This episode of My First Million features a conversation between Sam Parr and Shaan Puri about the business potential of Chrome extensions and the viral growth of a new study-focused app. They discuss the mechanics of building successful browser-based tools, share personal anecdotes about their own ventures, and analyze the strategies behind apps like TwoCan and StudyStream.
Topics: Chrome extensions, SaaS, viral marketing, entrepreneurship, productivity apps, business strategy, venture capital
Chrome Extensions as a Business [00:00]
Sam Parr: Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought? And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on and I was like, “How big are you guys?” He was like, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” And I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He was like, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” And then I and then I go, “You just raised money?” He goes, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because it’s at north of a billion dollar valuation.”
Shaan Puri: What’s up everybody? We just recorded the pod. We talked about, uh, I was on CNBC today. So we talked about going on TV, going on CNBC. We talked about a bunch of business ideas that are Chrome extensions, which is kind of like a niche that nobody really talks about, but Sam’s super into it and, uh, he brought the fire. And then at the end, we shoot the shit about a bunch of random things in maybe the last 10 minutes, uh, talking about, you know, some of the stuff from the Michael Saylor episode and, uh, and some cool stuff we have going on. We just shoot the shit at the end. That might have been the best part. So stick around for that last 10 minutes of the pod. All right, enjoy.
Sam Parr: All right, great. What’s going on? Um, congratulations. Um, do you want to talk about family stuff or no?
Shaan Puri: Uh, yeah, sure. Had a kid, uh, four or five days, four days ago, I think now.
Sam Parr: Congratulations. What are the details?
Shaan Puri: Uh, baby boy is here. His name is Banks and, uh,
Sam Parr: Banks? Why Banks?
Shaan Puri: Uh, I don’t know. We thought of the name a while when we were trying to name our first kid and we just and her name is Blush and so I just thought Banks and Blush go well together. Um, I don’t know. I just thought it was a cool name. Wanted to do something cool.
Sam Parr: It’s a cool name. It’s a cool name. It’s just a unique name, so I was wondering if there was a reason.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, at least this one is a name. Uh, the first one when we named her Blush, we Googled like, “Oh, Blush name meaning,” and there’s literally like it’s like, “No, this is not a name, bro.” So,
Sam Parr: What is Banks? Um, Banks is a it’s a popular last name and because of that, some people started doing it as a first name. Um, Hillary Duff’s kid is named Banks. I know that. Uh, that’s pretty much the extent of the popularity of it. I don’t really care to pick a popular name. I’d rather pick a a a unique name. Um, but I could tell like when we tell our family, they’re like, “What?” Uh, is there is there a nickname? What what are we going to do with this?
Sam Parr: No, Banks is good. My nephews are named Avit, like the Avit brothers and Jude, like, “Hey Jude.” And then now they have a girl named Billy. So I’m team odd names.
Shaan Puri: There you go. I mean, we can’t all be Sams, right?
Sam Parr: Or, well, people call you Shan.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. Um, There’s people that just straight call me Shane and they just keep calling me that and I just have not correcting them and I’ve just now it’s like we’re years into the relationship. It’s like vendors that I work with.
Sam Parr: Um, well, congratulations. So you’re a year and a half older than me. I um, I’m 31. I for the longest time, I was like, “I’m going to wait to have kids.” But then a few things happened. The first, so my wife Sarah is 28. The first is that, um, a few of my friends, one of them’s 39 and, um, I think your wife’s older than you, right?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, by a year.
Sam Parr: So, like early mid-30s and and then a few of my friends are late 30s and these women are having kids and they’re like, “Oh my god, it sucks so bad. I wish I would have done it when I was younger.” So I’ve changed my I’ve like I’ve thought about having children.
Shaan Puri: Wait, the guys saying that or the women saying that?
Sam Parr: No, the woman. Well, the guys are like, “It’s definitely harder to parent when you’re in your 40s than when you’re younger.” But mainly, uh, for the woman, they’re like, “It’s just harder on the body.” And second, I had a friend and he was like, “Dude, have a kid now.” I was like, “Why? Like, I want to have all this freedom.” He goes, “It’s way different. Once I had a kid, I realized the later that I had it, the less years I’m going to be able to spend with him. And now I’m just going to die sooner. And I wish I would have had 10 more years and done it at 25 than 35.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s an interesting perspective.” So my opinion has been changing lately. I might have a a child soon, but we’re still deciding.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. And by the way, before we get to the first idea, congratulations on CNBC. You were on there today. Did anyone reach out to you and because they saw you?
Sam Parr: Uh, not really. Only people who knew me already, you know, like my mom was probably the most excited, you know. Basically, like people who are 30 years older than me were like, “This is amazing. CNBC, this is the shit.” I was on CNBC for two and a half minutes or three minutes or something like that. And so, but nobody, you know, like, I don’t know. If I go tweet something, I’ll get a lot more messages than, uh, than going on TV, which is weird. But it definitely was a cool feeling and like, I don’t know. It’s like one of those things that like I woke up before my alarm clock because I was like, “Okay, today’s a good day. Today’s a big day. I got something to do today that I’ve never done before.”
Shaan Puri: Dude, these these broadcast networks, like you think they’re huge, and they are huge, and they have reach and all that, but like the average viewers is only like 200,000 people at a time. It’s not it’s not like crazy high in the world of social media.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and I think even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are it’s it’s kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it’s hard to get like it’s hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment.
Shaan Puri: Um, yes. So, like it’s I I it’s prestigious, but it’s definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you’re coming on to talk about, it was.
Sam Parr: Right. Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I’ll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn’t have the same it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, I this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who’s ever done this. Um, have you ever gone on? It’s such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a a TV thing? So you get you get connected in and it’s like a Zoom call basically right now. Um, and you can’t see them. So on TV, it looks like you’re all like split screen, like you see your face, their face, and the other person. But in in reality, you have no you there’s no facial expressions because you can’t see each other’s video. So you’re only hearing each other. You don’t know when when it’s your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going down this checklist of like worry. It was like, “Okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to” And then like, it’s never like the things you expect. It’s always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you look if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at. They’re not on video. And so I’m just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and I look like a like a I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds in, I realized, “Oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that’s what will look normal.” And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian’s butt and I said, “I know, I thought that was funny.” to do balls and stuff. So I know I said some stuff maybe I wasn’t supposed to say.
Shaan Puri: No, the Kim you’re it was good. You you were a good interview. It was great. Uh, I watched the whole thing. It was good.
Sam Parr: Thank you.
Shaan Puri: Um, all right, you want to talk about the first idea?
Sam Parr: Yeah, let’s do it.
Shaan Puri: You want to do uh this thing TwoCan?
Sam Parr: Yes. Okay. So I um along with Joe Spizer, we I’m kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we’re just investing in we’re just investing in companies together.
Shaan Puri: Why why Hampton?
Sam Parr: I grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s And we were thinking for we were thinking about names and I was like, “Uh, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons. What do you think?”
Shaan Puri: And it’s just your own money or it’s a fund?
Sam Parr: We’re mostly our my own money, but uh him and I uh I Joe’s an investor in your thing and he would like, “Man, I want to put even more money in.” And he goes, “You just want to invest with me?” I go, “Yeah, sure.” And then he’s like, “You want to do a rolling fund?” I was like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” Uh, he’s like, “You want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals?” I go, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it with you.” So it’s just like a deal-by-deal basis. So we created an AngelList syndicate, which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have you have to tell me and then I’ll invest.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Um, also, so I heard this great description of AngelList, which is like, it’s Substack for VCs. Um, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. Uh, the same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It’s awesome.
Sam Parr: So, yeah, we did it and like so we I found a company already um and we invest and I was just going to invest like I I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And um he was like, “Why don’t you just do the syndicate thing?” And I was like, “All right, let’s try it.” So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with?
Shaan Puri: So so I know I know about this company, but give the give the what is your kind of like two-sentence description of it?
Sam Parr: It’s called TwoCan and it’s basically the really dumbed-down version is it’s like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it’s a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you’re reading into the language that you want to learn. So it’s contextual learning. Um, more complicated than that, but that’s the simple version.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It’s kind of genius, honestly. The the founder, what’s her name? Taylor something? She’s magical. She’s great. She’s been a fan of the podcast actually. She she messaged us a long time ago when like before this fundraise, uh, being like, “Hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I’m doing.” Or maybe I missed it.
Sam Parr: Did she really? Oh, I can’t believe I missed it.
Shaan Puri: And so I um so I’ve been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn’t pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. Um, but I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it’s okay, so here’s my thing. Um, anything that there’s a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, “I should, I should, I should.” And you uh as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you’re just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it’s that hard to learn a language. It’s hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book, or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. Um, it doesn’t sound that hard, but in practice, it’s like it’s a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what TwoCan is doing is you don’t have to make it a separate thing. It’s like you’re already just browsing the internet. So why don’t we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you’re visiting? So you’re not you don’t have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You’ll learn the language in bits and pieces while you’re browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And um and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don’t even know why I didn’t invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I’ll hit her up after this and and see if I can get in.
Sam Parr: Have you talked Yeah, do it. If you don’t know her well, I can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman’s a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, “Oh, well, you’re going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company.” Like Oh, really? Okay. I I hope it’s this one, but like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just she just oozed CEO. Um Wow, interesting. I’ve never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there’s if there’s anyone come to mind?
Sam Parr: Um, the guy from Superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, “Oh yeah, like you are a so you I would bet on you for just about anything.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, “I’m going to write a book,” I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be great.” Yeah, I was like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. Um, when we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey, or Harley, Harley, uh, I kind of but obviously he’s already hugely successful. But like there was a handful of people we’ve interviewed where they have the Harley when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody’s business. And so he just had this good-looking guy in this great-looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn’t he didn’t even have to say a word. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy’s like a power player.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, and so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, “Oh, you she just she just was on top of it. I just felt great.” Another person, and this is uh a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that’s her name, who started ClassPass. Payal. Payal. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, “Oh, you’re really special.” Uh, so uh, anyway, this woman Taylor, I met with her. I was like, “Oh, you’re I whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I’m in, no matter what.” Um, and so, but I started like also I mean, let’s we’ll just we’ll move on past TwoCan, but it’s joinedtwocan.com. The reason it’s interesting is they have this like head she worked at Headspace. So they have this like Headspace cute branding shit. Right. By the way, we should just say TwoCan is like the bird. TwoCan Sam type of thing. It’s it’s not yeah, it’s spelled like that. T-O-U-C-A-N.
Sam Parr: Yeah, TwoCan. Um, which I don’t know, do those birds like speak or something? I I don’t know why. Maybe maybe that might be it. Yeah. So so do you have any kind of stats you can share about them? Like give us a sense of why you feel like this is working.
Sam Parr: Uh, I didn’t ask her for permission to ask to talk about that, but basically Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like I think 5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that and what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I’m like, “Well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It’s a $5 billion company, I think.” Um, and I I I’ve been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, I do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say, “Well, how can I just create this in the form of a Google plugin?” Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don’t do it because there’s a little bit of friction, and how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Right. Now, there’s a ton of downside with Google plugins, you know, you’re a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you. But it’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that’s what I wanted to bring up was some uh Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this I don’t know if this is how she did it, but she basically um uh or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing. So for example, learning a language. People already want to learn a language, you just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar. So you just fix it as you write. Uh, one that I use all the time is SimilarWeb, so it tells me the traffic of someone’s website. Uh, passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis, so a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?
Shaan Puri: Oh yeah. My my buddy was with the guy who started it.
Sam Parr: Isn’t that worth like a billion dollars? Uh, not yet, but getting close. It’s several hundred millions, I think, was the last round.
Sam Parr: And all it does is uh screen recordings. Screen recordings. Yeah. So so they basically say, “Oh, you want to show something on your screen, here’s a click, boom, record, share.” Um, so the the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several billion. $4 billion. So Honey had, I think 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you’re about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background, it’s looking for, is there a is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else? Or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don’t have to take an action. I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It’s just going to do it and it the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over $100 million a year. So The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he’s an engineer. He’s like a very um by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He’s really cool. His name’s Max. And I was like shooting the shit with him and I was like, “Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought?” And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on and I was like, “How big are you guys?” He was like, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” And I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He was like, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” And then I and then I go, “You just raised money?” He goes, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because it was at it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation.”
Sam Parr: Yeah. I was like, “Oh my god, you pulled it off.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, they did it. Exactly. Um, so those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as I believe a Chrome Chrome extension. So it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. Um, you needed a a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there’s others that like, like for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have AdBlock or, you know, UBlock Origin or whatever. Um, that’s definitely one of them. And so I think I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It’s like, “Dude, you’re just making this like plugin.” And definitely there’s a lot of people like my mom doesn’t know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn’t know there’s a Chrome extension store. She doesn’t really know how to install them. Like she knows apps, but she doesn’t know Chrome extensions. So you’re going to get a little bit more of a tech-savvy audience. You know, it’s a smaller market overall. But the friction was a big deal.
Sam Parr: So I’m going to try and I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the the numbers. There’s 1.6 billion iPhone users, okay? 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There’s a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn’t know how to do this, but does your mom need to know how to do this?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are it’s it’s kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it’s hard to get like it’s hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment.
Sam Parr: Um, yes. So, like it’s I I it’s prestigious, but it’s definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you’re coming on to talk about, it was. Right. Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I’ll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn’t have the same it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, I this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who’s ever done this. Um, have you ever gone on? It’s such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a a TV thing? So you get you get connected in and it’s like a Zoom call basically right now. Um, and you can’t see them. So on TV, it looks like you’re all like split screen, like you see your face, their face, and the other person. But in in reality, you have no you there’s no facial expressions because you can’t see each other’s video. So you’re only hearing each other. You don’t know when when it’s your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going down this checklist of like worry. It was like, “Okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to” And then like, it’s never like the things you expect. It’s always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you look if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at. They’re not on video. And so I’m just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and I look like a like a I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds in, I realized, “Oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that’s what will look normal.” And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian’s butt and I said, “I know, I thought that was funny.” to do balls and stuff. So I know I said some stuff maybe I wasn’t supposed to say.
Sam Parr: No, the Kim you’re it was good. You you were a good interview. It was great. Uh, I watched the whole thing. It was good.
Shaan Puri: Thank you.
Sam Parr: Um, all right, you want to talk about the first idea?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, let’s do it.
Sam Parr: You want to do uh this thing TwoCan?
Shaan Puri: Yes.
Sam Parr: Okay. So I um along with Joe Spizer, we I’m kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we’re just investing in we’re just investing in companies together.
Shaan Puri: Why why Hampton?
Sam Parr: I grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s And we were thinking for we were thinking about names and I was like, “Uh, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons. What do you think?”
Shaan Puri: And it’s just your own money or it’s a fund?
