Shaan gives a behind-the-scenes breakdown of his Power Writing course — numbers, learnings, structure, and surprises. Sam and Shaan then riff on a series of business ideas: a Solidity/smart contracts bootcamp, Swimply, a ClassPass for online courses, the Every.to newsletter bundle model, and what happens to gas stations in an EV world.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host)
Cold Open and Intro [00:00:00]
Shaan: I think when you treat your hobby like a job, that’s a recipe for failure, and that’s what happens to a lot of people.
Sam: Yeah.
Shaan: All right, what’s going on?
Sam: What’s up, man? So we’re going to get into some ideas, but let me tell you something I did this week — and I cannot give details because I actually got in trouble three different times where someone was like, “Hey, we had this conversation and you just talked.” I’m like, well, the way you and I talk now is how I talk all the time.
Shaan: Yeah.
Sam: And they’re right. So I’m going to try to keep this one vague. I had this dinner, and I was with a guy who has 8,000 employees in China as well as many thousands in America.
Shaan: Wow.
Sam: Impressive person. Like a factory, or something else in China?
Shaan: Tech-related. Just some huge company. If I gave you 100 guesses you likely wouldn’t guess it. It’s just some big company that exists in the tech world.
Sam: Fair enough.
Shaan: And it’s impressive, but it’s not like a mainstream thing.
Sam: Okay. And there was this other guy there who made a comment — “China’s gonna crush us in the next five years” or something. And then a couple other people jumped on that.
Shaan: People love to say that, by the way. Don’t people love saying how China’s passed up America?
Sam: A bunch of other people pounced on that, and then this guy — he lives in China, I believe he was born and raised in China — and there was also a woman there who was born and raised in China, and this guy with the 8,000 Chinese employees goes, “A lot of people say that. I do not think that’s true, and I don’t think any of you should ever think that.” He was saying Americans actually work maybe as hard or harder than a lot of other countries.
Shaan: Interesting.
Sam: And you talk about this like AI thing — it’s mostly AI that people bring up when they say China’s crushing America — and this guy was like, “I don’t think that would happen.” And he said, “What I think you should do is invest most of your money into American equities. I’m just so bullish on America.”
So it was an interesting perspective. Have you ever heard that? It’s like the one person who probably knows what they’re talking about at the table, and everybody else just reads stuff on Twitter and regurgitates it.
Shaan: I’m gonna go with the guy who’s got 8,000 employees in China. That makes more sense to me.
Sam: Yeah. And I felt great about that. It was just an interesting perspective. We love some pro-America news.
Shaan: Well, I just finished reading this really great book. Do you know who John Steinbeck is?
Sam: No. Of course you do — Grapes of Wrath?
Shaan: What? I got a blank here. Have you heard of To Kill a Mockingbird?
Sam: I have heard of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Shaan: That’s the author?
Sam: Oh my god. Like, John Steinbeck?
Shaan: People are going to make fun of you, by the way. You mostly just read Harry Potter — let’s be clear.
Sam: Okay, fair.
Shaan: He was born in 1902, so he’s dead — died probably in the 70s. But anyway, I’m reading this great book, his memoir from driving across the country for three months in America, getting to know America. And it’s really funny — in 1965 when he was doing this trip, he was complaining about how Americans are getting out of touch, getting too focused on technology. How there’s refrigerators everywhere, TVs everywhere, artificial food everywhere. It’s very funny. We’ve always complained about this stuff.
But I do love learning about America. I think America’s special. I think we have this resilience. And yeah, anyway, I’m very pro-America. So yes, I did like hearing it.
Sam: But you want to talk about some ideas?
Shaan: Yeah. By the way, Dan corrected us — I don’t think he wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. That was someone else. He wrote Of Mice and Men.
Sam: I know he wrote Grapes of Wrath. It’s just a famous American classic. I’m just shocked that you don’t know Of Mice and Men.
Shaan: I’ve heard those words before. That’s all I know about it.
Sam: Anyway, let’s go into the stuff I do know about, because I feel a lot better about that.
Bitcoin Short Squeeze Explained [00:06:00]
Shaan: Also — bitcoin rally! I’ve been waiting for this bitcoin pump, and here we are. We’re back up to almost $40,000 over the last 24 to 48 hours. There was a bit of a short squeeze — about a billion dollars of short positions got liquidated, and that caused the price to run up. Are you familiar with how that works? What a short squeeze is?
Sam: No.
