Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Shaan Puri: All right, it’s a new year, but it’s the same old us. And we wanted to do something for you guys. We wanted to do a mailbag of fan questions. People have written in questions and we are going to answer them. You ready to jump in, Sam?
Sam Parr: Yeah.
[00:00:00] Mailbag: Biggest Business Mistakes and Hiring Lessons
Shaan Puri: All right. Here we go. Question number one: What is the biggest mistake you’ve made in your business that you have not spoken about publicly yet? And how has it shaped your decision making? Man, I’ve got a great one for this. Tell me if your experience has been with this. I tend to hire ambitious young people and I take chances on them. I hate to say it, but the majority of the time that is a horrible plan. It’s significantly better to hire more experienced people and pay them a lot more money; I get way better results.
Sam Parr: When was this mistake? Is this something you’ve been making forever?
Shaan Puri: Man, look, this is my mistake. It’s the American dream: give me your broken, your weak, and your ambitious young.
Sam Parr: I can fix him.
Shaan Puri: Yes. I always want to do that because I’m into the romantic idea of that. Recently, at Hampton, we’ve hired significantly more experienced people. They cost two or three times more than a young and upcoming person, but the results are five or 10 times better. I get so emotional and I always find people say hire high agency people or hire these people whose growth rate is really high, but in general, it’s just better to say, “Hey, you already did this at this other company. Do it here, please.”
Sam Parr: We were just going through a hiring process. I wanted to hire somebody on my content team and we found this kid who was great. He sent in this wonderful video application that was super funny and well done. I was like, “Yes, this is my kind of guy. Young, green.” He just graduated, but this video is amazing. I talked to him, I like him, he’s a good dude.
Right before we hired him, we asked a very simple question: “We want this to go well, we want this to be great, and we want this to work. Does it make sense to just go with somebody who has never done anything even remotely like this, or are there people in the world who have done very similar things that we could go talk to first? Should we not lean in that direction?”
As soon as we had that simple sanity check—because I’m like you, I fall in love with the angel investing in people idea—it’s the raw up-and-comer who has never done anything, the diamond in the rough. Why do I like that? It’s not for generous reasons; it’s because I feel cool that I found that thing. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack. But I have such a low hit rate with that. By definition, you’re going to have a low hit rate with that strategy. If it matters and if there are people who have done it before that are way more proven in this category, why are you not going in that direction? I’ve definitely had that same mistake. It can work, and when it does work, it’s the best story.
Shaan Puri: But check this out. This strategy that I’ve been doing has been working well. I love hiring consultants and agencies, but I’ll say, “I’m only going to hire you for two months. You’re going to do the work for the first 30 days, but then the second 30 days, it’s just you teaching me what to do.” I have found experience getting a young, ambitious, high agency, green person and teaming them up with an agency, and I have had some results with that. But in general, just hiring more experienced people and paying them more money is typically the way to go. That sounds so “duh,” but that’s the biggest mistake that I’ve made.
Sam Parr: Most of business is just figuring out what are your own leaks in your bucket. Of course, to other people who don’t have that leak, they’re like, “Well, obviously.” But you have to know what your biases are. In your case, your biases are: “I like to be cheap as hell when I build my companies.” This was how you were before with The Hustle, at least. It’s get the cheap office, get the free desk off Craigslist, our dog will be security. You’re like, “I’m going to build this the frugal way.” And then secondly, “What if I found a guy like me, just a lovable idiot who could be fixed?” Those are biases that would lead you too far in that direction. It’s not to say you never hire a junior person, but too often defaulting to that is the issue. You have to know your own biases.
Shaan Puri: What about yours? Do you have one?
Sam Parr: I wrote “project selection.” My theory is this: if you are hardworking and you are sufficiently talented, then the only variable that matters is what project you pick to work on. If you’re going to work really hard on it and you’re talented, then either you’re going to be a 10 out of 10 person working on a two out of 10 opportunity or a 10 out of 10 person working on a 10 out of 10 opportunity. I think I have picked some real dog-shit projects in the past.
I tried to start a sushi restaurant chain. Restaurants are one of the worst businesses, and sushi would be one of the worst types of restaurants to do. By the way, that makes no sense for me as a person to do. The second one: I tried to make the next hit social media app. I tried to make the next Twitter, the next Facebook, the next Snapchat, and I spent six years going after that as a project to select. God, that is hard to do.
Shaan Puri: You tried to make a hit social media app, which frankly, you don’t really use social media. You used Twitter, but seldomly to be honest, even though you’re good at it. And two, you eventually made a streaming video game—or that’s who your market was. Neither of us know or play video games or like streaming.
Sam Parr: Or had ever streamed a video game in my life, dude. I made a craft beer app for craft beer enthusiasts. Dude, I can’t spell beer. Beer is gross. It makes me burp. I don’t like it. I just picked all these terrible projects that were bad founder fit and just weak market opportunities in general. These were very poor projects. I started my e-commerce brand as a clothing brand. You’ve seen me dress.
Shaan Puri: Clothing. You love clothes.
Sam Parr: You’ve seen me dress. You know what I’m doing? That one worked, but it’s such a grind because e-com and fashion and apparel and inventory is one of the worst projects you can select. Just those projects I mentioned—and those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head—those are 10 years of my professional life. I’ve only had 17. The majority of my professional life has been spent on really poor project selections. Everybody who’s talented knows opportunity cost is the biggest cost. Every year I was working on one of those, it was a year I wasn’t working on something that was a better fit for me.
Shaan Puri: The good news is, Sam, that even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. You’ve taken enough swings that it’s worked out.
[00:08:15] Sarah’s List: The Next 10x Companies (Neuralink & Owner.com)
Sam Parr: This is from Dan from LA: “I’ve been a fan ever since the pod was promoted in The Hustle. I think that was four or five years ago. I’m dying for another Sarah’s List episode. My wife currently works at Waymo, but it’s time to jump to the next 5 to 10xer. I’m tired of waiting. Throw a brother a bone. Give me one company that you think would be perfect for the Sarah’s List.”
Let’s tell the listener what Sarah’s List is. My wife, Sara, was looking for a new job, and we came up with this idea: let’s see if you can join a company that has something like a thousand employees. You can make a great living in terms of work-life balance because there’s some stability, and you can make a pretty decent salary, but even still, there’s enough growth left where your stock could 10x and hopefully make you worth millions. In her case, it worked. She did that with Airbnb. She joined Airbnb when they were a huge company—it was an $18 billion company with 4,000 people—and it grew to be a hundred billion dollar company. Her $250,000 a year stock grew to like a million dollars a year stock. Shaan and I have made maybe three different lists where we’ve predicted what the next Sarah’s style companies are.
Shaan Puri: We love this because everybody wants to be a millionaire. I haven’t actually met anybody who doesn’t want that. But not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur; that’s huge risk. Not everybody has the winning idea. Not everybody wants to be the brilliant investor who finds the gem at an early price. This path was basically: no, you’re not the hotshot exec getting this insane package. You just join as a normal employee into a clearly good company that’s already in a stable position. You’re going to get healthcare. There are systems in place. There’s a nice office to go to. You didn’t make any of those crazy sacrifices, but even if you had a $50,000 a year stock grant—let’s say your total comp was going to be $180k, and of that, $120k is cash and the rest is stock—you get that every year for four years on a normal vesting cycle. Well, over those four years, that $200,000 of stock could become a million dollars of stock just by the company naturally growing at the rate it’s already growing at.