Sam Parr: We’re mostly our my own money, but uh him and I uh I Joe’s an investor in your thing and he would like, “Man, I want to put even more money in.” And he goes, “You just want to invest with me?” I go, “Yeah, sure.” And then he’s like, “You want to do a rolling fund?” I was like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” Uh, he’s like, “You want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals?” I go, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it with you.” So it’s just like a deal-by-deal basis. So we created an AngelList syndicate, which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have you have to tell me and then I’ll invest.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Um, also, so I heard this great description of AngelList, which is like, it’s Substack for VCs. Um, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. Uh, the same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It’s awesome.
Sam Parr: So, yeah, we did it and like so we I found a company already um and we invest and I was just going to invest like I I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And um he was like, “Why don’t you just do the syndicate thing?” And I was like, “All right, let’s try it.” So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with?
Shaan Puri: So so I know I know about this company, but give the give the what is your kind of like two-sentence description of it?
Sam Parr: It’s called TwoCan and it’s basically the really dumbed-down version is it’s like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it’s a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you’re reading into the language that you want to learn. So it’s contextual learning. Um, more complicated than that, but that’s the simple version.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It’s kind of genius, honestly. The the founder, what’s her name? Taylor something? She’s magical. She’s great. She’s been a fan of the podcast actually. She she messaged us a long time ago when like before this fundraise, uh, being like, “Hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I’m doing.” Or maybe I missed it.
Sam Parr: Did she really? Oh, I can’t believe I missed it.
Shaan Puri: And so I um so I’ve been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn’t pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. Um, but I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it’s okay, so here’s my thing. Um, anything that there’s a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, “I should, I should, I should.” And you uh as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you’re just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it’s that hard to learn a language. It’s hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book, or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. Um, it doesn’t sound that hard, but in practice, it’s like it’s a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what TwoCan is doing is you don’t have to make it a separate thing. It’s like you’re already just browsing the internet. So why don’t we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you’re visiting? So you’re not you don’t have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You’ll learn the language in bits and pieces while you’re browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And um and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don’t even know why I didn’t invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I’ll hit her up after this and and see if I can get in.
Sam Parr: Have you talked Yeah, do it. If you don’t know her well, I can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman’s a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, “Oh, well, you’re going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company.” Like Oh, really? Okay. I I hope it’s this one, but like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just she just oozed CEO. Um Wow, interesting. I’ve never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there’s if there’s anyone come to mind?
Sam Parr: Um, the guy from Superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, “Oh yeah, like you are a so you I would bet on you for just about anything.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, “I’m going to write a book,” I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be great.” Yeah, I was like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. Um, when we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey, or Harley, Harley, uh, I kind of but obviously he’s already hugely successful. But like there was a handful of people we’ve interviewed where they have the Harley when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody’s business. And so he just had this good-looking guy in this great-looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn’t he didn’t even have to say a word. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy’s like a power player.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, and so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, “Oh, you she just she just was on top of it. I just felt great.” Another person, and this is uh a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that’s her name, who started ClassPass. Payal. Payal. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, “Oh, you’re really special.” Uh, so uh, anyway, this woman Taylor, I met with her. I was like, “Oh, you’re I whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I’m in, no matter what.” Um, and so, but I started like also I mean, let’s we’ll just we’ll move on past TwoCan, but it’s joinedtwocan.com. The reason it’s interesting is they have this like head she worked at Headspace. So they have this like Headspace cute branding shit. Right. By the way, we should just say TwoCan is like the bird. TwoCan Sam type of thing. It’s it’s not yeah, it’s spelled like that. T-O-U-C-A-N.
Sam Parr: Yeah, TwoCan. Um, which I don’t know, do those birds like speak or something? I I don’t know why. Maybe maybe that might be it. Yeah. So so do you have any kind of stats you can share about them? Like give us a sense of why you feel like this is working.
Sam Parr: Uh, I didn’t ask her for permission to ask to talk about that, but basically Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like I think 5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that and what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I’m like, “Well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It’s a $5 billion company, I think.” Um, and I I I’ve been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, I do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say, “Well, how can I just create this in the form of a Google plugin?” Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don’t do it because there’s a little bit of friction, and how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Right. Now, there’s a ton of downside with Google plugins, you know, you’re a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you. But it’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that’s what I wanted to bring up was some uh Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this I don’t know if this is how she did it, but she basically um uh or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing. So for example, learning a language. People already want to learn a language, you just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar. So you just fix it as you write. Uh, one that I use all the time is SimilarWeb, so it tells me the traffic of someone’s website. Uh, passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis, so a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?
Shaan Puri: Oh yeah. My my buddy was with the guy who started it.
Sam Parr: Isn’t that worth like a billion dollars? Uh, not yet, but getting close. It’s several hundred millions, I think, was the last round.
Sam Parr: And all it does is uh screen recordings. Screen recordings. Yeah. So so they basically say, “Oh, you want to show something on your screen, here’s a click, boom, record, share.” Um, so the the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several billion. $4 billion. So Honey had, I think 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you’re about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background, it’s looking for, is there a is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else? Or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don’t have to take an action. I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It’s just going to do it and it the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over $100 million a year. So The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he’s an engineer. He’s like a very um by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He’s really cool. His name’s Max. And I was like shooting the shit with him and I was like, “Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought?” And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on and I was like, “How big are you guys?” He was like, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” And I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He was like, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” And then I and then I go, “You just raised money?” He goes, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because it was at it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation.”
Sam Parr: Yeah. I was like, “Oh my god, you pulled it off.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, they did it. Exactly. Um, so those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as I believe a Chrome Chrome extension. So it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. Um, you needed a a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there’s others that like, like for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have AdBlock or, you know, UBlock Origin or whatever. Um, that’s definitely one of them. And so I think I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It’s like, “Dude, you’re just making this like plugin.” And definitely there’s a lot of people like my mom doesn’t know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn’t know there’s a Chrome extension store. She doesn’t really know how to install them. Like she knows apps, but she doesn’t know Chrome extensions. So you’re going to get a little bit more of a tech-savvy audience. You know, it’s a smaller market overall. But the friction was a big deal.
Sam Parr: So I’m going to try and I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the the numbers. There’s 1.6 billion iPhone users, okay? 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There’s a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn’t know how to do this, but does your mom need to know how to do this?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are it’s it’s kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it’s hard to get like it’s hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment.
Sam Parr: Um, yes. So, like it’s I I it’s prestigious, but it’s definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you’re coming on to talk about, it was. Right. Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I’ll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn’t have the same it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, I this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who’s ever done this. Um, have you ever gone on? It’s such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a a TV thing? So you get you get connected in and it’s like a Zoom call basically right now. Um, and you can’t see them. So on TV, it looks like you’re all like split screen, like you see your face, their face, and the other person. But in in reality, you have no you there’s no facial expressions because you can’t see each other’s video. So you’re only hearing each other. You don’t know when when it’s your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going down this checklist of like worry. It was like, “Okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to” And then like, it’s never like the things you expect. It’s always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you look if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at. They’re not on video. And so I’m just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and I look like a like a I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds in, I realized, “Oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that’s what will look normal.” And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian’s butt and I said, “I know, I thought that was funny.” to do balls and stuff. So I know I said some stuff maybe I wasn’t supposed to say.
Sam Parr: No, the Kim you’re it was good. You you were a good interview. It was great. Uh, I watched the whole thing. It was good.
Sam Parr: Thank you.
Shaan Puri: Um, all right, you want to talk about the first idea?
Sam Parr: Yeah, let’s do it.
Shaan Puri: You want to do uh this thing TwoCan?
Sam Parr: Yes.
Shaan Puri: Okay. So I um along with Joe Spizer, we I’m kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we’re just investing in we’re just investing in companies together.
Shaan Puri: Why why Hampton?
Sam Parr: I grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s And we were thinking for we were thinking about names and I was like, “Uh, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons. What do you think?”
Shaan Puri: And it’s just your own money or it’s a fund?
Sam Parr: We’re mostly our my own money, but uh him and I uh I Joe’s an investor in your thing and he would like, “Man, I want to put even more money in.” And he goes, “You just want to invest with me?” I go, “Yeah, sure.” And then he’s like, “You want to do a rolling fund?” I was like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” Uh, he’s like, “You want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals?” I go, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it with you.” So it’s just like a deal-by-deal basis. So we created an AngelList syndicate, which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have you have to tell me and then I’ll invest.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Um, also, so I heard this great description of AngelList, which is like, it’s Substack for VCs. Um, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. Uh, the same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It’s awesome.
Sam Parr: So, yeah, we did it and like so we I found a company already um and we invest and I was just going to invest like I I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And um he was like, “Why don’t you just do the syndicate thing?” And I was like, “All right, let’s try it.” So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with?
Shaan Puri: So so I know I know about this company, but give the give the what is your kind of like two-sentence description of it?
Sam Parr: It’s called TwoCan and it’s basically the really dumbed-down version is it’s like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it’s a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you’re reading into the language that you want to learn. So it’s contextual learning. Um, more complicated than that, but that’s the simple version.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It’s kind of genius, honestly. The the founder, what’s her name? Taylor something? She’s magical. She’s great. She’s been a fan of the podcast actually. She she messaged us a long time ago when like before this fundraise, uh, being like, “Hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I’m doing.” Or maybe I missed it.
Sam Parr: Did she really? Oh, I can’t believe I missed it.
Shaan Puri: And so I um so I’ve been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn’t pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. Um, but I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it’s okay, so here’s my thing. Um, anything that there’s a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, “I should, I should, I should.” And you uh as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you’re just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it’s that hard to learn a language. It’s hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book, or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. Um, it doesn’t sound that hard, but in practice, it’s like it’s a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what TwoCan is doing is you don’t have to make it a separate thing. It’s like you’re already just browsing the internet. So why don’t we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you’re visiting? So you’re not you don’t have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You’ll learn the language in bits and pieces while you’re browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And um and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don’t even know why I didn’t invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I’ll hit her up after this and and see if I can get in.
Sam Parr: Have you talked Yeah, do it. If you don’t know her well, I can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman’s a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, “Oh, well, you’re going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company.” Like Oh, really? Okay. I I hope it’s this one, but like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just she just oozed CEO. Um Wow, interesting. I’ve never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there’s if there’s anyone come to mind?
Sam Parr: Um, the guy from Superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, “Oh yeah, like you are a so you I would bet on you for just about anything.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, “I’m going to write a book,” I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be great.” Yeah, I was like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. Um, when we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey, or Harley, Harley, uh, I kind of but obviously he’s already hugely successful. But like there was a handful of people we’ve interviewed where they have the Harley when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody’s business. And so he just had this good-looking guy in this great-looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn’t he didn’t even have to say a word. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy’s like a power player.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, and so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, “Oh, you she just she just was on top of it. I just felt great.” Another person, and this is uh a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that’s her name, who started ClassPass. Payal. Payal. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, “Oh, you’re really special.” Uh, so uh, anyway, this woman Taylor, I met with her. I was like, “Oh, you’re I whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I’m in, no matter what.” Um, and so, but I started like also I mean, let’s we’ll just we’ll move on past TwoCan, but it’s joinedtwocan.com. The reason it’s interesting is they have this like head she worked at Headspace. So they have this like Headspace cute branding shit. Right. By the way, we should just say TwoCan is like the bird. TwoCan Sam type of thing. It’s it’s not yeah, it’s spelled like that. T-O-U-C-A-N.
Sam Parr: Yeah, TwoCan. Um, which I don’t know, do those birds like speak or something? I I don’t know why. Maybe maybe that might be it. Yeah. So so do you have any kind of stats you can share about them? Like give us a sense of why you feel like this is working.
Sam Parr: Uh, I didn’t ask her for permission to ask to talk about that, but basically Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like I think 5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that and what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I’m like, “Well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It’s a $5 billion company, I think.” Um, and I I I’ve been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, I do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say, “Well, how can I just create this in the form of a Google plugin?” Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don’t do it because there’s a little bit of friction, and how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Right. Now, there’s a ton of downside with Google plugins, you know, you’re a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you. But it’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that’s what I wanted to bring up was some uh Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this I don’t know if this is how she did it, but she basically um uh or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing. So for example, learning a language. People already want to learn a language, you just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar. So you just fix it as you write. Uh, one that I use all the time is SimilarWeb, so it tells me the traffic of someone’s website. Uh, passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis, so a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?
Shaan Puri: Oh yeah. My my buddy was with the guy who started it.
Sam Parr: Isn’t that worth like a billion dollars? Uh, not yet, but getting close. It’s several hundred millions, I think, was the last round.
Sam Parr: And all it does is uh screen recordings. Screen recordings. Yeah. So so they basically say, “Oh, you want to show something on your screen, here’s a click, boom, record, share.” Um, so the the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several billion. $4 billion. So Honey had, I think 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you’re about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background, it’s looking for, is there a is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else? Or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don’t have to take an action. I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It’s just going to do it and it the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over $100 million a year. So The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he’s an engineer. He’s like a very um by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He’s really cool. His name’s Max. And I was like shooting the shit with him and I was like, “Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought?” And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on and I was like, “How big are you guys?” He was like, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” And I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He was like, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” And then I and then I go, “You just raised money?” He goes, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because it was at it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation.”
Sam Parr: Yeah. I was like, “Oh my god, you pulled it off.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, they did it. Exactly. Um, so those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as I believe a Chrome Chrome extension. So it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. Um, you needed a a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there’s others that like, like for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have AdBlock or, you know, UBlock Origin or whatever. Um, that’s definitely one of them. And so I think I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It’s like, “Dude, you’re just making this like plugin.” And definitely there’s a lot of people like my mom doesn’t know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn’t know there’s a Chrome extension store. She doesn’t really know how to install them. Like she knows apps, but she doesn’t know Chrome extensions. So you’re going to get a little bit more of a tech-savvy audience. You know, it’s a smaller market overall. But the friction was a big deal.
Sam Parr: So I’m going to try and I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the the numbers. There’s 1.6 billion iPhone users, okay? 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There’s a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn’t know how to do this, but does your mom need to know how to do this?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are it’s it’s kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it’s hard to get like it’s hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment.
Sam Parr: Um, yes. So, like it’s I I it’s prestigious, but it’s definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you’re coming on to talk about, it was. Right. Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I’ll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn’t have the same it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, I this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who’s ever done this. Um, have you ever gone on? It’s such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a a TV thing? So you get you get connected in and it’s like a Zoom call basically right now. Um, and you can’t see them. So on TV, it looks like you’re all like split screen, like you see your face, their face, and the other person. But in in reality, you have no you there’s no facial expressions because you can’t see each other’s video. So you’re only hearing each other. You don’t know when when it’s your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going down this checklist of like worry. It was like, “Okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to” And then like, it’s never like the things you expect. It’s always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you look if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at. They’re not on video. And so I’m just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and I look like a like a I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds in, I realized, “Oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that’s what will look normal.” And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian’s butt and I said, “I know, I thought that was funny.” to do balls and stuff. So I know I said some stuff maybe I wasn’t supposed to say.
