Recorded in April 2020, this episode covers Sam and Shaan’s early strategy for growing the MFM podcast — guests for reach, the Sam/Shaan dynamic as the core product, and guesting on other shows. They riff on business ideas: a home office setup e-commerce store (Visual Candy), a mid-tier comedians streaming subscription, and a Quello-style live concert app. They critique Carta CEO Henry Ward’s public layoff announcement as tone-deaf. They close with a discussion of tech journalism’s “befriend and betray” dynamic — the kayfabe between Silicon Valley and media.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host)
How We Plan to Grow This Podcast [00:00:00]
Sam: I want to give you feedback from listeners. What I’m noticing with this podcast is we have a similar number of views each week. I think it’s the same people coming back. We’ve become part of people’s routines, which is cool — but here’s what I think the growth lever is: guests.
When we had Andrew on, he shared it. His audience came and listened. If we hooked them, they’ll keep listening. So the plan is to bring on more guests. But here’s the tension — people keep telling me they love it when it’s just you and me riffing.
Shaan: I felt that. And I think it’s even more true on Zoom because the pace is a little slower. In person with a third guest is better. But guests have to bring energy. Being successful and smart is not enough. You have to know what people want to hear, get to the point, and bring the energy.
Sam: For the record, Shaan and I have recorded a bunch of guest episodes that we’ve never published. We just throw them away. We don’t even tell the person. We’ve had people who are amazing operators, genuinely interesting people — and the content was wack. We just delete it.
Shaan: Right. And listener feedback is that people like the dynamic between us. You’re more optimistic, I’m more skeptical and down-to-earth. They can’t get that combination anywhere else. But that dynamic doesn’t grow the show. Guests grow the show.
Sam: So we’ll mix it in. The other thing — guesting on other people’s podcasts. I asked Shaan to reach out to around 50 podcasts and just offer: “Hey, I’ll come talk about building a podcast that did a million downloads in the first six months. Or about selling a company.”
Shaan: I’ve been a guest maybe a hundred times. For a period I had 3-5pm blocked on my calendar just for guesting. And the results are totally hit or miss. Small podcasts drove almost nothing. You’re basically doing the same thing over and over like a comedian doing the same set, and sometimes it lands and sometimes it doesn’t. The sticky base matters though — you’re not building a viral product, you’re building an army. People who will actually go to war for you.
Sam: When I started this I told Sully — our first guest — that I wasn’t sure this was a business. It was a step down from what I’d been doing. But my goal was simple: I want to be in a million people’s earbuds every morning. I don’t know exactly how to get there, but that’s the target. If you do that, you’re in a great position no matter what.
Shaan: It may or may not be a business on its own, but it absolutely leads to opportunity. I went to New York, tweeted that I’d be there, and had 200 people want to come. We let 20 in. That’s just because we’re in people’s ears. And a lot of those ears are interesting people — we posted something in our Facebook group asking who had a business doing over a million a year, and there were a hundred-plus responses.
Amazon FBA Update — Listener Fills in the Gaps [00:14:00]
Sam: We talked on Tuesday about Thrasio — a company that’s raised over $100M at a $750M valuation, buying up Fulfilled by Amazon brands and making them better. I asked a listener who’s a mid-seven-figure Amazon seller what the real economics look like.
Here’s what he said: sub-$10M Amazon sellers typically have zero to a handful of US employees, an active offshore team, and net 10-20% margins. Typical size is $3-5M revenue, pulling $500K to $1M per year for themselves.
The problem is it’s getting harder. In 2013 you could sell almost anything and build a seven-figure business. Now the competition is much more sophisticated, ranking is expensive and difficult, and Amazon treats sellers poorly. You can take a month off, let your team run it, and everything’s fine — or you can get an email tomorrow saying your account’s suspended, and you need a lawyer to get it back.
Shaan: That’s the Nassim Taleb “picking up pennies in front of a steamroller” problem. High probability of consistent small wins. Low probability of complete death. Amazon can also change the rules midgame — they changed affiliate rates recently and some categories got cut roughly in half. If you’re a WireCutter or BuzzFeed and you made $100M from Amazon affiliates, a 50% rate cut is devastating.
