In this episode of the My First Million podcast, hosts Sam Parr and Shaan Puri discuss the strategic value of asking for a raise, the mechanics of corporate compensation bands, and the importance of building a “monstrous” business. They also share personal anecdotes about their own entrepreneurial journeys, including the acquisition of local media companies and the development of unique business models like those of Zillow and Picasso.
Topics: Entrepreneurship, Salary Negotiation, Business Strategy, Corporate Compensation, Startup Growth, Real Estate, Media Acquisitions
The Appeal of the Hamptons [00:20]
Shaan Puri: Sam, where are you, dude? This looks awesome. You’re at like a pool, a backyard? You’re in the Hamptons. What’s going on?
Sam Parr: I spent the weekend at my in-laws’ house in the Hamptons, and I felt pretty sick yesterday, so I just stayed the night here. I didn’t feel well, but I feel fine now. But I’m in I’m in the Hamptons. It looks good, right?
Shaan Puri: I mean, it looks amazing. Yeah, it looks like what I I’ve never been to the Hamptons. Not even close. Never got an invite. I don’t even know anyone that lives in the Hamptons. So, let me let me tell you my opinion.
Sam Parr: I’m far away.
Shaan Puri: Okay, my opinion of the Hamptons, incredibly overrated. You want to know another thing that’s incredibly overrated? Central Park. Central Park, so overrated. Central Park and the Hamptons, both overrated. The Hamptons, not it’s not that pretty. It’s not that pretty at all. So, very overrated.
Sam Parr: So what’s the appeal? What what is good about it?
Shaan Puri: If you’re in New York, it’s only an hour an hour and a half away without traffic. So you can go to the beach there.
Sam Parr: So it’s a little bit like Sonoma or Napa. Like, I think those places are nice. They’re not the best. They’re kind of boring, as far as I can tell.
Shaan Puri: Napa is Napa and Sonoma are prettier than the Hamptons, without a doubt, in my opinion.
Sam Parr: Oh, okay. Interesting. And do you like do you feel different? You walk around, every car is like a Bentley or better?
Shaan Puri: Yes. You have to have a Range Rover to fit in. It’s crazy, man. I it’s not my style at all. It’s very it’s not it’s not even remotely my style.
Jake Paul vs. Tyron Woodley Fight [01:44]
Sam Parr: Um, did you see the Jake Paul, Paul and uh, Tyron Tyron Woodley fight last night?
Shaan Puri: Did I tell my wife I can’t help with the kids’ bedtime routine because I’m watching the Jake Paul fight? Yeah, I did that. And I watched that fight, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It was an amazing fight.
Sam Parr: I thought it was, um, a good fight. I thought Jake Paul, I had higher expectations.
Shaan Puri: The drama was there, right? I’m not talking about the technical boxing was great. I’m saying the drama was there. I didn’t know what was going to happen beforehand, and then every round, it still felt like anything could happen, which is what you want.
Sam Parr: The drama was so high. My my my anxiety level was equal to the best UFC fight. Like, uh, like the best grudge UFC fight. My like anxiety level was equal to it. I thought it was amazing. We had Jake Paul on the podcast. He, uh, was way different on the podcast than he was in, uh, like for the for this whole, uh, boxing thing. But anyway, it was a good fight.
Shaan Puri: I was going to tweet it out. I was like, “Hey, uh, congrats to to guest of episode 170 on your victory tonight.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, it it was it was a fun fight. I’m happy I got to watch it. It was more it was more intense than any as intense as any UFC fight I’ve ever seen. It was pretty badass. They’ve done an amazing job.
The Business of Pay-Per-View [02:57]
Shaan Puri: Well, let’s talk about it a little bit. Uh, so they, for for those who don’t know or kind of just roll your eyes at, oh, you’re watching Jake Paul and Jake Paul fight this guy, is this rigged? What’s the point of this? Isn’t he a YouTuber? Like, I got a lot of respect for what they did. I’m pretty impressed by this. I think that this move they did to go from YouTuber, Viner to YouTuber, and then YouTuber to basically one of the best business models you can do as a uh as a single person is basically sell pay-per-views. And uh, why is that, right? So like this fight, I wouldn’t be surprised if they sold a million pay-per-views. And so you sell a million pay-per-views at, you know, roughly 60 bucks a pay-per-view, you know, per pay-per-view. Um, you know, that’s $60 million. And then they partner up with Showtime to do that, to do that whole thing. And so, you know, they can make 10 million bucks in one hour doing this, right? In in basically a single event. And you you that’s totally different and and it grows their brand. Like this whole thing makes them more famous because ESPN is talking about it and Twitter is talking about it. Everybody’s talking about it. And uh they’re doing kind of like a hobby that they like, which is boxing, right? They train hard, so it’s not easy, but man, is it lucrative. So like pretty impressive jump from one platform to the next. And as a business person, I think they’re geniuses. I think they are, whether it’s intentional or unintentional, they are geniuses. Uh, the way that they approach this, the way that they promote these things, the way they leverage the brand, it’s genius.
The Courage of Amateur Fighting [04:21]
Sam Parr: Also, getting in a ring in front of a million people, getting in a ring in front of 50 people, it’s incredibly frightening. Now, to do it with someone who’s like, even though Woodley’s at the Yeah, he’s at the end of his career, he’s 40, he fucking kills people. Like he crushes people. Like he could he you definitely could die. I mean, it’s not likely, but you could. And that’s incredibly bold. And so Very likely you could get humiliated, knocked out, brutally by this guy, you know, in front of everybody.
Sam Parr: Yeah, 100%. And so I do think it’s incredibly courageous. Even though whether I agree or don’t agree with like a lot of the shit they do, it’s wild. I can’t believe they pulled this off. It’s wild. It’s incredibly wild. The crowd on TV, I’ve been to like three or four or five, I forget how many, UFC fights and I’ve been to some of the big ones at Madison Square Garden. The crowd on the TV, like on the at in Cleveland last night, felt the same as when I saw a UFC fight, like the same energy. It was pretty wild they built this.
Shaan Puri: They yeah, they they did it. They pulled it off. Um, I also went to uh a live MMA fight, a local one here in San Francisco.
Sam Parr: Where? In the uh the Dragon Den?
Shaan Puri: Dragon House, yeah.
Sam Parr: Amazing. You went to one? We went to one together. This weekend, I went to one. I’ve been to a bunch there. It’s badass, right? It’s way scarier than UFC. Way way more intense. So so we get cage side seats because they’re only 50 bucks, right? So like the you know, it’s not a huge stadium. It’s Caesar Stadium. It’s a very small place, but uh we went there, we get cage side seats for 50 bucks since COVID, you know, started. And they said like, “Oh, everybody’s got to be vaccinated.” They didn’t check anything at the door. So that was not so great. But I walk in and the crowd is just lit. I don’t know what they’re all Well, they’re all like super drunk. It’s it’s yeah.
Shaan Puri: So so I think there’s like four or five factors going in. So first of all, it’s their friends fighting, usually. So like there’s a whole in every fight, there’s at least like 20 people that are there because they’re friends with this person. Because these are amateur fights. These are people who by day, you know, they deliver for DoorDash or they like work in a, you know, consulting company or whatever. And then this is like a nighttime fight club thing for them where they just like decided, screw it, I’m going to try this. Um, because I get there early. I get there for the amateur fights before I find those way more interesting than the pro fights. And um, so first of all, there’s there’s 20 people that for that that’s their friend, that’s their brother, that’s their kid. I’m seeing moms just yelling like, “Kill him!” because it’s like their son in in the in the ring or whatever. Second thing is, um, it’s like people are drunk. Yeah, so people are drinking. There’s only like one concession stand. They’re wicked drunk there. One concession stand and it’s only beer. So like Well, they only sell they only sell beer and Costco pizza, right?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, exactly. Uh, so like beer and things that make you want beer. And then third thing is, um, I think so I think the third one would be I’m so used to like you’re in the Hamptons right now, dude. I I just hang out online on Tech Twitter and Crypto Twitter and like the group of people I normally hang out with are so nerdy and like they’re they’re just concerned about different things. The priorities are different. I went to this thing and everybody’s like super dressed up, like not like fancy, but they were dressed up like, I might I might meet someone here. Like this is like a club to them, right? Um, I just feel like everybody here was like more real people than the like kind of bubble that I usually live in. And so it was just different. It was like shocking. There was three fights that broke out in the crowd just after after a fight would be done, a fight would break out in the crowd. And I’m sitting there with my sister and my brother-in-law and we’re just hoping it doesn’t happen near us. And the last thing was COVID. Like COVID, I think has riled people up. Like when I came in, I was telling my brother-in-law, I was like, “Dude, this crowd is way better than the last time we came to Dragon House pre-COVID.” He goes, “Dude, people are ready to live.” He’s like, “People are just ready to get out.” And you could see it, dude. People were just like, I don’t know what I don’t know how the kids use the word lit, but people were lit at this event. This was the whole event was lit. It was insane.
Sam Parr: I love going to those. I’ve probably been to three of them. Were the Mongols there? I guess they weren’t there because uh they can’t travel. No. No. I’ve been there and there’s they have there’s like a large like contingency in Mongolians and and they have their family there. One there was one Mongolian fighter and he yeah, his crowd was like, his crew was pretty crazy. And then he fought this Irish dude and I I swear to God, it was like Conor McGregor came out. As soon as the guy comes out, it’s like, “Ole, ole, ole.” The whole crowd is chanting, “Ole.” I’m like, “Where did this huge Irish contingent come from?” He’s got a tattoo silhouette of Ireland on the side of his body. He gets in the ring and they had a crazy fight. And so it was it was a lot of fun, first of all. So if you have like a I don’t know if people I don’t know if it’s only for people who like UFC, but if you like UFC, which is like maybe 1% of our audience, go to a local show.
Shaan Puri: I bet it’s more. Go to a local show. I I I didn’t think it would be this good. It’s like amazing. It was like truly amazing. But it also made me feel like what is it about people who why would anybody sign up to do this? And then I know you are the type who you sign up to get punched in the face quite a bit. What’s the appeal and would you ever do this?
Sam Parr: Well, I signed up for a smoker. So what a smoker is is it’s uh amateur, so there’s no judges. And typically you can kind of have like in a like you can like say ahead of time like, “Hey, I’m new, you’re new.” Like you’re you you don’t actually at the fight that you went into, they’re going in with bad intentions, you know, they want to hurt you. With the the thing that I signed up for, sometimes like you’d be like, “Hey, let’s let’s get after it.” And you’ll try to knock people out and you might get knocked out, but it’s like not nearly as angry and you could like say, “Hey, we’re going too hard, let’s take it easy.” So I’ve signed up for one of those. It’s like a above a sparring session. It’s above a sparring session, but it’s not quite a real fight, or at least it doesn’t have to be. And I signed up for it because it makes me feel alive. It makes me feel, uh, like I feel soft when I just sit in front of the computer all day. It makes me feel good to survive getting beat up because I know that I’m not going to be stressed out about anything else that I’m going to do throughout the day. Because like when I stress out about like this podcast or if I get mad that our freaking internet wasn’t working really well, I’m like, “Dog, I just got my ass kicked.” Like like this like everything else is fine.