Sam Parr: No, the Kim you’re it was good. You you were a good interview. It was great. Uh, I watched the whole thing. It was good.
Sam Parr: Thank you.
Shaan Puri: Um, all right, you want to talk about the first idea?
Sam Parr: Yeah, let’s do it.
Shaan Puri: You want to do uh this thing TwoCan?
Sam Parr: Yes.
Shaan Puri: Okay. So I um along with Joe Spizer, we I’m kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we’re just investing in we’re just investing in companies together.
Shaan Puri: Why why Hampton?
Sam Parr: I grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s And we were thinking for we were thinking about names and I was like, “Uh, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons. What do you think?”
Shaan Puri: And it’s just your own money or it’s a fund?
Sam Parr: We’re mostly our my own money, but uh him and I uh I Joe’s an investor in your thing and he would like, “Man, I want to put even more money in.” And he goes, “You just want to invest with me?” I go, “Yeah, sure.” And then he’s like, “You want to do a rolling fund?” I was like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” Uh, he’s like, “You want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals?” I go, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it with you.” So it’s just like a deal-by-deal basis. So we created an AngelList syndicate, which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have you have to tell me and then I’ll invest.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Um, also, so I heard this great description of AngelList, which is like, it’s Substack for VCs. Um, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. Uh, the same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It’s awesome.
Sam Parr: So, yeah, we did it and like so we I found a company already um and we invest and I was just going to invest like I I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And um he was like, “Why don’t you just do the syndicate thing?” And I was like, “All right, let’s try it.” So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with?
Shaan Puri: So so I know I know about this company, but give the give the what is your kind of like two-sentence description of it?
Sam Parr: It’s called TwoCan and it’s basically the really dumbed-down version is it’s like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it’s a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you’re reading into the language that you want to learn. So it’s contextual learning. Um, more complicated than that, but that’s the simple version.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It’s kind of genius, honestly. The the founder, what’s her name? Taylor something? She’s magical. She’s great. She’s been a fan of the podcast actually. She she messaged us a long time ago when like before this fundraise, uh, being like, “Hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I’m doing.” Or maybe I missed it.
Sam Parr: Did she really? Oh, I can’t believe I missed it.
Shaan Puri: And so I um so I’ve been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn’t pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. Um, but I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it’s okay, so here’s my thing. Um, anything that there’s a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, “I should, I should, I should.” And you uh as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you’re just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it’s that hard to learn a language. It’s hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book, or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. Um, it doesn’t sound that hard, but in practice, it’s like it’s a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what TwoCan is doing is you don’t have to make it a separate thing. It’s like you’re already just browsing the internet. So why don’t we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you’re visiting? So you’re not you don’t have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You’ll learn the language in bits and pieces while you’re browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And um and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don’t even know why I didn’t invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I’ll hit her up after this and and see if I can get in.
Sam Parr: Have you talked Yeah, do it. If you don’t know her well, I can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman’s a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, “Oh, well, you’re going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company.” Like Oh, really? Okay. I I hope it’s this one, but like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just she just oozed CEO. Um Wow, interesting. I’ve never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there’s if there’s anyone come to mind?
Sam Parr: Um, the guy from Superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, “Oh yeah, like you are a so you I would bet on you for just about anything.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, “I’m going to write a book,” I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be great.” Yeah, I was like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. Um, when we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey, or Harley, Harley, uh, I kind of but obviously he’s already hugely successful. But like there was a handful of people we’ve interviewed where they have the Harley when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody’s business. And so he just had this good-looking guy in this great-looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn’t he didn’t even have to say a word. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy’s like a power player.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, and so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, “Oh, you she just she just was on top of it. I just felt great.” Another person, and this is uh a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that’s her name, who started ClassPass. Payal. Payal. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, “Oh, you’re really special.” Uh, so uh, anyway, this woman Taylor, I met with her. I was like, “Oh, you’re I whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I’m in, no matter what.” Um, and so, but I started like also I mean, let’s we’ll just we’ll move on past TwoCan, but it’s joinedtwocan.com. The reason it’s interesting is they have this like head she worked at Headspace. So they have this like Headspace cute branding shit. Right. By the way, we should just say TwoCan is like the bird. TwoCan Sam type of thing. It’s it’s not yeah, it’s spelled like that. T-O-U-C-A-N.
Sam Parr: Yeah, TwoCan. Um, which I don’t know, do those birds like speak or something? I I don’t know why. Maybe maybe that might be it. Yeah. So so do you have any kind of stats you can share about them? Like give us a sense of why you feel like this is working.
Sam Parr: Uh, I didn’t ask her for permission to ask to talk about that, but basically Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like I think 5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that and what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I’m like, “Well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It’s a $5 billion company, I think.” Um, and I I I’ve been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, I do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say, “Well, how can I just create this in the form of a Google plugin?” Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don’t do it because there’s a little bit of friction, and how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Right. Now, there’s a ton of downside with Google plugins, you know, you’re a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you. But it’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that’s what I wanted to bring up was some uh Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this I don’t know if this is how she did it, but she basically um uh or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing. So for example, learning a language. People already want to learn a language, you just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar. So you just fix it as you write. Uh, one that I use all the time is SimilarWeb, so it tells me the traffic of someone’s website. Uh, passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis, so a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?
Shaan Puri: Oh yeah. My my buddy was with the guy who started it.
Sam Parr: Isn’t that worth like a billion dollars? Uh, not yet, but getting close. It’s several hundred millions, I think, was the last round.
Sam Parr: And all it does is uh screen recordings. Screen recordings. Yeah. So so they basically say, “Oh, you want to show something on your screen, here’s a click, boom, record, share.” Um, so the the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several billion. $4 billion. So Honey had, I think 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you’re about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background, it’s looking for, is there a is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else? Or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don’t have to take an action. I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It’s just going to do it and it the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over $100 million a year. So The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he’s an engineer. He’s like a very um by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He’s really cool. His name’s Max. And I was like shooting the shit with him and I was like, “Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought?” And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on and I was like, “How big are you guys?” He was like, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” And I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He was like, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” And then I and then I go, “You just raised money?” He goes, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because it was at it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation.”
Sam Parr: Yeah. I was like, “Oh my god, you pulled it off.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, they did it. Exactly. Um, so those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as I believe a Chrome Chrome extension. So it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. Um, you needed a a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there’s others that like, like for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have AdBlock or, you know, UBlock Origin or whatever. Um, that’s definitely one of them. And so I think I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It’s like, “Dude, you’re just making this like plugin.” And definitely there’s a lot of people like my mom doesn’t know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn’t know there’s a Chrome extension store. She doesn’t really know how to install them. Like she knows apps, but she doesn’t know Chrome extensions. So you’re going to get a little bit more of a tech-savvy audience. You know, it’s a smaller market overall. But the friction was a big deal.
Sam Parr: So I’m going to try and I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the the numbers. There’s 1.6 billion iPhone users, okay? 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There’s a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn’t know how to do this, but does your mom need to know how to do this?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are it’s it’s kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it’s hard to get like it’s hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment.
Sam Parr: Um, yes. So, like it’s I I it’s prestigious, but it’s definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you’re coming on to talk about, it was. Right. Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I’ll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn’t have the same it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, I this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who’s ever done this. Um, have you ever gone on? It’s such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a a TV thing? So you get you get connected in and it’s like a Zoom call basically right now. Um, and you can’t see them. So on TV, it looks like you’re all like split screen, like you see your face, their face, and the other person. But in in reality, you have no you there’s no facial expressions because you can’t see each other’s video. So you’re only hearing each other. You don’t know when when it’s your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going down this checklist of like worry. It was like, “Okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to” And then like, it’s never like the things you expect. It’s always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you look if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at. They’re not on video. And so I’m just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and I look like a like a I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds in, I realized, “Oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that’s what will look normal.” And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian’s butt and I said, “I know, I thought that was funny.” to do balls and stuff. So I know I said some stuff maybe I wasn’t supposed to say.
Sam Parr: No, the Kim you’re it was good. You you were a good interview. It was great. Uh, I watched the whole thing. It was good.
Sam Parr: Thank you.
Shaan Puri: Um, all right, you want to talk about the first idea?
Sam Parr: Yeah, let’s do it.
Shaan Puri: You want to do uh this thing TwoCan?
Sam Parr: Yes.
Shaan Puri: Okay. So I um along with Joe Spizer, we I’m kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we’re just investing in we’re just investing in companies together.
Shaan Puri: Why why Hampton?
Sam Parr: I grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s And we were thinking for we were thinking about names and I was like, “Uh, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons. What do you think?”
Shaan Puri: And it’s just your own money or it’s a fund?
Sam Parr: We’re mostly our my own money, but uh him and I uh I Joe’s an investor in your thing and he would like, “Man, I want to put even more money in.” And he goes, “You just want to invest with me?” I go, “Yeah, sure.” And then he’s like, “You want to do a rolling fund?” I was like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” Uh, he’s like, “You want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals?” I go, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it with you.” So it’s just like a deal-by-deal basis. So we created an AngelList syndicate, which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have you have to tell me and then I’ll invest.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Um, also, so I heard this great description of AngelList, which is like, it’s Substack for VCs. Um, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. Uh, the same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It’s awesome.
Sam Parr: So, yeah, we did it and like so we I found a company already um and we invest and I was just going to invest like I I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And um he was like, “Why don’t you just do the syndicate thing?” And I was like, “All right, let’s try it.” So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with?
Shaan Puri: So so I know I know about this company, but give the give the what is your kind of like two-sentence description of it?
Sam Parr: It’s called TwoCan and it’s basically the really dumbed-down version is it’s like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it’s a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you’re reading into the language that you want to learn. So it’s contextual learning. Um, more complicated than that, but that’s the simple version.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It’s kind of genius, honestly. The the founder, what’s her name? Taylor something? She’s magical. She’s great. She’s been a fan of the podcast actually. She she messaged us a long time ago when like before this fundraise, uh, being like, “Hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I’m doing.” Or maybe I missed it.
Sam Parr: Did she really? Oh, I can’t believe I missed it.
Shaan Puri: And so I um so I’ve been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn’t pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. Um, but I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it’s okay, so here’s my thing. Um, anything that there’s a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, “I should, I should, I should.” And you uh as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you’re just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it’s that hard to learn a language. It’s hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book, or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. Um, it doesn’t sound that hard, but in practice, it’s like it’s a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what TwoCan is doing is you don’t have to make it a separate thing. It’s like you’re already just browsing the internet. So why don’t we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you’re visiting? So you’re not you don’t have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You’ll learn the language in bits and pieces while you’re browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And um and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don’t even know why I didn’t invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I’ll hit her up after this and and see if I can get in.
Sam Parr: Have you talked Yeah, do it. If you don’t know her well, I can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman’s a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, “Oh, well, you’re going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company.” Like Oh, really? Okay. I I hope it’s this one, but like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just she just oozed CEO. Um Wow, interesting. I’ve never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there’s if there’s anyone come to mind?
Sam Parr: Um, the guy from Superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, “Oh yeah, like you are a so you I would bet on you for just about anything.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, “I’m going to write a book,” I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be great.” Yeah, I was like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. Um, when we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey, or Harley, Harley, uh, I kind of but obviously he’s already hugely successful. But like there was a handful of people we’ve interviewed where they have the Harley when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody’s business. And so he just had this good-looking guy in this great-looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn’t he didn’t even have to say a word. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy’s like a power player.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, and so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, “Oh, you she just she just was on top of it. I just felt great.” Another person, and this is uh a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that’s her name, who started ClassPass. Payal. Payal. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, “Oh, you’re really special.” Uh, so uh, anyway, this woman Taylor, I met with her. I was like, “Oh, you’re I whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I’m in, no matter what.” Um, and so, but I started like also I mean, let’s we’ll just we’ll move on past TwoCan, but it’s joinedtwocan.com. The reason it’s interesting is they have this like head she worked at Headspace. So they have this like Headspace cute branding shit. Right. By the way, we should just say TwoCan is like the bird. TwoCan Sam type of thing. It’s it’s not yeah, it’s spelled like that. T-O-U-C-A-N.
Sam Parr: Yeah, TwoCan. Um, which I don’t know, do those birds like speak or something? I I don’t know why. Maybe maybe that might be it. Yeah. So so do you have any kind of stats you can share about them? Like give us a sense of why you feel like this is working.
Sam Parr: Uh, I didn’t ask her for permission to ask to talk about that, but basically Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like I think 5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that and what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I’m like, “Well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It’s a $5 billion company, I think.” Um, and I I I’ve been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, I do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say, “Well, how can I just create this in the form of a Google plugin?” Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don’t do it because there’s a little bit of friction, and how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Right. Now, there’s a ton of downside with Google plugins, you know, you’re a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you. But it’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that’s what I wanted to bring up was some uh Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this I don’t know if this is how she did it, but she basically um uh or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing. So for example, learning a language. People already want to learn a language, you just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar. So you just fix it as you write. Uh, one that I use all the time is SimilarWeb, so it tells me the traffic of someone’s website. Uh, passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis, so a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?
Shaan Puri: Oh yeah. My my buddy was with the guy who started it.
Sam Parr: Isn’t that worth like a billion dollars? Uh, not yet, but getting close. It’s several hundred millions, I think, was the last round.
Sam Parr: And all it does is uh screen recordings. Screen recordings. Yeah. So so they basically say, “Oh, you want to show something on your screen, here’s a click, boom, record, share.” Um, so the the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several billion. $4 billion. So Honey had, I think 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you’re about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background, it’s looking for, is there a is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else? Or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don’t have to take an action. I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It’s just going to do it and it the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over $100 million a year. So The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he’s an engineer. He’s like a very um by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He’s really cool. His name’s Max. And I was like shooting the shit with him and I was like, “Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought?” And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on and I was like, “How big are you guys?” He was like, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” And I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He was like, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” And then I and then I go, “You just raised money?” He goes, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because it was at it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation.”
Sam Parr: Yeah. I was like, “Oh my god, you pulled it off.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, they did it. Exactly. Um, so those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as I believe a Chrome Chrome extension. So it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. Um, you needed a a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there’s others that like, like for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have AdBlock or, you know, UBlock Origin or whatever. Um, that’s definitely one of them. And so I think I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It’s like, “Dude, you’re just making this like plugin.” And definitely there’s a lot of people like my mom doesn’t know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn’t know there’s a Chrome extension store. She doesn’t really know how to install them. Like she knows apps, but she doesn’t know Chrome extensions. So you’re going to get a little bit more of a tech-savvy audience. You know, it’s a smaller market overall. But the friction was a big deal.