Shaan: Here’s the non-technical version. Basically, when you have a short, you’re betting against something. If it goes up, you’re on the hook to pay the price for being wrong. So if you think something’s going to keep going down, you’re better off just closing your short position, taking the loss, and buying the asset now.
Let’s say it’s at $30,000 — I think it’s going down, it goes to $32,000. To close out my position, I’ll go buy the asset at $32,000 and eat the loss. But what happens is, because all the shorts start worrying that the price is going to run up, they all start trying to close out their positions at the same time. So they all start buying. The people who were betting against it suddenly create all this buying pressure — and that causes the price to go up and up and up.
What happened is, as it started running up, all the shorts had to cover their positions because they were massively leveraged — not putting in their own money, putting in like 5 to 10% down and taking 10x or 20x leverage. So they’re very sensitive to price moves. That’s what happened to cause the price to go up about $10,000 in two days.
This is also what happened with Tesla. Tesla was the most shorted stock on the exchange, and as the price started going up, those shorts were paying a huge price for every dollar it rose, so they had to close out — which put a bunch of buying pressure — which is why it becomes a squeeze. The shorts themselves cause the other shorts to cover, and the price shoots way above what any earnings metric would justify.
Sam: This is funny, because in this chat group — you and me and a bunch of other like-minded guys — they talk about “alpha” and “crushing alpha,” and I’m like, I don’t know what that means. We talk about short squeezes and I’m like, these words don’t mean anything to me.
Shaan: You guys feel so sophisticated to me.
Sam: All right, let’s talk about some ideas.
Idea: Solidity / Smart Contracts Bootcamp [00:12:00]
Shaan: Let’s do it. You go first.
Sam: Okay. Here’s another one that’s crypto-related and you’re going to be like “what” — but I’m telling you, this is a good idea. This is actually Ben’s idea.
Ben is visiting me, so I’m getting to see him in person. He’s sitting five feet away from me. I wanted him to join, but there were so many technical difficulties we couldn’t get it set up. Maybe Wednesday we’ll take an extra hour beforehand and just make it work.
Anyway, Ben and I were talking last night, and we were talking about courses — I can share what the numbers were on my course in a bit. We were talking about other courses we could do, like what would be fun. He says, “We’re not the right people to teach this, but I think this course would crush right now.”
Sam, do you know what Solidity is?
Sam: When I saw you write it, I thought it was a typo for “solidarity.”
Shaan: So Solidity is the programming language you use to write smart contracts for Ethereum. Let’s say one of the most promising things about crypto is that you can write a smart contract. Think like a basic escrow contract. I buy a house, you’re going to give me the title, I’m going to give you the money — but I don’t want to give you the money first, and you don’t want to give me the title first. So we use this escrow agent, we pay them, they hold both, verify everything’s there, and then release it to each other.
In the real world, we pay exorbitant middleman fees. What did you pay for escrow when you sold your business?
Sam: I think the escrow was $50,000.
Shaan: Right. Crazy. And they literally do almost nothing. A smart contract says, look, we don’t need this person in the middle, and we don’t need to pay them thousands of dollars. We just write a contract with some rules. Instead of a lawyer contract, we write a programmer contract. The programmer contract says: when this wallet has this much money in it, person A has fulfilled their obligation; when this wallet has this asset in it, person B has fulfilled their obligation; then release assets to each other. And instead of paying $4,000, you pay $4 or $40 in gas fees.
So a lot of jobs that today go to lawyers are going to go to programmers. You’re not going to want a lawyer to write a contract for something — you’re going to want a programmer. But you need that contract to work. It needs to be bug-proof, hack-proof, and able to handle all the things you need.
So there is an extreme shortage right now of smart contract developers who know how to write in this new programming language. It’s clearly a big part of the future. So the idea is: create a bootcamp that takes an existing engineer and says, “Hey, you write JavaScript, you’re a back-end engineer — you’re one of 10 million. Why don’t you come over here where there’s high demand and a shortage of people who know how to do this? I can train you in six weeks to write smart contracts in Solidity, and then place you in all the companies trying to hire for this.”
Think Lambda School, but really niche and focused. If you’re an engineer who’s a crypto nerd, this is a business you could do — train other engineers, get them hired, take a placement fee.
Sam: I’m doing research while you’re talking. Okay, I agree with a lot of that, except for the last part. Have you heard of Coursera?
Shaan: Of course.
