Michael Pryor's Triple Exit
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Sam Parr shares a story about meeting Michael Pryor, a successful but low-key entrepreneur who built multiple billion-dollar companies.
"I met this guy Michael through Hampton. He invited me fishing at his house 30 minutes outside New York City. He has this massive beautiful home built on a peninsula with a boat right on his front porch.
He started Fog Creek Software in 2000 as an agency doing development work. They spun off multiple products - first was Fogbugz, a bug tracking software that did about 8 figures in revenue. Then they spun off Trello, which they sold to Atlassian for $450 million. They also created Stack Overflow, which sold for $1.8 billion to a European publishing company.
What struck me was how zen and low-key he was about everything. He was the CFO of Stack Overflow but had no formal training - he was originally a programmer who just learned how to do payroll and taxes as needed. When I asked if he was intense about work, he said 'No, I'm not intense at all. We were smart and worked pretty hard but I wouldn't describe what we did as hardcore. We just rolled with the punches.'
Now he spends his days fishing and barely opens his laptop anymore. He's super under the radar but as successful as anyone we've talked about on this podcast - just without the big mouth about it."
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.