When you said that Sara did this and that you guys were intentional about what company to pick, she worked at Facebook, then Airbnb, and we decided to christen this as Sarah’s List.
Sam Parr: I think we came up with 30 companies. A couple of them were home runs: Rippling, Figma, Anduril. There’ve been others.
Shaan Puri: Now the question is why haven’t we done this again? I have an answer, and I think you’re going to agree: it’s so much harder to predict what the winners are right now. Compared to Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, and Rippling, those software companies had fairly steady growth. With all these new AI companies, it’s impossible to predict what’s going to hit and impossible to predict if they actually going to have longevity.
Sam Parr: The hot companies today are so proud to be the fastest growing, fastest to 100 million in ARR, but that happened in four or five months. That’s not the same sure footing that you could stand on. It’s not a stable foundation whereas you could see these things that have been going for seven years just compounding steadily and you could predict that the next seven years will probably be more compounding steadily. But I do have an answer. Do you have an answer for Dan from LA?
Sam Parr: My answer sounds so boring. There are probably two of them that I would predict. One of them—I heard Scott Galloway make the same argument, so I’m just stealing his—was your old alma mater, Amazon. I do think that you can get incredibly wealthy still at Amazon.
Shaan Puri: That’s a crazy pick, dude. They’ve underperformed the market.
Sam Parr: No, they’ve underperformed the market, but you’re saying it’s currently a $2.4 trillion company. You’re saying it’s going to be a $10 trillion company, the first ever? Yeah, because I think that when I use my Alexa, it’s still so stupid. It doesn’t understand AI. When you use Amazon.com and search for stuff, the AI is still horrible.
Shaan Puri: Amazon is a wild pick. What else do you have?
Sam Parr: I don’t know. What else do you have?
Shaan Puri: I have two for you. There’s one layup. We’re both investors in this one company. I thought you were going to say that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, that one’s pretty good.
Shaan Puri: I’ll give you mine and then you can use that one. I don’t know if their valuation is public, so be careful what you say.
Shaan Puri: No, I think it is. My pick would be Neuralink. Why Neuralink? Well, first, if you’re going to join a company, maybe join the company by the greatest entrepreneur ever of all time, which is Elon Musk. Undisputed at this point, I would say. The Elon index of companies has just performed at this absurd level. Whether it’s Tesla, SpaceX, or xAI, which is now a ridiculously valued company. Neuralink is what’s next.
Neuralink is one of these companies that is doing something that very few—there are no competitors to this. There are like five competitors total in the world and they’re all way far behind. What is Neuralink doing? They’re putting chips in your brain that today help a quadriplegic person be able to use a computer just with their thoughts. This isn’t just a pie-in-the-sky idea. There’s a guy you can watch streaming himself playing video games on Twitch using his mind as the controller. It’s pretty insane. They’ve done it in monkeys and I think two humans now. It’s just getting better and better where it’s becoming less invasive. Also, he just tweeted out there’s a more surface-level implant that they could do rather than going so deep into the brain.
Sam Parr: Can you even work here? How do you get a job?
Shaan Puri: It’s a company. Neuralink, when I initially said this on Sarah’s List, was at a $2 billion valuation. It’s now at 10 billion. It’s already had one Sarah’s List jump of 5x. It’s going to have another. This is going to be a huge company. If you think about computing, computing went from computers to laptops to mobile phones, and the next one is probably some version of glasses or a watch. What comes after that is the computer in your mind, just attaching yourself to the computer so that you can literally just think and you have access to the internet just from your thoughts.
Some people will say this is dystopian. Some people say they don’t want this. Guess what? Once the first people start to have the chip in their brain, you will be the equivalent of a turtle if you do not. The game theory of this is that we’re all going to end up with this because if anybody does it, they’re going to be a god amongst men.
Sam Parr: You’re like one of these guys—I’m going to make a prediction. You never said this. Are you the type of guy who doesn’t even like taking medicine?
Shaan Puri: I don’t take much medicine. No.
Sam Parr: That’s what I thought.
Shaan Puri: Don’t take any supplements. Don’t take medicine.
Sam Parr: That’s exactly what I thought. The guy who doesn’t even take medicine like Advil is saying he’s going to be putting a brain chip in his brain?
Shaan Puri: Again, you have to, right? I already basically have the computer attached to my hand if I’m honest. It’s in my hand eight hours a day. It’s in my pocket. It’s attached to my body at all times. If I don’t have my phone on me, I kind of panic. It is in some ways already a third limb. Once this goes to the point where I can just have it in my mind, it’s not really going to be that much of a choice because the people who have it are going to be walking around like gods compared to the people who don’t.
By the way, he’s doing the Tesla model. The Tesla business plan was you first do the really expensive sports car—high cost, low production volume—sell it to just rich enthusiasts who want a cool toy, and then the cool toy becomes more and more mainstream. Eventually, you get to the Model 3, which is now a mainstream car. With Neuralink, he’s doing it where first it’s going to solve the problems for people who are quadriplegics. The next one he’s going for is people who are blind. People who can really improve their quality of life. Eventually, it’ll get to where it’s like a phone, a consumer device we all just do for fun. But it’s inarguable that you should be helping people who are paralyzed have more function because of this technology.
Sam Parr: The reason I was like, “Could you even apply to work there?” is because I had never seen their job openings. I thought it was a project. I didn’t realize it was a proper company yet. If you go to the CEO’s LinkedIn, he says manager of a family office, but they do have a careers page and they’re hiring for a bunch of roles in San Francisco, Fremont, and Austin. Their jobs page is pretty cool. It says, “You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to work at Neuralink,” and then it lists all the open roles they have.
Shaan Puri: There’s a content creator role. There’s a junior accounts payable specialist. You can work at these companies.
Sam Parr: I talked to a guy who worked at Facebook in PR. I think he said he was the 400th employee. He said that they did things where at a large company like Amazon or HubSpot, you get a discount on the stock or if you buy the stock they match it as a perk—20 grand a year, nothing crazy. He told me he did that plus he just stayed for 10 years and he said he made $90 million. If you’re listening to this and you are an accounts payable person, this definitely looks cool.
Shaan Puri: I thought you were going to say Owner for your answer. Owner is valued in the billion-dollar range. I think the last round they raised was a billion dollars. I’ll just tell you two things. One, when I got introduced to the investment for Owner, the friend who introduced it said, “By the way, this is the best founder I’ve ever invested in and probably the best company I’ve ever invested in.” I was like, “Okay, well, that’s an incredibly strong recommendation.”
Within 10 minutes, the CEO, Adam, emailed me. This is normal. They’ll say, “Hey, love to set up a time to chat. Here’s my calendar. Maybe we could grab coffee next week.” This guy, Adam, is a savage. He goes, “Hey, Shaan, great to meet you. I just forwarded you our last three investor updates so you can get a sense of how things are going.”