Sam Parr: So I’m going to try and I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the the numbers. There’s 1.6 billion iPhone users, okay? 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There’s a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn’t know how to do this, but does your mom need to know how to do this?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are it’s it’s kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it’s hard to get like it’s hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment.
Sam Parr: Um, yes. So, like it’s I I it’s prestigious, but it’s definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you’re coming on to talk about, it was. Right. Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I’ll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn’t have the same it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, I this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who’s ever done this. Um, have you ever gone on? It’s such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a a TV thing? So you get you get connected in and it’s like a Zoom call basically right now. Um, and you can’t see them. So on TV, it looks like you’re all like split screen, like you see your face, their face, and the other person. But in in reality, you have no you there’s no facial expressions because you can’t see each other’s video. So you’re only hearing each other. You don’t know when when it’s your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going down this checklist of like worry. It was like, “Okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to” And then like, it’s never like the things you expect. It’s always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you look if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at. They’re not on video. And so I’m just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and I look like a like a I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds in, I realized, “Oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that’s what will look normal.” And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian’s butt and I said, “I know, I thought that was funny.” to do balls and stuff. So I know I said some stuff maybe I wasn’t supposed to say.
Sam Parr: No, the Kim you’re it was good. You you were a good interview. It was great. Uh, I watched the whole thing. It was good.
Sam Parr: Thank you.
Shaan Puri: Um, all right, you want to talk about the first idea?
Sam Parr: Yeah, let’s do it.
Shaan Puri: You want to do uh this thing TwoCan?
Sam Parr: Yes.
Shaan Puri: Okay. So I um along with Joe Spizer, we I’m kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we’re just investing in we’re just investing in companies together.
Shaan Puri: Why why Hampton?
Sam Parr: I grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s And we were thinking for we were thinking about names and I was like, “Uh, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons. What do you think?”
Shaan Puri: And it’s just your own money or it’s a fund?
Sam Parr: We’re mostly our my own money, but uh him and I uh I Joe’s an investor in your thing and he would like, “Man, I want to put even more money in.” And he goes, “You just want to invest with me?” I go, “Yeah, sure.” And then he’s like, “You want to do a rolling fund?” I was like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” Uh, he’s like, “You want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals?” I go, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it with you.” So it’s just like a deal-by-deal basis. So we created an AngelList syndicate, which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have you have to tell me and then I’ll invest.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Um, also, so I heard this great description of AngelList, which is like, it’s Substack for VCs. Um, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. Uh, the same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It’s awesome.
Sam Parr: So, yeah, we did it and like so we I found a company already um and we invest and I was just going to invest like I I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And um he was like, “Why don’t you just do the syndicate thing?” And I was like, “All right, let’s try it.” So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with?
Shaan Puri: So so I know I know about this company, but give the give the what is your kind of like two-sentence description of it?
Sam Parr: It’s called TwoCan and it’s basically the really dumbed-down version is it’s like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it’s a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you’re reading into the language that you want to learn. So it’s contextual learning. Um, more complicated than that, but that’s the simple version.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It’s kind of genius, honestly. The the founder, what’s her name? Taylor something? She’s magical. She’s great. She’s been a fan of the podcast actually. She she messaged us a long time ago when like before this fundraise, uh, being like, “Hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I’m doing.” Or maybe I missed it.
Sam Parr: Did she really? Oh, I can’t believe I missed it.
Shaan Puri: And so I um so I’ve been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn’t pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. Um, but I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it’s okay, so here’s my thing. Um, anything that there’s a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, “I should, I should, I should.” And you uh as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you’re just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it’s that hard to learn a language. It’s hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book, or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. Um, it doesn’t sound that hard, but in practice, it’s like it’s a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what TwoCan is doing is you don’t have to make it a separate thing. It’s like you’re already just browsing the internet. So why don’t we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you’re visiting? So you’re not you don’t have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You’ll learn the language in bits and pieces while you’re browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And um and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don’t even know why I didn’t invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I’ll hit her up after this and and see if I can get in.
Sam Parr: Have you talked Yeah, do it. If you don’t know her well, I can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman’s a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, “Oh, well, you’re going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company.” Like Oh, really? Okay. I I hope it’s this one, but like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just she just oozed CEO. Um Wow, interesting. I’ve never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there’s if there’s anyone come to mind?
Sam Parr: Um, the guy from Superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, “Oh yeah, like you are a so you I would bet on you for just about anything.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, “I’m going to write a book,” I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be great.” Yeah, I was like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. Um, when we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey, or Harley, Harley, uh, I kind of but obviously he’s already hugely successful. But like there was a handful of people we’ve interviewed where they have the Harley when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody’s business. And so he just had this good-looking guy in this great-looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn’t he didn’t even have to say a word. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy’s like a power player.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, and so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, “Oh, you she just she just was on top of it. I just felt great.” Another person, and this is uh a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that’s her name, who started ClassPass. Payal. Payal. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, “Oh, you’re really special.” Uh, so uh, anyway, this woman Taylor, I met with her. I was like, “Oh, you’re I whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I’m in, no matter what.” Um, and so, but I started like also I mean, let’s we’ll just we’ll move on past TwoCan, but it’s joinedtwocan.com. The reason it’s interesting is they have this like head she worked at Headspace. So they have this like Headspace cute branding shit. Right. By the way, we should just say TwoCan is like the bird. TwoCan Sam type of thing. It’s it’s not yeah, it’s spelled like that. T-O-U-C-A-N.
Sam Parr: Yeah, TwoCan. Um, which I don’t know, do those birds like speak or something? I I don’t know why. Maybe maybe that might be it. Yeah. So so do you have any kind of stats you can share about them? Like give us a sense of why you feel like this is working.
Sam Parr: Uh, I didn’t ask her for permission to ask to talk about that, but basically Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like I think 5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that and what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I’m like, “Well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It’s a $5 billion company, I think.” Um, and I I I’ve been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, I do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say, “Well, how can I just create this in the form of a Google plugin?” Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don’t do it because there’s a little bit of friction, and how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Right. Now, there’s a ton of downside with Google plugins, you know, you’re a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you. But it’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that’s what I wanted to bring up was some uh Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this I don’t know if this is how she did it, but she basically um uh or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing. So for example, learning a language. People already want to learn a language, you just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar. So you just fix it as you write. Uh, one that I use all the time is SimilarWeb, so it tells me the traffic of someone’s website. Uh, passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis, so a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?
Shaan Puri: Oh yeah. My my buddy was with the guy who started it.
Sam Parr: Isn’t that worth like a billion dollars? Uh, not yet, but getting close. It’s several hundred millions, I think, was the last round.
Sam Parr: And all it does is uh screen recordings. Screen recordings. Yeah. So so they basically say, “Oh, you want to show something on your screen, here’s a click, boom, record, share.” Um, so the the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several billion. $4 billion. So Honey had, I think 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you’re about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background, it’s looking for, is there a is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else? Or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don’t have to take an action. I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It’s just going to do it and it the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over $100 million a year. So The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he’s an engineer. He’s like a very um by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He’s really cool. His name’s Max. And I was like shooting the shit with him and I was like, “Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought?” And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on and I was like, “How big are you guys?” He was like, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” And I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He was like, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” And then I and then I go, “You just raised money?” He goes, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because it was at it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation.”
Sam Parr: Yeah. I was like, “Oh my god, you pulled it off.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, they did it. Exactly. Um, so those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as I believe a Chrome Chrome extension. So it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. Um, you needed a a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there’s others that like, like for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have AdBlock or, you know, UBlock Origin or whatever. Um, that’s definitely one of them. And so I think I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It’s like, “Dude, you’re just making this like plugin.” And definitely there’s a lot of people like my mom doesn’t know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn’t know there’s a Chrome extension store. She doesn’t really know how to install them. Like she knows apps, but she doesn’t know Chrome extensions. So you’re going to get a little bit more of a tech-savvy audience. You know, it’s a smaller market overall. But the friction was a big deal.
Sam Parr: So I’m going to try and I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the the numbers. There’s 1.6 billion iPhone users, okay? 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There’s a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn’t know how to do this, but does your mom need to know how to do this?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are it’s it’s kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it’s hard to get like it’s hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment.
Sam Parr: Um, yes. So, like it’s I I it’s prestigious, but it’s definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you’re coming on to talk about, it was. Right. Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I’ll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn’t have the same it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, I this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who’s ever done this. Um, have you ever gone on? It’s such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a a TV thing? So you get you get connected in and it’s like a Zoom call basically right now. Um, and you can’t see them. So on TV, it looks like you’re all like split screen, like you see your face, their face, and the other person. But in in reality, you have no you there’s no facial expressions because you can’t see each other’s video. So you’re only hearing each other. You don’t know when when it’s your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going down this checklist of like worry. It was like, “Okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to” And then like, it’s never like the things you expect. It’s always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you look if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at. They’re not on video. And so I’m just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and I look like a like a I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds in, I realized, “Oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that’s what will look normal.” And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian’s butt and I said, “I know, I thought that was funny.” to do balls and stuff. So I know I said some stuff maybe I wasn’t supposed to say.
Sam Parr: No, the Kim you’re it was good. You you were a good interview. It was great. Uh, I watched the whole thing. It was good.
Sam Parr: Thank you.
Shaan Puri: Um, all right, you want to talk about the first idea?
Sam Parr: Yeah, let’s do it.
Shaan Puri: You want to do uh this thing TwoCan?
Sam Parr: Yes.
Shaan Puri: Okay. So I um along with Joe Spizer, we I’m kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we’re just investing in we’re just investing in companies together.
Shaan Puri: Why why Hampton?
Sam Parr: I grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s And we were thinking for we were thinking about names and I was like, “Uh, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons. What do you think?”
Shaan Puri: And it’s just your own money or it’s a fund?
Sam Parr: We’re mostly our my own money, but uh him and I uh I Joe’s an investor in your thing and he would like, “Man, I want to put even more money in.” And he goes, “You just want to invest with me?” I go, “Yeah, sure.” And then he’s like, “You want to do a rolling fund?” I was like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” Uh, he’s like, “You want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals?” I go, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it with you.” So it’s just like a deal-by-deal basis. So we created an AngelList syndicate, which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have you have to tell me and then I’ll invest.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Um, also, so I heard this great description of AngelList, which is like, it’s Substack for VCs. Um, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. Uh, the same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It’s awesome.
Sam Parr: So, yeah, we did it and like so we I found a company already um and we invest and I was just going to invest like I I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And um he was like, “Why don’t you just do the syndicate thing?” And I was like, “All right, let’s try it.” So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with?
Shaan Puri: So so I know I know about this company, but give the give the what is your kind of like two-sentence description of it?
Sam Parr: It’s called TwoCan and it’s basically the really dumbed-down version is it’s like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it’s a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you’re reading into the language that you want to learn. So it’s contextual learning. Um, more complicated than that, but that’s the simple version.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It’s kind of genius, honestly. The the founder, what’s her name? Taylor something? She’s magical. She’s great. She’s been a fan of the podcast actually. She she messaged us a long time ago when like before this fundraise, uh, being like, “Hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I’m doing.” Or maybe I missed it.
Sam Parr: Did she really? Oh, I can’t believe I missed it.
Shaan Puri: And so I um so I’ve been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn’t pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. Um, but I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it’s okay, so here’s my thing. Um, anything that there’s a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, “I should, I should, I should.” And you uh as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you’re just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it’s that hard to learn a language. It’s hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book, or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. Um, it doesn’t sound that hard, but in practice, it’s like it’s a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what TwoCan is doing is you don’t have to make it a separate thing. It’s like you’re already just browsing the internet. So why don’t we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you’re visiting? So you’re not you don’t have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You’ll learn the language in bits and pieces while you’re browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And um and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don’t even know why I didn’t invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I’ll hit her up after this and and see if I can get in.
Sam Parr: Have you talked Yeah, do it. If you don’t know her well, I can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman’s a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, “Oh, well, you’re going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company.” Like Oh, really? Okay. I I hope it’s this one, but like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just she just oozed CEO. Um Wow, interesting. I’ve never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there’s if there’s anyone come to mind?
Sam Parr: Um, the guy from Superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, “Oh yeah, like you are a so you I would bet on you for just about anything.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, “I’m going to write a book,” I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be great.” Yeah, I was like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. Um, when we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey, or Harley, Harley, uh, I kind of but obviously he’s already hugely successful. But like there was a handful of people we’ve interviewed where they have the Harley when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody’s business. And so he just had this good-looking guy in this great-looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn’t he didn’t even have to say a word. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy’s like a power player.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, and so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, “Oh, you she just she just was on top of it. I just felt great.” Another person, and this is uh a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that’s her name, who started ClassPass. Payal. Payal. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, “Oh, you’re really special.” Uh, so uh, anyway, this woman Taylor, I met with her. I was like, “Oh, you’re I whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I’m in, no matter what.” Um, and so, but I started like also I mean, let’s we’ll just we’ll move on past TwoCan, but it’s joinedtwocan.com. The reason it’s interesting is they have this like head she worked at Headspace. So they have this like Headspace cute branding shit. Right. By the way, we should just say TwoCan is like the bird. TwoCan Sam type of thing. It’s it’s not yeah, it’s spelled like that. T-O-U-C-A-N.
Sam Parr: Yeah, TwoCan. Um, which I don’t know, do those birds like speak or something? I I don’t know why. Maybe maybe that might be it. Yeah. So so do you have any kind of stats you can share about them? Like give us a sense of why you feel like this is working.
Sam Parr: Uh, I didn’t ask her for permission to ask to talk about that, but basically Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like I think 5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that and what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I’m like, “Well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It’s a $5 billion company, I think.” Um, and I I I’ve been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, I do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say, “Well, how can I just create this in the form of a Google plugin?” Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don’t do it because there’s a little bit of friction, and how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Right. Now, there’s a ton of downside with Google plugins, you know, you’re a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you. But it’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that’s what I wanted to bring up was some uh Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this I don’t know if this is how she did it, but she basically um uh or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing. So for example, learning a language. People already want to learn a language, you just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar. So you just fix it as you write. Uh, one that I use all the time is SimilarWeb, so it tells me the traffic of someone’s website. Uh, passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis, so a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?
Shaan Puri: Oh yeah. My my buddy was with the guy who started it.
Sam Parr: Isn’t that worth like a billion dollars? Uh, not yet, but getting close. It’s several hundred millions, I think, was the last round.
