Puri

I don't know the name of it; that's really hard to remember. But no, and I also don't know what came of it. I remember when the California wildfires were happening. It felt like every three months there was a new fire, and the entire state of California was covered in smoke. I remember when that was happening. To find early detection of wildfires was like a startup idea that a bunch of people got funded for.

Sam Parr

Yeah, it was really interesting. What we need to do, what I'll do not this week but next week, because we have Jack on NextBiz, I'm going to actually do research and see how these guys are doing. It's very similar to what you're talking about. But what was your... oh, and what was your other thing that you're looking at? You have this other thing, the celeb. You're going to go from selling to governments to selling to Jessica Simpson?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. It's not the same IQ. So basically, this next idea is that celebrities are having this **deep fake crisis**—a crisis and an opportunity. Deep fakes are getting really, really good. Celebrities now face both a crisis and an opportunity. The crisis is that you've seen this fake Tom Cruise; it's deep fake Tom Cruise. This guy looks just like Tom Cruise, and it's like a video. You know, this is getting really good. You're not going to be able to tell.

Sam Parr

dude did you see did

Shaan Puri

you see the do you

Sam Parr

see the ones where they put our podcast in spanish

Shaan Puri

yeah those are awesome by the way we should do that we should release our podcast in every language

Sam Parr

They were amazing. They were so good. I've been hearing about these new scams where they'll take people's voice and video. They call your parents and say, "Hey Dad, look, I'm trapped. I need some money. Can you please send it? Just don't ask questions, just send the money." It's wild. It's wild.

Shaan Puri

And so, I think there's an opportunity here. Celebrities who get paid for their name and face, you know, "Oh, I gotta go fly to Arizona and shoot this commercial for Gatorade right now, and it's gonna be three days, but I'm gonna get paid all this money, blah blah blah." That's going to change into, "Gatorade would like to use your AI clone in their commercial. You cool with that?" Yeah, you get to sit at home and collect the check. It’s like maybe it's 50% less expensive for the brand, maybe it's the same cost for the brand, I don't know. But celebrities won't have to do the work anymore. That's going to be a big deal. The more famous you get, now you're not going to have to actually do the appearance thing because you'll just send your AI stunt double to go do it. So that's an opportunity, but there's also a risk there. What if somebody's just doing it without your consent? I think somebody's going to need to create a sort of celebrity deep fake licensing company. It's a company that goes and says, "Look, we're going to create the legal entity that's going to house your name and likeness that other brands can come interact with when they want access to this." We're also going to do the detection to find out if anybody is doing the unauthorized use of your name and face somewhere, and we will handle all the takedowns for you. So it's kind of like Reputation.com but for this new deep fake thing. You basically will go, and I think you need to... it's almost like AngelList. You need to create the legal framework for how these work. You need to go sell this to every agency and say, "Hey, we've created one for you. You have one of these for all of your clients on your roster." When a brand comes to you, use this to issue the license that has the rights and controls on it, that has the digital encrypted watermark on it, that has the tracking on it. Then we will also fight anybody who is trying to use it without paying you because that's going to become an issue as well. That's what I think is going to happen. I think somebody could build that company right now.

Sam Parr

I used to get all these emails when I first started the hustle. What we would do is eventually buy a Getty's license, which is like $50 a year. But before that, I would just type in whatever picture I wanted, go to Google, and click "allow for commercial use." Then, I would use those pictures on our website. Once we got popular, we would receive all these emails from these patent trolls. Well, not patent trolls, but we were using someone else's picture. They would say, "Send us $3 and we'll go away; otherwise, we're suing you." I started looking into them, and basically, what they did was build technology to detect if someone's photo was being used. They would automatically crawl the web, use WHOIS to find out who the webmaster was, and send you this email. I wonder how those folks turned out. What's going on with some of these people who actually built those things? Were they profitable? I imagine so. There was one time I used someone's picture; it was in a thumbnail, the smallest picture. I don't even know how we used it. I think maybe someone at our company took a screenshot of it, tried to alter it, and then put it on our website in the smallest way. They totally caught it, and within a few hours, we had to send them $3,000. It's like, "Shit, they got us." I wonder what that looks like in the world of AI when you have a bunch of these fake celebrity videos, you know what I'm saying?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. So I think somebody's going to need to create the good version of that. One option is to become the troll. The other option is to become the official broker of the usage of these digital deepfakes. Alright, so that's my second one.

