The BEST Private Search Engine For Online Privacy & Security (DuckDuckGo 2020) | My First Million

Sam Parr

They average 62,000,000 queries per day. I have no idea. I mean, what do you think Google's queries per day are? Probably like 5,000,000. Okay, let's start with DuckDuckGo. I was on the James Altucher podcast. James was here with us a few weeks ago. James is like a dorky, nerdy guy. I say this with love; I like him a lot. He's a nerdy guy, libertarian guy, with a libertarian audience. I can't decide if this whole privacy stuff that we're talking about... So, hey.com, an email service, launched a few days ago, a week ago? Yeah, its premise is like, one of its many promises is it's on privacy. Okay, right. I'm really into this privacy thing. The founder of Pandora told me that he is seeing his customers, who are middle America people, actually care about privacy. When I was on my trip, I saw DuckDuckGo billboards everywhere. For those who don't know, DuckDuckGo is a Google competitor. It's a search engine, and it's all based on the fact that they don't track you, which like... [expletive] ruins the business model. I have no idea how they make money, but...

Shaan Puri

No, no, no, it doesn't. So their thing was like, it's not no ads. They still do search ads, but they're like, "Look, when you search for... you said you're going to buy a new car. When you go search for, you know, Mercedes versus BMW or whatever you're going to search for, they'll serve you an ad." They just don't need to know that you're Sampar, that you live in this place, that you have a wife. They don't need the personal data for the ads to still be effective because search is high intent. They know what you're looking for, so they can serve you a relevant ad. Their insight was that the slight drop-off you get by not personalizing is not so bad if that can become your value proposition. That, "Hey, we're not using personal information to serve these ads."

Sam Parr

Okay, so I just sent you their traffic. Yep, so go to **duckduckgo.com/traffic**. So here's my question to you, first of all.

Shaan Puri

We're looking at a hockey stick. We're looking at phenomenal growth in 2010. This is queries per day, or this is...

Sam Parr

Yeah, so they average **62,000,000** queries per day. I have no idea. I mean, what do you think Google's queries per day are? Probably like **5,000,000,000**.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, insane. Listen, I mean operator, see if you can find Google's today so we can put this. So, $3,500,000,000 per day.

Sam Parr

off okay

Shaan Puri

okay yes

Sam Parr

So go ahead, Google or DuckDuckGo, at 50, 50, 60,000,000 a day. So they're... I don't even know, what's that like, 3% the size? Anyway, DuckDuckGo, what do you think about that? I personally love this. What I want to know from you is: do you like DuckDuckGo? And do you also think this privacy thing—like building products where the main feature or value is privacy—do you think that's going to be a hit?

Shaan Puri

I think it's a hit. I used to think the opposite. I was in the camp that believed, "Look, people don't give a shit." If you just say, "Yeah, sure, in theory, people want privacy," but when it comes down to products, they're like, "Oh, this is a free good thing, and I have to give up all my data? Alright, here you go." So, I used to think that people, in practice, were willing to easily trade privacy. I think that's still true on the whole. But if you ask, "Where is the pendulum swinging?" I think the pendulum is swinging more towards people caring about privacy. These things stack up, right? The more paranoid you get, the less trust you have in the system and in the big companies. You don't have to know which one is the straw that breaks the camel's back. Maybe it's the fake news stuff on Facebook, or maybe it's when your information gets breached for the 35th time, and you get an email saying, "Hey, sorry, your personal info might have been leaked." You don't know where it is, but these things just keep happening.

Shaan Puri

Where I believe people care more than they did before, and they'll continue to care more. That's number one. Number two, you have to do it on a global product—like a product everybody uses—because it's still a niche audience. So, right, like you said, Google is about 50 times the search query size than DuckDuckGo. So, it's like 50 to 1. You need a product that's used by pretty much everybody for those numbers to add up and be a big enough market for you. So, I wouldn't do it on some niche product. It's like, "Oh, you know, some niche mailing, you know, Mailchimp software thing? Cool, I'm gonna make a privacy-focused version." It's like, no, that's a niche of a niche. Well, but if you take a niche of a midstream, it works.

Sam Parr

like hey.com I call it hey.com because I don't even

Shaan Puri

email's global right emails everybody uses

Sam Parr

It is global, but you don't need that many users to build a $1,000,000,000 company.