Sam: So they started around 2012 — I believe two guys from Google noticed they were struggling to hire a particular type of engineer, I think data science or machine learning. They built courses and it worked great coming out of the gate. Then over the last five years or so they kind of went nowhere. But then over the last year or two with COVID and everything else, they started crushing it.
Do you know what Coursera’s revenue is now?
Shaan: No idea.
Sam: They went public. In 2020 they did about $400 million in revenue, and they’re currently publicly traded at a $5.5 billion dollar valuation.
Shaan: Wow. Yeah, totally forgot about them.
Sam: What you did with your course — and what a lot of people do — is charge like $300, which makes things a little bit challenging because you need a lot of buyers. What I would do is take the thing you’re describing and just copy the Coursera model. Churn these out, and charge like $8,000 — and target companies that need to train their people. Lambda for X. Coursera for X.
Shaan: That’s fair. The Lambda angle — I think every time you place one of these engineers, that’s like a $20,000 to $25,000 placement fee. Doesn’t take much to be a good business. I wouldn’t do this as a venture-scale business. It’s more like: I’ve been tinkering with smart contracts for two years, I’m a converted back-end engineer who now does smart contracts, and I could make $4 million a year as a two-person company. That’s why I’m interested.
Sam: Yeah, I would never do it as a Lambda model. When Shaan says Lambda School, it’s free upfront and they make money by taking a percentage of the placement salary. I know nothing about Lambda beyond that we had Austin on the show and I think he’s amazing.
My prediction, if I had to bet money — it won’t work.
Shaan: I mean, I think that’s a fair prediction about most startups.
Sam: But they’re not most startups. They’ve raised like $100 million. They’re not early-stage. They’re in the thick of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re out of business in two years.
Shaan: I would agree with that even as a fan and an investor.
Greg Twitter Account and Jose Canseco [00:22:00]
Shaan: Okay, let me tell you a really hilarious story. Do you know this Twitter account — it’s like “Greg” and then a bunch of numbers? A kind of nerdy-looking white guy?
Sam: No, I don’t know it.
Shaan: Google “Greg meme account.” I bet you’ve seen this guy. So you know how there are these meme castle accounts — like Dr. ParkPatel, by the way, big fan of his, I think he’s a fan of ours. He works for The Hustle, you know that?
Sam: What?!
Shaan: He’s a contractor, writes for you guys sometimes.
Sam: Oh my god, I love it! Wow. I did not know that.
Shaan: Yeah. So I was a fan of his, I DM’d him, and then you contracted him. Makes way more sense. Anyway, what Greg does is — every time Chamath tweets, he’s the first reply, and he just says something completely non-standard. Like, “I’m so proud of you, son.” Or something like that. He does it with Kylie Jenner and other celebrities too, as if they’re dating. So he’s this dorky-looking guy and whenever she posts something he’ll be like, “Babe, why didn’t you call me?”
So the other day — do you know who Jose Canseco is?
Sam: Of course.
Shaan: Ben told me this story. Jose Canseco the former baseball player tweets out: “I need a smart contract developer for a new token I’m going to launch.” Which is just the classic thing — Paris Hilton, celebrities ready to launch their own crypto token. What could go wrong?
So Greg replies. And Greg goes, “Hey, it’s Greg — DM me, how can I help?” And Jose replies: “Awesome — are you a token developer? Do you know how to do token development?” And Greg just replies: “No way, Jose.”
Two hundred thousand likes on that tweet. Just one of the most liked tweets on Twitter. So dumb. But this guy is crushing it — he’s got like 130,000 followers. And the funny thing is, when you sign up for Twitter and the username you want is taken, it suggests something like “Sam8000006.” His handle is Greg and then like 10 random numbers — the default. You would never think it’s going to go viral.
Sam: Yeah, “Greg167676whatever.”
Idea: Unbundling YC — A Fundraising Bootcamp [00:26:30]
Shaan: That was just my smart contract tangent. My next idea — ready to transition?
Sam: I am.
Shaan: It’s unbundling a piece of YC. So YC does a few things for founders: they put a stamp on you, they coach you for three months, they work on your pitch, and then there’s Demo Day where you stand in front of investors and raise money. They do about 120 startups a year now or something.
But I was brainstorming, working backwards from: what’s a course where the person gets a clear outcome? This is part of my learnings from doing a course — people don’t buy a course for learning, they buy a transformation. So for a startup, going from unfunded to funded, or from no name to a stamp of approval — that’s a big change.