Shaan Puri: Exactly. I went skydiving once and we did it in the morning. It was like 8:00 in the morning. And so the rest of the day, like, you know, from 8:30 onward, skydiving only lasts like five minutes. Like you just you fall for 60 seconds and then you kind of float down gently for five minutes and then it’s over. But the rest of that day, I was like, I couldn’t be bothered by anything. I was like, “Dude, I jumped out of a plane this morning. You think I’m going to worry about this presentation I have or this person who didn’t call me back or this person who cut me in line?” Like, but I I flew. I was flying in the air this morning. And so it was like, if I could bottle that feeling up and have it more often, which it sounds like you get by by sparring, what what not, that’s pretty good. I also have been rewatching Breaking Bad. So, have you watched Breaking Bad like once?
Sam Parr: Yeah.
Shaan Puri: So I just I just started rewatching it. And uh it’s like enough years have gone by where I kind of forgot it. And that’s basically the premise of the show. The show is basically this guy lived kind of his whole life, you know, by the book and was like always like kind of just like worried about, you know, he didn’t want to offend anybody, he didn’t take much risk, blah, blah, blah. And then when he finds out that he’s got, you know, a few months to live, he starts doing this stuff initially to help his family. Like, how do I how do I provide my for my family if I pass away? I don’t want them to have nothing because I’m just a teacher, I didn’t save up too much money. And then once he starts to do it, it starts to feel good. He starts to feel alive. And so this has become kind of like a theme I’m thinking about. And like, if we want to tie this to business, I’ll I’ll force it here, which is there’s probably a whole set of products or experiences that just make somebody feel alive and they’re kind of counterintuitive. Like, why would you choose to get punched in the face? Why would you choose to take this risk and almost get caught by the cops? And then how do you bottle that up and package that in a product or service so that because I think a lot of people do want this feeling and once they get it, I think it’s very addictive.
The Value of “Small” Business [12:30]
Sam Parr: But I would say that that’s what you do with a lot of your investments, right? Like when I think about what you’re doing with an NFT or what you’re doing with crypto, to me, it’s a high adrenaline, high risk, uh type of thing, right?
Shaan Puri: Uh, kind of. I think you think I take more risk than I actually do, but uh but yeah, I I could see that. That’s definitely a piece of it. There’s a bit of the roller coaster that you get to go on, and a roller coaster is for a thrill seeker. But I just think in general, like, you know, we were in LA, I went to Disneyland. Why are there even roller coasters, right? Well, because people in 30 seconds, you can get that feeling like you might die and then you live. And that little package that thrills it taps into this thrill seeker part of people, and I I just feel like there’s probably more experiences that could be built that are like that. I think if you’re building in VR, for example, instead of trying to build a VR like kind of like Fantasy Land, I would build things in VR that make people feel a little bit afraid, a little bit scared, a little bit alive. I think a lot of video games try this, right? Like, that’s why a lot of video games are about shooting people and stuff like that because it’s it’s cool and it’s an escape and it’s something you can’t do in real life. So you get to like live vicariously through this. But I just think there’s a lot more that could be done.
The “Happiness” Study [13:39]
Sam Parr: So, instead of talking about fear, can I tell you something that I read recently that’s it’s about happiness? Can I tell you something that totally like kind of like I read something recently and the data seems pretty clear and it totally like goes against what we’ve been told previously. Can can I tell you about that?
Shaan Puri: So lay out lay out what we’ve been told and then what you saw.
Sam Parr: So the you know, there’s these like things that you see headlines. So one of these headlines is like, “The average American doesn’t have $500 in savings” or something like that. That’s that that’s that’s mostly bullshit by the way. That’s that’s a bullshit headline. But the other one was that after you make $75,000, your perceived happiness level doesn’t really go up significantly. And I read about that a while ago. We read about I mean, when did that come out, you think? Like in 2012 or something, 2013?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I feel like I’ve heard this kind of my whole professional life. So maybe at least 12, 15 years, something like that.
Sam Parr: I’ve always thought that that was bullshit. I’ve always thought that was bullshit.
Shaan Puri: It didn’t didn’t pass the sniff test for you.
Sam Parr: Not even a little bit. Not even a little bit. And so I came across this study, and so what these guys did was they got 40,000 people to install this app. And this app at random times would ask you like on they would ask you a bunch of questions, but it would be on a scale of like one to five or one to 10. I see you’re highlighting the app. You can click it and you can see it. It’s called Track Your Happiness.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and it’s pretty cool. It’s just a simple app. And what they did was they got 35, 40,000 people and they ranged they had all types of ranges and they asked people how they felt during different periods of the week, of the day, and they would track your income. And what they found is is that while it is true that after you get past a certain point, your happiness levels doesn’t necessarily uh go up in proportion, but what this study found is like up until like 500, 600, $700,000 a year, it it was definitely still going going up like Yeah, we can we can show this graphic. If if you’re watching on YouTube, we’ll put this graph on the screen. And it’s basically two lines. It’s your uh life satisfaction and your uh experienced well-being. And uh they’re both like from $15,000 of household income up to $500,000, they’re tracking like up into the right, just like a straight line. So the more income you were getting, the more sort of life satisfaction you were having um during at each step of those. It didn’t just plateau at 75,000 like the the old kind of like that quoted quoted study is.
Sam Parr: And it may, like the difference between 2 million and 3 million probably won’t be significant, but like according to this study, like the difference between 10 million and 1 million is significant and does impact your happiness. And that totally like kind of broke my frame, even though I always thought it would be true. I thought this study was actually really interesting. And there’s a few reason why a few reasons why basically the other one was nonsense was the first one was remembered feelings. So the $75,000 study, basically what they did was they asked people how they felt in the past. And that’s kind of bullshit because you always think that you remember uh things better than you actually did or like during during one period you’ll think it’s great and then you’ll say how you remembered it and you’ll think it or sorry, you’ll during the time you think it’s horrible, then you’ll look back and be like, “Oh, that was actually awesome.” Right. This actually asked you right then and there how you felt. The second thing was before it said, “Were you happier then or were you happier now?” And that’s kind of nonsense because there’s no variance. Like the variance is too low and like, you know, sometimes like it could be a lot I’m a little bit better and that matters. And so that’s what It’s too binary. It’s it’s just yes or no. There’s no like there’s no granularity.
Sam Parr: Yeah, so I don’t know. I thought this was interesting. I wanted to bring this up because that’s one of the it’s one of those studies that I always thought that people base like you read this headline and you believe this to be true and a lot of people probably make decisions based off of this. And I think it’s important to say, “No, that’s I think it’s bullshit and and you shouldn’t base your life on that data or that study.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I I like uh I love this topic by the way. I think it’s great. It’s sort of like myth busting of these like common things you hear. Like another one is like the 10,000 hour rule that got really popular because Malcolm Gladwell wrote this book called Outliers and he’s like, “Oh, you know, to be great at something, you got to spend 10,000 hours.” And uh and so then a lot of people run with that and it’s like, “Well, there’s obviously a bunch of caveats, but like the caveats get stripped away as the thing just gets kind of like turned into a fortune cookie tweet, right? It’s like 10,000 hours, that’s the rule.” And um and sure, there’s instances where somebody spends 10,000 hours and gets really great at something, but there’s definitely instances where it doesn’t take 10,000 hours to get great at something. I’ve had many of them in my life. And uh and so you want to like, I guess question a lot of these things that you’re told and try to figure out what what’s the truth and what’s the truth for me? What am I going to experience? What do I choose to believe? And so I’m with you on uh on looking into stuff like this. I also think this app is cool. This Track Your Happiness app. I’m going to actually use it. Where at my previous company, when I was running the Idea Lab, I was my first time uh like as CEO of like a larger group. We had like 20 something employees uh at that time and that was I was 25 years old. It was the most people I had ever managed. And I was like, “Okay, well, how do I manage people?” I was like, “Well, there’s all a bunch of books on this, but I created something pretty simple. I asked one of the programmers, uh I went to this guy Quinn, and he’s like this young hacker guy and I was basically like, “Hey Quinn, I would love to know I would love to just kind of like if I could go have a conversation with each person each day saying, “Hey, how are you feeling? Uh how’s it going?” I think I could be a better manager, but that would take way too much time and it would just also be like a full-on conversation with each person. I said, “Can you just set up a thing so that at the end of every like workday, so at like 4:30 p.m. or whatever, it just pings everybody individually in Slack and it just says, “Hey Sean, uh how you feeling today?” You know, one to 10. And uh what what’s your happiness right now?” And it would just I would basically do what this app does. And then they would put it in and then I had a dashboard as the manager, as the CEO, that would show me all these different people. And what I found was two things. The first is some people have a very narrow range of emotions that they feel. So like there was like our CTO was this uh British guy, Paul, and he’s like, he’s very kind of like stoic. He’s sort of like, you know, like British people sort of dry humor. And so like he never got too far too high up, too high down. Like he was always like a, you know, like a seven or an eight. He didn’t he never hit a 10, he never hit a five. He always stayed in that range. So I had to interpret his data differently because I was like, for this guy, his self-assessment of his own like kind of like happiness or well-being, his his range is different. So I can’t just say, “Oh, eight, you’re good.” Eight is actually great for him and a seven is actually quite bad for him. Whereas for other people who are like, you know, the hot mess folks, it’s like some days it’s a one and some days it’s a 10. And I had to interpret them differently. So that was the first observation. The second was when I would go and uh I I could I could ping them afterwards. I could just say, you know, it could basically ping them once they submit their score, it would say, “Cool, do you want to add a note on why?” And the reasons that affected people’s happiness were so different than what I would have expected. I thought people would be unhappy because, you know, they feel like underpaid or overworked or, you know, maybe the colleague sent something to them. It was always like the smallest shit. It’s like Like what? It’d be like, you know, it’d be something like, “Oh, you know, uh at lunch today, uh you know, I whatever. I you know, this table was full so I kind of had to go sit over there.” Or it’d be like, you know, at uh you know, we we’re working on this project. I really wanted to get more done, but I got a phone call, I got distracted. It’s like they were like some people were like real they some people got off on high output. And so their happiness was like, it’s like, “Oh yeah, we had to do that team meeting and so I didn’t get to go work on my project. I didn’t get to write enough code today.” Or it’d be like something really, really small. It’s like, “Yeah, I’m really dealing with this kind of like back pain, so this chair is really uncomfortable.” It was always things that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen. And so it brought those to the surface and then I could decide, is this something I could affect and like improve or do I just like at least I get a better understanding of them. So that was like one of the better products that we built. We probably should have productized it and made it an actual like work tool for other people to use.