Shaan Puri

Totally! What I'm saying is that you're only going to get about 2% of the value needed to make a change. You know, like Superhuman did the same thing. Email is such a huge market. They thought, "Cool! We'll go get the 1% or 2% who are willing to pay $30 a month for email instead of using free email."

Sam Parr

and so I

Shaan Puri

think that's the same thing happening here

Sam Parr

Abreu, how old are you? 27? You're a little old for this question, the Zoomers.

Shaan Puri

5 years ago

Sam Parr

No, it's a generational thing. I want to know, do the 22-year-olds give a shit about this? Because the way that the Zoomers, the way that they live and think is...

Shaan Puri

really give a shit about getting coronavirus so what what are we

Sam Parr

talking about the privacy of their data

Shaan Puri

they don't care about their body

Sam Parr

They're a pretty conscientious group of people, I think. I don't know; I would want to know how they think. But that was my question. Okay, so here's another opportunity for privacy that I'm interested in. Do you know that when you go to Safeway... So, in California, we have Safeway. In the South, you've got Kroger, and in the other South, you've got Publix. What else is there?

Shaan Puri

albertsons

Sam Parr

Albertsons. Okay, so when you go to your grocery store, like your major grocery store, you enter your phone number to get a discount, right? What they do with that is they understand your buying behavior. They'll show you, they'll send you stuff in the mail, or they will just learn about inventory, whatever. And this is incredibly effective. So effective that there's a famous story about a woman—a 16-year-old girl—getting mailed stuff to her dad's home, saying like "baby supplies." The dad was like, "Hey, my daughter's 16, she's not pregnant! What are you talking about?" Turns out she was pregnant, and they knew it because of her shopping habits at Target.

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

Yeah, month... you know what to buy. Anyway, when you go and buy that ship, did you know that you can submit a request and they'll send you all of your...

Shaan Puri

a do not track request

Sam Parr

well they you could do a do not track and they can send you everything you've ever bought

Shaan Puri

oh that's pretty cool okay I like that

Sam Parr

so what what would you do with that data

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think that's just an interesting thing you could do in general, like a Mint.com style. I think you could say, "Hey, what's your phone number?" Then you go request it on behalf of the customer and you give them cool visualizations about their spending patterns over time and other products they might like. But I don't... what do you think I would do with that data if I was the company, or if I was myself? What do you think of it?

Sam Parr

if you're trying to build a business

Shaan Puri

I would go figure out other areas where this sort of linking and tracking will work. A lot of people have already done this, right? Like the ad market, it's kind of like porn where porn innovates first. A close second or third might be the ad market.

Sam Parr

so you

Shaan Puri

know furkan who was

Sam Parr

kind of

Shaan Puri

My co-founder, or CTO, of a previous company, his previous company was an ad tech company. One of the versions of their app that they made was called AppLovin. Initially, the premise was: "What apps are your friends loving? We will recommend those apps to you." It was like, if I know what apps you have and I know that you're my friend because you're in my address book, then it can tell me that Sam Parr loves this app.

Sam Parr

I thought it was a play on mclovin

Shaan Puri

No, it was... I don't know, maybe that was a side benefit because everybody loves *Superbad*. But then all kinds of little edge cases started messing them up. They would tell me that they love Grindr or whatever, right? So first, it's like not everybody's app behavior. They want to be transparent to their friends or their contacts. I think there was one really horrible case where they switched to trying to do this for app installs. They were like, "Okay, if I'm playing a game and it's awesome..." or sorry, forget about it, it's awesome. I'm playing a game, and they want you to download that game because they get paid $9 if you download it. They would show my face from your address book as, "Hey, Sean's playing Candy Crush right now. Tap here to play Candy Crush too." That was like a super effective ad unit; they were printing money. But then something really bad happened. The CEO of Expedia or something like that got an ad that showed his deceased wife was playing this game or something like that. Someone from his address book who had this app was shown to him, and he was like, "What the hell is this?" So it got back to them, and they had to turn it off. They did a similar experiment around location tracking, like a Life 360 thing. You gotta be really careful with these data... oh, let's use data to give you information about either yourself or others. You can get into situations like the dad who finds out a 16-year-old is pregnant.