Sam Parr: And all it does is uh screen recordings. Screen recordings. Yeah. So so they basically say, “Oh, you want to show something on your screen, here’s a click, boom, record, share.” Um, so the the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several billion. $4 billion. So Honey had, I think 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you’re about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background, it’s looking for, is there a is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else? Or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don’t have to take an action. I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It’s just going to do it and it the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over $100 million a year. So The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he’s an engineer. He’s like a very um by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He’s really cool. His name’s Max. And I was like shooting the shit with him and I was like, “Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought?” And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on and I was like, “How big are you guys?” He was like, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” And I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He was like, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” And then I and then I go, “You just raised money?” He goes, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because it was at it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation.”
Sam Parr: Yeah. I was like, “Oh my god, you pulled it off.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, they did it. Exactly. Um, so those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as I believe a Chrome Chrome extension. So it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. Um, you needed a a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there’s others that like, like for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have AdBlock or, you know, UBlock Origin or whatever. Um, that’s definitely one of them. And so I think I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It’s like, “Dude, you’re just making this like plugin.” And definitely there’s a lot of people like my mom doesn’t know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn’t know there’s a Chrome extension store. She doesn’t really know how to install them. Like she knows apps, but she doesn’t know Chrome extensions. So you’re going to get a little bit more of a tech-savvy audience. You know, it’s a smaller market overall. But the friction was a big deal.
Sam Parr: So I’m going to try and I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the the numbers. There’s 1.6 billion iPhone users, okay? 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There’s a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn’t know how to do this, but does your mom need to know how to do this?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are it’s it’s kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it’s hard to get like it’s hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment.
Sam Parr: Um, yes. So, like it’s I I it’s prestigious, but it’s definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you’re coming on to talk about, it was. Right. Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I’ll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn’t have the same it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, I this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who’s ever done this. Um, have you ever gone on? It’s such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a a TV thing? So you get you get connected in and it’s like a Zoom call basically right now. Um, and you can’t see them. So on TV, it looks like you’re all like split screen, like you see your face, their face, and the other person. But in in reality, you have no you there’s no facial expressions because you can’t see each other’s video. So you’re only hearing each other. You don’t know when when it’s your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going down this checklist of like worry. It was like, “Okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to” And then like, it’s never like the things you expect. It’s always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you look if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at. They’re not on video. And so I’m just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and I look like a like a I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds in, I realized, “Oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that’s what will look normal.” And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian’s butt and I said, “I know, I thought that was funny.” to do balls and stuff. So I know I said some stuff maybe I wasn’t supposed to say.
Sam Parr: No, the Kim you’re it was good. You you were a good interview. It was great. Uh, I watched the whole thing. It was good.
Sam Parr: Thank you.
Shaan Puri: Um, all right, you want to talk about the first idea?
Sam Parr: Yeah, let’s do it.
Shaan Puri: You want to do uh this thing TwoCan?
Sam Parr: Yes.
Shaan Puri: Okay. So I um along with Joe Spizer, we I’m kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we’re just investing in we’re just investing in companies together.
Shaan Puri: Why why Hampton?
Sam Parr: I grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s And we were thinking for we were thinking about names and I was like, “Uh, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons. What do you think?”
Shaan Puri: And it’s just your own money or it’s a fund?
Sam Parr: We’re mostly our my own money, but uh him and I uh I Joe’s an investor in your thing and he would like, “Man, I want to put even more money in.” And he goes, “You just want to invest with me?” I go, “Yeah, sure.” And then he’s like, “You want to do a rolling fund?” I was like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” Uh, he’s like, “You want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals?” I go, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it with you.” So it’s just like a deal-by-deal basis. So we created an AngelList syndicate, which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have you have to tell me and then I’ll invest.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Um, also, so I heard this great description of AngelList, which is like, it’s Substack for VCs. Um, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. Uh, the same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It’s awesome.
Sam Parr: So, yeah, we did it and like so we I found a company already um and we invest and I was just going to invest like I I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And um he was like, “Why don’t you just do the syndicate thing?” And I was like, “All right, let’s try it.” So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with?
Shaan Puri: So so I know I know about this company, but give the give the what is your kind of like two-sentence description of it?
Sam Parr: It’s called TwoCan and it’s basically the really dumbed-down version is it’s like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it’s a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you’re reading into the language that you want to learn. So it’s contextual learning. Um, more complicated than that, but that’s the simple version.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It’s kind of genius, honestly. The the founder, what’s her name? Taylor something? She’s magical. She’s great. She’s been a fan of the podcast actually. She she messaged us a long time ago when like before this fundraise, uh, being like, “Hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I’m doing.” Or maybe I missed it.
Sam Parr: Did she really? Oh, I can’t believe I missed it.
Shaan Puri: And so I um so I’ve been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn’t pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. Um, but I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it’s okay, so here’s my thing. Um, anything that there’s a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, “I should, I should, I should.” And you uh as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you’re just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it’s that hard to learn a language. It’s hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book, or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. Um, it doesn’t sound that hard, but in practice, it’s like it’s a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what TwoCan is doing is you don’t have to make it a separate thing. It’s like you’re already just browsing the internet. So why don’t we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you’re visiting? So you’re not you don’t have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You’ll learn the language in bits and pieces while you’re browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And um and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don’t even know why I didn’t invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I’ll hit her up after this and and see if I can get in.
Sam Parr: Have you talked Yeah, do it. If you don’t know her well, I can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman’s a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, “Oh, well, you’re going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company.” Like Oh, really? Okay. I I hope it’s this one, but like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just she just oozed CEO. Um Wow, interesting. I’ve never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there’s if there’s anyone come to mind?
Sam Parr: Um, the guy from Superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, “Oh yeah, like you are a so you I would bet on you for just about anything.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, “I’m going to write a book,” I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be great.” Yeah, I was like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. Um, when we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey, or Harley, Harley, uh, I kind of but obviously he’s already hugely successful. But like there was a handful of people we’ve interviewed where they have the Harley when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody’s business. And so he just had this good-looking guy in this great-looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn’t he didn’t even have to say a word. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy’s like a power player.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, and so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, “Oh, you she just she just was on top of it. I just felt great.” Another person, and this is uh a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that’s her name, who started ClassPass. Payal. Payal. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, “Oh, you’re really special.” Uh, so uh, anyway, this woman Taylor, I met with her. I was like, “Oh, you’re I whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I’m in, no matter what.” Um, and so, but I started like also I mean, let’s we’ll just we’ll move on past TwoCan, but it’s joinedtwocan.com. The reason it’s interesting is they have this like head she worked at Headspace. So they have this like Headspace cute branding shit. Right. By the way, we should just say TwoCan is like the bird. TwoCan Sam type of thing. It’s it’s not yeah, it’s spelled like that. T-O-U-C-A-N.
Sam Parr: Yeah, TwoCan. Um, which I don’t know, do those birds like speak or something? I I don’t know why. Maybe maybe that might be it. Yeah. So so do you have any kind of stats you can share about them? Like give us a sense of why you feel like this is working.
Sam Parr: Uh, I didn’t ask her for permission to ask to talk about that, but basically Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like I think 5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that and what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I’m like, “Well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It’s a $5 billion company, I think.” Um, and I I I’ve been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, I do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say, “Well, how can I just create this in the form of a Google plugin?” Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don’t do it because there’s a little bit of friction, and how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Right. Now, there’s a ton of downside with Google plugins, you know, you’re a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you. But it’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that’s what I wanted to bring up was some uh Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this I don’t know if this is how she did it, but she basically um uh or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing. So for example, learning a language. People already want to learn a language, you just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar. So you just fix it as you write. Uh, one that I use all the time is SimilarWeb, so it tells me the traffic of someone’s website. Uh, passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis, so a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?
Shaan Puri: Oh yeah. My my buddy was with the guy who started it.
Sam Parr: Isn’t that worth like a billion dollars? Uh, not yet, but getting close. It’s several hundred millions, I think, was the last round.
Sam Parr: And all it does is uh screen recordings. Screen recordings. Yeah. So so they basically say, “Oh, you want to show something on your screen, here’s a click, boom, record, share.” Um, so the the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several billion. $4 billion. So Honey had, I think 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you’re about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background, it’s looking for, is there a is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else? Or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don’t have to take an action. I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It’s just going to do it and it the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over $100 million a year. So The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he’s an engineer. He’s like a very um by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He’s really cool. His name’s Max. And I was like shooting the shit with him and I was like, “Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought?” And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on and I was like, “How big are you guys?” He was like, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” And I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He was like, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” And then I and then I go, “You just raised money?” He goes, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because it was at it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation.”
Sam Parr: Yeah. I was like, “Oh my god, you pulled it off.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, they did it. Exactly. Um, so those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as I believe a Chrome Chrome extension. So it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. Um, you needed a a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there’s others that like, like for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have AdBlock or, you know, UBlock Origin or whatever. Um, that’s definitely one of them. And so I think I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It’s like, “Dude, you’re just making this like plugin.” And definitely there’s a lot of people like my mom doesn’t know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn’t know there’s a Chrome extension store. She doesn’t really know how to install them. Like she knows apps, but she doesn’t know Chrome extensions. So you’re going to get a little bit more of a tech-savvy audience. You know, it’s a smaller market overall. But the friction was a big deal.
Sam Parr: So I’m going to try and I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the the numbers. There’s 1.6 billion iPhone users, okay? 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There’s a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn’t know how to do this, but does your mom need to know how to do this?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are it’s it’s kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it’s hard to get like it’s hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment.
Sam Parr: Um, yes. So, like it’s I I it’s prestigious, but it’s definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you’re coming on to talk about, it was. Right. Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I’ll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn’t have the same it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, I this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who’s ever done this. Um, have you ever gone on? It’s such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a a TV thing? So you get you get connected in and it’s like a Zoom call basically right now. Um, and you can’t see them. So on TV, it looks like you’re all like split screen, like you see your face, their face, and the other person. But in in reality, you have no you there’s no facial expressions because you can’t see each other’s video. So you’re only hearing each other. You don’t know when when it’s your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going down this checklist of like worry. It was like, “Okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to” And then like, it’s never like the things you expect. It’s always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you look if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at. They’re not on video. And so I’m just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and I look like a like a I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds in, I realized, “Oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that’s what will look normal.” And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian’s butt and I said, “I know, I thought that was funny.” to do balls and stuff. So I know I said some stuff maybe I wasn’t supposed to say.
Sam Parr: No, the Kim you’re it was good. You you were a good interview. It was great. Uh, I watched the whole thing. It was good.
Sam Parr: Thank you.
Shaan Puri: Um, all right, you want to talk about the first idea?
Sam Parr: Yeah, let’s do it.
Shaan Puri: You want to do uh this thing TwoCan?
Sam Parr: Yes.
Shaan Puri: Okay. So I um along with Joe Spizer, we I’m kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we’re just investing in we’re just investing in companies together.
Shaan Puri: Why why Hampton?
Sam Parr: I grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s And we were thinking for we were thinking about names and I was like, “Uh, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons. What do you think?”
Shaan Puri: And it’s just your own money or it’s a fund?
Sam Parr: We’re mostly our my own money, but uh him and I uh I Joe’s an investor in your thing and he would like, “Man, I want to put even more money in.” And he goes, “You just want to invest with me?” I go, “Yeah, sure.” And then he’s like, “You want to do a rolling fund?” I was like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” Uh, he’s like, “You want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals?” I go, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it with you.” So it’s just like a deal-by-deal basis. So we created an AngelList syndicate, which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have you have to tell me and then I’ll invest.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Um, also, so I heard this great description of AngelList, which is like, it’s Substack for VCs. Um, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. Uh, the same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It’s awesome.
Sam Parr: So, yeah, we did it and like so we I found a company already um and we invest and I was just going to invest like I I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And um he was like, “Why don’t you just do the syndicate thing?” And I was like, “All right, let’s try it.” So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with?
Shaan Puri: So so I know I know about this company, but give the give the what is your kind of like two-sentence description of it?
Sam Parr: It’s called TwoCan and it’s basically the really dumbed-down version is it’s like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it’s a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you’re reading into the language that you want to learn. So it’s contextual learning. Um, more complicated than that, but that’s the simple version.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It’s kind of genius, honestly. The the founder, what’s her name? Taylor something? She’s magical. She’s great. She’s been a fan of the podcast actually. She she messaged us a long time ago when like before this fundraise, uh, being like, “Hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I’m doing.” Or maybe I missed it.
Sam Parr: Did she really? Oh, I can’t believe I missed it.
Shaan Puri: And so I um so I’ve been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn’t pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. Um, but I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it’s okay, so here’s my thing. Um, anything that there’s a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, “I should, I should, I should.” And you uh as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you’re just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it’s that hard to learn a language. It’s hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book, or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. Um, it doesn’t sound that hard, but in practice, it’s like it’s a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what TwoCan is doing is you don’t have to make it a separate thing. It’s like you’re already just browsing the internet. So why don’t we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you’re visiting? So you’re not you don’t have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You’ll learn the language in bits and pieces while you’re browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And um and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don’t even know why I didn’t invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I’ll hit her up after this and and see if I can get in.
Sam Parr: Have you talked Yeah, do it. If you don’t know her well, I can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman’s a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, “Oh, well, you’re going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company.” Like Oh, really? Okay. I I hope it’s this one, but like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just she just oozed CEO. Um Wow, interesting. I’ve never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there’s if there’s anyone come to mind?
Sam Parr: Um, the guy from Superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, “Oh yeah, like you are a so you I would bet on you for just about anything.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, “I’m going to write a book,” I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be great.” Yeah, I was like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. Um, when we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey, or Harley, Harley, uh, I kind of but obviously he’s already hugely successful. But like there was a handful of people we’ve interviewed where they have the Harley when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody’s business. And so he just had this good-looking guy in this great-looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn’t he didn’t even have to say a word. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy’s like a power player.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, and so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, “Oh, you she just she just was on top of it. I just felt great.” Another person, and this is uh a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that’s her name, who started ClassPass. Payal. Payal. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, “Oh, you’re really special.” Uh, so uh, anyway, this woman Taylor, I met with her. I was like, “Oh, you’re I whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I’m in, no matter what.” Um, and so, but I started like also I mean, let’s we’ll just we’ll move on past TwoCan, but it’s joinedtwocan.com. The reason it’s interesting is they have this like head she worked at Headspace. So they have this like Headspace cute branding shit. Right. By the way, we should just say TwoCan is like the bird. TwoCan Sam type of thing. It’s it’s not yeah, it’s spelled like that. T-O-U-C-A-N.
Sam Parr: Yeah, TwoCan. Um, which I don’t know, do those birds like speak or something? I I don’t know why. Maybe maybe that might be it. Yeah. So so do you have any kind of stats you can share about them? Like give us a sense of why you feel like this is working.