Sam: The formula right now seems to be: build a successful Amazon business from 2013 to 2015, then start teaching other people how to do it because it’s too hard to do anymore. Consistent with what we’ve heard.
Business Idea: Visual Candy — Home Office Setup for Remote Workers [00:24:00]
Shaan: There’s a guy I talked to on Twitter who was building an e-commerce store called Visual Candy. His original target was Twitch streamers and YouTubers — people who broadcast from a home setup and invest in lighting, wall panels, smart speakers, artwork to make their backgrounds look good.
But with COVID and work-from-home, this extends way past that original market. Now it’s any professional who’s going to spend significant time in a home office. Think about how many home offices are being built out right now. And even after COVID, that infrastructure stays.
Sam: I’ve been trying to buy all this stuff and it’s complicated. I didn’t know which cameras work, how to do the blurred background look, which mounts, which lighting — it’s a rabbit hole. There’s a YouTuber named Gary Tan who put out a video called “How to Look Amazing on Zoom” that only had 1,500 views, but it showed exactly what to buy and why. This is the new equivalent of wearing a suit to work. Looking professional on video is now a career skill.
Shaan: Visual Candy is targeting the right thing. You aggregate all the hardware — lighting, cameras, mounts, cable management, backgrounds — into a curated shopping experience. Right now it’s fragmented across Amazon with confusing specs. If someone does the curation work and says “here’s what you need for a $500 setup, a $1,000 setup, a $2,500 setup,” that’s a real product.
Business Idea: Mid-Tier Comedian Streaming [00:34:00]
Shaan: Netflix has been cutting $10-20M checks for comedy specials because comedians have rabid fan bases and the content is proprietary. But that’s only for the Chris Rocks and Chappelles. What about the tier below — the Whitney Cummings level and below?
I think someone could build a $5-7/month subscription that aggregates mid-tier comedians. Not hour-long specials — 10-20 minute sets. Each comedian has a few thousand fans who would pay for exclusive access. You aggregate them and offer an all-you-can-eat pass where viewers can also discover new comedians.
Sam: There’s already something like this for concerts. Quello — spelled Q-E-L-L-O — it’s an app on Apple TV with a library of live concerts. Been around since 2010. Ten dollars a month. They have 70,000 paying subscribers, recently acquired by Stingray Communications, a publicly traded Canadian cable company.
Shaan: That’s a useful analog. It’s niche, it’s been around for 10 years, and they only have 70,000 subscribers — which is not a huge number. But it’s a real business. If I were building the comedy version I’d read Stingray’s filings to understand how Quello operates, what the content deals look like, what the unit economics are.
Sam: National Geographic is another model. Non-profit structure means their financials are public. They still do hundreds of millions a year in magazine subscriptions — which is insane when you think about it. Disney bought in at a billion-dollar valuation.
Carta’s Layoff Announcement — What Not to Do [00:48:00]
Sam: Carta laid off 161 people — 16% of the company. Their CEO Henry Ward published the announcement publicly, which he framed as transparency and something other CEOs could learn from. I think it was lame. Do you agree?
Shaan: I’ve followed this guy for a while. Seems smart, seems like a good person, Carta seems like a good product. But yeah, this move I thought was off.
Sam: Walk through why. He starts with: “I apologize if I sound robotic — I’m reading from a script because I don’t know if I could get through this without something to lean on.” That’s making yourself the victim. You’re not the victim. That’s a weak opening.
Then he says the people being affected will receive an invitation from their manager, and if you don’t receive a meeting invitation, you are safe. That’s Hunger Games. He announced it that way, and then continued talking for several more paragraphs — but no one in that room heard any of it because everyone’s mind went immediately to “am I getting that meeting invite?”
Shaan: The real problem for me was what he called “the moral conflict.” He explained that CEOs sit between shareholders and employees, that these are diametrically opposed perspectives, and that he chose to manage the conflict by taking the shareholder perspective in deciding who should leave. Nobody in that room cares about that framework. They’re not thinking about the CEO’s philosophical dilemma. They’re thinking about their paycheck.
