Belsky's Pinterest Windfall
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A story about how Scott Belsky discovered and invested in Pinterest and Uber through analyzing his website traffic.
"Scott Belsky told me that when he was in his early twenties, he had a website and noticed he was getting traffic from this brand new website called Pinterest. He reached out to the founder of Pinterest and asked 'What's this thing? Tell me all about it.' He wasn't getting a lot of traffic, like 100 people a day - pretty small.
The founder said 'Yeah, it's just this thing I'm working on. I'm gonna raise a little bit of money at a $3 million valuation, do you want to invest?' Scott only had like $50 in his name but decided to give $15,000 and that went on to make probably $100 million.
That same week, he started getting traffic from StumbleUpon. He did the same thing - talked to the guy. StumbleUpon wasn't raising money, but he became friends with Garrett Camp who went on a couple years later to found Uber. Scott invested $15,000 in Uber as well and made something like $100 million because both times he was getting traffic from these brand new websites that he thought were interesting."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.