So one transformation people would buy: getting your first round of funding. Not just “here’s knowledge you may or may not use” — but “I’m going to help you get funded.” I’ve raised probably $20 million in my life, I’ve helped a bunch of founders raise money, I think I’m pretty good at storytelling. So I was thinking I could help a founder who has no funding get funding in like a month. Sit them down with their deck, workshop their story, and then do angel introductions — and teach them how to manage their fundraising pipeline like a process, like a bidding war. Unlike what most people do, which is they try to date one investor at a time, go slowly, fear rejection, don’t know how to reach out.
I can teach the sales process of investing. And you could do this on a success basis — similar to Lambda, where your incentives are aligned.
Sam: I like Lambda, I just think the business model is silly.
Shaan: The beauty of Lambda is that their incentive is aligned. Most courses — like my writing course — I don’t care if you’re good or bad at writing. I really don’t. If you don’t hit your goals, it doesn’t make a financial difference to me. Whereas Lambda has to select people who can succeed, and they only make money when somebody gets a high-paying job. That’s the beauty, but also the hard part.
Sam: What were the results from your course though?
Shaan: Went well. Can I let you guess?
Sam: Yeah, sure — let’s go category by category. Money: how much do you think you made?
Sam: $150,000?
Shaan: Very close. $127,000 in top-line sales.
Power Writing Course: Numbers and Breakdown [00:32:00]
Shaan: All right, let me break down the P&L. I had a graphic designer do custom illustrations, which was about $7,500 — totally worth it, he was amazing. Then Maven takes 10%, so that’s about $12,700 off the top. Then payment processing fees were another $3 or $4 grand. So net I was probably at around $100,000 or a bit above. I’m doing the math loosely here.
That was off 320 students. I charged the first batch at half price — $400 or $450 — and the later ones at $950.
Sam: Did you do an NPS?
Shaan: I did. What’s your guess?
Sam: 9.1 out of 10. I’d bet it was like a 10 out of 10.
Shaan: 9.1. That’s amazing.
Sam: Most things that are good will have a high NPS, but that is definitely nice.
Shaan: Some people didn’t reply to the survey, so I assume the people who really didn’t care also didn’t reply. I gave myself a “true NPS” of probably 8, but it was 9.1 on paper.
The feedback was kind of amazing. I did a survey of “what did you like about it?” and it broke into three categories. The first was: “Two of those sessions were game-changers for me.” Like the cold emailing one — “That was great, I immediately implemented it and I got meetings I wanted, I booked more sales.” Or the one about writing inside a big company — how to stand out with your writing internally. “I didn’t even know I wanted that, that was a great one.”
So everybody had two sessions that were “the one” and the rest was fine — good, but those two were worth the price of admission.
The other question I asked was: “On average, how much value did you get — zero, 1x, 3x, 5x, 10x?” The average answer was 10x. “I got 10x my money back.” I don’t know how scientific that is, but okay.
Sam: What was the biggest downside? Because you’ve done a course before.
Shaan: Timing was the biggest complaint, because I taught it live. A lot of people were like, “The time worked great for me” or “It was horrible because I’m in Australia.” So they just watched the recordings.
But the biggest downside for me was: complete underestimation of the work. I spent probably 50 to 100 hours making the content — way more than I thought. I figured like two hours per session — that’s 14 hours, whatever. It was like a full eight-hour day per session, plus the actual teaching, plus the follow-up.
Sam: What was the best thing you did?
Shaan: Rehearsals. For each session I would invite four people — usually younger, 25 and under — who couldn’t afford the course. I’d say, “Hey, you want the course for free in a personal session? I need to do a dry run with you.” And in doing that I would realize five minutes in: “Oh, this is all messed up, I need to change this” or “This is way too hard, they’re confused.” Like, open mics to work the material.
Also, the structure I used worked really well. Every session started with: “Here’s the promise — by the end of this hour you’ll be able to do this.” Then I’d have everyone write something first — don’t teach anything, just have them do the thing. So for the cold email session, I’d say, “Write a cold email right now.” They’d all sit there and write it, 10 to 15 minutes. Share it in the Slack channel. Then I’d teach the three biggest things you can do to improve your cold emails — examples, theory. Then the last 15 minutes: “Redo it.” And they’d have a before-and-after from one hour.
Afterwards, I’d take an hour and just go through as many student examples as I could and give them feedback via Loom.