The 15Five Story [22:43]
Sam Parr: Yeah, I used to use this thing called 15Five. You remember that company?
Shaan Puri: They’re doing pretty well, dude. I think they’re they’re pretty successful.
Sam Parr: I bet they I bet I would bet they are. So they kind of like went quiet for a little while and and typically that means it’s failing horribly or it’s actually quite large. Like it’s usually like one or the other. Uh and so it it was called 15Five and basically they would send you five the whole product, it was very simple and it’s probably thrived during COVID. But basically, they send you an email every day and it takes is it 15 questions that are five minutes to answer or it’s 15 minutes to answer five questions, one of those. And that’s all it is is they just send you an email at the end of the day and they say, “What did you get done today? How do you feel?”
Shaan Puri: Yep.
Sam Parr: And that’s all the product is. And I would imagine that it’s quite large, yeah.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I think it it raised that like $130 million valuation recently or something. So, you know, maybe that’s a little out of date, that’s 2019. So I bet it’s doing doing pretty well.
ESRI and Geographic Information Systems [23:59]
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you about a different uh a different company that I recently discovered. So it’s called ESRI. Have you ever heard of that?
Shaan Puri: No. Sounds like a government agency.
Sam Parr: Kinda. Okay, so ESRI. So basically, there’s this entire uh sector, this entire industry that needs important map information. If you scroll all the way down to where it says felt, you’ll see where I am. But basically, the idea here is um there’s this company called ESRI. It was started in the 1960s. It’s 100% owned by this one guy and his brother. So 100% owned by the same family. No debt, they never taken any outside funding. You can’t find anything about it. It does over a billion dollars a year in subscription revenue. And basically what it does is It’s subscription revenue, nice.
Sam Parr: Yes. Um, it’s software. It’s a soft I guess it I guess you could call it information, but probably at this point, software. Because it started in the 60s. So at the time it was basically information, but what it what it does is very simple. So 20,000 plus cities use it. So most cities, most like reasonably sized cities in America use it. Most states use it, most Fortune 500 companies use it. And what it does is they have loads of um of information on maps. And so if you’re a government and you want to build new gas new new pipes or something like that in your city, you’re going to take their data and you could also give them more data and they’re going to give you an interactive map that you can use to figure out where the other pipes are and you’re going to be able to build this this this pretty complex system that you can continually use year over year that’s going to show where your pipes are. It’s called Geographic Information System. You never heard of you never heard of that term?
Shaan Puri: GIS. Yeah, I’ve heard that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I thought for sure you would have heard of that. So, um, it’s almost like uh Google Maps on steroids. So in the same way that Apple, or sorry, the same way that It’s like B2B. It’s like B2B Google Maps.
Sam Parr: Yes, in the same way Uber uses one of the Apple or either uh uh Google Maps, this is what like the city of like the Hamptons would use when they’re building new roads and when they’re building new electricities. Now, the the there’s a few reasons why this is interesting. One, it’s one of the most complex and one of the most interesting family-owned businesses I’ve ever seen. Total monopoly. So, in the way that they got their monopoly is they go into colleges and so they work with engineering students. They’ve worked really hard on making sure all the colleges they give their software to for free, so the engineering students start using it at a very young age and they’re used to it. Then when they graduate, they go, “Oh yeah, let’s just use ESRI.” And so they know exactly what they’re doing. And it has a total moat also because selling to a government is impossibly hard. It’s incredibly difficult. Why? Because when you’re a government, you want to make sure that the vendor that you’re using takes 100% responsibility if something effs up. And so when you’re like signing up for if you’re a government employee, if you’re working at a Fortune 500 employee, you want cover your ass insurance. You know, you want a company that’s like well-known and like not new and like they’re going to take responsibility if something bad happens. That’s ESRI. Crazy fascinating company. But I’m curious about which businesses are going to because whenever you see something old, you know, from the 1960s, that’s a software company, you think, “Well, like surely they’re like, you know, you can’t crush it forever.” Also, the founder of this company, ESRI, he’s probably worth $10 billion at this point. I think he’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works.
Shaan Puri: Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this Never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother.
Sam Parr: Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome.
Shaan Puri: No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating.
The “Felt” Opportunity [27:46]
Shaan Puri: Yeah, this is cool. I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that um anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more actionable like data and insights from that.
Sam Parr: Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
Shaan Puri: The name of what company?
Sam Parr: Oh, that No. He told me. Am I saying it wrong?
Shaan Puri: I I Is it a French Have you heard of the philosopher uh what’s the Yeah, what’s the French philosopher’s name? Rene Descartes?
Sam Parr: Maybe. Maybe that’s what it is.
Shaan Puri: What did you call it?
Sam Parr: Descartes. It’s it’s Descartes, yeah. It’s Descartes. It’s like it’s like the I don’t I forget. Uh Rene Descartes. Is he the guy who said, “I think, therefore I am?” Uh, anyway, it’s That’s Well, I think therefore uh I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don’t even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” All my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to-do lists and stuff like that. And this guy’s basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were, I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Uh because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
Sam Parr: Um, you want me to keep going or you want one?
Shaan Puri: No, do one.
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Huizenga. I love Wayne Huizenga. I read his book. I believe it’s called uh Building Blockbuster. So there’s this guy named Wayne Huizenga. Where All right, now I’m going to sound uncultured. Is he from I always get it confused. Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch. Are they all the same thing?
Shaan Puri: Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I’m not sure.
Sam Parr: Dude, I don’t know. I’m sounding uncultured. I I’m sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Huizenga say?
Shaan Puri: So he’s of Dutch descent. We’ll go with that. Of Dutch descent. Came to the United States from from the Netherlands. All right, good.
Sam Parr: All right. So he’s born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army, and when he was in his 20s, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door throwing away your trash. And eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these uh this this business is incredibly um there’s all there’s loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, “Well, fuck, I’m just going to buy all of them.” And so he starts buying a shit ton of them. Something like two or three uh a week. Um and his business eventually be called is become Waste Management. Today, it’s got a $64 billion market cap. It’s uh the biggest waste removal uh company in the country and it’s incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business and you think, “All right, so uh that’s great. Go and chill.” Next, when he was still in his 50s, I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 19 uh 87. He uh bought he he found one Blockbuster, it was one Blockbuster store. He bought it uh with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later. So this guy’s like a financial arbitrage machine. So he’s like he’s really good at raising money and deploying capital. And so he raises this money and so Blockbuster after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores, and then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in revenue and 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about uh eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it’s pretty crazy. And if you would have invested 25,000 and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 in into uh Blockbuster when it went public in uh in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he he’s he’s got a good track record. So He also started something else, right? He also started automation. Yeah, so Yeah, so the guy All right, so he’s in waste management, he’s in Blockbuster. At this point, he’s in his 60s, you think, “All right, now you’re just going to chill.” Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it’s the largest seller of used cars in America. So he went from waste management to Blockbuster to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he’s also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of uh Extended Stay America? I believe now it’s owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended Stay of America? So basically, they’ve got they’ve got something like 5, 6, 700 uh motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like uh a handful of or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the ’90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. And I think he bought another Florida uh what’s the Florida football team? Wait, so that’s the Dolphins and then he bought the the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Uh pretty amazing. Is this and and and so I always was amazed at this guy and um the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here’s a few things what here’s a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about where his philosophy. The first, “We made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who was already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I’d hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth.” The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easier to go out to a certain market and just buy uh buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, “Okay, let’s do this on our own.” And that’s what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but and they grew on their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There’s another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He’s uh he’s worth like five or $10 billion at this point. He’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this He never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother. Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating. Yeah, this is cool. I I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that um anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more actionable like data and insights from that.
Sam Parr: Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
Shaan Puri: The name of what company?
Sam Parr: Oh, that No. He told me. Am I saying it wrong?
Shaan Puri: I I Is it a French Have you heard of the philosopher uh what’s the Yeah, what’s the French philosopher’s name? Rene Descartes?
Sam Parr: Maybe. Maybe that’s what it is.
Shaan Puri: What did you call it?
Sam Parr: Descartes. It’s it’s Descartes, yeah. It’s Descartes. It’s like it’s like the I don’t I forget. Uh Rene Descartes. Is he the guy who said, “I think, therefore I am?” Uh, anyway, it’s That’s Well, I think therefore uh I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don’t even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” All my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to-do lists and stuff like that. And this guy’s basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were, I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Uh because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
Sam Parr: Um, you want me to keep going or you want one?
Shaan Puri: No, do one.
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Huizenga. I love Wayne Huizenga. I read his book. I believe it’s called uh Building Blockbuster. So there’s this guy named Wayne Huizenga. Where All right, now I’m going to sound uncultured. Is he from I always get it confused. Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch. Are they all the same thing?
Shaan Puri: Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I’m not sure.
Sam Parr: Dude, I don’t know. I’m sounding uncultured. I I’m sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Huizenga say?
Shaan Puri: So he’s of Dutch descent. We’ll go with that. Of Dutch descent. Came to the United States from from the Netherlands. All right, good.
Sam Parr: All right. So he’s born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army, and when he was in his 20s, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door throwing away your trash. And eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these uh this this business is incredibly um there’s all there’s loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, “Well, fuck, I’m just going to buy all of them.” And so he starts buying a shit ton of them. Something like two or three uh a week. Um and his business eventually be called is become Waste Management. Today, it’s got a $64 billion market cap. It’s uh the biggest waste removal uh company in the country and it’s incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business and you think, “All right, so uh that’s great. Go and chill.” Next, when he was still in his 50s, I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 19 uh 87. He uh bought he he found one Blockbuster, it was one Blockbuster store. He bought it uh with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later. So this guy’s like a financial arbitrage machine. So he’s like he’s really good at raising money and deploying capital. And so he raises this money and so Blockbuster after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores, and then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in revenue and 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about uh eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it’s pretty crazy. And if you would have invested 25,000 and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 in into uh Blockbuster when it went public in uh in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he he’s he’s got a good track record. So He also started something else, right? He also started automation. Yeah, so Yeah, so the guy All right, so he’s in waste management, he’s in Blockbuster. At this point, he’s in his 60s, you think, “All right, now you’re just going to chill.” Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it’s the largest seller of used cars in America. So he went from waste management to Blockbuster to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he’s also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of uh Extended Stay America? I believe now it’s owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended Stay of America? So basically, they’ve got they’ve got something like 5, 6, 700 uh motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like uh a handful of or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the ’90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. And I think he bought another Florida uh what’s the Florida football team? Wait, so that’s the Dolphins and then he bought the the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Uh pretty amazing. Is this and and and so I always was amazed at this guy and um the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here’s a few things what here’s a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about where his philosophy. The first, “We made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who was already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I’d hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth.” The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easier to go out to a certain market and just buy uh buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, “Okay, let’s do this on our own.” And that’s what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but and they grew on their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There’s another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He’s uh he’s worth like five or $10 billion at this point. He’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this He never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother. Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating. Yeah, this is cool. I I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that um anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more actionable like data and insights from that.
