Sam describes taking his daughter to the Blippi live show and getting fascinated by the business behind it — V-Star Entertainment licenses kids YouTube and TV brands and tours them as live shows, generating tens of millions in ticket revenue. The conversation widens to Cirque du Soleil’s acquisition strategy, the opportunity to turn other IP (religion, science, dinosaurs) into touring shows, and in-person community businesses booming as the world goes digital. Sam also shares how The Hustle’s 2x women’s entrepreneurship events quietly generated $20-30K per night.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
The Blippi Live Show [00:00:00]
Sam: Did I tell you about the Blippi show? I went last weekend.
Shaan: No. What is that?
Sam: Do you know who Blippi is?
Shaan: No idea.
Sam: So think Barney or Pee-Wee Herman — it’s a guy who created a YouTube brand called Blippi. He’s entertaining in a very children’s-show way. The interesting thing he does: there’s no set. He just goes into places after hours — “Hey we’re at the aquarium” — and they have it to themselves. He’ll say, “We’re at this rock climbing studio in Las Vegas,” and he just uses the location to film. He gives the venue a shoutout at the beginning. The video gets 40 million views. So it’s worth it to let him film there.
He basically just plays with toys. He goes to an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese and plays with everything. Same guy every single time — blue outfit, orange glasses, always looks the same. Well, except when he blew up and they switched him out with a stunt double for a bit. But the main guy is the main guy.
Anyway, my daughter loved Blippi. We used to watch it constantly. Then we saw an ad — the Blippi live show is coming to Oakland. My wife buys tickets immediately for the whole family. We go last weekend, same venue where we did Hustle Con — the Paramount Theater.
Hustle Con was sold out-ish. This was sold-out sold-out. Every seat, including the back shitty ones. Full of parents and their kids. And they created a little mini musical — one hour, because kids don’t have long attention spans. Music, lights, colors.
Shaan: How much were tickets?
Sam: Something like $50 to $70. The venue seats maybe 2,500 to 3,000. So we’re looking at around $120,000 for that one show. And he played four shows that weekend, then moved to the next city. He was doing eight shows total — so that weekend alone, they made something like $800,000.
The guy on stage wasn’t actually Blippi — it was some theater kid who didn’t quite make it. Plan B: I’ll be Blippi. They took the IP and made their own show out of it.
V-Star Entertainment and the Live Kids Brand Business [00:06:00]
Sam: So I started looking into this. There’s a company that does exactly this — it’s called V-Star Entertainment. What they do is license kids brands and put on kids Broadway. They tour around the country.
Blippi’s just one. Another one you’ve definitely heard of: Paw Patrol.
Shaan: Paw Patrol. Yeah.
Sam: Guess how much they sold in Paw Patrol tickets — just tickets — in a single year.
Shaan: $20 million?
Sam: $40 million. And that’s just tickets, not merch or concessions. That was around 2019-2020, pre-COVID numbers.
Then V-Star got acquired by Cirque du Soleil. The backstory: some guy was watching Sesame Street and thought Sesame Street should do a live show. He raised $500K — mortgaged his house, pulled $25K in home equity — got the Sesame Street license, then added the Muppets. This was back in the 1980s. Eventually another company doing similar work merged with him, and the whole thing got bought by Cirque du Soleil.
Shaan: How big is Cirque du Soleil?
Sam: A billion dollars a year in revenue. Ten percent of all Las Vegas tourists go to a Cirque show when they’re in town. They have something like ten shows — Zoomanity, the Beatles one, all of them. Private equity owns it now. The original idea was do a circus but with no animals — just human performers. Crazy acrobatics, great costumes. It became its own genre.
Then Cirque bought Blue Man Group and V-Star. So now Cirque does 10 million in ticket sales, Blue Man adds 2 million, V-Star adds another 2 million. Fourteen million in tickets sold per year across all three.
The Broader Opportunity: IP to Live Show [00:13:00]
Sam: This live entertainment thing has caught my attention. As the world goes more digital, the demand for one-off in-person experiences — “let’s get out of the house and go do something” — I think it just keeps going up. Music festivals are a winner. Plays and musicals are going to be bigger than before, not smaller, because the world went digital.
Shaan: I’m 100% on board. I was actually sending you a Notion doc today — notes on peer businesses. Basically you pay money and you’re part of a club, and you meet up a few times a year. I can’t name the companies, but one does $100 million a year in profit on two or three executive meetups annually — executives paying $50,000 to be members. I think these are going to completely boom. In-person is the move.
Sam: Yes. And so there are a few ways to play this. One: just go compete with V-Star on the same brands or find new ones. What the Blippi guy did was take YouTube IP and turn it into a live show. What V-Star did was take TV IP and do the same.
I think you could do this for more categories. Religion — the greatest free IP in the world. An extremely kid-friendly, kid-focused Christianity show. You could do it for dinosaurs or science as a generic genre. Kids love trucks and dinosaurs. You create a show called “A Day with Dinosaurs” or something like that. If you hit a certain level of quality, moms spread the word. Mommy groups sell the tickets for you.
The economics are simple: you build one show and sell it a thousand times. The show goes on tour. Mamma Mia has made some stupid amount of money just being the same show touring with rotating low-cost actors.
How The Hustle’s 2x Events Worked [00:20:00]
Sam: We used to do events at The Hustle. The big one was Hustle Con — thousands of people. But then we had this thing called 2x. Seven to ten PM. We’d get fifteen or ten women — all in tech and business, not all well-known — and each had ten minutes to tell a story. We charged like $25 for tickets. And then we’d get tens of thousands in sponsors.
We got to the point where we could pull this off almost weekly in other cities. When we started, The Hustle wasn’t that big, but we were making around $30,000 a night with one employee running it — she had a team of contractors and used Splash, which is basically Eventbrite.
Shaan: Wait — you were running one of the best women’s entrepreneurship events? You?
Sam: I know. I’m like an onion, man. Layers.
It started with this thing called Pizza and 40s — I’d interview someone, and when their 40-ounce beer was finished, the talk was done. Then some women said: it’s all dudes here. So we made a wine version. Way better engagement. We called it Cheese and Wine or something. Then we created 2x — as in two X chromosomes. I thought it was clever. Stole it from Reddit.
We did 10 or 12 of those in one year. Every single time: $20,000 to $30,000. And the cost was renting the venue, maybe $3,000.
Shaan: And you had readers in every city — that’s how you sold tickets.
Sam: Basically the speakers sold the tickets. I had 15 speakers because I figured each one would bring 25 people. Plus a little bit of our email engine.
The business model: tickets paid for the event, sponsors were all the profit. And whenever you have an underserved community, sponsors pay more. There was also a B-to-B component — corporate women’s initiatives all wanted to be attached to it.
My point is it was far easier than people think, and way more raw and rudimentary than you’d expect. Splash, a few speakers, corporate sponsors. And it worked.