Sam: Was it high-risk? Like, you’re performing a magic trick live and you don’t know what they’re going to do.
Shaan: Yeah. Could go wrong. My wife Sarah did it by the way — she made $10,000 in like two weeks.
Sam: Why did she cap it?
Shaan: I told her to cap it. She’s not like you and me — this is her first time doing a public-facing thing. You and I have tens of thousands of hours of riffing under our belt, we know how to perform. She’s learning.
Sam: Will this be a significant income source for you going forward?
Shaan: I’m doing it one more time in August and we’ll see. My goal is to keep the price at $950. Below that it’s not really worth it — you need too many students, and it’s a lot of work. I had a lot of fun doing it, so we’ll see if it’s still fun or if it gets old. And I have ideas for other courses — I think I’m going to teach different courses, which is more work but more fun for me.
Sam: Can I tell you — we’re basically talking about Maven.com here, and I want to be clear that we both have an incredibly vested interest. We invested in them. But I do think they’re going to have to change. I don’t think live courses can be their bread and butter long-term. That’s my prediction.
Shaan: I started off planning to do it recorded. I started recording the content — but recording good content takes a lot of time too. It’s scalable later but more work upfront. And the second thing was people were way less excited about recorded content. I’m like, “No, no — it’s me, I’m planning this out, it’s going to be as good as it can get.” And they’re like, “No, we’d rather just have you live, off the cuff.” The perceived value of live is way higher. So I had to pivot halfway through.
Idea: Swimply (Airbnb for Pools) [00:48:00]
Shaan: All right, let me pivot to a different topic.
Sam: Maybe you told me about this, but I had Jake research it. Did you tell me about Swimply?
Shaan: Yes.
Sam: I like to keep a list of things I thought were horrible ideas that ended up doing amazingly well. I would put bitcoin in that category. Ryan Hoover told me about Product Hunt when he was launching it and I was like, “Just quit.” I also thought that was stupid.
Shaan: Yeah.
Sam: I found this company — the name is even stupid, it’s called Swimply. Actually, is it Swimply?
Shaan: Let me see. It might be Swimply.
Sam: Yes, S-W-I-M-P-L-Y. And the way I found it, I was just driving and I saw a billboard: “Swimply — rent a swimming pool near you.” And I was like, what?
That’s what it is — Airbnb for pools. With everything going on, people are desperate to get out of their homes. They’re working from home, they want to get outside, so they can rent someone else’s pool. If you told me about this four years ago, I’d be like, “This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” But the numbers show that I’m wrong.
They’ve grown 4,000% in a year — that’s 40x.
Shaan: You could do 40x on anything from a standing start, right?
Sam: True, but they raised a Series A — $10 to $12 million — from people I respect. Norwest Ventures.
The idea is: I have a pool in my backyard, I set a $50/hour rate, and somebody who doesn’t have a pool can rent it — come swim for two hours, $100 for a group of four. You clean up your backyard afterwards.
Their traffic is pretty nuts. January: 50,000 visitors. By June: hockey-sticking to 400,000 monthly visitors, according to SimilarWeb. So they’ve doubled multiple months in a row.
I got interested in this space because of a company that was raising money — which got me thinking about the broader category. We had this guy Preston on the podcast, his company was called Spacious — they would do short-term retail space and rent it out for co-working. And there’s this other company I’ll find — they’re letting you rent people’s homes during the day for co-working.
Here are a few more in the space: Neighbor — a storage marketplace, just raised a $53M Series B. iMoov — electric vehicle subscription service. Pacaso — buy and own a second home with eight others. (That’s just a timeshare, right?) And ResortPass — day passes to resort pools and hotels.
Shaan: Interesting. I’ve always been in this camp of “this is really stupid and it’s not going to work,” and I keep getting proven wrong.
Sam: By the way, you just said something about sharing a thing, and we’re talking about courses — we had this idea a long time ago and I still think it’s good.
Idea: ClassPass for Online Courses [00:56:00]
Sam: ClassPass for online courses. Right now, if you said, “Hey, I can bring you a student but they’re getting 50% off — I can get you volume and you don’t have to worry about acquiring students” — I’d take that. You could work out the math where it’s like $100 a month from somebody and they get access to your course, my course, Sarah’s course, 10 other courses — all you can eat. I think there’s a ClassPass for courses that could work.
Shaan: Let me keep being a hater. There’s this company called Every.to — E-V-E-R-Y dot T-O. They’re doing that for newsletters. The guys running it are great — Nathan, really cool, wonderful guy. Nat’s a writer there. A bunch of great writers.