Sam Parr

The company, by the way, is called **Felt** (f-e-l-t.com). That was what we had talked about. Good remembering! Do you want to talk about how you flew Ben out to convince him to move with you?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think it's good actually because remote work is, you know, obviously all the rage. Remote work is great in a bunch of different ways, but I'm of the opinion that remote is great when you have things figured out. You need people who are just operational to do things. Anytime there's a lot of needs figuring out, or creativity, or just your brain trust, I think it works best in person. I told Ben the other day, I was like, "Ben, I think we're on to something with what we're doing." Business partner Ben, I was like, you know he lives in Austin right now. I said, "You gotta move out here." And he's like, "You know I live here now, wife, kid, we got family in Texas." I was like, "Yeah, I know, but we both believe the following, right? Every time we get together, magic happens. This can be pretty big. What we're doing can become pretty big." Even like if there's a 10 to 20% improvement on what we're doing, it could be worth maybe tens of millions of dollars. So it's like, you know, it could be worth it to move. And California's a great place too, so it's not like I'm saying, "Let's go to rural Ohio or something." So he was like, "Okay, why don't we do this?" He moved out here for the month, so he got an Airbnb in...

Sam Parr

the burbs or san francisco

Shaan Puri

Where I'm at, he's got an Airbnb. He brought his wife's kid and came out here. He's just been living here for the month. I also offered him, I was like, "Dude, I'll pay you [amount] if you move." We should bleep that out. He was like... and I told him, "But the number drops by 20% every quarter that you don't move." I was like, "This is not like a standing offer forever. It's a burning, it's an exploding offer." I said, "You should take your time, you should think about it, but you should also know that every quarter that you don't move, that number goes down." So, dude...

Sam Parr

he he should tell you you come you get your ass to texas

Shaan Puri

Yeah, no, he knows I'm not going anywhere. He knows I'm not going anywhere. That's not the deal. I actually lived in Texas for a long time. The other thing is, here in California, you know, in San Francisco, there is kind of like... for example, for our rolling fund, there are so many companies, so many other investors, and so many people in the startup world. You want to be like, "Proximity is power." You want to be near as many other people as you can that are doing the same sorts of things as you, to the extent that your lifestyle will allow it. So, yeah, we'll see.

Sam Parr

he told me

Shaan Puri

I think I think I got like a 10 to 20% chance

Sam Parr

well of

Shaan Puri

him coming out

Sam Parr

I was with him a week or two weeks before he went out there, and I was shocked when he told me that he thought there was maybe a 20% chance that he could be convinced. By "he," I mean the Levy entity, the household. I was shocked that it was 20%. Is it still 20%?

Shaan Puri

I don't know, I think so. But we also work a lot when he's here, so I'm sure his wife's like, "Dude, this is terrible! You work more now." Like, oh man, I don't want to do this. So that might be working against us. The other thing, though, is the way we work is kind of goofy. I don't think most people do this, but you know for coding, they have pair programming. It's not that popular, but some people do it. Pair programming is... I think what's the name of that agency that was in San Francisco? It was like a really popular dev shop. It was like it went public at one... You know, you know the name?