Sam Parr: Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
Shaan Puri: The name of what company?
Sam Parr: Oh, that No. He told me. Am I saying it wrong?
Shaan Puri: I I Is it a French Have you heard of the philosopher uh what’s the Yeah, what’s the French philosopher’s name? Rene Descartes?
Sam Parr: Maybe. Maybe that’s what it is.
Shaan Puri: What did you call it?
Sam Parr: Descartes. It’s it’s Descartes, yeah. It’s Descartes. It’s like it’s like the I don’t I forget. Uh Rene Descartes. Is he the guy who said, “I think, therefore I am?” Uh, anyway, it’s That’s Well, I think therefore uh I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don’t even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” All my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to-do lists and stuff like that. And this guy’s basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were, I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Uh because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
Sam Parr: Um, you want me to keep going or you want one?
Shaan Puri: No, do one.
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Huizenga. I love Wayne Huizenga. I read his book. I believe it’s called uh Building Blockbuster. So there’s this guy named Wayne Huizenga. Where All right, now I’m going to sound uncultured. Is he from I always get it confused. Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch. Are they all the same thing?
Shaan Puri: Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I’m not sure.
Sam Parr: Dude, I don’t know. I’m sounding uncultured. I I’m sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Huizenga say?
Shaan Puri: So he’s of Dutch descent. We’ll go with that. Of Dutch descent. Came to the United States from from the Netherlands. All right, good.
Sam Parr: All right. So he’s born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army, and when he was in his 20s, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door throwing away your trash. And eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these uh this this business is incredibly um there’s all there’s loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, “Well, fuck, I’m just going to buy all of them.” And so he starts buying a shit ton of them. Something like two or three uh a week. Um and his business eventually be called is become Waste Management. Today, it’s got a $64 billion market cap. It’s uh the biggest waste removal uh company in the country and it’s incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business and you think, “All right, so uh that’s great. Go and chill.” Next, when he was still in his 50s, I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 19 uh 87. He uh bought he he found one Blockbuster, it was one Blockbuster store. He bought it uh with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later. So this guy’s like a financial arbitrage machine. So he’s like he’s really good at raising money and deploying capital. And so he raises this money and so Blockbuster after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores, and then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in revenue and 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about uh eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it’s pretty crazy. And if you would have invested 25,000 and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 in into uh Blockbuster when it went public in uh in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he he’s he’s got a good track record. So He also started something else, right? He also started automation. Yeah, so Yeah, so the guy All right, so he’s in waste management, he’s in Blockbuster. At this point, he’s in his 60s, you think, “All right, now you’re just going to chill.” Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it’s the largest seller of used cars in America. So he went from waste management to Blockbuster to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he’s also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of uh Extended Stay America? I believe now it’s owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended Stay of America? So basically, they’ve got they’ve got something like 5, 6, 700 uh motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like uh a handful of or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the ’90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. And I think he bought another Florida uh what’s the Florida football team? Wait, so that’s the Dolphins and then he bought the the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Uh pretty amazing. Is this and and and so I always was amazed at this guy and um the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here’s a few things what here’s a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about where his philosophy. The first, “We made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who was already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I’d hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth.” The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easier to go out to a certain market and just buy uh buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, “Okay, let’s do this on our own.” And that’s what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but and they grew on their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There’s another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He’s uh he’s worth like five or $10 billion at this point. He’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this He never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother. Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating. Yeah, this is cool. I I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that um anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more actionable like data and insights from that.
Sam Parr: Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
Shaan Puri: The name of what company?
Sam Parr: Oh, that No. He told me. Am I saying it wrong?
Shaan Puri: I I Is it a French Have you heard of the philosopher uh what’s the Yeah, what’s the French philosopher’s name? Rene Descartes?
Sam Parr: Maybe. Maybe that’s what it is.
Shaan Puri: What did you call it?
Sam Parr: Descartes. It’s it’s Descartes, yeah. It’s Descartes. It’s like it’s like the I don’t I forget. Uh Rene Descartes. Is he the guy who said, “I think, therefore I am?” Uh, anyway, it’s That’s Well, I think therefore uh I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don’t even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” All my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to-do lists and stuff like that. And this guy’s basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were, I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Uh because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
Sam Parr: Um, you want me to keep going or you want one?
Shaan Puri: No, do one.
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Huizenga. I love Wayne Huizenga. I read his book. I believe it’s called uh Building Blockbuster. So there’s this guy named Wayne Huizenga. Where All right, now I’m going to sound uncultured. Is he from I always get it confused. Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch. Are they all the same thing?
Shaan Puri: Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I’m not sure.
Sam Parr: Dude, I don’t know. I’m sounding uncultured. I I’m sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Huizenga say?
Shaan Puri: So he’s of Dutch descent. We’ll go with that. Of Dutch descent. Came to the United States from from the Netherlands. All right, good.
Sam Parr: All right. So he’s born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army, and when he was in his 20s, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door throwing away your trash. And eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these uh this this business is incredibly um there’s all there’s loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, “Well, fuck, I’m just going to buy all of them.” And so he starts buying a shit ton of them. Something like two or three uh a week. Um and his business eventually be called is become Waste Management. Today, it’s got a $64 billion market cap. It’s uh the biggest waste removal uh company in the country and it’s incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business and you think, “All right, so uh that’s great. Go and chill.” Next, when he was still in his 50s, I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 19 uh 87. He uh bought he he found one Blockbuster, it was one Blockbuster store. He bought it uh with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later. So this guy’s like a financial arbitrage machine. So he’s like he’s really good at raising money and deploying capital. And so he raises this money and so Blockbuster after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores, and then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in revenue and 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about uh eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it’s pretty crazy. And if you would have invested 25,000 and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 in into uh Blockbuster when it went public in uh in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he he’s he’s got a good track record. So He also started something else, right? He also started automation. Yeah, so Yeah, so the guy All right, so he’s in waste management, he’s in Blockbuster. At this point, he’s in his 60s, you think, “All right, now you’re just going to chill.” Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it’s the largest seller of used cars in America. So he went from waste management to Blockbuster to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he’s also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of uh Extended Stay America? I believe now it’s owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended Stay of America? So basically, they’ve got they’ve got something like 5, 6, 700 uh motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like uh a handful of or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the ’90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. And I think he bought another Florida uh what’s the Florida football team? Wait, so that’s the Dolphins and then he bought the the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Uh pretty amazing. Is this and and and so I always was amazed at this guy and um the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here’s a few things what here’s a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about where his philosophy. The first, “We made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who was already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I’d hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth.” The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easier to go out to a certain market and just buy uh buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, “Okay, let’s do this on our own.” And that’s what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but and they grew on their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There’s another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He’s uh he’s worth like five or $10 billion at this point. He’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this He never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother. Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating. Yeah, this is cool. I I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that um anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more actionable like data and insights from that.
Sam Parr: Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
Shaan Puri: The name of what company?
Sam Parr: Oh, that No. He told me. Am I saying it wrong?
Shaan Puri: I I Is it a French Have you heard of the philosopher uh what’s the Yeah, what’s the French philosopher’s name? Rene Descartes?
Sam Parr: Maybe. Maybe that’s what it is.
Shaan Puri: What did you call it?
Sam Parr: Descartes. It’s it’s Descartes, yeah. It’s Descartes. It’s like it’s like the I don’t I forget. Uh Rene Descartes. Is he the guy who said, “I think, therefore I am?” Uh, anyway, it’s That’s Well, I think therefore uh I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don’t even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” All my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to-do lists and stuff like that. And this guy’s basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were, I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Uh because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
Sam Parr: Um, you want me to keep going or you want one?
Shaan Puri: No, do one.
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Huizenga. I love Wayne Huizenga. I read his book. I believe it’s called uh Building Blockbuster. So there’s this guy named Wayne Huizenga. Where All right, now I’m going to sound uncultured. Is he from I always get it confused. Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch. Are they all the same thing?
Shaan Puri: Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I’m not sure.
Sam Parr: Dude, I don’t know. I’m sounding uncultured. I I’m sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Huizenga say?
Shaan Puri: So he’s of Dutch descent. We’ll go with that. Of Dutch descent. Came to the United States from from the Netherlands. All right, good.
Sam Parr: All right. So he’s born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army, and when he was in his 20s, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door throwing away your trash. And eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these uh this this business is incredibly um there’s all there’s loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, “Well, fuck, I’m just going to buy all of them.” And so he starts buying a shit ton of them. Something like two or three uh a week. Um and his business eventually be called is become Waste Management. Today, it’s got a $64 billion market cap. It’s uh the biggest waste removal uh company in the country and it’s incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business and you think, “All right, so uh that’s great. Go and chill.” Next, when he was still in his 50s, I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 19 uh 87. He uh bought he he found one Blockbuster, it was one Blockbuster store. He bought it uh with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later. So this guy’s like a financial arbitrage machine. So he’s like he’s really good at raising money and deploying capital. And so he raises this money and so Blockbuster after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores, and then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in revenue and 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about uh eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it’s pretty crazy. And if you would have invested 25,000 and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 in into uh Blockbuster when it went public in uh in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he he’s he’s got a good track record. So He also started something else, right? He also started automation. Yeah, so Yeah, so the guy All right, so he’s in waste management, he’s in Blockbuster. At this point, he’s in his 60s, you think, “All right, now you’re just going to chill.” Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it’s the largest seller of used cars in America. So he went from waste management to Blockbuster to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he’s also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of uh Extended Stay America? I believe now it’s owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended Stay of America? So basically, they’ve got they’ve got something like 5, 6, 700 uh motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like uh a handful of or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the ’90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. And I think he bought another Florida uh what’s the Florida football team? Wait, so that’s the Dolphins and then he bought the the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Uh pretty amazing. Is this and and and so I always was amazed at this guy and um the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here’s a few things what here’s a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about where his philosophy. The first, “We made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who was already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I’d hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth.” The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easier to go out to a certain market and just buy uh buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, “Okay, let’s do this on our own.” And that’s what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but and they grew on their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There’s another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He’s uh he’s worth like five or $10 billion at this point. He’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this He never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother. Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating. Yeah, this is cool. I I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that um anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more actionable like data and insights from that.