But I think this business model is horrible. Dealing with how you pay each writer seems like a huge pain in the ass, doesn’t it?
Sam: Yeah, if I’m a big draw and someone else isn’t, I want to own all of it.
Shaan: You get a majority bounty on your subs — let’s say you get 50% of the subs you bring in. But you’re also putting 50% into the pool. So you’re going to get 50% from everybody else too.
And here’s the beauty of it for a paid newsletter: there’s this obligation — I have to write this thing, it can’t just be off the cuff, they’re paying for it, it’s gotta be better than normal. But what Every does is say: you just have to write one good thing a week, because the consumer is getting value from eight other writers in the bundle. So you don’t have to carry the whole subscription value yourself.
Sam: Do you think it’s going to work?
Shaan: I kind of believe in the concept. It’s that Andreessen thing — “most business is just bundling and unbundling.” Right now newsletters are all unbundled, and somebody creating a bundle is like the cable package. People will say, “Why am I paying for 10 individual subscriptions? If I could pay a flat $15 a month and get access to my 10 favorite writers — great.” So I think it can work.
Sam: Are you getting sick of newsletters?
Shaan: No, I have fun. I like writing my stuff. But I do it on my terms — I’m not consistent. I have this thing I send out every Tuesday, but if you subscribe to it, you know I send it like every other Tuesday at best. If I’m doing something else that’s fun, I don’t send it. The good of it is that when I do send it, I’m never going through the motions. And if I don’t send it because I’m doing something interesting, that’ll make the next week’s letter more interesting.
That’s my only way of sustaining this. I think when you treat your hobby like a job — people think it’s fun to blog and then they want to make that their career and then they make the grave mistake of turning your hobby into a job when you never actually wanted it as a job.
Sam: Yeah, it’s hard. As someone who has owned a newsletter company that has sent 365 newsletters times four years — very, very hard.
I heard another newsletter company — which shall not be named — say “our subscriber base is like the third largest city in America,” and I thought that was just a badass way of saying “we have whatever, three million subscribers.” You should steal that framing and start saying things like that.
Shaan: I like that. Like how the Skim said, “If we were a morning show, we’d be the number one most popular morning show.”
Sam: Another great way of framing it. It’s a bit much, but it is useful.
Elon’s Gas Station Patent and the Future of Fueling [01:04:00]
Sam: Do we want to wrap, or do we want to go one more?
Shaan: Let’s do one more fun thing. I have one — the Elon gas station patent thing.
Sam: That sounds good.
Shaan: I’m working with Jake, our researcher, to find different signals and figure out what they mean. Something I’ve always been interested in is gas stations. I’m kind of a nerd about America, I love nostalgia, Middle America stuff — and gas stations are interesting to me. We spend a lot of time there. Some of the biggest top-100 privately owned businesses in America are gas stations.
By revenue, gas makes up typically two-thirds of gas station sales, but only one-third or less of profit. The majority of profit comes from what you buy inside.
And Elon Musk recently filed a trademark for restaurant services aimed at electric vehicles — food services basically. So I’m very eager to see what Tesla’s going to do, and how the modern gas station is going to change.
What do you think is going to happen to gas stations? How are they going to continue making money?
Shaan: Two big changes. Cars go electric — then what? Do gas stations just convert into electric charging stations? Or is it different because you charge at home? Like I can’t fill up my tank overnight in my garage, but I can charge my electric vehicle. So maybe those gas stations just aren’t needed anymore. Like Blockbuster on the corner when you could just push a button and stream Netflix.
The second is self-driving cars, which is going to change the game for both gas stations and parking garages. Most of city real estate is parking — street parking, parking garages. And because cars are idle 90% of the time now, when cars go self-driving they’re not going to be idle 97% of the time, so cities are going to have to renovate the way they use land.
But for gas stations specifically: one theory is they become entertainment hubs. Charging a car takes way more time than filling up a gas tank. A supercharger takes like 30 minutes. So what do you do to entertain people during that time? Maybe they’re just in their car using the in-car entertainment system, but maybe there’s something else. Food and drink and TVs. Maybe it’s a sports bar, essentially.
Let me give my cousin a shout-out — my cousin Rohan has a startup called Stable.Auto. He’s a robotics guy from MIT. He was thinking: self-driving cars need to charge, but how does the car go charge itself? Are you just going to have attendants plugging in cars? He started building a robotic arm — machine learning that finds the charging port and plugs in, basically, for any brand of EV. Different companies have different charging port locations, different shapes.