Sam Parr

yeah I don't remember it but yeah I know what you mean

Shaan Puri

They popularized it. At least, I don't know if they invented or popularized it, but basically, it's two programmers working on one computer. You know, right? It's like the engineering version of "Two Girls, One Cup." Basically, you sit together, there's one keyboard, and you would think, "Well, okay, you have half the efficiency; only one person is working, only one person is coding." But actually, you get more than double the efficiency because it keeps you completely focused. You and your partner are both talking things through and figuring things out on the fly. Literally, Ben and I do that when he comes out here to work. I'm like, "Alright, put your laptop down." We buddy up side by side at this desk and work on the same thing at the same time. I can't just open Twitter and start messing around over there. You say, "What? What's happening? What are you doing?" You can't just open new tabs, you know, as you're figuring something out. One of the guys is pointing something out, and you're just sort of really stacking, as I call it, like stacking focus. It's like whatever my level of focus is plus his level of focus on the same thing. So that's been good. The other thing is the in-between time. Already, when we work remotely, we call each other all the time. You know, probably on the phone for two hours a day, three hours a day, maybe on calls either with others or just ourselves. But what's happening now is we'll work on something for a bit, which is kind of like us being on a call together, working on something. Then we're like, "Alright, let's go get food." We'll just hop on our bikes, go to this taco shop, and we go to the same taco shop every day. We get the same meal every day.

Sam Parr

what do you play wolf a ball afterwards

Shaan Puri

Yeah, we hold hands and we skip home basically. But while we're doing it, it's sort of like the best ideas are coming out in all the in-between time. That's the time where normally, if we'd be like, "Okay, yep, bye," we would close Zoom, close Google Hangouts, or whatever. Then, you know, I put on a podcast and he does something else. It's the in-between time where you get the serendipitous ideas. So it's just kind of reminding me how valuable it is to work in person.

Sam Parr

So here's the issue that I've always had with you. Whenever I'm around you, both of us are high-energy people. You're the type of person that eggs people on, and then I'll egg you back on. I can see that, and I'm not even that bad at it, but you do. I'm sure there are a lot of other people, like Sully, where you guys just start egging each other on. It's like, "Wait a minute, we're totally off track here. We should just do the same thing over and over again." Does having him around just distract you further? Because I can see you guys just sitting on two love seats, throwing a football back and forth, and you're like, "Why don't we do this?"

Shaan Puri

yeah what yeah

Sam Parr

what if we did this it's like well fuck it let's just do it right now

Shaan Puri

There's definitely a part of the day, every single day, that's like that. I crumple up a piece of paper, I throw it to him, and he throws it back. We catch, talking about **bullshit**—things we could do that are not just the obvious things. But the beauty of it is, as I've gotten older and wiser, and I've been doing this podcast, two things have happened. 1. I hang around you, and you're very good at just doing the thing every day, whether it's your workout or whatever. So I'm just going to do the thing. I don't want to get distracted by everything; I just want to do the thing. 2. There was also a guy who came on the podcast a long time ago, one of the earliest episodes. He's from Peak Design; they make these camera bags. He started his company off...

Sam Parr

of his side that that was 2 years ago

Shaan Puri

Yeah, this was like one of the first 15 episodes, I think. He makes these camera bags—who knew? They do, like, I don't know, at the time, around $70,000,000 a year in revenue off of camera bags and clips for your DSLR camera. I was like, "What the hell? This is that big of a market?" He had done it off of Kickstarter and he’s kind of an inspiring guy. As I was talking to him, I asked, "So, what's your philosophy around business?" He goes, "Everybody's got these plans, they got these ideas, blah blah blah." He said, "I think life and business is just the 6 inches in front of your face." He held up his hand, 6 inches away, and said, "I just look at this and I just do the 6 inches in front of my face. It's all I'm focused on, and I just do that every day." That stuck with me. So, we have— you can't see it, but on the wall here, I wrote "6 inches in front of our face" on a giant sticky pad. These things are great, by the way. You should buy these giant sticky pad things where you sort of tear the paper. It's like a huge Post-it note that goes on your wall.

Sam Parr

Dude, at Monkey Inferno, your old office, you were like that guy. You always had whiteboards and pads. That was your thing.

Shaan Puri

I was

Sam Parr

At the whiteboard, standing up and writing. Yeah, that was you. You always said that.