Sam Parr: Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
Shaan Puri: The name of what company?
Sam Parr: Oh, that No. He told me. Am I saying it wrong?
Shaan Puri: I I Is it a French Have you heard of the philosopher uh what’s the Yeah, what’s the French philosopher’s name? Rene Descartes?
Sam Parr: Maybe. Maybe that’s what it is.
Shaan Puri: What did you call it?
Sam Parr: Descartes. It’s it’s Descartes, yeah. It’s Descartes. It’s like it’s like the I don’t I forget. Uh Rene Descartes. Is he the guy who said, “I think, therefore I am?” Uh, anyway, it’s That’s Well, I think therefore uh I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don’t even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” All my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to-do lists and stuff like that. And this guy’s basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were, I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Uh because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
Sam Parr: Um, you want me to keep going or you want one?
Shaan Puri: No, do one.
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Huizenga. I love Wayne Huizenga. I read his book. I believe it’s called uh Building Blockbuster. So there’s this guy named Wayne Huizenga. Where All right, now I’m going to sound uncultured. Is he from I always get it confused. Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch. Are they all the same thing?
Shaan Puri: Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I’m not sure.
Sam Parr: Dude, I don’t know. I’m sounding uncultured. I I’m sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Huizenga say?
Shaan Puri: So he’s of Dutch descent. We’ll go with that. Of Dutch descent. Came to the United States from from the Netherlands. All right, good.
Sam Parr: All right. So he’s born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army, and when he was in his 20s, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door throwing away your trash. And eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these uh this this business is incredibly um there’s all there’s loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, “Well, fuck, I’m just going to buy all of them.” And so he starts buying a shit ton of them. Something like two or three uh a week. Um and his business eventually be called is become Waste Management. Today, it’s got a $64 billion market cap. It’s uh the biggest waste removal uh company in the country and it’s incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business and you think, “All right, so uh that’s great. Go and chill.” Next, when he was still in his 50s, I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 19 uh 87. He uh bought he he found one Blockbuster, it was one Blockbuster store. He bought it uh with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later. So this guy’s like a financial arbitrage machine. So he’s like he’s really good at raising money and deploying capital. And so he raises this money and so Blockbuster after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores, and then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in revenue and 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about uh eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it’s pretty crazy. And if you would have invested 25,000 and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 in into uh Blockbuster when it went public in uh in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he he’s he’s got a good track record. So He also started something else, right? He also started automation. Yeah, so Yeah, so the guy All right, so he’s in waste management, he’s in Blockbuster. At this point, he’s in his 60s, you think, “All right, now you’re just going to chill.” Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it’s the largest seller of used cars in America. So he went from waste management to Blockbuster to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he’s also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of uh Extended Stay America? I believe now it’s owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended Stay of America? So basically, they’ve got they’ve got something like 5, 6, 700 uh motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like uh a handful of or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the ’90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. And I think he bought another Florida uh what’s the Florida football team? Wait, so that’s the Dolphins and then he bought the the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Uh pretty amazing. Is this and and and so I always was amazed at this guy and um the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here’s a few things what here’s a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about where his philosophy. The first, “We made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who was already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I’d hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth.” The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easier to go out to a certain market and just buy uh buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, “Okay, let’s do this on our own.” And that’s what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but and they grew on their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There’s another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He’s uh he’s worth like five or $10 billion at this point. He’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this He never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother. Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating. Yeah, this is cool. I I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that um anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more actionable like data and insights from that.
Sam Parr: Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
Shaan Puri: The name of what company?
Sam Parr: Oh, that No. He told me. Am I saying it wrong?
Shaan Puri: I I Is it a French Have you heard of the philosopher uh what’s the Yeah, what’s the French philosopher’s name? Rene Descartes?
Sam Parr: Maybe. Maybe that’s what it is.
Shaan Puri: What did you call it?
Sam Parr: Descartes. It’s it’s Descartes, yeah. It’s Descartes. It’s like it’s like the I don’t I forget. Uh Rene Descartes. Is he the guy who said, “I think, therefore I am?” Uh, anyway, it’s That’s Well, I think therefore uh I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don’t even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” All my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to-do lists and stuff like that. And this guy’s basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were, I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Uh because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
Sam Parr: Um, you want me to keep going or you want one?
Shaan Puri: No, do one.
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Huizenga. I love Wayne Huizenga. I read his book. I believe it’s called uh Building Blockbuster. So there’s this guy named Wayne Huizenga. Where All right, now I’m going to sound uncultured. Is he from I always get it confused. Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch. Are they all the same thing?
Shaan Puri: Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I’m not sure.
Sam Parr: Dude, I don’t know. I’m sounding uncultured. I I’m sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Huizenga say?
Shaan Puri: So he’s of Dutch descent. We’ll go with that. Of Dutch descent. Came to the United States from from the Netherlands. All right, good.
Sam Parr: All right. So he’s born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army, and when he was in his 20s, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door throwing away your trash. And eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these uh this this business is incredibly um there’s all there’s loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, “Well, fuck, I’m just going to buy all of them.” And so he starts buying a shit ton of them. Something like two or three uh a week. Um and his business eventually be called is become Waste Management. Today, it’s got a $64 billion market cap. It’s uh the biggest waste removal uh company in the country and it’s incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business and you think, “All right, so uh that’s great. Go and chill.” Next, when he was still in his 50s, I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 19 uh 87. He uh bought he he found one Blockbuster, it was one Blockbuster store. He bought it uh with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later. So this guy’s like a financial arbitrage machine. So he’s like he’s really good at raising money and deploying capital. And so he raises this money and so Blockbuster after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores, and then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in revenue and 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about uh eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it’s pretty crazy. And if you would have invested 25,000 and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 in into uh Blockbuster when it went public in uh in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he he’s he’s got a good track record. So He also started something else, right? He also started automation. Yeah, so Yeah, so the guy All right, so he’s in waste management, he’s in Blockbuster. At this point, he’s in his 60s, you think, “All right, now you’re just going to chill.” Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it’s the largest seller of used cars in America. So he went from waste management to Blockbuster to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he’s also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of uh Extended Stay America? I believe now it’s owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended Stay of America? So basically, they’ve got they’ve got something like 5, 6, 700 uh motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like uh a handful of or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the ’90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. And I think he bought another Florida uh what’s the Florida football team? Wait, so that’s the Dolphins and then he bought the the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Uh pretty amazing. Is this and and and so I always was amazed at this guy and um the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here’s a few things what here’s a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about where his philosophy. The first, “We made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who was already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I’d hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth.” The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easier to go out to a certain market and just buy uh buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, “Okay, let’s do this on our own.” And that’s what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but and they grew on their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There’s another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He’s uh he’s worth like five or $10 billion at this point. He’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this He never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother. Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating. Yeah, this is cool. I I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that um anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more actionable like data and insights from that.
Sam Parr: Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
Shaan Puri: The name of what company?
Sam Parr: Oh, that No. He told me. Am I saying it wrong?
Shaan Puri: I I Is it a French Have you heard of the philosopher uh what’s the Yeah, what’s the French philosopher’s name? Rene Descartes?
Sam Parr: Maybe. Maybe that’s what it is.
Shaan Puri: What did you call it?
Sam Parr: Descartes. It’s it’s Descartes, yeah. It’s Descartes. It’s like it’s like the I don’t I forget. Uh Rene Descartes. Is he the guy who said, “I think, therefore I am?” Uh, anyway, it’s That’s Well, I think therefore uh I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don’t even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” All my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to-do lists and stuff like that. And this guy’s basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were, I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Uh because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
Sam Parr: Um, you want me to keep going or you want one?
Shaan Puri: No, do one.
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Huizenga. I love Wayne Huizenga. I read his book. I believe it’s called uh Building Blockbuster. So there’s this guy named Wayne Huizenga. Where All right, now I’m going to sound uncultured. Is he from I always get it confused. Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch. Are they all the same thing?
Shaan Puri: Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I’m not sure.
Sam Parr: Dude, I don’t know. I’m sounding uncultured. I I’m sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Huizenga say?
Shaan Puri: So he’s of Dutch descent. We’ll go with that. Of Dutch descent. Came to the United States from from the Netherlands. All right, good.
Sam Parr: All right. So he’s born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army, and when he was in his 20s, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door throwing away your trash. And eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these uh this this business is incredibly um there’s all there’s loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, “Well, fuck, I’m just going to buy all of them.” And so he starts buying a shit ton of them. Something like two or three uh a week. Um and his business eventually be called is become Waste Management. Today, it’s got a $64 billion market cap. It’s uh the biggest waste removal uh company in the country and it’s incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business and you think, “All right, so uh that’s great. Go and chill.” Next, when he was still in his 50s, I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 19 uh 87. He uh bought he he found one Blockbuster, it was one Blockbuster store. He bought it uh with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later. So this guy’s like a financial arbitrage machine. So he’s like he’s really good at raising money and deploying capital. And so he raises this money and so Blockbuster after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores, and then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in revenue and 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about uh eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it’s pretty crazy. And if you would have invested 25,000 and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 in into uh Blockbuster when it went public in uh in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he he’s he’s got a good track record. So He also started something else, right? He also started automation. Yeah, so Yeah, so the guy All right, so he’s in waste management, he’s in Blockbuster. At this point, he’s in his 60s, you think, “All right, now you’re just going to chill.” Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it’s the largest seller of used cars in America. So he went from waste management to Blockbuster to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he’s also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of uh Extended Stay America? I believe now it’s owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended Stay of America? So basically, they’ve got they’ve got something like 5, 6, 700 uh motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like uh a handful of or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the ’90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. And I think he bought another Florida uh what’s the Florida football team? Wait, so that’s the Dolphins and then he bought the the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Uh pretty amazing. Is this and and and so I always was amazed at this guy and um the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here’s a few things what here’s a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about where his philosophy. The first, “We made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who was already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I’d hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth.” The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easier to go out to a certain market and just buy uh buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, “Okay, let’s do this on our own.” And that’s what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but and they grew on their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There’s another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He’s uh he’s worth like five or $10 billion at this point. He’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this He never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother. Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating. Yeah, this is cool. I I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that um anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more actionable like data and insights from that.
Sam Parr: Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
Shaan Puri: The name of what company?