He started doing that, but the problem was — and I told him this — self-driving cars are not here yet. You’re building for a future market and you don’t know when it’s going to happen. So he switched to something else: software that tells you when you should go charge your electric car optimally.
Imagine Uber and Lyft fleets of electric vehicles. When do you go charge? If you wait until almost empty, you might miss peak traffic time when you’re getting lots of rides and making money. You might also go charge when it’s really expensive because electricity costs fluctuate throughout the day. So what they’re building is an app for any Uber or Lyft driver with an EV: “Now is the optimal time to charge. Go to this charging station nearby — there’s not much traffic for rides right now and electricity prices are low.” When you have self-driving fleets, it’ll do the whole thing automatically — “send 10% of your fleet to charge now, keep 90% on the road,” optimizing costs in both directions.
Sam: I mean, his idea makes sense. But I think the answer is far simpler. Have you heard of Buc-ee’s?
Shaan: Yes. Tell people what it is.
Sam: Buc-ee’s is basically in Texas there’s a gas station chain that people love. They don’t just like it, they love it — it’s a tourist destination. For a couple of reasons: extremely clean bathrooms, and they have a bunch of food that people are obsessed with. It’s basically sugary road-trip food, but it has a funny logo and they serve brisket. It just became a thing.
I think it’s going to break down into two categories. The first is everyday use — I think people are going to charge at home or charge while they’re at the grocery store. Whole Foods is going to be the winner there. The second is travel, and I think what that’s going to look like is Buc-ee’s — it’s going to be Buc-ee’s meets Museum of Ice Cream.
When I go to Buc-ee’s it’s a spectacle. I stop there because I’m going to get a huge soda, maybe something to eat, but I’m just going to look at stupid stuff — a Buc-ee’s knife, a Buc-ee’s tote bag, dumb trinkets. Like going into a Bass Pro Shop or walking around IKEA. It’s just a spectacle. With a little bit of Museum of Ice Cream on top — a little bit more spectacle, things that are fun to take pictures in front of.
That is what’s going to happen. And I think 7-Eleven could actually become a Buc-ee’s — 7-Eleven has a little bit of nostalgia. Like Subway could be the next Vans.
Shaan: There’s definitely some operators that are going to go that route — make it a tourist destination, have a quirky brand. And then some are going to go full automation. In San Francisco we had that thing, Cafe X — did you ever get coffee from that?
Sam: No, it took too long.
Shaan: I mean it takes like a minute, right?
Sam: I thought it was dumb. Cafe X is stupid.
Shaan: How can you think that’s stupid? That’s so good. For anyone who doesn’t know — it’s basically a robot arm inside a glass enclosure, in a building. It’s making a spectacle of moving the coffee cup around and pouring the milk. In reality, you don’t need that arm — it could just be a coffee vending machine.
Sam: That’s my point. When I see these things in warehouses it’s just: put two quarters in, get a cappuccino. The arm is theater.
Shaan: I could see that point of view. But what’s the difference between Starbucks and a vending machine? Is it the quality?
Sam: Probably not the quality. One’s a spectacle and one you talk to a person.
Shaan: So maybe it’s just: I like getting out of the house and seeing people.
Sam: Okay. Maybe then Starbucks is safe.
Shaan: Or there’s some middle ground of variety and quality that’s above a coffee machine but different from Starbucks. You want your soy latte with almond milk and two pumps of sugar and light ice — a normal machine can’t do that, and neither can it do it quickly. Cafe X says: what if we serve starbucks-quality coffee, faster and cheaper, because we have a robot arm working 24/7 that never calls in sick, never has employee issues, takes up one-tenth of the square footage? You can shove these things anywhere — inside an apartment building where a full-service Starbucks with staff wouldn’t make sense.
I don’t think Cafe X specifically is going to succeed, but I’d be shocked if there’s not a Cafe X-type winner down the road.
So I think there’s a version of gas stations that’s pure automation — charging automated, giant robot slurpee machine at the push of a button. Like 7-Eleven but all robotic.
Sam: We’ll see if it works out. But I think it’s going to be more like Buc-ee’s. At least, I hope it will be.
Shaan: All right, that’s the episode. I gotta go get a haircut. No days off on the road — let’s travel. Never looking back.