If you’ve ever seen that slide that says if they don’t have revenue, they’ll talk about users; if they don’t have profit, they’ll talk about revenue; if they don’t have revenue, they’ll talk about users; if they don’t have users, they’ll talk about features; if they don’t have features, they’ll talk about potential. It’s basically the ladder of proof. I can tell you what you have based on what you choose to reveal. A founder that just says, “Here’s the last three investor updates,” was just like, “Oh, let me just show you I have a straight flush, so here’s my cards.” Because he sent me the last three, I know the trajectory of how fast they’re growing. I can see how the CEO communicates and I can see what their priorities are. I made the investment without ever talking to the guy instantly once I read those three updates. Since then, every update is just like, “Hey, so we’re crushing it. Here’s another gigantic number. Here’s how much growth we had just this quarter or just this month instead of like what most companies do in a year.”
Sam Parr: And check this out. This guy, Adam, I don’t know how old he is. I think of him as a 22-year-old.
Shaan Puri: Dog, he was born in 1999. He was born during Y2K.
Sam Parr: One time he messaged me about his brother. He’s like, “My brother’s looking for a project to do.” I thought it was a kid and he’s like, “Yeah, he’s a content creator and his brother has 30 million followers on TikTok.” I don’t know if you saw that, but then he wrote this update yesterday. I was reading it and he was explaining how the company was killing it and he was like, “We also had a little bit of churn in December and that really bothers me.” I thought, okay, he’s bothered because the product sucks or something. He goes, “I’m bothered because that means that these businesses likely went out of business.”
Owner serves small restaurants; that’s their customer. It’s an ordering platform for restaurants. He was like, “We had some churn in December and it was all because they likely went out of business because that’s when these restaurants tend to go out of business at the end of the year.” I read that line and it was pretty cool because he’s kind of a Terminator. He says, “Here’s where we said we were going to go. Here’s how we exceeded it.” Constantly throughout each category of the company. At the end, he was like, “We did have some churn and that is part of the bad news because they went out of business and that devastates me.” That was really cool.
Shaan Puri: I ignored that. I was like, “I’m just going to think this guy’s a Terminator.” I’m not even going to think of the human side of this that he actually cares.
Sam Parr: You need both. This guy seems very likable. You can’t just have everything. I refuse to accept that.
[00:18:45] Hampton Revenue & The “FU Money” Purchase
Shaan Puri: Let’s do another question. Alex from Brooklyn says, “Gentlemen, every culture has its quirks. The Japanese make you take your shoes off at the dinner table. The French chicks don’t shave their pits. And My First Million is home for asking blunt financial questions. Sam, you are the king of blunt financial questions. So, it’s our turn to return the favor. I won’t ask you for the number, but is Hampton over or under 10 million in revenue in 2025?” Alex from Brooklyn.
Sam Parr: Over. And that’s all I will say because it’s my only company and I just want to shut up and quietly build for the next decade and keep on trucking. Maybe after 10 years I’ll come out and reveal some more information. But yeah, it’s done really well.
Shaan Puri: There you go. All right. Good job, Alex. You put Sam on the hot seat. All right, next one. “I just watched the Jesser episode and Shaan playing the piano had me wowed. It’s nuts what you can do in a year. If that was your misogi for 2025, what is each of yours for 2026?” Dave from Mexico City. Put some respect on an American living in CDMX.
Sam Parr: That’s Mexico City, you hillbilly.
Shaan Puri: CDMX. How does that stand for Mexico City?
Sam Parr: I think it’s some Spanish way of saying the City of Mexico. Sorry, Dave. I didn’t get it right.
Shaan Puri: Dave, I speak Spanish, too. By the way, did you have a misogi in 2025? Did you do that?
Sam Parr: Yeah. The point of a misogi is it’s supposed to be so hard that you have a high chance of failing. We don’t talk about the failure enough, but yes, I trained for a 50-mile run and I got hurt and destroyed my Achilles and I couldn’t do it. So, I did it and I failed.
Let me recap something. Two days ago, Shaan put out this video of him going to Jesse Itzler’s house. You prefaced it by telling what you did. Jesse, friend of the pod, amazing guy. You flew to his house in Atlanta, and it seemed planned, but it was very spontaneous that you played piano for him and his wife, Sara Blakely, a very famous entrepreneur. They were in tears. You told us about the video and then it finally got released. It was awesome. But I have a bone to pick. Everyone’s saying how amazing this is and they’re like, “You inspired me because you played this beautiful song and people were literally in tears.” Earlier this year, you said you’re going to start playing piano. I’m pretty sure you’ve been playing piano for years and years and years. You did not just pick this up from scratch.
Shaan Puri: No, I haven’t been playing for years and years. I did as a kid. My parents did buy a piano and they probably got us a couple months of lessons when I was maybe eight or something like that. But by the time I’m 38 now, I had forgotten everything. When I started this year, I started from scratch.
Sam Parr: But I remember us being somewhere and seeing a piano and you sat down and I thought you played a song.
Shaan Puri: I did know how to play two things on the piano. I knew how to play the intro to James Bond GoldenEye, like a one-hand song type of thing. I think I also knew the beginning of Für Elise, which is a classic piano song through muscle memory, but I couldn’t read sheet music, didn’t know how to do the notes, didn’t know what the keys were called. I just had memorized because at some point my sister or somebody had showed me, “Hey, push these white and black keys and that’ll sound like James Bond.” That was the level I was at.
Sam Parr: Well, it was very good. What’s your misogi going to be this year?
[00:22:30] Misogis and Life Seasons: Piano, Coaching, and Parenting
Shaan Puri: I have one. I’m trying to figure out the exact way to frame it, but I think I told you this: I deleted all my social media apps and consumption. I said I’m going to go dark in terms of consuming. I was like, “How do I trade consuming stuff that people put 20 seconds of thought into—like a tweet—for doing things that people put 20 years of thought into, which is books?” I deleted Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Instead, if I open up my phone to kill boredom, I have to open up Kindle. It’s the only thing left to do on my phone.
I basically made a list: the 26 for 2026, the 26 books I want to read in 2026. I have a hit list. These are books I’ve probably owned for years, have thought about reading, but hadn’t actually read. I started that a couple weeks ago, so that’s going good. The only other one that might count here is I have this life bucket list idea of coaching a high school basketball team. Walking away from business and not focusing on business for a season, which is three months. I started that last month and our season goes until the end of February. There’s a local high school basketball team and I’ve become an assistant coach. We want to go to the state tournament and win; that’s the goal.
Sam Parr: I know your first game you got spanked. I think you said the second game went better.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, we are six and three now. We’re doing all right. We’re getting better as a team. Right now it’s all about if we can improve. I’m basically going to practices and games four days a week. I get my coach’s whistle and my little whiteboard and I drive to this high school and I’m doing the actual thing. I’m coaching this high school basketball team.