Shaan Puri

Hey you guys, all your little whiteboard session real quick. So, yeah, I have it here and it says "the 6 inches in front of our face." The first thing we do every day when he comes over is we reprioritize the 6 inches in front of our face. It's like, what are the small, no-brainer steps forward that will make this like 1% better today? For the first three hours of the day, we don't do anything else besides knock those out. I think theoretically we could just do that for 8 hours a day, but I would get bored out of my mind. Also, I can kind of get 8 hours of work done in 3 hours of focus when I put my mind to it. So that's what we do first. Then, for the rest of the day, we think, "Okay, what else could leapfrog something forward beyond those 1% obvious improvements?" We knock out anything we could think of that's a 1% obvious improvement in the 6 inches in front of our face first. So that's how we've been able to stay focused.

Hubspot

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Shaan Puri

I think I

Sam Parr

I love our new CRM. Our software is the best: HubSpot. Grow better! Dude, you shared something on Twitter about... what's this football player's name? Russell?

Shaan Puri

russell okung yeah

Sam Parr

Oh my God! I'm not a sports guy at all, so I didn't even know who this person was. You shared this thing, and I was like, "Who is he? Was he good?"

Shaan Puri

Yeah, he was awesome. He was a former lineman. Linemen are like the biggest guys on the football field. So, he's probably, I don't know, 300 pounds or something like that. He's like 6'5".

Sam Parr

he's he's 6 5 £310 when he played when he played it

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and he was like a star. He won a Super Bowl ring; he was a Pro Bowler, an awesome, awesome player. I remember he was playing on the Seahawks for a while. That's kind of what I remember. He's now on Twitter. There are a couple of these athletes, like Ndamukong Suh and Russell Okung, who are kind of on Tech Twitter somehow. So, Russell's...

Sam Parr

dm them and they'll and and he's been he's been replying to my dms yeah

Shaan Puri

Like Matthew Dellavedova invited me to an event the other day. I was like, "This is so cool that they've crossed over." They've got their athlete camp, and they've also got kind of a business tech interest in there. By the way, the best thing about it is they come in so humble. They don't come in with this "Well, you know who I am" personality. This Saturday, we... I started this basketball pickup game every Saturday for founders and investors out here in the East Bay. We rent this gym, and then we all just play pickup for about three hours. Zaza Pachulia came, and he's a former player on the Warriors.

Sam Parr

oh really

Shaan Puri

I tweeted, "Oh yeah, I'll play," and I didn't invite him to the first one because I thought he was joking when he replied. Then he emailed me after the first one, and I was like, "Bro, what happened? I didn't get the invite."

Sam Parr

no way

Shaan Puri

And I was like, "No way! Shit, you actually were gonna show up?" So he came this week, and he was **fucking awesome**. Dude, like, not awesome at basketball—obviously he's awesome at basketball compared to us, but he...

Sam Parr

zaza is is it like a big russian looking guy or I don't know where he's from yeah

Shaan Puri

he's where

Sam Parr

is he from

Shaan Puri

I don't know

Sam Parr

serbia or

Shaan Puri

I think he's from I think he's from serbia I'm not a 100% he's he's

Sam Parr

from georgia georgian

Shaan Puri

He's, yeah, he's like 7 feet tall and he's just a beast. Now, he works for the Warriors. He does their business side; they operate basketball operations and investing for them. He's a super personable, super funny guy. He was totally humble and, you know...

Sam Parr

obviously play

Shaan Puri

Yeah, he played with us for 3 hours. It was amazing! I was talking so much trash to him, and he was just such a good sport about it. I have to say, I've been so impressed with the way that athletes I've seen crossover into business and tech. They do it with so much finesse. It's really impressive.

Sam Parr

Wait, what did you learn about...? I love seeing pro athletes in real life. It's great to see them joke around or watch behind-the-scenes Instagram videos where they're like, "Hey, watch this! I bet you I can jump over this thing." Then they jump over this huge obstacle, and you're like, "Oh my God, these people... we're not the same type of person." Was there any athletic attribute that he had, or was he just totally chilling?