Sam Parr: Uh, I didn’t ask her for permission to ask to talk about that, but basically Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like I think 5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that and what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I’m like, “Well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It’s a $5 billion company, I think.” Um, and I I I’ve been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, I do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say, “Well, how can I just create this in the form of a Google plugin?” Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don’t do it because there’s a little bit of friction, and how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Right. Now, there’s a ton of downside with Google plugins, you know, you’re a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you. But it’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that’s what I wanted to bring up was some uh Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this I don’t know if this is how she did it, but she basically um uh or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing. So for example, learning a language. People already want to learn a language, you just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar. So you just fix it as you write. Uh, one that I use all the time is SimilarWeb, so it tells me the traffic of someone’s website. Uh, passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis, so a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?
Shaan Puri: Oh yeah. My my buddy was with the guy who started it.
Sam Parr: Isn’t that worth like a billion dollars? Uh, not yet, but getting close. It’s several hundred millions, I think, was the last round.
Sam Parr: And all it does is uh screen recordings. Screen recordings. Yeah. So so they basically say, “Oh, you want to show something on your screen, here’s a click, boom, record, share.” Um, so the the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several billion. $4 billion. So Honey had, I think 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you’re about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background, it’s looking for, is there a is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else? Or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don’t have to take an action. I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It’s just going to do it and it the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over $100 million a year. So The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he’s an engineer. He’s like a very um by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He’s really cool. His name’s Max. And I was like shooting the shit with him and I was like, “Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought?” And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on and I was like, “How big are you guys?” He was like, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” And I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He was like, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” And then I and then I go, “You just raised money?” He goes, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because it was at it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation.”
Sam Parr: Yeah. I was like, “Oh my god, you pulled it off.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, they did it. Exactly. Um, so those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as I believe a Chrome Chrome extension. So it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. Um, you needed a a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there’s others that like, like for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have AdBlock or, you know, UBlock Origin or whatever. Um, that’s definitely one of them. And so I think I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It’s like, “Dude, you’re just making this like plugin.” And definitely there’s a lot of people like my mom doesn’t know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn’t know there’s a Chrome extension store. She doesn’t really know how to install them. Like she knows apps, but she doesn’t know Chrome extensions. So you’re going to get a little bit more of a tech-savvy audience. You know, it’s a smaller market overall. But the friction was a big deal.
Sam Parr: So I’m going to try and I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the the numbers. There’s 1.6 billion iPhone users, okay? 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There’s a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn’t know how to do this, but does your mom need to know how to do this?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are it’s it’s kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it’s hard to get like it’s hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment.
Sam Parr: Um, yes. So, like it’s I I it’s prestigious, but it’s definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you’re coming on to talk about, it was. Right. Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I’ll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn’t have the same it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, I this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who’s ever done this. Um, have you ever gone on? It’s such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a a TV thing? So you get you get connected in and it’s like a Zoom call basically right now. Um, and you can’t see them. So on TV, it looks like you’re all like split screen, like you see your face, their face, and the other person. But in in reality, you have no you there’s no facial expressions because you can’t see each other’s video. So you’re only hearing each other. You don’t know when when it’s your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going down this checklist of like worry. It was like, “Okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to” And then like, it’s never like the things you expect. It’s always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you look if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at. They’re not on video. And so I’m just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and I look like a like a I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds in, I realized, “Oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that’s what will look normal.” And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian’s butt and I said, “I know, I thought that was funny.” to do balls and stuff. So I know I said some stuff maybe I wasn’t supposed to say.
Sam Parr: No, the Kim you’re it was good. You you were a good interview. It was great. Uh, I watched the whole thing. It was good.
Sam Parr: Thank you.
Shaan Puri: Um, all right, you want to talk about the first idea?
Sam Parr: Yeah, let’s do it.
Shaan Puri: You want to do uh this thing TwoCan?
Sam Parr: Yes.
Shaan Puri: Okay. So I um along with Joe Spizer, we I’m kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we’re just investing in we’re just investing in companies together.
Shaan Puri: Why why Hampton?
Sam Parr: I grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s And we were thinking for we were thinking about names and I was like, “Uh, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons. What do you think?”
Shaan Puri: And it’s just your own money or it’s a fund?
Sam Parr: We’re mostly our my own money, but uh him and I uh I Joe’s an investor in your thing and he would like, “Man, I want to put even more money in.” And he goes, “You just want to invest with me?” I go, “Yeah, sure.” And then he’s like, “You want to do a rolling fund?” I was like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” Uh, he’s like, “You want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals?” I go, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it with you.” So it’s just like a deal-by-deal basis. So we created an AngelList syndicate, which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have you have to tell me and then I’ll invest.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Um, also, so I heard this great description of AngelList, which is like, it’s Substack for VCs. Um, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. Uh, the same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It’s awesome.
Sam Parr: So, yeah, we did it and like so we I found a company already um and we invest and I was just going to invest like I I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And um he was like, “Why don’t you just do the syndicate thing?” And I was like, “All right, let’s try it.” So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with?
Shaan Puri: So so I know I know about this company, but give the give the what is your kind of like two-sentence description of it?
Sam Parr: It’s called TwoCan and it’s basically the really dumbed-down version is it’s like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it’s a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you’re reading into the language that you want to learn. So it’s contextual learning. Um, more complicated than that, but that’s the simple version.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It’s kind of genius, honestly. The the founder, what’s her name? Taylor something? She’s magical. She’s great. She’s been a fan of the podcast actually. She she messaged us a long time ago when like before this fundraise, uh, being like, “Hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I’m doing.” Or maybe I missed it.
Sam Parr: Did she really? Oh, I can’t believe I missed it.
Shaan Puri: And so I um so I’ve been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn’t pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. Um, but I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it’s okay, so here’s my thing. Um, anything that there’s a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, “I should, I should, I should.” And you uh as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you’re just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it’s that hard to learn a language. It’s hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book, or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. Um, it doesn’t sound that hard, but in practice, it’s like it’s a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what TwoCan is doing is you don’t have to make it a separate thing. It’s like you’re already just browsing the internet. So why don’t we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you’re visiting? So you’re not you don’t have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You’ll learn the language in bits and pieces while you’re browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And um and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don’t even know why I didn’t invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I’ll hit her up after this and and see if I can get in.
Sam Parr: Have you talked Yeah, do it. If you don’t know her well, I can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman’s a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, “Oh, well, you’re going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company.” Like Oh, really? Okay. I I hope it’s this one, but like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just she just oozed CEO. Um Wow, interesting. I’ve never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there’s if there’s anyone come to mind?
Sam Parr: Um, the guy from Superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, “Oh yeah, like you are a so you I would bet on you for just about anything.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, “I’m going to write a book,” I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be great.” Yeah, I was like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. Um, when we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey, or Harley, Harley, uh, I kind of but obviously he’s already hugely successful. But like there was a handful of people we’ve interviewed where they have the Harley when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody’s business. And so he just had this good-looking guy in this great-looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn’t he didn’t even have to say a word. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy’s like a power player.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, and so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, “Oh, you she just she just was on top of it. I just felt great.” Another person, and this is uh a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that’s her name, who started ClassPass. Payal. Payal. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, “Oh, you’re really special.” Uh, so uh, anyway, this woman Taylor, I met with her. I was like, “Oh, you’re I whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I’m in, no matter what.” Um, and so, but I started like also I mean, let’s we’ll just we’ll move on past TwoCan, but it’s joinedtwocan.com. The reason it’s interesting is they have this like head she worked at Headspace. So they have this like Headspace cute branding shit. Right. By the way, we should just say TwoCan is like the bird. TwoCan Sam type of thing. It’s it’s not yeah, it’s spelled like that. T-O-U-C-A-N.
Sam Parr: Yeah, TwoCan. Um, which I don’t know, do those birds like speak or something? I I don’t know why. Maybe maybe that might be it. Yeah. So so do you have any kind of stats you can share about them? Like give us a sense of why you feel like this is working.
Sam Parr: Uh, I didn’t ask her for permission to ask to talk about that, but basically Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like I think 5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that and what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I’m like, “Well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It’s a $5 billion company, I think.” Um, and I I I’ve been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, I do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say, “Well, how can I just create this in the form of a Google plugin?” Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don’t do it because there’s a little bit of friction, and how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Right. Now, there’s a ton of downside with Google plugins, you know, you’re a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you. But it’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that’s what I wanted to bring up was some uh Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this I don’t know if this is how she did it, but she basically um uh or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing. So for example, learning a language. People already want to learn a language, you just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar. So you just fix it as you write. Uh, one that I use all the time is SimilarWeb, so it tells me the traffic of someone’s website. Uh, passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis, so a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?
Shaan Puri: Oh yeah. My my buddy was with the guy who started it.
Sam Parr: Isn’t that worth like a billion dollars? Uh, not yet, but getting close. It’s several hundred millions, I think, was the last round.
Sam Parr: And all it does is uh screen recordings. Screen recordings. Yeah. So so they basically say, “Oh, you want to show something on your screen, here’s a click, boom, record, share.” Um, so the the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several billion. $4 billion. So Honey had, I think 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you’re about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background, it’s looking for, is there a is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else? Or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don’t have to take an action. I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It’s just going to do it and it the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over $100 million a year. So The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he’s an engineer. He’s like a very um by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He’s really cool. His name’s Max. And I was like shooting the shit with him and I was like, “Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought?” And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on and I was like, “How big are you guys?” He was like, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” And I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He was like, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” And then I and then I go, “You just raised money?” He goes, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because it was at it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation.”
Sam Parr: Yeah. I was like, “Oh my god, you pulled it off.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, they did it. Exactly. Um, so those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as I believe a Chrome Chrome extension. So it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. Um, you needed a a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there’s others that like, like for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have AdBlock or, you know, UBlock Origin or whatever. Um, that’s definitely one of them. And so I think I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It’s like, “Dude, you’re just making this like plugin.” And definitely there’s a lot of people like my mom doesn’t know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn’t know there’s a Chrome extension store. She doesn’t really know how to install them. Like she knows apps, but she doesn’t know Chrome extensions. So you’re going to get a little bit more of a tech-savvy audience. You know, it’s a smaller market overall. But the friction was a big deal.
Sam Parr: So I’m going to try and I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the the numbers. There’s 1.6 billion iPhone users, okay? 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There’s a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn’t know how to do this, but does your mom need to know how to do this?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are it’s it’s kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it’s hard to get like it’s hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment.
Sam Parr: Um, yes. So, like it’s I I it’s prestigious, but it’s definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you’re coming on to talk about, it was. Right. Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I’ll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn’t have the same it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, I this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who’s ever done this. Um, have you ever gone on? It’s such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a a TV thing? So you get you get connected in and it’s like a Zoom call basically right now. Um, and you can’t see them. So on TV, it looks like you’re all like split screen, like you see your face, their face, and the other person. But in in reality, you have no you there’s no facial expressions because you can’t see each other’s video. So you’re only hearing each other. You don’t know when when it’s your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going down this checklist of like worry. It was like, “Okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to” And then like, it’s never like the things you expect. It’s always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you look if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at. They’re not on video. And so I’m just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and I look like a like a I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds in, I realized, “Oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that’s what will look normal.” And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian’s butt and I said, “I know, I thought that was funny.” to do balls and stuff. So I know I said some stuff maybe I wasn’t supposed to say.
Sam Parr: No, the Kim you’re it was good. You you were a good interview. It was great. Uh, I watched the whole thing. It was good.
Sam Parr: Thank you.
Shaan Puri: Um, all right, you want to talk about the first idea?
Sam Parr: Yeah, let’s do it.
Shaan Puri: You want to do uh this thing TwoCan?
Sam Parr: Yes.
Shaan Puri: Okay. So I um along with Joe Spizer, we I’m kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we’re just investing in we’re just investing in companies together.
Shaan Puri: Why why Hampton?
Sam Parr: I grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s And we were thinking for we were thinking about names and I was like, “Uh, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons. What do you think?”
Shaan Puri: And it’s just your own money or it’s a fund?
Sam Parr: We’re mostly our my own money, but uh him and I uh I Joe’s an investor in your thing and he would like, “Man, I want to put even more money in.” And he goes, “You just want to invest with me?” I go, “Yeah, sure.” And then he’s like, “You want to do a rolling fund?” I was like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” Uh, he’s like, “You want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals?” I go, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it with you.” So it’s just like a deal-by-deal basis. So we created an AngelList syndicate, which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have you have to tell me and then I’ll invest.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Um, also, so I heard this great description of AngelList, which is like, it’s Substack for VCs. Um, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. Uh, the same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It’s awesome.
Sam Parr: So, yeah, we did it and like so we I found a company already um and we invest and I was just going to invest like I I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And um he was like, “Why don’t you just do the syndicate thing?” And I was like, “All right, let’s try it.” So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with?
Shaan Puri: So so I know I know about this company, but give the give the what is your kind of like two-sentence description of it?
Sam Parr: It’s called TwoCan and it’s basically the really dumbed-down version is it’s like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it’s a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you’re reading into the language that you want to learn. So it’s contextual learning. Um, more complicated than that, but that’s the simple version.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It’s kind of genius, honestly. The the founder, what’s her name? Taylor something? She’s magical. She’s great. She’s been a fan of the podcast actually. She she messaged us a long time ago when like before this fundraise, uh, being like, “Hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I’m doing.” Or maybe I missed it.
Sam Parr: Did she really? Oh, I can’t believe I missed it.
Shaan Puri: And so I um so I’ve been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn’t pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. Um, but I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it’s okay, so here’s my thing. Um, anything that there’s a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, “I should, I should, I should.” And you uh as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you’re just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it’s that hard to learn a language. It’s hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book, or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. Um, it doesn’t sound that hard, but in practice, it’s like it’s a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what TwoCan is doing is you don’t have to make it a separate thing. It’s like you’re already just browsing the internet. So why don’t we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you’re visiting? So you’re not you don’t have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You’ll learn the language in bits and pieces while you’re browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And um and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don’t even know why I didn’t invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I’ll hit her up after this and and see if I can get in.
Sam Parr: Have you talked Yeah, do it. If you don’t know her well, I can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman’s a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, “Oh, well, you’re going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company.” Like Oh, really? Okay. I I hope it’s this one, but like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just she just oozed CEO. Um Wow, interesting. I’ve never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there’s if there’s anyone come to mind?