Sam Parr: I have a two-year-old girl and then I have a two-month-old little girl. I have underestimated leading up to it how difficult it would be. Even though I have grandparents around and people helping out, and my wife is running the show there, I have underestimated how challenging it was. Frankly, I kind of feel like I’m holding on right now. My goals are simple: I’m trying to eat 200 grams of protein a day and get out of bed at 6 a.m. I have pretty small ones because ever since I got into fitness, I’ve always been good at maintaining a fairly fit state. Right now, I’m at the lowest of my fairly fit era. I just need to eat my protein. Going to bed early and waking up early is so rudimentary, but it has had the biggest impact on my day’s productivity. I don’t really want to set a big goal right now because I am kind of hanging on.
Shaan Puri: I do think those are big. I know a lot of people who have that goal and don’t do that thing. That is actually quite difficult to do both of those things. If you actually did those, those are high leverage things. Also, I think it’s great to acknowledge the season you’re in. People want everything to be constant. There are seasons where you’re able to be full out. There are seasons where you’re in recovery mode. There are seasons where you’re in nesting mode where all that matters is protecting the nest because there are these baby eggs here right now. I don’t need to distract myself with a random hunt over here; I need to stay at the nest. Knowing the season and not beating yourself up about that is something that ambitious type-A people struggle with. You have to give yourself some grace when you’re so wired towards achievement of random goals.
Sam Parr: You didn’t do a good job of warning me, though. You should have warned me. I didn’t realize how challenging this would be.
Shaan Puri: Everybody says the same thing: it’s man-to-man defense now. There are two of you and two of them.
Sam Parr: I did not understand. Sometimes it feels like my wife is my roommate and I barely have gotten to know my new baby because I’m with the eldest. It’s my job to take care of her and you have to take her out of the house because she’s going to grab the pacifier out of the baby’s mouth.
Shaan Puri: It’s definitely a second baby blindside for dads because the first baby is the one you think everything’s going to change and it’s going to be like, “Oh my god, my life’s going to get really crazy.” And then it’s like, “That’s all right. I got this. This is not so bad. It’s different, but not crazy.” You get this false sense of security and then when the second baby comes, it’s a blindside. You had already stopped worrying about it in a way. It’s a wakeup call for the dad because the mom was carrying the team, but now she has to focus on the new baby and that means the existing kid is your kid. All of their needs and all of their time is on your clock.
Sam Parr: Just getting her socks on can be an ordeal. These small things that I just kind of dismissed. I’m not drowning, but my cup is a bit full.
All right, here’s another question. Gary Vaynerchuk wants to buy the Jets. “Sam, you’re working hard to grow Hampton now. Why are you doing all this? Are you trying to buy all the pawn shops in the US, brother? In all seriousness, what is the FU money purchase that you want if this is a home run?” This is Tahar from the Bay.
When I moved to New York City, I got this really big nice apartment and I love it. I’ve gotten so much joy having family come and stay and be comfortable that I have my eyes set on buying a huge, lavish, $15 or $25 million apartment in the next couple years. I do. That is something that I definitely want.
Shaan Puri: A $15 or $20 million apartment is your goal?
Sam Parr: Yeah.
Shaan Puri: Why an apartment? Shouldn’t you be getting a city block?
Sam Parr: No, brother. It sucks.
Shaan Puri: Get one of the brownstones at least.
Sam Parr: I don’t want a brownstone. I’ve rented one before. I don’t like them. I like having a doorman.
Shaan Puri: Is there a dream building in New York that’s the cool one to be in?
Sam Parr: It’s different flavors. There’s this thing called Billionaires’ Row right next to Central Park and that’s what a lot of the really rich tycoons like Bill Ackman live in. It’s $100 million for a fancy apartment there. It’s insane how rich some people are and how much this real estate costs. That’s not my flavor. That’s opulent. I mean, it’s all opulent if it’s $20 million, but that’s like the “master of the world” type of apartment and it’s all clean and cool looking.
What I’m really working to do—I don’t like Donald Trump, but I saw this photo of him working at his office. He had just left a meeting with a bunch of his employees and his wife and two kids came up to him while he was working. The cool part was that they lived in the same building where he worked. The kids could see him working and he was just able to do stuff and it was total life integration, work-life integration. That’s my dream. That’s really what I’m working towards.
Shaan Puri: Wow. I never took you, Sam, to be the penthouse kind of guy.
Sam Parr: I’m not a penthouse type of guy, but I guess I am. I just said I wanted to buy a penthouse.
Shaan Puri: I think by definition you are. We used to have this funny thing on the pod where it was like, “We’re just two entrepreneurs with big dreams. Shaan wants to buy the Lakers and Sam would love to buy a lake.” I feel like you were so much more likable then. Now, Manhattan Sam, you just lost 30 points of likability with that answer. What are you doing telling the truth over here, bro?
Sam Parr: It just so happens that I live in Manhattan. But really, if I lived in St. Louis, Missouri, I would say I want the fattest house in the cul-de-sac that has a soccer goal in the back and a basketball goal and all the kids play in my yard. That’s really what it is. It just so happens that I live in Manhattan. In order to do that, you have to spend $20 million.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, that sounds so much better. By the way, this Gary Vee buying the Jets thing, I’ve talked about this before. To me, this is a masterclass in personal brand. I always say for a personal brand you want these five Ds. One of the Ds is: what’s the dream? If your dream is, “I want to make so much money it’s crazy, I just want to be a billionaire,” it just sounds greedy. What Gary did, which is brilliant, is he said, “I want to buy the Jets.” It gives him the air cover to go try to pursue a bunch of money without just seeming greedy. He didn’t say he wants to buy the Yankees. He wanted to buy this lovable loser, his childhood team, the New York Jets, that’s never done anything and try to turn them around. There’s a nobility to the mission. There’s a likability to the mission where it’s a turnaround project. Everybody likes an underdog. It’s something a lot of people remember about him. Gary doing that is yet another example of Gary really understanding marketing and personal brand.
Sam Parr: Shaan and I like the UFC and after every fight Dana White does a press conference and he lists five or 10 stats. One stat that he always lists is how much money they made at the gate and it’s supposed to mean this is how many fans came to the fight. But the tickets are two grand. I went recently and it was $800 for bad seats. It’s pretty funny that he is using that as, “Look how many people are coming.” It’s like, “Dude, no, you’re just charging so much money for a ticket.” You’re bragging. It’s sort of like when Gary says—I’ve noticed in Gary’s videos—people will be like, “Let me help you buy the Jets and achieve your dream.” That’s so much better than people saying, “Let me put more money in your pocket and help you go from a 400 million net worth to 450 million net worth.”
Shaan Puri: Do you remember the kids’ house when you were younger where it was the open door where it’s like a campus and everyone can hang out? I’ve aspired to be that forever. It just so happens that you have to spend a lot of money in Manhattan to do it.
[00:35:10] Updates on the OGs: Sulie, Ramon, and Jack Smith
Sam Parr: All right, let’s do this one. “Early on, you guys had a ton of friends on the show as guests. Give us OGs an update on the OGs. Where’s Sulie? Where’s Ramon? Where’s Jack Smith? Is there anyone else that I missed?”
When Shaan started MFM, the first 50 episodes—a lot of people don’t realize this, MFM is at some number between 700 and 800 episodes—the first 25 or 50 were just Shaan interviewing people. When I came on, it was just 5,000 people listening and we basically just talked about our friends.