Shaan Puri

Well, yeah, for sure. I mean, if you see Zaza play in the NBA, Zaza was basically like a screen center. His number one skill was that he could set a huge pick to get Steph Curry a shot. But when he played against us, right? He's Steph Curry, he's just draining shots from all over the court. You never saw him take these shots in the NBA, and he's just...

Sam Parr

he made all of them

Shaan Puri

Fast break, pulled up from the three-point line, and he has... I was like, "When's the last time you played?" He's like, "2019." He's talking, but he's doing these hip flexor openers, and I'm like, "Oh yeah." He's just... he's actually an athlete who's had to get his body ready many, many, many times over. So you see a bunch of the dudes who come in, and it's like, "Oh, here's this VC" or "here's this tech founder," and we're like, "I don't know, I guess I should try to touch my toes. Is that what I do to warm up?" We don't know! We don't even know what to do to warm up. Whereas he's like doing these hip openers. The second thing is, when he played, obviously his game is a lot better than you see on TV because, you know, when the competition is... you gotta be a star in your role in the NBA. He was a star in his role as this paint protector and screen setter. He could do a lot of other things that he never got to show. The other thing is, he was like a bear, so he was mostly, you know, just playing.

Shaan Puri

Guards passing the ball mostly like getting... you know, obviously he could post any of us up. He's got a foot on all of us, you know, in terms of height. So he wasn't just abusing that. But we beat him the first game, and then they won like six straight. Yeah, we won the first game. They were just like, you know, whatever. We got off to a quick start, but then they went on a 6-0 run or something like that, just crushing everybody. When we came back out to try to beat them, it was a very competitive game. It's like we poked the bear. All of a sudden, he started driving to the hoop and playing aggressively. It's like, "Oh yeah, don't forget the bear can kill you." The bear might be nice right now, but the bear will let you know that, like, "I could kill you if I wanted to."

Sam Parr

Just choose which style he was going to use. Yeah, he's like, "Let's just put it to a 6." Now we were at a 3, so let's just put it at a 6 just for a few minutes. Alright, we'll go back.

Shaan Puri

to the 3 twisted the this has been a 3 up till now I'm just gonna show you that then I'll go back down

Sam Parr

wow that's awesome

Shaan Puri

that

Sam Parr

I love seeing those types of people, like just in normal settings. So, talk about Russell. What Russell's doing... I saw him, you shared it. He has his website, and here's why it's interesting: 1. He's doing a 40-day water fast. That alone is interesting, but what's even more interesting is he's doing it in a very... I wouldn't have expected this from a 6-foot-5, 300-pound football player. He's so introspective. If you go to his website, do you know the name of his website actually?

Shaan Puri

no I don't have it in front of me if you

Sam Parr

Just Google his name and then go to his Twitter. You can click off to the link. He's got this website, and it's built on Ghost, which is a pretty "in the know" nerdy web platform.

Shaan Puri

Oh, I think it's **okungfast.com**. That's at least where I think he's hosting it.

Sam Parr

If you just Google it, you'll see it. It's like a yellow website, and he has email pop-ups. Everything is set up really, actually, like exactly how it should be. Yeah, like the email pop-up is thoughtful, and then you go to a confirmation page that's thoughtful. He's blogging every single day and posting the same picture every day. As of now, I think he started this thing at 260. I have the notes here.

Shaan Puri

We buried the lead. So, he's gone on a **40-day water-only fast**. He's lost **£100** so far doing it. Obviously, it's not just about the weight loss; it's about the mental challenge and the mental clarity that he's gaining as he goes through this very intense fast. I think he's on **day 21**.

Sam Parr

Well, he talks about how it's a spiritual thing. He is just so much more thoughtful than I ever would have pegged this guy, just because I'm stereotyping like an NFL player. His writing is very good and very clear. There’s a lesson that he’s learning each day, and he talks about that. Everything is well written. It's just wonderful. It's really, really cool to see this guy do this thing.