Sam Parr: Um, the guy from Superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, “Oh yeah, like you are a so you I would bet on you for just about anything.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, “I’m going to write a book,” I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be great.” Yeah, I was like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. Um, when we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey, or Harley, Harley, uh, I kind of but obviously he’s already hugely successful. But like there was a handful of people we’ve interviewed where they have the Harley when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody’s business. And so he just had this good-looking guy in this great-looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn’t he didn’t even have to say a word. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy’s like a power player.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, and so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, “Oh, you she just she just was on top of it. I just felt great.” Another person, and this is uh a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that’s her name, who started ClassPass. Payal. Payal. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, “Oh, you’re really special.” Uh, so uh, anyway, this woman Taylor, I met with her. I was like, “Oh, you’re I whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I’m in, no matter what.” Um, and so, but I started like also I mean, let’s we’ll just we’ll move on past TwoCan, but it’s joinedtwocan.com. The reason it’s interesting is they have this like head she worked at Headspace. So they have this like Headspace cute branding shit. Right. By the way, we should just say TwoCan is like the bird. TwoCan Sam type of thing. It’s it’s not yeah, it’s spelled like that. T-O-U-C-A-N.
Sam Parr: Yeah, TwoCan. Um, which I don’t know, do those birds like speak or something? I I don’t know why. Maybe maybe that might be it. Yeah. So so do you have any kind of stats you can share about them? Like give us a sense of why you feel like this is working.
Sam Parr: Uh, I didn’t ask her for permission to ask to talk about that, but basically Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like I think 5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that and what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I’m like, “Well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It’s a $5 billion company, I think.” Um, and I I I’ve been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, I do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say, “Well, how can I just create this in the form of a Google plugin?” Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don’t do it because there’s a little bit of friction, and how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Right. Now, there’s a ton of downside with Google plugins, you know, you’re a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you. But it’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that’s what I wanted to bring up was some uh Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this I don’t know if this is how she did it, but she basically um uh or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing. So for example, learning a language. People already want to learn a language, you just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar. So you just fix it as you write. Uh, one that I use all the time is SimilarWeb, so it tells me the traffic of someone’s website. Uh, passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis, so a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?
Shaan Puri: Oh yeah. My my buddy was with the guy who started it.
Sam Parr: Isn’t that worth like a billion dollars? Uh, not yet, but getting close. It’s several hundred millions, I think, was the last round.
Sam Parr: And all it does is uh screen recordings. Screen recordings. Yeah. So so they basically say, “Oh, you want to show something on your screen, here’s a click, boom, record, share.” Um, so the the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several billion. $4 billion. So Honey had, I think 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you’re about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background, it’s looking for, is there a is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else? Or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don’t have to take an action. I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It’s just going to do it and it the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over $100 million a year. So The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he’s an engineer. He’s like a very um by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He’s really cool. His name’s Max. And I was like shooting the shit with him and I was like, “Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought?” And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on and I was like, “How big are you guys?” He was like, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” And I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He was like, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” And then I and then I go, “You just raised money?” He goes, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because it was at it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation.”
Sam Parr: Yeah. I was like, “Oh my god, you pulled it off.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, they did it. Exactly. Um, so those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as I believe a Chrome Chrome extension. So it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. Um, you needed a a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there’s others that like, like for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have AdBlock or, you know, UBlock Origin or whatever. Um, that’s definitely one of them. And so I think I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It’s like, “Dude, you’re just making this like plugin.” And definitely there’s a lot of people like my mom doesn’t know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn’t know there’s a Chrome extension store. She doesn’t really know how to install them. Like she knows apps, but she doesn’t know Chrome extensions. So you’re going to get a little bit more of a tech-savvy audience. You know, it’s a smaller market overall. But the friction was a big deal.
Sam Parr: So I’m going to try and I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the the numbers. There’s 1.6 billion iPhone users, okay? 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There’s a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn’t know how to do this, but does your mom need to know how to do this?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are it’s it’s kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it’s hard to get like it’s hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment.
Sam Parr: Um, yes. So, like it’s I I it’s prestigious, but it’s definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you’re coming on to talk about, it was. Right. Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I’ll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn’t have the same it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, I this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who’s ever done this. Um, have you ever gone on? It’s such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a a TV thing? So you get you get connected in and it’s like a Zoom call basically right now. Um, and you can’t see them. So on TV, it looks like you’re all like split screen, like you see your face, their face, and the other person. But in in reality, you have no you there’s no facial expressions because you can’t see each other’s video. So you’re only hearing each other. You don’t know when when it’s your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going down this checklist of like worry. It was like, “Okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to” And then like, it’s never like the things you expect. It’s always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you look if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at. They’re not on video. And so I’m just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and I look like a like a I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds in, I realized, “Oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that’s what will look normal.” And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian’s butt and I said, “I know, I thought that was funny.” to do balls and stuff. So I know I said some stuff maybe I wasn’t supposed to say.
Sam Parr: No, the Kim you’re it was good. You you were a good interview. It was great. Uh, I watched the whole thing. It was good.
Sam Parr: Thank you.
Shaan Puri: Um, all right, you want to talk about the first idea?
Sam Parr: Yeah, let’s do it.
Shaan Puri: You want to do uh this thing TwoCan?
Sam Parr: Yes.
Shaan Puri: Okay. So I um along with Joe Spizer, we I’m kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we’re just investing in we’re just investing in companies together.
Shaan Puri: Why why Hampton?
Sam Parr: I grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s And we were thinking for we were thinking about names and I was like, “Uh, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons. What do you think?”
Shaan Puri: And it’s just your own money or it’s a fund?
Sam Parr: We’re mostly our my own money, but uh him and I uh I Joe’s an investor in your thing and he would like, “Man, I want to put even more money in.” And he goes, “You just want to invest with me?” I go, “Yeah, sure.” And then he’s like, “You want to do a rolling fund?” I was like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” Uh, he’s like, “You want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals?” I go, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it with you.” So it’s just like a deal-by-deal basis. So we created an AngelList syndicate, which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have you have to tell me and then I’ll invest.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Um, also, so I heard this great description of AngelList, which is like, it’s Substack for VCs. Um, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. Uh, the same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It’s awesome.
Sam Parr: So, yeah, we did it and like so we I found a company already um and we invest and I was just going to invest like I I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And um he was like, “Why don’t you just do the syndicate thing?” And I was like, “All right, let’s try it.” So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with?
Shaan Puri: So so I know I know about this company, but give the give the what is your kind of like two-sentence description of it?
Sam Parr: It’s called TwoCan and it’s basically the really dumbed-down version is it’s like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it’s a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you’re reading into the language that you want to learn. So it’s contextual learning. Um, more complicated than that, but that’s the simple version.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It’s kind of genius, honestly. The the founder, what’s her name? Taylor something? She’s magical. She’s great. She’s been a fan of the podcast actually. She she messaged us a long time ago when like before this fundraise, uh, being like, “Hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I’m doing.” Or maybe I missed it.
Sam Parr: Did she really? Oh, I can’t believe I missed it.
Shaan Puri: And so I um so I’ve been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn’t pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. Um, but I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it’s okay, so here’s my thing. Um, anything that there’s a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, “I should, I should, I should.” And you uh as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you’re just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it’s that hard to learn a language. It’s hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book, or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. Um, it doesn’t sound that hard, but in practice, it’s like it’s a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what TwoCan is doing is you don’t have to make it a separate thing. It’s like you’re already just browsing the internet. So why don’t we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you’re visiting? So you’re not you don’t have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You’ll learn the language in bits and pieces while you’re browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And um and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don’t even know why I didn’t invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I’ll hit her up after this and and see if I can get in.
Sam Parr: Have you talked Yeah, do it. If you don’t know her well, I can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman’s a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, “Oh, well, you’re going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company.” Like Oh, really? Okay. I I hope it’s this one, but like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just she just oozed CEO. Um Wow, interesting. I’ve never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there’s if there’s anyone come to mind?
Sam Parr: Um, the guy from Superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, “Oh yeah, like you are a so you I would bet on you for just about anything.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, “I’m going to write a book,” I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be great.” Yeah, I was like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. Um, when we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey, or Harley, Harley, uh, I kind of but obviously he’s already hugely successful. But like there was a handful of people we’ve interviewed where they have the Harley when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody’s business. And so he just had this good-looking guy in this great-looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn’t he didn’t even have to say a word. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy’s like a power player.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, and so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, “Oh, you she just she just was on top of it. I just felt great.” Another person, and this is uh a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that’s her name, who started ClassPass. Payal. Payal. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, “Oh, you’re really special.” Uh, so uh, anyway, this woman Taylor, I met with her. I was like, “Oh, you’re I whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I’m in, no matter what.” Um, and so, but I started like also I mean, let’s we’ll just we’ll move on past TwoCan, but it’s joinedtwocan.com. The reason it’s interesting is they have this like head she worked at Headspace. So they have this like Headspace cute branding shit. Right. By the way, we should just say TwoCan is like the bird. TwoCan Sam type of thing. It’s it’s not yeah, it’s spelled like that. T-O-U-C-A-N.
Sam Parr: Yeah, TwoCan. Um, which I don’t know, do those birds like speak or something? I I don’t know why. Maybe maybe that might be it. Yeah. So so do you have any kind of stats you can share about them? Like give us a sense of why you feel like this is working.
Sam Parr: Uh, I didn’t ask her for permission to ask to talk about that, but basically Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like I think 5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that and what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I’m like, “Well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It’s a $5 billion company, I think.” Um, and I I I’ve been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, I do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say, “Well, how can I just create this in the form of a Google plugin?” Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don’t do it because there’s a little bit of friction, and how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Right. Now, there’s a ton of downside with Google plugins, you know, you’re a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you. But it’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that’s what I wanted to bring up was some uh Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this I don’t know if this is how she did it, but she basically um uh or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing. So for example, learning a language. People already want to learn a language, you just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar. So you just fix it as you write. Uh, one that I use all the time is SimilarWeb, so it tells me the traffic of someone’s website. Uh, passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis, so a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?
Shaan Puri: Oh yeah. My my buddy was with the guy who started it.
Sam Parr: Isn’t that worth like a billion dollars? Uh, not yet, but getting close. It’s several hundred millions, I think, was the last round.
Sam Parr: And all it does is uh screen recordings. Screen recordings. Yeah. So so they basically say, “Oh, you want to show something on your screen, here’s a click, boom, record, share.” Um, so the the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several billion. $4 billion. So Honey had, I think 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you’re about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background, it’s looking for, is there a is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else? Or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don’t have to take an action. I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It’s just going to do it and it the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over $100 million a year. So The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he’s an engineer. He’s like a very um by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He’s really cool. His name’s Max. And I was like shooting the shit with him and I was like, “Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought?” And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on and I was like, “How big are you guys?” He was like, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” And I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He was like, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” And then I and then I go, “You just raised money?” He goes, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because it was at it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation.”
Sam Parr: Yeah. I was like, “Oh my god, you pulled it off.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, they did it. Exactly. Um, so those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as I believe a Chrome Chrome extension. So it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. Um, you needed a a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there’s others that like, like for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have AdBlock or, you know, UBlock Origin or whatever. Um, that’s definitely one of them. And so I think I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It’s like, “Dude, you’re just making this like plugin.” And definitely there’s a lot of people like my mom doesn’t know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn’t know there’s a Chrome extension store. She doesn’t really know how to install them. Like she knows apps, but she doesn’t know Chrome extensions. So you’re going to get a little bit more of a tech-savvy audience. You know, it’s a smaller market overall. But the friction was a big deal.
Sam Parr: So I’m going to try and I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the the numbers. There’s 1.6 billion iPhone users, okay? 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There’s a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn’t know how to do this, but does your mom need to know how to do this?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are it’s it’s kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it’s hard to get like it’s hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment.
Sam Parr: Um, yes. So, like it’s I I it’s prestigious, but it’s definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you’re coming on to talk about, it was. Right. Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I’ll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn’t have the same it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, I this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who’s ever done this. Um, have you ever gone on? It’s such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a a TV thing? So you get you get connected in and it’s like a Zoom call basically right now. Um, and you can’t see them. So on TV, it looks like you’re all like split screen, like you see your face, their face, and the other person. But in in reality, you have no you there’s no facial expressions because you can’t see each other’s video. So you’re only hearing each other. You don’t know when when it’s your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going down this checklist of like worry. It was like, “Okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to” And then like, it’s never like the things you expect. It’s always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you look if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at. They’re not on video. And so I’m just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and I look like a like a I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds in, I realized, “Oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that’s what will look normal.” And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian’s butt and I said, “I know, I thought that was funny.” to do balls and stuff. So I know I said some stuff maybe I wasn’t supposed to say.
Sam Parr: No, the Kim you’re it was good. You you were a good interview. It was great. Uh, I watched the whole thing. It was good.
Sam Parr: Thank you.
Shaan Puri: Um, all right, you want to talk about the first idea?
Sam Parr: Yeah, let’s do it.
Shaan Puri: You want to do uh this thing TwoCan?
Sam Parr: Yes.
Shaan Puri: Okay. So I um along with Joe Spizer, we I’m kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we’re just investing in we’re just investing in companies together.
Shaan Puri: Why why Hampton?
Sam Parr: I grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s And we were thinking for we were thinking about names and I was like, “Uh, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons. What do you think?”
Shaan Puri: And it’s just your own money or it’s a fund?
Sam Parr: We’re mostly our my own money, but uh him and I uh I Joe’s an investor in your thing and he would like, “Man, I want to put even more money in.” And he goes, “You just want to invest with me?” I go, “Yeah, sure.” And then he’s like, “You want to do a rolling fund?” I was like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” Uh, he’s like, “You want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals?” I go, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it with you.” So it’s just like a deal-by-deal basis. So we created an AngelList syndicate, which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have you have to tell me and then I’ll invest.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Um, also, so I heard this great description of AngelList, which is like, it’s Substack for VCs. Um, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. Uh, the same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It’s awesome.
Sam Parr: So, yeah, we did it and like so we I found a company already um and we invest and I was just going to invest like I I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And um he was like, “Why don’t you just do the syndicate thing?” And I was like, “All right, let’s try it.” So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with?
Shaan Puri: So so I know I know about this company, but give the give the what is your kind of like two-sentence description of it?
Sam Parr: It’s called TwoCan and it’s basically the really dumbed-down version is it’s like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it’s a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you’re reading into the language that you want to learn. So it’s contextual learning. Um, more complicated than that, but that’s the simple version.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It’s kind of genius, honestly. The the founder, what’s her name? Taylor something? She’s magical. She’s great. She’s been a fan of the podcast actually. She she messaged us a long time ago when like before this fundraise, uh, being like, “Hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I’m doing.” Or maybe I missed it.
Sam Parr: Did she really? Oh, I can’t believe I missed it.
Shaan Puri: And so I um so I’ve been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn’t pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. Um, but I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it’s okay, so here’s my thing. Um, anything that there’s a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, “I should, I should, I should.” And you uh as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you’re just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it’s that hard to learn a language. It’s hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book, or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. Um, it doesn’t sound that hard, but in practice, it’s like it’s a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what TwoCan is doing is you don’t have to make it a separate thing. It’s like you’re already just browsing the internet. So why don’t we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you’re visiting? So you’re not you don’t have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You’ll learn the language in bits and pieces while you’re browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And um and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don’t even know why I didn’t invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I’ll hit her up after this and and see if I can get in.