Shaan Puri: Or we had them on and asked, “Hey, what are you up to?” Before we were chasing clout, we were just hanging out with our buds. Once we figured out the YouTube algorithm, things changed. But before that, we invited our friends on the pod a lot.
Sam Parr: Okay, let’s do an update. Sulie—Sulaman Ali—is one of our friends. He’s one of my best buddies. He is an entrepreneur. He built a company called TinyCo, which was mobile games. Think like Candy Crush, but he licensed the IP for Family Guy. He made the Family Guy mobile game, the Harry Potter mobile game, those types of things. He sold TinyCo for a bunch of money, nine figures. He then helped his brother start and sell Native Deodorant. The Ali brothers are prolific and they’ve both been on the podcast.
Sulie did something that I really respect and admire, which was he was able to understand what matters. Sulie’s in his 40s and he’s been super successful. When you’re successful, winners have options. You get deals put on your plate every day, things you could go invest in and make a bunch of money. You have people who want to come work for you and start companies with you. You have more knowledge about how to win in the game of business. It is very tempting to just go get more success because success feels really good and you’re good at it. It’s tempting because there might be other areas of your life that you’re not so good at where you’re not getting that same feedback loop of “I’m awesome and my results are awesome.”
What Sulie did, which I thought was great, was he didn’t make the mistake of just chasing more success. He started to look at those other areas. First thing he did was he started working out religiously every day. I started being like, “Hey, what are you working on today?” He’s like, “I don’t know, but I scheduled my workout. That’s the most important thing that I did.” Dude, he takes more workout classes than a 23-year-old Manhattanite woman who works in PR.
Shaan Puri: And he takes the same classes that she takes, also. He introduced me to Rumble Boxing and Michael’s Boot Camp. He loves the classes.
Sam Parr: Then he was like, “I want to have kids; that’s the next chapter.” He just had a kid and he has resisted the AI wave to focus on having a kid for now. I think he wants to take a very big swing in the world of AI and robotics eventually, but he’s a first-time dad. That’s the Sulie update.
Ramon is doing a very cool company called Afina. If you’ve ever looked at your tap water and you’re like, “I don’t want to drink tap water. I want to drink clean water. I don’t want water that has heavy metals or chemicals in it.” A lot of people don’t even know the water supply in most cities is interlinked with the sewage system. It’s a pretty gross thing to drink tap water, but we all bathe in tap water. We put it all over our naked bodies. Ramon has built a company around clean water for the home. It started with a filtered shower head. How do you shower in water that’s going to be clean on your skin and good for your hair? It’s called Afina. He’s going into other categories with clean water for the home. Ramon’s basically gone back to what he knows best, which is how do I sell stuff online? He’s just moved to more noble things.
When he first came on the podcast, he was selling essentially soap opera daytime spoilers. Like what’s going to happen tomorrow on The Young and the Restless. He sold that company for like $9 or $10 million. It was a blog.
Shaan Puri: It was only two years old and he sold it for $10 million. When we talked about it, this was such a viral story. He’s a Dutch kickboxer. He’s never seen a soap opera in his life, but he just loves to sell stuff online. He loves to figure out how to get traffic from one place to another and how to sell. Now he’s selling things that actually improve people’s lives a little bit more than the soap opera spoiler.
Sam Parr: You guys should go listen to his episode early on. He started a soap opera business that he sold for $9 or $10 million. Then he started a dog ramp company called Sausage Dog Central so sausage dogs can use a ramp to get up in an SUV. Insane. He grew it to 18 million. Now he’s doing Afina. He’s a single dad and his son’s about to go to college. His kid is the most well-mannered, well-behaved kid. That’s probably the best thing he’s ever done. He’s been a single parent since his boy was two years old and his kid is thriving.
Jack Smith is our buddy. On paper, he basically sold his company at the age of 28 or 29 for $850 million. It was called Vungle. If you meet Jack Smith, he’s very quiet. You’ll have to pull anything out of him. He won’t tell you anything. If you ask what he does for work, he’ll say, “Oh, I like to play on computers.” He won’t tell you. In terms of what you said about people wanting to flex, he is the most non-flexing person I’ve ever met in my life. He’s very special. He now lives in Portugal and he just bought 50 acres of land on the coast of Portugal and he’s building a meditation center.
Shaan Puri: It’s like digital detox meditation, right?
Sam Parr: Yeah. He bought 50 acres of land and he has a mobile home that he mostly lives in. I think they’ve rented a house nearby now, but for a little while they were living in a tiny home—him, his kid, and his wife. Him and his wife are both tycoons. They’re both incredibly successful people and they live very modest lives. They’re dedicating everything right now to building a retreat so people can get into self-awareness and calmness. You’ll be there soon.
[00:44:20] Pivoting from Real Estate: Building a Company vs. a Job
Sam Parr: I got a tactical, practical business question. This is from Ben’s brother. Ben’s my business partner. He says, “I’ve been a realtor for the past decade. I’ve had good success. I made $300,000 a year for about a decade, but I hate how it just doesn’t seem to be compounding. I’ve decided it’s time to make a change. Everything is on the table: buying a business, buying a franchise, flipping houses, getting a job. I’m not looking for specific prescriptive advice on what I should specifically do, but I’m looking for you guys to tell me how you would think about deciding the type of thing you’d look for next and how you would attack it.”
Have you ever read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield? He talks about the difference between an amateur and a professional. An amateur says they have writer’s block or that their creativity hasn’t come to them. A professional sits down at the same time every day and they get to work and they just write regardless of how they feel. Their emotion doesn’t impact how they feel. They’re a professional. You go to work.
The things that I’ve noticed that have held a lot of people back is when they think about making money, they don’t think of themselves as a company builder. When you’re thinking about what to do next, you have to think: how do I get enough traction to hire people to create a team and to create a proper company with a culture that solves a problem and has recurring customers? I’ve noticed this with a lot of real estate agents in particular because they’re one-person businesses oftentimes with just an assistant. I have a bone to pick with these one-person companies that we talk about online all the time. They’re incredibly interesting, but in general, in order to build a lot of value for yourself, you have to create a company. In my head, what that means is employees who are all working together on a mission and who are creating an asset that has a lot of value, not just creating something that pays your salary.
Shaan Puri: Are you suggesting he take his current job where he puts in hours and gets a commission selling a home and start to think about why he doesn’t turn this into more of a brokerage or create a real estate team? He sells 20 homes a year, but they could sell 300 if he was able to hire other people like him, maybe even better than him at selling homes, and organize them all under one brand as a company rather than him as a broker.
Sam Parr: John D. Rockefeller, who’s the best businessman ever, famously said, “I’d rather have 1% effort from a 100 people than 100% effort from me.” I think that to be true, where the name of the game to creating a lot of value and something sustainable is to create something that involves getting other people organized and them doing a lot of the work. That sounds very simplistic, but I don’t think that’s how a lot of people think about it.