Sam: The core message should have been: we tried everything else first, this was the last resort, this is not your fault, it’s mine, and here’s exactly what we’re doing to take care of you. Full stop. No theory about shareholder versus employee perspective. Just: this sucks, we did everything we could, I’m sorry, here’s the support.
Shaan: And to be fair — the actual actions were good. They extended COBRA health insurance to the end of the year. They removed cliffs and let people vest their shares. They gave severance. They built an alumni job placement network. All of that is genuinely good. The actions were right. The framing was wrong.
Sam: I wouldn’t have published it externally. The upside of making it public wasn’t clear to me. It came across as wanting validation — wanting people to say “wow, great leadership.” I’d rather take it on the chin. And I hope Carta crushes it. I believe they will. This is just one bad move on what is probably a long and positive journey. Taking risk and missing sometimes is part of it.
Tech Journalism’s Kayfabe — Befriend and Betray [01:04:00]
Shaan: There’s a concept I heard from Eric Weinstein on his podcast The Portal. He calls it kayfabe — a wrestling term. In wrestling it’s a pre-arranged fake fight where both sides are the hero and the heel. They agree to the fight because it makes them both more popular. The feud is mutually beneficial.
He argues this happens in the real world too. Take Trump and the CNN reporter Jim Acosta. Trump calls on him, Acosta asks the hostile question, Trump fires back — and that becomes the seven-minute YouTube clip CNN runs all day. On one hand: why doesn’t Trump revoke the press credential? On the other: why doesn’t Acosta escalate or change tactics? Because the dance serves them both. CNN gets great content. Trump gets a defined enemy that motivates his base.
Sam: That’s the media-Silicon Valley version of the same thing. There’s this writer Natasha Tiku at the Washington Post, previously at Valleywag, BuzzFeed, Wired. She wrote an article about San Francisco declaring luxury housing as “essential” during COVID. The first line of the article said the mayor deemed luxury housing — and then immediately clarified that all other housing including housing projects was also deemed essential. That was the whole story. Nothing happened. But it ran as a Silicon Valley criticism piece in the tech section.
Shaan: Balaji Srinivasan had this exact experience early in COVID. He showed up to a crypto meetup in January wearing gloves and a mask when nobody in the US was taking it seriously. A journalist reached out for comment on a story about how Silicon Valley was reacting to coronavirus. He declined and screenshotted the exchange. All the journalists said: “Why are you putting her on blast? She just wanted a comment.” But Balaji said: I know how this story ends. The headline is going to be “Silicon Valley Nerds Refuse to Shake Hands.” That was essentially the headline.
Sam: He called it “befriend and betray.” The journalist comes to you as an expert — “I’d love your take” — and their goal is to write a story that makes you look like an out-of-touch tech bro. The headline gets written by the editor, not the journalist, because the editor optimizes for clicks. The journalist might even write a fair body. But the headline is what everyone sees.
Shaan: I had a version of this. I relaunched Bebo — bought it back out of auction, quiet process, nobody knew. I gave a reporter an embargo scoop. She came over, did an interview. Next day the headline ran as something like “Remember Bebo? Yeah, It’s Dead.” The body was actually our full conversation, fairly reported. The headline was someone else’s idea of what would drive clicks.
Sam: I texted her. She said: “I don’t write the headlines. My editor does. He thinks this angle drives the most clicks.” Which is true. And I don’t fully blame her — if she thinks we’re doing something dumb, she should say it. But the disconnect between the fair body and the mocking headline is what bothers me. And practically speaking, she burned the relationship for no reason. We had other stories to give. She didn’t get any of them.
Shaan: The ecosystem only works if journalists tell their actual opinion. I get that. If everyone just writes puff pieces to keep sources happy, it’s useless. The kayfabe isn’t a conspiracy — it’s an emergent dynamic. Both sides are rational actors getting what they want. But the end product is a lot of noise and not a lot of news.