Sam Parr

yeah I long story short privacy

Shaan Puri

the privacy I I have a privacy idea for you

Sam Parr

I love

Shaan Puri

a privacy idea for you so I just got

Sam Parr

I've become more libertarian as I've gotten older. I have this "fuck the government" mentality now.

Shaan Puri

Well, there are two things that are happening. There are people who become libertarians, which is like "F the government" and "F the man" in general. Then, there are people who are becoming more nationalistic, which is like "it's us versus them." This "us versus them" mentality means keeping them out and raising us up. In both cases, you see a sort of retreat. It's not like a physical shelter-in-place, but it's a psychological and behavioral shelter-in-place. You reduce your openness and your spread, you know, in your behaviors, in your data, and in other ways. I think, in general, when times get a little crazy, people have a flight to safety. I see this with investing and with the way people act and behave. More people tend to do this when times get turbulent. Now, I had a privacy-focused idea the other day. I moved into this new house and needed to get the internet set up. Oh, shit! I had to play the Comcast game. Comcast comes over, and of course, the Wi-Fi doesn't really work great in my house. So, I thought, "Okay, I need to invest in good Wi-Fi." Not having good Wi-Fi is like not having water to drink. I'm looking for these Eero mesh networks that you can use in your house.

Sam Parr

I just bought 1

Shaan Puri

to give you more coverage so I just bought eero but I was talking to furkan and I was like I

Sam Parr

think eero sucks

Shaan Puri

Well, I hope it doesn't suck because I just bought it. The idea I was thinking about was, you know how when you... what typically happens is you have your Wi-Fi router, and then on your laptop, you'll have a VPN. A lot of people have VPNs; they are becoming more and more popular. Some people have it for work, while others use it to hide their traffic as they go bootleg movies on the internet, and they don't want it to be traced back to them. VPNs are kind of complicated to set up. You have to download one, and you don't know if it's malware. The average person doesn't even know what the hell a VPN is. So, I was asking...

Sam Parr

I've I've done a ton of research on this market

Shaan Puri

Well, the idea was actually, "Why don't you build a VPN into the router?" That way, you never need to download anything. It's just VPN by default, and it's built into the hardware itself. So, the value proposition of the router is that this is secure internet.

Sam Parr

oh that's

Shaan Puri

Fantastic! So, Furkon, of course, was like, "You know, there are people doing this." I can't say I'm the first to have this idea, but he was telling me about a couple of companies to check out if you're interested in this. NextDNS is one of them, and Ubiquiti is another one. He was showing me a few of these that today are still kind of like... you kind of need to be a developer to know about these or, like, know how to configure them to set them up. I think if somebody takes the Eero level of simplicity and design, but they make the value proposition, "Hey, your internet search traffic, whatever you're doing on the internet, is private if you buy this box instead of that box," I think people can get behind that.

Sam Parr

The hard thing about these companies... So first of all, VPN businesses. I wrote about them because I think that they're going to explode, and they already are exploding. But a lot of them are based in Panama because of the privacy laws there. Many of them are notoriously scammy and weird. They're also ridiculously profitable. I talked to one guy who had a VPN that made $200,000,000 a year in revenue and like $100,000,000 in profit. It's just stupid. But do you remember Eero? You know, Eero got bought by Google, I think.

Shaan Puri

amazon I think

Sam Parr

Amazon got acquired for nothing. These companies are so hard to make money because it costs so much money.

Shaan Puri

Right, yeah, I think hardware is hard. Everybody knows that. Like, the Ring doorbell, you know, it gets a $1,000,000,000 outcome, but I don't think it was ultra profitable at the time. I think it was strategic; that's the reason it got bought. The reason I think Wi-Fi routers are interesting is because Wi-Fi is like email. It's like Google search. It's a thing that everybody has. Every physical place has a router. So, the 2% of that market that cares about privacy, I think, is still a big market. I don't believe that it's so hard to make money. Again, with this Comcast box that I have here, I have to pay these guys $14 a month just for this router to sit here. There's no way this router's worth more than like $50, but they're going to make money on me. They'll break even in 5 months, and they know I'm never going to get rid of my router. So, yeah, I think there's something interesting there.

Sam Parr

yeah also fuck those guys yeah