Shaan Puri: My answer would be it’s kind of like eating late at night: are you hungry or are you just bored? A lot of what people think is hunger is actually just boredom. Similarly, I think he wants to do something different. He’s basically saying, “I’ve been a successful realtor for a long time but I’m ready to buy a franchise, flip houses, go do something completely different.” I think you first would want to question the initial assumption, which was, “I’m making 300k a year for about a decade but it just doesn’t seem to be compounding.” Well, why not? I’ve seen many brokers make way more money if the goal is to make way more money or to work way less. I know many brokers that have productized themselves or made a company out of what they’re doing, made a team out of what they’re doing and scaled it. I think that would be the first instinct.
My general advice for anybody who’s trying to figure out what to do next is go talk to 20 people because the goal is to work backwards from a specific idea, not forwards from uncertainty. What I mean by that is you go talk to 20 people who you think are having success in one way or another. That means you go talk to friends or friends of friends. You go talk to local businesses. Once you realize that everything around you is a product made by a business, then you can go find the owner of that business and you can just chat with them or you can study what they do from afar. You want to find people who have similar backgrounds to you, like other realtors who then pivoted and did something bigger and better out of it. What did they do? You’re just searching for a blueprint that you can copy-paste for yourself. You’re going to tweak it as you go, but you’re going to steal like an artist. You’re going to find something that already works and work backwards from that.
You talked about buying a franchise. Go talk to 20 franchisees and see: do I want the life that they have? Do I want the inputs of the life, not just the output? Everybody wants success, but do you want to do the things that they have to do in order to get the success? Does that sound like fun to you? Does it seem like things you’re naturally good at? Is that the type of work you want to sign up to do 3,000 times? Those are questions you got to ask yourself. I would go and try to look for blueprints. I’d look for the people like me and what they did, and then maybe go a little bit further out on the weirdness scale and find other things. Once you go look at those blueprints, something will scream out at you. Some combination of “that looks fun to try, I think I could do that, I like the lifestyle that comes with doing that.” That will give you more direction on where to go. I think people don’t really think about business as blueprints. They think they need to be original. Instead, I think you should largely look for existing blueprints that many people have done and say, “Which one of those do I want to do?”
Sam Parr: Do you know this guy? I’ve talked to him a bunch. This is Ben’s brother.
Shaan Puri: Well, I guess we’re going to have to follow up with him.
Sam Parr: There’s one other thing that is specific to Ben’s brother that is a challenge for him. He doesn’t make time to search. Every time I talk to him, I’m like, “Great, what are you thinking about now?” and he’s made so little progress. The reason why is because he’s got his job. Then he also bought into a restaurant. He owns a piece of a restaurant. He spends a bunch of time trying to make sure that restaurant doesn’t fail because he doesn’t want it to fail. I’m like, “So, how much time are you dedicating to this?” He’s like, “Whenever I have free time.” “How much free time you got?” “Not a lot.”
If you want to actually make a change, you need to first clear your plate a little bit and create some space to actually work on the thing. Dedicated religious time that’s as sacred as your work, as sacred as going to the gym, as sacred as other things you make time for. For him, he’s got to find two or three hours a day that he’s going to just spend doing this and specifically mark it off on his calendar. He might sell fewer homes this year and he has to be okay with that trade because he’s working on building the next thing. People don’t really make specific concrete time. They try to hope that in the extra time they have—you don’t have extra time.
[00:51:45] The One Phone Call: Business Mentors & Founder Mode
Shaan Puri: That’s a great answer. Can I pick the last one? This is hilarious. This is from Peter J: “One of my favorite American traditions is that when you get arrested, you get one phone call. That has to be one of the highest stakes calls ever. I almost want to get arrested just to feel the rush of that one phone call rule when they place that phone in your hands. Anyway, what’s your one phone call when it comes to business? When you need advice or you’re in a tough spot, who’s that one call you’re going to make and why?” That is a great question, Peter J. I definitely have one. Do you?
Sam Parr: I have one. You go first.
Shaan Puri: Do you know who Barry Diller is? Barry Diller is the founder of IAC. He’s a dealmaker.
Sam Parr: Phone call? Isn’t he like 85?
Shaan Puri: He’s not my phone call. But he’s a guy who kind of knows everyone and he owns this huge conglomerate and he’s just a little bit of a business savant when it comes to numbers. A little bit like Ari Emanuel where he just knows deals and he just knows numbers and he spots value and he organizes people around it. Austin Rief is one of those guys but at the age of 30.
Austin Rief is one of my best friends. Austin Rief started this company called Morning Brew. I had a company called The Hustle. Both daily business newsletters. They were a little bit more finance; we were more entrepreneurial and tech. When we were both getting going, I hated him. I wanted to kill him. Not because of him, just because we were competitors. We both sold our companies and we both were in the same core group of Hampton. One of the reasons I moved to where I live is because I’m down the street from him. He’s one of my best friends. I love him like family. He is probably the smartest business person I’ve ever met because I do think he is genius level. I’m pretty sure he got a perfect score on the SATs. He approaches things with the perfect balance of something must have soul and you must love it and you must be passionate. But then for any problem that I have, he’s very good at taking away the passion and the emotion away from the actual logistics and he’s very pragmatic. He’s the best person I’ve ever experienced when it comes to asking advice on a certain issue. It sounds very similar to Sulie.
Shaan Puri: My answer is Sulie. No secret here. My rule for the person you would call—if you think about the jail phone call—you would want three things. One, they have to care. I want this to be like the dad from Taken when his daughter is taken and he’s like, “Oh, okay. It’s on now.” When you come to them with your personal life problem, it becomes their personal life problem. Sulie is like that. He had a friend from high school who was a dentist. I don’t think he had talked to him in several years. The guy was like, “Hey, I know you’re in the business world. We’ve gone our separate ways since high school, but I’m trying to sell my practice. Any tips for me?” Sulie flew out there and made it his mission to help his friend sell his dental practice business and had this incredible outcome.
Sam Parr: When was this?
Shaan Puri: This was a couple years ago. Second, they need to be wiser than me. I want you to have seen 10 times more data points and be better at putting together those data points so that when I come to you with noise and panic, you just see the signal. You know what to ignore and what to focus on. Lastly, I want that person to basically live rent-free in my head afterwards, which is what I have now. I don’t even need to call him anymore. It’s just, “Oh, what would Sulie say? Oh, he’d say this. Okay, I’m just going to do that thing.” It’s as simple as it’s become. I’ve spent enough time with him to know what he would say in 90% of these situations.
Sam Parr: Can I give you two fun facts about calling people from jail? I used to be a problematic person and I had to experience this a couple times. The first thing that I’ve realized—people learn this the second time they go to jail—you have to write down the phone number of the person you want to call on your hand because you don’t remember any.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. You don’t know anyone’s phone number.
Sam Parr: You don’t know anyone. The second time I did this when I was getting arrested, I looked at my buddy and said, “Hey, can you run and grab the Sharpie and write your number on my hand for me, please?” That’s what you have to do because cell phones don’t show up in the white pages. The second thing—here’s the bad part. It might be different now, thank god I’ve not had to experience this in over a decade—most cell phones don’t accept collect calls.
Shaan Puri: So you hit a dead end right away.