Shaan Puri

The fourth day was the hardest. He said this is where the body is transitioning into a new state. He experienced headaches and fatigue as his body was transitioning to using fat as the energy source rather than relying on the input of new carbohydrates or whatever.

Sam Parr

And he looks good. You could see, even when he started, if you look at day one, he still looked pretty lean. Now, you look at him at day one, and he's starting to get skinnier and skinnier. His writing is starting to change; it's very fascinating. He's been tweeting about it every day as he goes. I need to blog about it. I think it's awesome. I love seeing this.

Shaan Puri

right yeah and he's also like

Sam Parr

he's on day 21 he's on day 21

Shaan Puri

He's also like a Bitcoin max. He's an interesting guy. By the way, there's a guy I met named Byron Jones who retired this year. He was one of the best quarterbacks in the league, and he retired at 30. So, he came into the league probably at 21 or 22, and he retired at 30, which is an early retirement. He got paid very well; he probably made like, I don't know, $80,000,000 playing in the NFL. But he had said something when he retired, which is that "I can't run or jump anymore." This is shocking because he was one of the most athletic guys in the NFL at the time when he was playing. I went to a dinner...

Sam Parr

he had a 44 inch vert wow forty 4 inch vert

Shaan Puri

and now

Sam Parr

he's a hit broad jump

Shaan Puri

Freak! My buddy Romine hosts this event called "Game Time" every year in LA. It's basically a mix of investors and athletes that get together. I've gone the last couple of years, and he hosts this dinner. At the dinner, there were a few NFL players at the table, and they all mentioned something like "torbitol"—not torbitol, not the steroid. It's like some shot that NFL players get. Basically, it's a pain tolerance shot, a pain reduction shot, a pain killer. They were just like, "Dude, that shot is like magic, and it's a curse." They're like...

Sam Parr

because it doesn't make you feel better right it just makes you not feel pain for yourself

Shaan Puri

you feel better

Sam Parr

but sorry it doesn't cure an injury it's

Shaan Puri

Doesn't cure the underlying issues. It's like, he's like, we would go from, you know, Sunday you play, Monday you feel bad, Tuesday you feel like, "Man, I was in a car accident." And your body feels like it's in a car accident. You're like, "There's no way I'm gonna be able to practice on Thursday and play next Sunday." That's just where my body's at on Tuesday versus Sunday. Seems crazy. And they said that, like, the culture in the NFL is like, you gotta play, obviously. So a lot of guys get in the habit of taking this one shot... something I forgot what it's called. They take the shot and it's like a miracle, dude. Within an hour, you're running again. You're going from limping to just back to you. But also, every time you do it, it's like taking... you know, it shortens your career because it's just so bad for your body. What you're actually doing to your body when you do that... it's not like the underlying tissues have healed in the process. It's kind of a crazy thing. So I think one cool thing about what Russell's doing is he's basically trying to rewind the clock. When you're in alignment, they tell you to beef up. What he's doing is a sort of rapid and drastic change in his physiology in order to get his weight down so that he can live a, you know, longer, healthier life as he goes.

Sam Parr

Yeah, he said, "I went through a pulmonary embolism." I don't know what that is. Is that a hard thing? I had lacerated lungs. No idea how you get lacerated lungs, but that's wild. A series of surgeries, ligament damage... getting up every day was just really hard. I thought magically when I finished playing it would get easier, but it got harder and harder. I had completely depleted my testosterone. So he basically just explains, "I was left in shambles." And so that's, I guess, one of the reasons why he's done this. I think it's really, really, really cool, but I don't think I'm going to do it.

Shaan Puri

shout out to him

Sam Parr

I likes I like seeing him do it what else you got

Shaan Puri

I like this question. I got a tweet from a guy, and I want to get your take on it. His name's Christian Von Uefel—great name! So, Christian says, "Question for you, Sean: What work seems like small boy stuff but actually packs a punch?" We have this phrase we say on the pod all the time: "No small boy stuff." We don't even spend a ton of time defining it because, honestly, small boy stuff is kind of obvious. But I would say the general buckets of small boy stuff would be, you know, overly worrying about things. Small boy stuff would be thinking small rather than thinking big, thinking short term rather than thinking long term, and caring too much about what other people think of you. There are a whole bunch of things that you could classify as small boy stuff, like complaining when things get hard or when things don't go your way. Complaining in general, waiting in general—these are all small boy moves. I thought his question was great because the magic is in things that other people think are small but actually pack a punch. I had an answer, but I'm curious what your answer would be. Do you want me to go first, or do you want to go first?