Sam Parr: Oh, that No. He told me. Am I saying it wrong?
Shaan Puri: I I Is it a French Have you heard of the philosopher uh what’s the Yeah, what’s the French philosopher’s name? Rene Descartes?
Sam Parr: Maybe. Maybe that’s what it is.
Shaan Puri: What did you call it?
Sam Parr: Descartes. It’s it’s Descartes, yeah. It’s Descartes. It’s like it’s like the I don’t I forget. Uh Rene Descartes. Is he the guy who said, “I think, therefore I am?” Uh, anyway, it’s That’s Well, I think therefore uh I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don’t even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” All my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to-do lists and stuff like that. And this guy’s basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were, I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Uh because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
Sam Parr: Um, you want me to keep going or you want one?
Shaan Puri: No, do one.
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Huizenga. I love Wayne Huizenga. I read his book. I believe it’s called uh Building Blockbuster. So there’s this guy named Wayne Huizenga. Where All right, now I’m going to sound uncultured. Is he from I always get it confused. Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch. Are they all the same thing?
Shaan Puri: Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I’m not sure.
Sam Parr: Dude, I don’t know. I’m sounding uncultured. I I’m sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Huizenga say?
Shaan Puri: So he’s of Dutch descent. We’ll go with that. Of Dutch descent. Came to the United States from from the Netherlands. All right, good.
Sam Parr: All right. So he’s born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army, and when he was in his 20s, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door throwing away your trash. And eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these uh this this business is incredibly um there’s all there’s loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, “Well, fuck, I’m just going to buy all of them.” And so he starts buying a shit ton of them. Something like two or three uh a week. Um and his business eventually be called is become Waste Management. Today, it’s got a $64 billion market cap. It’s uh the biggest waste removal uh company in the country and it’s incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business and you think, “All right, so uh that’s great. Go and chill.” Next, when he was still in his 50s, I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 19 uh 87. He uh bought he he found one Blockbuster, it was one Blockbuster store. He bought it uh with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later. So this guy’s like a financial arbitrage machine. So he’s like he’s really good at raising money and deploying capital. And so he raises this money and so Blockbuster after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores, and then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in revenue and 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about uh eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it’s pretty crazy. And if you would have invested 25,000 and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 in into uh Blockbuster when it went public in uh in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he he’s he’s got a good track record. So He also started something else, right? He also started automation. Yeah, so Yeah, so the guy All right, so he’s in waste management, he’s in Blockbuster. At this point, he’s in his 60s, you think, “All right, now you’re just going to chill.” Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it’s the largest seller of used cars in America. So he went from waste management to Blockbuster to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he’s also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of uh Extended Stay America? I believe now it’s owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended Stay of America? So basically, they’ve got they’ve got something like 5, 6, 700 uh motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like uh a handful of or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the ’90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. And I think he bought another Florida uh what’s the Florida football team? Wait, so that’s the Dolphins and then he bought the the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Uh pretty amazing. Is this and and and so I always was amazed at this guy and um the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here’s a few things what here’s a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about where his philosophy. The first, “We made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who was already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I’d hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth.” The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easier to go out to a certain market and just buy uh buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, “Okay, let’s do this on our own.” And that’s what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but and they grew on their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There’s another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He’s uh he’s worth like five or $10 billion at this point. He’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this He never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother. Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating. Yeah, this is cool. I I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that um anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more actionable like data and insights from that.
Sam Parr: Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
Shaan Puri: The name of what company?
Sam Parr: Oh, that No. He told me. Am I saying it wrong?
Shaan Puri: I I Is it a French Have you heard of the philosopher uh what’s the Yeah, what’s the French philosopher’s name? Rene Descartes?
Sam Parr: Maybe. Maybe that’s what it is.
Shaan Puri: What did you call it?
Sam Parr: Descartes. It’s it’s Descartes, yeah. It’s Descartes. It’s like it’s like the I don’t I forget. Uh Rene Descartes. Is he the guy who said, “I think, therefore I am?” Uh, anyway, it’s That’s Well, I think therefore uh I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don’t even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” All my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to-do lists and stuff like that. And this guy’s basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were, I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Uh because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
Sam Parr: Um, you want me to keep going or you want one?
Shaan Puri: No, do one.
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Huizenga. I love Wayne Huizenga. I read his book. I believe it’s called uh Building Blockbuster. So there’s this guy named Wayne Huizenga. Where All right, now I’m going to sound uncultured. Is he from I always get it confused. Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch. Are they all the same thing?
Shaan Puri: Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I’m not sure.
Sam Parr: Dude, I don’t know. I’m sounding uncultured. I I’m sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Huizenga say?
Shaan Puri: So he’s of Dutch descent. We’ll go with that. Of Dutch descent. Came to the United States from from the Netherlands. All right, good.
Sam Parr: All right. So he’s born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army, and when he was in his 20s, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door throwing away your trash. And eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these uh this this business is incredibly um there’s all there’s loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, “Well, fuck, I’m just going to buy all of them.” And so he starts buying a shit ton of them. Something like two or three uh a week. Um and his business eventually be called is become Waste Management. Today, it’s got a $64 billion market cap. It’s uh the biggest waste removal uh company in the country and it’s incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business and you think, “All right, so uh that’s great. Go and chill.” Next, when he was still in his 50s, I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 19 uh 87. He uh bought he he found one Blockbuster, it was one Blockbuster store. He bought it uh with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later. So this guy’s like a financial arbitrage machine. So he’s like he’s really good at raising money and deploying capital. And so he raises this money and so Blockbuster after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores, and then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in revenue and 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about uh eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it’s pretty crazy. And if you would have invested 25,000 and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 in into uh Blockbuster when it went public in uh in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he he’s he’s got a good track record. So He also started something else, right? He also started automation. Yeah, so Yeah, so the guy All right, so he’s in waste management, he’s in Blockbuster. At this point, he’s in his 60s, you think, “All right, now you’re just going to chill.” Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it’s the largest seller of used cars in America. So he went from waste management to Blockbuster to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he’s also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of uh Extended Stay America? I believe now it’s owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended Stay of America? So basically, they’ve got they’ve got something like 5, 6, 700 uh motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like uh a handful of or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the ’90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. And I think he bought another Florida uh what’s the Florida football team? Wait, so that’s the Dolphins and then he bought the the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Uh pretty amazing. Is this and and and so I always was amazed at this guy and um the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here’s a few things what here’s a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about where his philosophy. The first, “We made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who was already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I’d hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth.” The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easier to go out to a certain market and just buy uh buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, “Okay, let’s do this on our own.” And that’s what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but and they grew on their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There’s another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He’s uh he’s worth like five or $10 billion at this point. He’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this He never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother. Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating. Yeah, this is cool. I I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that um anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more actionable like data and insights from that.
Sam Parr: Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
Shaan Puri: The name of what company?
Sam Parr: Oh, that No. He told me. Am I saying it wrong?
Shaan Puri: I I Is it a French Have you heard of the philosopher uh what’s the Yeah, what’s the French philosopher’s name? Rene Descartes?
Sam Parr: Maybe. Maybe that’s what it is.
Shaan Puri: What did you call it?
Sam Parr: Descartes. It’s it’s Descartes, yeah. It’s Descartes. It’s like it’s like the I don’t I forget. Uh Rene Descartes. Is he the guy who said, “I think, therefore I am?” Uh, anyway, it’s That’s Well, I think therefore uh I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don’t even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” All my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to-do lists and stuff like that. And this guy’s basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were, I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Uh because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
Sam Parr: Um, you want me to keep going or you want one?
Shaan Puri: No, do one.
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Huizenga. I love Wayne Huizenga. I read his book. I believe it’s called uh Building Blockbuster. So there’s this guy named Wayne Huizenga. Where All right, now I’m going to sound uncultured. Is he from I always get it confused. Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch. Are they all the same thing?
Shaan Puri: Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I’m not sure.
Sam Parr: Dude, I don’t know. I’m sounding uncultured. I I’m sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Huizenga say?
Shaan Puri: So he’s of Dutch descent. We’ll go with that. Of Dutch descent. Came to the United States from from the Netherlands. All right, good.
Sam Parr: All right. So he’s born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army, and when he was in his 20s, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door throwing away your trash. And eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these uh this this business is incredibly um there’s all there’s loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, “Well, fuck, I’m just going to buy all of them.” And so he starts buying a shit ton of them. Something like two or three uh a week. Um and his business eventually be called is become Waste Management. Today, it’s got a $64 billion market cap. It’s uh the biggest waste removal uh company in the country and it’s incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business and you think, “All right, so uh that’s great. Go and chill.” Next, when he was still in his 50s, I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 19 uh 87. He uh bought he he found one Blockbuster, it was one Blockbuster store. He bought it uh with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later. So this guy’s like a financial arbitrage machine. So he’s like he’s really good at raising money and deploying capital. And so he raises this money and so Blockbuster after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores, and then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in revenue and 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about uh eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it’s pretty crazy. And if you would have invested 25,000 and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 in into uh Blockbuster when it went public in uh in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he he’s he’s got a good track record. So He also started something else, right? He also started automation. Yeah, so Yeah, so the guy All right, so he’s in waste management, he’s in Blockbuster. At this point, he’s in his 60s, you think, “All right, now you’re just going to chill.” Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it’s the largest seller of used cars in America. So he went from waste management to Blockbuster to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he’s also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of uh Extended Stay America? I believe now it’s owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended Stay of America? So basically, they’ve got they’ve got something like 5, 6, 700 uh motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like uh a handful of or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the ’90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. And I think he bought another Florida uh what’s the Florida football team? Wait, so that’s the Dolphins and then he bought the the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Uh pretty amazing. Is this and and and so I always was amazed at this guy and um the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here’s a few things what here’s a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about where his philosophy. The first, “We made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who was already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I’d hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth.” The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easier to go out to a certain market and just buy uh buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, “Okay, let’s do this on our own.” And that’s what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but and they grew on their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There’s another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He’s uh he’s worth like five or $10 billion at this point. He’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this He never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother. Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating. Yeah, this is cool. I I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that um anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more actionable like data and insights from that.
Sam Parr: Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
Shaan Puri: The name of what company?
Sam Parr: Oh, that No. He told me. Am I saying it wrong?
Shaan Puri: I I Is it a French Have you heard of the philosopher uh what’s the Yeah, what’s the French philosopher’s name? Rene Descartes?
Sam Parr: Maybe. Maybe that’s what it is.
Shaan Puri: What did you call it?