Sam Parr: Dead end. You have to figure out how to make it work.
Shaan Puri: You got to call someone with a landline who happens to be at home. I just Googled it. I think Verizon accepts it, but most do not.
Sam Parr: That’s ridiculous.
Shaan Puri: Also, most of my friends don’t even pick up phone calls. It needs to be a text from jail.
Sam Parr: It usually says it. It’ll say like, “Sacramento County Correctional” or something like that. Do you know what’s crazy? I think one in five American men have been arrested at least once. Do you have any friends besides me who have been arrested?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, of course.
Sam Parr: Good. You got friends in dark places.
Shaan Puri: I’m going to give you two times that Sulie was this call. The first time I was trying to figure out if we should sell The Milk Road. We had gotten an offer to sell the business and we were debating should we take it, should we not, and we were spinning in circles writing these pros and cons lists. “Is this enough? Is that enough?” It was so confusing. We were just tied up in a knot. We call Sulie and he just listens to us for five minutes and he goes, “All right, how about we put away the pros and cons list? Listen, you’re selling your company. Do you want to sell your company or not? You should have a visceral gut reaction when I say you’re selling your company. Either that gut reaction is yes or it’s no. And if you don’t know, don’t do anything. You don’t need to make any decisions here.” Just simplifying it to needing a visceral gut reaction made it very clear to me what I wanted to do. I wanted to sell the business. That was a lot of clarity in a very short amount of time.
The second one was my e-commerce business. I was like, “Hey, you know a ton about e-com. Your brother built Native Deodorant. You helped him with that. I want you to help me with strategy. Can we do a call where I ask you questions and we figure out a good growth strategy?” I show up to that meeting ready to have a strategy talk and five minutes before the meeting, it just says “Sulie has shared a Google Doc with you.” The Google Doc is a list of 40 shitty things about our website, our email popups, our welcome email flow, our SMS sequence, our Facebook ad copy. He just went and looked at our funnel and wrote 40 things that we’re doing that probably could be done better. We get on the call and I’m like, “So, should we talk strategy?” He’s like, “This is the strategy. The strategy is you look at your product, you figure out everything that sucks, you fix it, and then we do this again in two weeks. And we do that again and again and again until there’s not that many things that suck anymore.” That really just shook me. I was like, “Oh, that’s how winners operate. Got it. I thought this guy’s so smart he’s going to say something brilliant.” No, he just drilled in and looked at the details and was like, “Why are we doing this? This took three seconds to load. Make that faster. This is the wrong photo for this. This copy is weak.”
Sam Parr: The smart people I’ve noticed or the people I admire tend to be—I don’t know if he would fall in this category, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s in the traditional sense of genius level IQ, like a perfect scorer on the standardized test—but they’re also really good at just being a caveman.
Shaan Puri: It’s the Midwit meme.
Sam Parr: Where they are incredibly brilliant. I’ve seen him talk about some financial instruments in a very sophisticated way that I didn’t understand entirely, particularly when you talk about tax structures. It’s as if he has literally read the tax code. But then he’s also giving me advice like, “Why aren’t you doing this?” and he’ll say some answer just like he did with you: “Well, do you want to sell? Okay, sell.” Just these rudimentary, child-like answers. You should do this because you want to do this.
Shaan Puri: There was a meeting I had with the now CEO of Twitch. When I was at Twitch, we got acquired and this guy became my boss for a period of time. His name is Dan Clancy. I go into Dan’s office and he tells me, “I’m the new Chief Product Officer. I want to tell you a little bit about how I work, how I operate. First 100 days, I’m just going to ask a lot of questions. I want to go meet people at the front lines, not talk to managers.” Standard first 100 days stuff. Then he goes, “And then from there, you’ll see me work like this.” He took a marker and he drew on the whiteboard. He goes, “Do you know what a square line curve looks like?” I was like, “Sure don’t.” He goes, “You know what a sine wave is?” I was like, “Yeah, it’s like an up and downy, musicy, heartbeaty looking thing.” He’s like, “Yes, that’s a sine curve. It’s this smooth round thing. A square curve looks like this.” He basically drew a straight flat line. He goes, “I’ll spend a lot of time at the 10,000-foot level, figuring out big picture priorities, what matters, what are the three things we need to do to win, where are the key levers? What do we have to get right? What makes this whole thing work?” He’s like, “I’ll spend a bunch of time here and then as soon as I find some problem, I go like this straight down all the way to a level of depth that you will find confusing and amusing. Like, wait, why does he care about the pixels and the color and the copy and the details of this area?” He’s like, “And I stay there for a little bit and then I go back up. That is how I work. I will be at the 10,000-foot, I’ll drop down to 10 centimeters, I’ll stay there, I’ll go back to 10,000 feet.” Ever since I saw that, I realized, “Oh, this is what Paul Graham and those people meant when they said founder mode.” This is what founder mode is. Founder mode is being able to simultaneously hold in your head the big idea, the North Star, the vision, the direction we need to go, and then being able to dive down into the absolute most simple details of those areas that are problematic and roll up your sleeves, solve the problem side by side with the team, and then go back up for air.
Sam Parr: Would this guy want to come on MFM?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, we should have Dan on. That’d be fun actually.
Sam Parr: You guys who are listening, you got to Google this guy. First of all, he does not look like the CEO of Twitch. You would think it’d be like a Red Bull looking bro. This guy looks like he’s 61 and he’s got all the t-shirts from the Grateful Dead tours. He looks wise just because he looks older than the average Twitch user, but he’s got long white hair and a goatee. He looks like he should be studying philosophy or giving a lecture on Man’s Search for Meaning. But he’s a Twitch guy. This is so fascinating to me. This guy looks awesome. I would love to hang out with this guy.
Shaan Puri: He’s very wise. I remember once he was like, “So, what do you want to do?” It was like a one-on-one career talk. I go in and I just got acquired into the company. My career plan at Twitch was earn this vest check and get the hell out of here. That was just the general mindset. I wasn’t trying to think about my 10-year career at Twitch. I walk in and I’m like, “What am I going to say? Do I need to fake the funk here and tell this guy I really want to get this promotion and in 10 years I see myself here as a senior VP?” That wasn’t true. So am I going to lie or do I tell him the truth? But then is he going to be like, “F this kid,” and check out on me because I’m checked out on the long term with Twitch? Short term I was going to try, but long term I wasn’t going to be there.
So I told him the truth. I was like, “Yeah, long term I’m not here.” He goes, “Okay, great. So we don’t need to worry about this pile of stuff. Tell me, what is it that you do want to do?” I started telling him this thing that I had told many people before about how I wanted to start a university someday. I had this very logical plan: in order to do that, first I need to do this to get the capital and the network and the skills, and then those three things are the core components that you need to be able to pull this off. He just looked at me and he goes, “Yeah, I don’t buy any of that.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” Somebody who could call bullshit is generally somebody you want as a friend. He was like, “I don’t believe in the deferred life plan. I don’t believe you need to do all these prerequisites to go do the thing you want to do. I think more often you’re better served just going and doing the thing you really want to do if you really want to go do it. And if you don’t really want to go do it, just say you don’t want to do it. Figure out what you do want to do and go do that instead.” Just immediately cutting through the BS. I had 10 interactions like this with him where I go into his office and I come out with some nugget of wisdom that really shifted the way I think because this guy’s just been around and done a lot of things. He worked early at Google. He worked directly with Larry. Sundar, who’s now the CEO, was a peer of his at the time. He was in that circle of 15 up-and-comers where one of them might be the CEO of Google one day. That’s who this guy is.