Sam Parr

I'll give you a very quick example. We had our... I keep talking about the off-site. My CEO of the company put all this effort into creating little individual awards for people, writing appreciation notes, and being very thoughtful in the itinerary. I was like, "Dude, just like, who gives a shit? Let's just get in a room and hang out." He put all this work into it, spent hours and hours and hours. 100% worth it. I was giving him a hard time, and then afterwards I go, "Nope, you are right. I was wrong." That is an example of things that seem below your pay grade that you proved were worth it.

Shaan Puri

love it I would actually also give you credit because that would be one of my answers which is admitting when you're wrong openly and quickly I remember hearing a story about the one of the guys at sequoia who's awesome like helped build sequoia into like most successful vc brand or one of the most in in a long time somebody asked like what makes him great they go all he cares about is getting it right he'll be in a meeting with you he'll say his opinion and somebody else will say their opinion and you know most people either start to debate or like what kind of like it's like we're talking past each other it's like I'm talking about one thing you're talking about another and I'm the boss so I'm gonna get my way and he's like he's the first guy and he has this phrase he always says well here we go okay nope I like your way better let's go with that like nope that's better like let's go with that is a a awesome small but big thing you could do as a leader in in any company it sets the culture that it's not about who's right it's about getting it right getting to right you know over time here's what I wrote as as some of my answers I said small things that seem like small boy stuff is actually big doing customer service yourself early on so being on the front lines answering customer service emails questions feedback picking up the phone all that stuff manually onboarding your first 10 or a 100 users so literally yourself sitting there with them you know going to sit side by side with them having them install your product or onboard onto your product and and answering their questions seems like an unscalable small boy way of you spending your time actually no it's a huge huge thing and it'll teach you a lot about your product and your market sending follow ups follow ups following up with somebody who didn't answer you always feels like you know like a little low status bitch move but it packs a big punch follow ups are where all the magic is and I think there's also a big piece of follow ups which is a lot of people don't follow-up because they don't hear back and they assume they say they're saying no they don't like me they hate they hate this idea I don't

Sam Parr

wanna look stupid

Shaan Puri

Place, they get in their head about it. They start assuming the worst instead of assuming the obvious. People are busy, and they forget that people are busy and didn't get around to it yet. When you follow up with that mindset, that's the sort of "no small boy" mindset. It was like, "I'm offering something of value to this person. Of course, they would want it. Maybe they haven't yet seen the value in it, maybe I didn't convey it properly, or they just haven't gotten around to it. They're busy, and that's okay. I'm still here." The other point I wrote was about finding things that recur daily and making them 2% better. Daily things that you do, things you do with high frequency, compound. If you made them slightly better, this is where I think a lot of people are like, "Why are you optimizing for your shoes, or your mattress, or your pillow, or whatever? Why do you care so much about how you're...?" You know, I'm a stickler for how a meeting starts. I'm always like, "No, no, no. At the start of every meeting, we say, 'Alright, the purpose of this meeting is this, and a good outcome of this meeting would be...'" You know, if you can't say X and Y, then we're not doing the meeting. I'll stop people and I'll say, "No, no, do this." Or when people talk, I'll be like, "Hey, you know, you're talking in a really low voice and you're not sitting up straight. Can you just say it with some energy? It'll make a difference." But that's every meeting. Then people know that's how we do meetings. Once you teach about how we do meetings, we're going to have a lot of meetings at this company, so we're going to make them better. We're not just going to have crappy meetings and let them slide. So, finding recurring things and making them slightly better because it'll compound over time. So that was my... What was your partner's?