Sam Parr: Descartes. It’s it’s Descartes, yeah. It’s Descartes. It’s like it’s like the I don’t I forget. Uh Rene Descartes. Is he the guy who said, “I think, therefore I am?” Uh, anyway, it’s That’s Well, I think therefore uh I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don’t even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” All my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to-do lists and stuff like that. And this guy’s basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were, I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Uh because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
Sam Parr: Um, you want me to keep going or you want one?
Shaan Puri: No, do one.
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Huizenga. I love Wayne Huizenga. I read his book. I believe it’s called uh Building Blockbuster. So there’s this guy named Wayne Huizenga. Where All right, now I’m going to sound uncultured. Is he from I always get it confused. Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch. Are they all the same thing?
Shaan Puri: Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I’m not sure.
Sam Parr: Dude, I don’t know. I’m sounding uncultured. I I’m sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Huizenga say?
Shaan Puri: So he’s of Dutch descent. We’ll go with that. Of Dutch descent. Came to the United States from from the Netherlands. All right, good.
Sam Parr: All right. So he’s born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army, and when he was in his 20s, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door throwing away your trash. And eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these uh this this business is incredibly um there’s all there’s loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, “Well, fuck, I’m just going to buy all of them.” And so he starts buying a shit ton of them. Something like two or three uh a week. Um and his business eventually be called is become Waste Management. Today, it’s got a $64 billion market cap. It’s uh the biggest waste removal uh company in the country and it’s incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business and you think, “All right, so uh that’s great. Go and chill.” Next, when he was still in his 50s, I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 19 uh 87. He uh bought he he found one Blockbuster, it was one Blockbuster store. He bought it uh with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later. So this guy’s like a financial arbitrage machine. So he’s like he’s really good at raising money and deploying capital. And so he raises this money and so Blockbuster after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores, and then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in revenue and 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about uh eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it’s pretty crazy. And if you would have invested 25,000 and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 in into uh Blockbuster when it went public in uh in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he he’s he’s got a good track record. So He also started something else, right? He also started automation. Yeah, so Yeah, so the guy All right, so he’s in waste management, he’s in Blockbuster. At this point, he’s in his 60s, you think, “All right, now you’re just going to chill.” Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it’s the largest seller of used cars in America. So he went from waste management to Blockbuster to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he’s also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of uh Extended Stay America? I believe now it’s owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended Stay of America? So basically, they’ve got they’ve got something like 5, 6, 700 uh motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like uh a handful of or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the ’90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. And I think he bought another Florida uh what’s the Florida football team? Wait, so that’s the Dolphins and then he bought the the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Uh pretty amazing. Is this and and and so I always was amazed at this guy and um the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here’s a few things what here’s a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about where his philosophy. The first, “We made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who was already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I’d hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth.” The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easier to go out to a certain market and just buy uh buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, “Okay, let’s do this on our own.” And that’s what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but and they grew on their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There’s another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He’s uh he’s worth like five or $10 billion at this point. He’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this He never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother. Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating. Yeah, this is cool. I I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that um anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more actionable like data and insights from that.
Sam Parr: Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
Shaan Puri: The name of what company?
Sam Parr: Oh, that No. He told me. Am I saying it wrong?
Shaan Puri: I I Is it a French Have you heard of the philosopher uh what’s the Yeah, what’s the French philosopher’s name? Rene Descartes?
Sam Parr: Maybe. Maybe that’s what it is.
Shaan Puri: What did you call it?
Sam Parr: Descartes. It’s it’s Descartes, yeah. It’s Descartes. It’s like it’s like the I don’t I forget. Uh Rene Descartes. Is he the guy who said, “I think, therefore I am?” Uh, anyway, it’s That’s Well, I think therefore uh I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don’t even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” All my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to-do lists and stuff like that. And this guy’s basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were, I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Uh because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
Sam Parr: Um, you want me to keep going or you want one?
Shaan Puri: No, do one.
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Huizenga. I love Wayne Huizenga. I read his book. I believe it’s called uh Building Blockbuster. So there’s this guy named Wayne Huizenga. Where All right, now I’m going to sound uncultured. Is he from I always get it confused. Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch. Are they all the same thing?
Shaan Puri: Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I’m not sure.
Sam Parr: Dude, I don’t know. I’m sounding uncultured. I I’m sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Huizenga say?
Shaan Puri: So he’s of Dutch descent. We’ll go with that. Of Dutch descent. Came to the United States from from the Netherlands. All right, good.
Sam Parr: All right. So he’s born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army, and when he was in his 20s, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door throwing away your trash. And eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these uh this this business is incredibly um there’s all there’s loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, “Well, fuck, I’m just going to buy all of them.” And so he starts buying a shit ton of them. Something like two or three uh a week. Um and his business eventually be called is become Waste Management. Today, it’s got a $64 billion market cap. It’s uh the biggest waste removal uh company in the country and it’s incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business and you think, “All right, so uh that’s great. Go and chill.” Next, when he was still in his 50s, I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 19 uh 87. He uh bought he he found one Blockbuster, it was one Blockbuster store. He bought it uh with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later. So this guy’s like a financial arbitrage machine. So he’s like he’s really good at raising money and deploying capital. And so he raises this money and so Blockbuster after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores, and then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in revenue and 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about uh eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it’s pretty crazy. And if you would have invested 25,000 and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 in into uh Blockbuster when it went public in uh in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he he’s he’s got a good track record. So He also started something else, right? He also started automation. Yeah, so Yeah, so the guy All right, so he’s in waste management, he’s in Blockbuster. At this point, he’s in his 60s, you think, “All right, now you’re just going to chill.” Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it’s the largest seller of used cars in America. So he went from waste management to Blockbuster to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he’s also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of uh Extended Stay America? I believe now it’s owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended Stay of America? So basically, they’ve got they’ve got something like 5, 6, 700 uh motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like uh a handful of or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the ’90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. And I think he bought another Florida uh what’s the Florida football team? Wait, so that’s the Dolphins and then he bought the the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Uh pretty amazing. Is this and and and so I always was amazed at this guy and um the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here’s a few things what here’s a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about where his philosophy. The first, “We made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who was already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I’d hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth.” The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easier to go out to a certain market and just buy uh buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, “Okay, let’s do this on our own.” And that’s what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but and they grew on their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There’s another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He’s uh he’s worth like five or $10 billion at this point. He’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this He never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother. Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating. Yeah, this is cool. I I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that um anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more actionable like data and insights from that.
Sam Parr: Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
Shaan Puri: The name of what company?
Sam Parr: Oh, that No. He told me. Am I saying it wrong?
Shaan Puri: I I Is it a French Have you heard of the philosopher uh what’s the Yeah, what’s the French philosopher’s name? Rene Descartes?
Sam Parr: Maybe. Maybe that’s what it is.
Shaan Puri: What did you call it?
Sam Parr: Descartes. It’s it’s Descartes, yeah. It’s Descartes. It’s like it’s like the I don’t I forget. Uh Rene Descartes. Is he the guy who said, “I think, therefore I am?” Uh, anyway, it’s That’s Well, I think therefore uh I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don’t even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” All my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to-do lists and stuff like that. And this guy’s basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were, I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Uh because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
Sam Parr: Um, you want me to keep going or you want one?
Shaan Puri: No, do one.
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Huizenga. I love Wayne Huizenga. I read his book. I believe it’s called uh Building Blockbuster. So there’s this guy named Wayne Huizenga. Where All right, now I’m going to sound uncultured. Is he from I always get it confused. Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch. Are they all the same thing?
Shaan Puri: Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I’m not sure.
Sam Parr: Dude, I don’t know. I’m sounding uncultured. I I’m sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Huizenga say?
Shaan Puri: So he’s of Dutch descent. We’ll go with that. Of Dutch descent. Came to the United States from from the Netherlands. All right, good.
Sam Parr: All right. So he’s born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army, and when he was in his 20s, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door throwing away your trash. And eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these uh this this business is incredibly um there’s all there’s loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, “Well, fuck, I’m just going to buy all of them.” And so he starts buying a shit ton of them. Something like two or three uh a week. Um and his business eventually be called is become Waste Management. Today, it’s got a $64 billion market cap. It’s uh the biggest waste removal uh company in the country and it’s incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business and you think, “All right, so uh that’s great. Go and chill.” Next, when he was still in his 50s, I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 19 uh 87. He uh bought he he found one Blockbuster, it was one Blockbuster store. He bought it uh with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later. So this guy’s like a financial arbitrage machine. So he’s like he’s really good at raising money and deploying capital. And so he raises this money and so Blockbuster after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores, and then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in revenue and 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about uh eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it’s pretty crazy. And if you would have invested 25,000 and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 in into uh Blockbuster when it went public in uh in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he he’s he’s got a good track record. So He also started something else, right? He also started automation. Yeah, so Yeah, so the guy All right, so he’s in waste management, he’s in Blockbuster. At this point, he’s in his 60s, you think, “All right, now you’re just going to chill.” Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it’s the largest seller of used cars in America. So he went from waste management to Blockbuster to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he’s also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of uh Extended Stay America? I believe now it’s owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended Stay of America? So basically, they’ve got they’ve got something like 5, 6, 700 uh motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like uh a handful of or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the ’90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. And I think he bought another Florida uh what’s the Florida football team? Wait, so that’s the Dolphins and then he bought the the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Uh pretty amazing. Is this and and and so I always was amazed at this guy and um the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here’s a few things what here’s a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about where his philosophy. The first, “We made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who was already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I’d hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth.” The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easier to go out to a certain market and just buy uh buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, “Okay, let’s do this on our own.” And that’s what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but and they grew on their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There’s another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He’s uh he’s worth like five or $10 billion at this point. He’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this He never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother. Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating. Yeah, this is cool. I I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that um anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more actionable like data and insights from that.
Sam Parr: Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
Shaan Puri: The name of what company?
Sam Parr: Oh, that No. He told me. Am I saying it wrong?
Shaan Puri: I I Is it a French Have you heard of the philosopher uh what’s the Yeah, what’s the French philosopher’s name? Rene Descartes?
Sam Parr: Maybe. Maybe that’s what it is.
Shaan Puri: What did you call it?
Sam Parr: Descartes. It’s it’s Descartes, yeah. It’s Descartes. It’s like it’s like the I don’t I forget. Uh Rene Descartes. Is he the guy who said, “I think, therefore I am?” Uh, anyway, it’s That’s Well, I think therefore uh I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don’t even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” All my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to-do lists and stuff like that. And this guy’s basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were, I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Uh because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
Sam Parr: Um, you want me to keep going or you want one?
Shaan Puri: No, do one.
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Huizenga. I love Wayne Huizenga. I read his book. I believe it’s called uh Building Blockbuster. So there’s this guy named Wayne Huizenga. Where All right, now I’m going to sound uncultured. Is he from I always get it confused. Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch. Are they all the same thing?