Sam Parr: I just think it’s funny to imagine this guy having a meeting with IShowSpeed.
Shaan Puri: Well, he’s gone on his stream. There are videos of him going and hanging out with them and going on their streams. It is a fish out of water for sure. But props to him for doing it because it would be pretty easy to just retreat to the ivory tower and try to be this corporate person behind the scenes. Instead, he’s like, “No, I’m going to do this.”
Sam Parr: Dan, if this makes it to you, we would love to have you on. I know I’m personally trying to learn how to be a proper CEO and it sounds like you’re amazing at all the things I aspire to learn. This would be awesome if you came on. This guy seems badass. I also want to know what he thought of you, Shaan.
Shaan Puri: I also want to know that.
[01:05:30] Unclaimed Business Ideas: Youth Sports Combine & Hardware
Sam Parr: There’s one more I want to do. This question comes from Brian from Austin. He says, “My guess is that there’s been over a thousand business ideas shared on the podcast. Don’t need a list, just gut reaction. What is an idea you wish somebody ran with that has been said before on the podcast? You got 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go.” I have one for this. I don’t know if any ideas come to you initially for this.
Shaan Puri: You’re going to laugh at mine. What’s yours?
Sam Parr: I like hardware just as a fan. I like gadgets. I don’t know anything about them. People thought I was joking about making a really good washer and dryer. That’s one. But we have seen Matic. Have you seen Matic? It’s a new Roomba. It’s a thousand-dollar Roomba that I absolutely love. We have seen Figure with robots. That fits the stereotype of these big things. But we’ve seen Nest. I’ve seen all these really cool gadget companies.
Shaan Puri: All gadgets. Dyson has done a good job. June oven—it’s a fancy convection oven.
Sam Parr: Not all of them have totally hit.
Shaan Puri: I think June failed. I don’t know what happened.
Sam Parr: I think it failed. But there are a handful that seemed silly like a Nest or a Ring camera, but they actually were so cool and they did revolutionize an industry and I always thought that could be one of them. I’m shocked no one has pounced on that. What about yours?
Shaan Puri: Mine is not the biggest idea, but it’s one that I wish existed and I think would totally win if somebody had the right amount of hustle. It’s the youth sports combine. Professional sports have combines where you go and get measured: your height, your weight, your wingspan, your vertical leap, your strength, your speed. As I’ve had kids and as I’ve met most of my friends who have had kids, I’ve seen the absolute money hurricane that is youth sports.
The idea here was to create a city-to-city traveling tour similar to Tough Mudder, but your goal is you go into a city and you say, “Hey, if you’re a youth athlete—it could be as young as five years old all the way up to 18 years old—come get tested. Get your 40-yard dash, your vertical leap, your height, your weight, your body fat, all the attributes that go into becoming an athlete.” Every city you go to, I think you get somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 kids to show up easily. I think you could charge $120 a pop. I think you could charge a little bit extra for either a printed photo or for storing your data for the long term.
If you just do the math on that—1,500 kids, let’s say 2,000 kids—you’re basically making 200 grand a weekend in every city you go to. You do that 50 weeks out of the year, you have a $10 million a year business that is going to dominate one angle. I think you could upsell training and camps and the data. There’s a bunch of other things you could do on top of that. To me, I can’t believe this doesn’t exist with the amount of money I see poured into youth sports. I cannot believe there’s not somebody that’s doing the fitness testing, the standardized testing, the SATs for athleticism. I really want to be a part of this if somebody wants to do it. I don’t have the hustle to do it, but if somebody else has the time and hustle, I really want to be a part of that.
Sam Parr: What sports do you want your kids to be good at? Every parent has this.
Shaan Puri: This is a great question. There are two factors here. One is what are the sports that I love? Basketball. The second is what are the sports that I strategically would choose? For example, baseball is out. I’m out. My son, I don’t want him to know what a baseball glove looks like. I don’t even want him to see it. Why? Because he’s going to stand around for three hours. I’m going to sit around for three hours. Nothing’s going to happen. That is the worst sport for a kid to be in.
I just took my kids skiing. Great time. Not going to double down on skiing. Skiing is weather dependent, location dependent, equipment dependent, and you get injured.
Sam Parr: So dangerous, too.
Shaan Puri: Expensive, dangerous, impossible to access sport. I went skiing recently and I saw old people going down these hills and they go so fast. It’s crazy to me. I get it, families have fun together. It’s fine as a hobby, fine as a family vacation. I don’t want my kids to be doing it as a sport.
Soccer. My kids love soccer right now and I hate it. I want to get them out of it, but I can’t do it yet. They love it too much. But the idea of soccer where nobody scores—you can be amazing and you’re just not going to score. There’s so little reward in soccer. It’s crazy. I had a friend once whose parents sat him down when he was in seventh grade and they were like, “Look, the big four, we’re not doing it. You guys don’t have the raw athleticism to succeed at the higher levels of this. You want to play varsity, you want to play college, it’s not going to happen. May I interest you in water polo? May I interest you in these niche sports where you’re not going to compete against the best athletes?” I think there’s a strategic part to it, too. Of course, whatever my kids like, great. But I’m going to try to expose them to sports like tennis, which I think is a great sport for the mind and body. Tennis is one that we’re definitely going for. Basketball is another because I just know it so well and I had such a good experience that I can’t say no to that one.
Sam Parr: Tennis is ours. It’s one of the only sports where the men and women appear equal in terms of status, right? And you could play it forever.
Shaan Puri: You could play forever. The best athletes don’t go into it. Hard work is not super athleticism dependent. Hard work takes you a long way there. It’s an individual sport or it could be a team sport depending on how you want to do it. There’s a huge mental component to it, like controlling your own psyche and being competitive. There’s a feedback loop every single point that you have to recover from. I think there are a lot of good things that you get out of tennis. Also martial arts would be the other one that I think is pretty cool for kids to be in for a period of time.
Sam Parr: If I could wave a magic wand, my kids would be very interested in tennis. And then I want to do some type of individual fitness sport. That could be wrestling, martial arts, track and field, cross country, swimming—something where it’s just you versus a clock and it’s just totally objective and you just got to grit through it and dedicate a lot of time and just put in the hours.
Shaan Puri: Did you play team sports growing up as a kid?
Sam Parr: Yeah, and I was all right at it. I was never terribly—I mean you’ve seen me play sports. I’m not terribly coordinated, but I always had attributes where I could always jump and run and I was strong. But I was never good enough where I could catch a ball and learn the skill part. It was always very hard for me. I always looked like a giraffe. I was always like a dancing giraffe. I wasn’t very coordinated.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s it.
Sam Parr: That’s the pod.