Sam Parr

Name at Monkeenferno... Firkon, Firkon, Firkon. I think... I don't know him well, but I could only hang out with him for 30 seconds and I could just tell he's the man at seeing... not redundancies, but seeing things that you do over and over and over again. And he'd be like, "Yeah, we're gonna get rid of that and we're gonna fix it by doing this, this, and this." It seems like you're thinking, "Dude, you're just slowing us down. What are you doing?" He's like, "No, no, no. You gotta go fast to go slow," or "You gotta go slow to go fast." He seems like that type of personality. Did he do that all the time?

Shaan Puri

He was definitely exhibiting what you might call "hacker's laziness," which was like, "I'm not going to do something unless it's clear that it matters." He wasn't just going to do things for the sake of doing them. The first thing is that he wasn't going to do the same thing every day. If he had to do something multiple times, he would automate it. The same thing applied when he would look around and say, "Yeah, what's Sean doing? What's Jason doing?" He would observe the non-technical people and then say, "Hey Neil, do you see Jason? He keeps going and finding each person manually on Twitter. You should just scrape this whole list and put it..."

Sam Parr

in a

Shaan Puri

database and and copy paste this code snippet so that he could put that on his machine so that he could just have his leads ready so he can go faster he would do a lot of stuff like that like he told a story early at applovin so applovin was a a mobile ad tech company that is now worth 1,000,000,000 of dollars and he was the cofounder of it and what furkan told me a story he's like yeah adam the ceo he's like one thing he really cared about was his dashboard like what does our dashboard look like so that I have visibility and he's like I was like I kinda watched adam to see like is there really any value out of this or is he just you know sometimes ceos just have pet projects they just want to look nice and he's like is it that or is there value here so he shadowed him he's like alright I'm not gonna sit at my computer I'm sitting at your computer you show me what are you looking at with this dashboard what do you do with it and so he showed him and he's like yeah I do I look at this I look at this and that tells me who we need to go after for these deals and I need to figure out how much to offer them so that I can get them faster like you know instead of just saying you should work with us for these features if I just make a monetary offer that's better than their current ad network they'll switch and he's like okay so you need to figure out this list you need this data and then you need to know a projection of how much we can make with them so you can offer less than that but still more than what they're probably making for their current ad network and I should just show you which what their current ad network is in this dashboard I'll just figure that out by looking at their sdk blah blah blah and he look he basically put together this like command center for the ceo and he's like he basically built a sales tool rather than working on features of the product he's like I'm gonna build you something and what so what they did was they would go to a developer they say you should use our ad network and they're like I already have an ad network he said cool I'm guessing your ad network pays you $9 cpm and they're like yeah something like that he said cool we'll pay you $22 he said how can you do that don't worry our ad network is better I could sit here to convince you our ad network is better but I'll just sign this paper that says says we're already gonna pay you $20 no matter what like I'm just confident it's gonna perform because I know our ad network's better and they're like okay he's like but here's the you know you gotta switch and we have these 2 engineers standing here next to me they're gonna help you switch today and then they would just and they just rolled through the ad market because they were able to go to people and make them no brainer offers how did they make them no brainer offers they because they had this command center internally that was how big is this app what are they currently using how much are they currently making how much do we think we can make of of them and then how do we have a a spread there that we can work with and so I thought that that was a great example of figuring out how to make the company successful in a way that most engineers would not do because most engineers just wanna work on product and not even product like the under the hood parts of the product which is like even worse than making the product better

Sam Parr

dude this is the most wholesome episode we've done in like 2 months

Shaan Puri

because we weren't talking about like ceos fighting each other and shit

Sam Parr

No one's making fun of anyone. We're totally aligned. There's lots of take-home value here. This is like the most wholesome thing we've done in a long time. I actually feel like I'm learning. This episode is good because I'm sitting here with a notebook, taking notes. I'm learning.

Shaan Puri

that's a good scene learning yeah love that

Sam Parr

well that's it that's the episode good pod