Shaan Puri: Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I’m not sure.
Sam Parr: Dude, I don’t know. I’m sounding uncultured. I I’m sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Huizenga say?
Shaan Puri: So he’s of Dutch descent. We’ll go with that. Of Dutch descent. Came to the United States from from the Netherlands. All right, good.
Sam Parr: All right. So he’s born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army, and when he was in his 20s, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door throwing away your trash. And eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these uh this this business is incredibly um there’s all there’s loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, “Well, fuck, I’m just going to buy all of them.” And so he starts buying a shit ton of them. Something like two or three uh a week. Um and his business eventually be called is become Waste Management. Today, it’s got a $64 billion market cap. It’s uh the biggest waste removal uh company in the country and it’s incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business and you think, “All right, so uh that’s great. Go and chill.” Next, when he was still in his 50s, I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 19 uh 87. He uh bought he he found one Blockbuster, it was one Blockbuster store. He bought it uh with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later. So this guy’s like a financial arbitrage machine. So he’s like he’s really good at raising money and deploying capital. And so he raises this money and so Blockbuster after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores, and then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in revenue and 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about uh eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it’s pretty crazy. And if you would have invested 25,000 and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 in into uh Blockbuster when it went public in uh in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he he’s he’s got a good track record. So He also started something else, right? He also started automation. Yeah, so Yeah, so the guy All right, so he’s in waste management, he’s in Blockbuster. At this point, he’s in his 60s, you think, “All right, now you’re just going to chill.” Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it’s the largest seller of used cars in America. So he went from waste management to Blockbuster to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he’s also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of uh Extended Stay America? I believe now it’s owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended Stay of America? So basically, they’ve got they’ve got something like 5, 6, 700 uh motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like uh a handful of or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the ’90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. And I think he bought another Florida uh what’s the Florida football team? Wait, so that’s the Dolphins and then he bought the the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Uh pretty amazing. Is this and and and so I always was amazed at this guy and um the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here’s a few things what here’s a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about where his philosophy. The first, “We made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who was already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I’d hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth.” The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easier to go out to a certain market and just buy uh buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, “Okay, let’s do this on our own.” And that’s what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but and they grew on their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There’s another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He’s uh he’s worth like five or $10 billion at this point. He’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this He never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother. Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating. Yeah, this is cool. I I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that um anything any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space and other people are doing it taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more actionable like data and insights from that.
Sam Parr: Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
Shaan Puri: The name of what company?
Sam Parr: Oh, that No. He told me. Am I saying it wrong?
Shaan Puri: I I Is it a French Have you heard of the philosopher uh what’s the Yeah, what’s the French philosopher’s name? Rene Descartes?
Sam Parr: Maybe. Maybe that’s what it is.
Shaan Puri: What did you call it?
Sam Parr: Descartes. It’s it’s Descartes, yeah. It’s Descartes. It’s like it’s like the I don’t I forget. Uh Rene Descartes. Is he the guy who said, “I think, therefore I am?” Uh, anyway, it’s That’s Well, I think therefore uh I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don’t even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s interesting.” All my friends are making like apps to like order pizza and like to-do lists and stuff like that. And this guy’s basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were, I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Uh because that sounds way more cool and interesting and like probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of do. And so that was a you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
Sam Parr: Um, you want me to keep going or you want one?
Shaan Puri: No, do one.
Sam Parr: All right, let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Huizenga. I love Wayne Huizenga. I read his book. I believe it’s called uh Building Blockbuster. So there’s this guy named Wayne Huizenga. Where All right, now I’m going to sound uncultured. Is he from I always get it confused. Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch. Are they all the same thing?
Shaan Puri: Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands. I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I’m not sure.
Sam Parr: Dude, I don’t know. I’m sounding uncultured. I I’m sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Huizenga say?
Shaan Puri: So he’s of Dutch descent. We’ll go with that. Of Dutch descent. Came to the United States from from the Netherlands. All right, good.
Sam Parr: All right. So he’s born in 1937. All right. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in 1937, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army, and when he was in his 20s, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically, he had one moving truck or one truck and he started a waste management business where he would just go from door to door throwing away your trash. And eventually, like after only a short amount of time, like two years, he starts realizing that these uh this this business is incredibly um there’s all there’s loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, “Well, fuck, I’m just going to buy all of them.” And so he starts buying a shit ton of them. Something like two or three uh a week. Um and his business eventually be called is become Waste Management. Today, it’s got a $64 billion market cap. It’s uh the biggest waste removal uh company in the country and it’s incredibly big. And he left that in 1984. So he built this huge business and you think, “All right, so uh that’s great. Go and chill.” Next, when he was still in his 50s, I believe, he starts a company called Blockbuster. And so this is in 19 uh 87. He uh bought he he found one Blockbuster, it was one Blockbuster store. He bought it uh with a little bit of money and he took it public like two years later. So this guy’s like a financial arbitrage machine. So he’s like he’s really good at raising money and deploying capital. And so he raises this money and so Blockbuster after like two years, it has $7 million in revenue, 19 stores, and then in just a handful of years, he gets it to $4 billion in revenue and 3,000 stores in 11 countries. And eventually he sells it to Viacom in 1994. This is about uh eight years after starting the company for $8.5 billion. And so it’s pretty crazy. And if you would have invested 25,000 and so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested $25,000 in into uh Blockbuster when it went public in uh in 1987, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he he’s he’s got a good track record. So He also started something else, right? He also started automation. Yeah, so Yeah, so the guy All right, so he’s in waste management, he’s in Blockbuster. At this point, he’s in his 60s, you think, “All right, now you’re just going to chill.” Absolutely not. He starts AutoNation, which is at this point, it’s the largest seller of used cars in America. So he went from waste management to Blockbuster to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he’s also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of uh Extended Stay America? I believe now it’s owned by Marriott. You never heard of Extended Stay of America? So basically, they’ve got they’ve got something like 5, 6, 700 uh motels that are nice enough that you could stay for like uh a handful of or for like a month or like two, four weeks at a time. He started that. He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the ’90s, he eventually buys the Miami Dolphins. And I think he bought another Florida uh what’s the Florida football team? Wait, so that’s the Dolphins and then he bought the the Florida Marlins also, the baseball team. The Marlins. Uh pretty amazing. Is this and and and so I always was amazed at this guy and um the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here’s a few things what here’s a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about where his philosophy. The first, “We made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. It was just easier, faster, and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who was already established in a market, even if it was very small. Then I’d hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth.” The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easier to go out to a certain market and just buy uh buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, “Okay, let’s do this on our own.” And that’s what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for Blockbuster, but even then he did it with Blockbuster because he started the brand, but and they grew on their own. But eventually they started buying like loads of different mom and pop mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There’s another guy who did this. His name is Bradley Jacobs. He’s uh he’s worth like five or $10 billion at this point. He’s like 85 years old. So he’s going to die. He’s going to they’re going to lose its way. Like this is just inevitably how it works. Dude, this guy’s name, by the way, Jack Dangermond. Is that his name? Right. This Dangermond? I mean, come on. That’s uh you know, I can see I can see why people don’t want to compete with this guy. Uh he’s pretty old. I don’t know. He doesn’t look like he’s like he’s 80. It looks like he’s, you know, Well, he’s rich. 60, 70, something like that. Uh yeah, personal fortune, $4 billion himself. Yeah, and he started with his brother when he was like 27. Crazy fascinating business, crazy fascinating business. And I came across this He never taken a cent outside of a $5,000 initial loan from Dangermond’s mother. Crazy, right? Crazy fascinating company. And and he seems for I mean, you know, what I read about him, he seems like a good guy. Him and his wife, he so he’s an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about like uh wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that um somehow reduce wildfire, which I’m going to explain in a second. But basically, there’s a new company, there’s a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called Felt. So go to felt.com. It totally does not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked Well, this is like an early access site, but my I saw it and I said, “Oh, this is kind of interesting.” So I started looking into it. I read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kind of awesome. No. No, I I we just I I’ve never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He’s his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold for $100 million. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the uh uh inadequacies of like basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, “Well, I’m going to create a better map business. Uh something that uh um people can uh add stuff to.” And it’s almost like uh where where ESRI is like Google Maps, this is like Waze. So people can contribute to it if you use it. Uh kind of fascinating. And um it seems very, very interesting. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like like this company this guy Jack started. I think it’s badass. I love seeing the new guys that are going to try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it’s very fascinating. Yeah, this is cool. I I like this a lot. There was a company called um what’s the name? They’re based in they spun out of like this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It’s And while you’re looking for that, so Felt, they describe it as the world’s first collaborative mapping tool and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine, they haven’t said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you’re going hiking with your friends, if you’re planning a trip, you’re allowed to use this. I imagine what they’re doing is their grand scheme though, their their niche, their wedge is to help wildfires uh uh go down. And so the way that you can do that is you can actually use data and you can figure out where wildfires are, where they’re going to happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wildfires. And I imagine what they’re going to do is they’re going to create this really cool because if you go to felt.com, it looks very um user focus, whereas it it’s they’re going to make all their money from B2B. So it doesn’t look the same, it doesn’t look like a B2B product. I imagine what they’re going to do is like just like Waze, they’re going to let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit, and then they’re going to go and sell the data and mapping tools to B2B uh to businesses, and that’s how they’re going to win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah, I think I think it’s cool. So the company I was thinking of is called Descartes Labs. And uh what this I met the founder of this at a dinner and he was telling me about it and I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, “Oh, I I really should invest in this.” And at the time, I wasn’t really investing super actively and I missed the boat. I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time I was like pretty convinced that this is going to be a winner. And um why why is that? So they spun out of Los Alamos Alamos National Labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It’s like this like it’s kind of like, you know, NASA or something like that. So it’s like highly kind of scientific community. They spin out, they create this commercial company um that’s called Descartes Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I don’t know if it was their own satellites or other people’s satellites, but they would take the imagery of like, “Cool, this is image from a satellite of a field.” And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and like kind of computer vision and and different like more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it’s like, you know, so it’s like if you ever watch Billions, they they kind of do some of this sometimes where it’s like, “Oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory.” So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they’re doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after. Things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically, at the time it was like they they were like trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me the story and this is many years ago, so I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was at the time, they didn’t have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on like futures of corn crop yields or something like that because they were Like they were putting their own They were their own balance sheet. They were just betting basically and they were showing that like, “Look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy because that’s how valuable our data is.” And I think since then, I think that was early on when they were like just making the technology and playing with it. But um either it was them or they were in a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it’s like, you know, a agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know