Sam Parr: Have you talked Yeah, do it. If you don’t know her well, I can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman’s a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, “Oh, well, you’re going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company.” Like Oh, really? Okay. I I hope it’s this one, but like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just she just oozed CEO. Um Wow, interesting. I’ve never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there’s if there’s anyone come to mind?
Sam Parr: Um, the guy from Superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, “Oh yeah, like you are a so you I would bet on you for just about anything.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, “I’m going to write a book,” I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be great.” Yeah, I was like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. Um, when we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey, or Harley, Harley, uh, I kind of but obviously he’s already hugely successful. But like there was a handful of people we’ve interviewed where they have the Harley when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody’s business. And so he just had this good-looking guy in this great-looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn’t he didn’t even have to say a word. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy’s like a power player.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, and so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, “Oh, you she just she just was on top of it. I just felt great.” Another person, and this is uh a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that’s her name, who started ClassPass. Payal. Payal. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, “Oh, you’re really special.” Uh, so uh, anyway, this woman Taylor, I met with her. I was like, “Oh, you’re I whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I’m in, no matter what.” Um, and so, but I started like also I mean, let’s we’ll just we’ll move on past TwoCan, but it’s joinedtwocan.com. The reason it’s interesting is they have this like head she worked at Headspace. So they have this like Headspace cute branding shit. Right. By the way, we should just say TwoCan is like the bird. TwoCan Sam type of thing. It’s it’s not yeah, it’s spelled like that. T-O-U-C-A-N.
Sam Parr: Yeah, TwoCan. Um, which I don’t know, do those birds like speak or something? I I don’t know why. Maybe maybe that might be it. Yeah. So so do you have any kind of stats you can share about them? Like give us a sense of why you feel like this is working.
Sam Parr: Uh, I didn’t ask her for permission to ask to talk about that, but basically Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like I think 5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that and what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I’m like, “Well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It’s a $5 billion company, I think.” Um, and I I I’ve been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, I do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say, “Well, how can I just create this in the form of a Google plugin?” Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don’t do it because there’s a little bit of friction, and how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Right. Now, there’s a ton of downside with Google plugins, you know, you’re a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you. But it’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that’s what I wanted to bring up was some uh Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this I don’t know if this is how she did it, but she basically um uh or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing. So for example, learning a language. People already want to learn a language, you just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar. So you just fix it as you write. Uh, one that I use all the time is SimilarWeb, so it tells me the traffic of someone’s website. Uh, passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis, so a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?
Shaan Puri: Oh yeah. My my buddy was with the guy who started it.
Sam Parr: Isn’t that worth like a billion dollars? Uh, not yet, but getting close. It’s several hundred millions, I think, was the last round.
Sam Parr: And all it does is uh screen recordings. Screen recordings. Yeah. So so they basically say, “Oh, you want to show something on your screen, here’s a click, boom, record, share.” Um, so the the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several billion. $4 billion. So Honey had, I think 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you’re about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background, it’s looking for, is there a is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else? Or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don’t have to take an action. I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It’s just going to do it and it the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over $100 million a year. So The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he’s an engineer. He’s like a very um by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He’s really cool. His name’s Max. And I was like shooting the shit with him and I was like, “Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought?” And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on and I was like, “How big are you guys?” He was like, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” And I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He was like, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” And then I and then I go, “You just raised money?” He goes, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because it was at it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation.”
Sam Parr: Yeah. I was like, “Oh my god, you pulled it off.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, they did it. Exactly. Um, so those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as I believe a Chrome Chrome extension. So it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. Um, you needed a a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there’s others that like, like for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have AdBlock or, you know, UBlock Origin or whatever. Um, that’s definitely one of them. And so I think I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It’s like, “Dude, you’re just making this like plugin.” And definitely there’s a lot of people like my mom doesn’t know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn’t know there’s a Chrome extension store. She doesn’t really know how to install them. Like she knows apps, but she doesn’t know Chrome extensions. So you’re going to get a little bit more of a tech-savvy audience. You know, it’s a smaller market overall. But the friction was a big deal.
Sam Parr: So I’m going to try and I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the the numbers. There’s 1.6 billion iPhone users, okay? 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There’s a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn’t know how to do this, but does your mom need to know how to do this?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are it’s it’s kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it’s hard to get like it’s hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment.
Sam Parr: Um, yes. So, like it’s I I it’s prestigious, but it’s definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you’re coming on to talk about, it was. Right. Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I’ll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn’t have the same it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, I this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who’s ever done this. Um, have you ever gone on? It’s such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a a TV thing? So you get you get connected in and it’s like a Zoom call basically right now. Um, and you can’t see them. So on TV, it looks like you’re all like split screen, like you see your face, their face, and the other person. But in in reality, you have no you there’s no facial expressions because you can’t see each other’s video. So you’re only hearing each other. You don’t know when when it’s your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going down this checklist of like worry. It was like, “Okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to” And then like, it’s never like the things you expect. It’s always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you look if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at. They’re not on video. And so I’m just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and I look like a like a I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds in, I realized, “Oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that’s what will look normal.” And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian’s butt and I said, “I know, I thought that was funny.” to do balls and stuff. So I know I said some stuff maybe I wasn’t supposed to say.
Sam Parr: No, the Kim you’re it was good. You you were a good interview. It was great. Uh, I watched the whole thing. It was good.
Sam Parr: Thank you.
Shaan Puri: Um, all right, you want to talk about the first idea?
Sam Parr: Yeah, let’s do it.
Shaan Puri: You want to do uh this thing TwoCan?
Sam Parr: Yes.
Shaan Puri: Okay. So I um along with Joe Spizer, we I’m kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we’re just investing in we’re just investing in companies together.
Shaan Puri: Why why Hampton?
Sam Parr: I grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s And we were thinking for we were thinking about names and I was like, “Uh, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons. What do you think?”
Shaan Puri: And it’s just your own money or it’s a fund?
Sam Parr: We’re mostly our my own money, but uh him and I uh I Joe’s an investor in your thing and he would like, “Man, I want to put even more money in.” And he goes, “You just want to invest with me?” I go, “Yeah, sure.” And then he’s like, “You want to do a rolling fund?” I was like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” Uh, he’s like, “You want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals?” I go, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it with you.” So it’s just like a deal-by-deal basis. So we created an AngelList syndicate, which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have you have to tell me and then I’ll invest.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Um, also, so I heard this great description of AngelList, which is like, it’s Substack for VCs. Um, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. Uh, the same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It’s awesome.
Sam Parr: So, yeah, we did it and like so we I found a company already um and we invest and I was just going to invest like I I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And um he was like, “Why don’t you just do the syndicate thing?” And I was like, “All right, let’s try it.” So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with?
Shaan Puri: So so I know I know about this company, but give the give the what is your kind of like two-sentence description of it?
Sam Parr: It’s called TwoCan and it’s basically the really dumbed-down version is it’s like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it’s a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you’re reading into the language that you want to learn. So it’s contextual learning. Um, more complicated than that, but that’s the simple version.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It’s kind of genius, honestly. The the founder, what’s her name? Taylor something? She’s magical. She’s great. She’s been a fan of the podcast actually. She she messaged us a long time ago when like before this fundraise, uh, being like, “Hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I’m doing.” Or maybe I missed it.
Sam Parr: Did she really? Oh, I can’t believe I missed it.
Shaan Puri: And so I um so I’ve been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn’t pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. Um, but I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it’s okay, so here’s my thing. Um, anything that there’s a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, “I should, I should, I should.” And you uh as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you’re just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it’s that hard to learn a language. It’s hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book, or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. Um, it doesn’t sound that hard, but in practice, it’s like it’s a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what TwoCan is doing is you don’t have to make it a separate thing. It’s like you’re already just browsing the internet. So why don’t we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you’re visiting? So you’re not you don’t have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You’ll learn the language in bits and pieces while you’re browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And um and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don’t even know why I didn’t invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I’ll hit her up after this and and see if I can get in.
Sam Parr: Have you talked Yeah, do it. If you don’t know her well, I can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman’s a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, “Oh, well, you’re going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company.” Like Oh, really? Okay. I I hope it’s this one, but like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just she just oozed CEO. Um Wow, interesting. I’ve never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there’s if there’s anyone come to mind?
Sam Parr: Um, the guy from Superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, “Oh yeah, like you are a so you I would bet on you for just about anything.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, “I’m going to write a book,” I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be great.” Yeah, I was like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. Um, when we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey, or Harley, Harley, uh, I kind of but obviously he’s already hugely successful. But like there was a handful of people we’ve interviewed where they have the Harley when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody’s business. And so he just had this good-looking guy in this great-looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn’t he didn’t even have to say a word. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy’s like a power player.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, and so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, “Oh, you she just she just was on top of it. I just felt great.” Another person, and this is uh a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that’s her name, who started ClassPass. Payal. Payal. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, “Oh, you’re really special.” Uh, so uh, anyway, this woman Taylor, I met with her. I was like, “Oh, you’re I whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I’m in, no matter what.” Um, and so, but I started like also I mean, let’s we’ll just we’ll move on past TwoCan, but it’s joinedtwocan.com. The reason it’s interesting is they have this like head she worked at Headspace. So they have this like Headspace cute branding shit. Right. By the way, we should just say TwoCan is like the bird. TwoCan Sam type of thing. It’s it’s not yeah, it’s spelled like that. T-O-U-C-A-N.
Sam Parr: Yeah, TwoCan. Um, which I don’t know, do those birds like speak or something? I I don’t know why. Maybe maybe that might be it. Yeah. So so do you have any kind of stats you can share about them? Like give us a sense of why you feel like this is working.
Sam Parr: Uh, I didn’t ask her for permission to ask to talk about that, but basically Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like I think 5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that and what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I’m like, “Well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It’s a $5 billion company, I think.” Um, and I I I’ve been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, I do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say, “Well, how can I just create this in the form of a Google plugin?” Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don’t do it because there’s a little bit of friction, and how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Right. Now, there’s a ton of downside with Google plugins, you know, you’re a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you. But it’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that’s what I wanted to bring up was some uh Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this I don’t know if this is how she did it, but she basically um uh or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing. So for example, learning a language. People already want to learn a language, you just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar. So you just fix it as you write. Uh, one that I use all the time is SimilarWeb, so it tells me the traffic of someone’s website. Uh, passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis, so a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?
Shaan Puri: Oh yeah. My my buddy was with the guy who started it.
Sam Parr: Isn’t that worth like a billion dollars? Uh, not yet, but getting close. It’s several hundred millions, I think, was the last round.
Sam Parr: And all it does is uh screen recordings. Screen recordings. Yeah. So so they basically say, “Oh, you want to show something on your screen, here’s a click, boom, record, share.” Um, so the the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several billion. $4 billion. So Honey had, I think 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you’re about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background, it’s looking for, is there a is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else? Or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don’t have to take an action. I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It’s just going to do it and it the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over $100 million a year. So The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he’s an engineer. He’s like a very um by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He’s really cool. His name’s Max. And I was like shooting the shit with him and I was like, “Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought?” And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on and I was like, “How big are you guys?” He was like, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” And I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He was like, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” And then I and then I go, “You just raised money?” He goes, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because it was at it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation.”
Sam Parr: Yeah. I was like, “Oh my god, you pulled it off.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, they did it. Exactly. Um, so those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as I believe a Chrome Chrome extension. So it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. Um, you needed a a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there’s others that like, like for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have AdBlock or, you know, UBlock Origin or whatever. Um, that’s definitely one of them. And so I think I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It’s like, “Dude, you’re just making this like plugin.” And definitely there’s a lot of people like my mom doesn’t know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn’t know there’s a Chrome extension store. She doesn’t really know how to install them. Like she knows apps, but she doesn’t know Chrome extensions. So you’re going to get a little bit more of a tech-savvy audience. You know, it’s a smaller market overall. But the friction was a big deal.
Sam Parr: So I’m going to try and I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the the numbers. There’s 1.6 billion iPhone users, okay? 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There’s a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn’t know how to do this, but does your mom need to know how to do this?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are it’s it’s kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it’s hard to get like it’s hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment.
Sam Parr: Um, yes. So, like it’s I I it’s prestigious, but it’s definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you’re coming on to talk about, it was. Right. Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I’ll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn’t have the same it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, I this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who’s ever done this. Um, have you ever gone on? It’s such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a a TV thing? So you get you get connected in and it’s like a Zoom call basically right now. Um, and you can’t see them. So on TV, it looks like you’re all like split screen, like you see your face, their face, and the other person. But in in reality, you have no you there’s no facial expressions because you can’t see each other’s video. So you’re only hearing each other. You don’t know when when it’s your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going down this checklist of like worry. It was like, “Okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to” And then like, it’s never like the things you expect. It’s always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you look if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at. They’re not on video. And so I’m just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and I look like a like a I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds in, I realized, “Oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that’s what will look normal.” And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian’s butt and I said, “I know, I thought that was funny.” to do balls and stuff. So I know I said some stuff maybe I wasn’t supposed to say.
Sam Parr: No, the Kim you’re it was good. You you were a good interview. It was great. Uh, I watched the whole thing. It was good.
Sam Parr: Thank you.
Shaan Puri: Um, all right, you want to talk about the first idea?
Sam Parr: Yeah, let’s do it.
Shaan Puri: You want to do uh this thing TwoCan?
Sam Parr: Yes.
Shaan Puri: Okay. So I um along with Joe Spizer, we I’m kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we’re just investing in we’re just investing in companies together.
Shaan Puri: Why why Hampton?
Sam Parr: I grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s And we were thinking for we were thinking about names and I was like, “Uh, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons. What do you think?”
Shaan Puri: And it’s just your own money or it’s a fund?
Sam Parr: We’re mostly our my own money, but uh him and I uh I Joe’s an investor in your thing and he would like, “Man, I want to put even more money in.” And he goes, “You just want to invest with me?” I go, “Yeah, sure.” And then he’s like, “You want to do a rolling fund?” I was like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” Uh, he’s like, “You want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals?” I go, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it with you.” So it’s just like a deal-by-deal basis. So we created an AngelList syndicate, which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have you have to tell me and then I’ll invest.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Um, also, so I heard this great description of AngelList, which is like, it’s Substack for VCs. Um, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. Uh, the same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It’s awesome.
Sam Parr: So, yeah, we did it and like so we I found a company already um and we invest and I was just going to invest like I I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And um he was like, “Why don’t you just do the syndicate thing?” And I was like, “All right, let’s try it.” So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with?
Shaan Puri: So so I know I know about this company, but give the give the what is your kind of like two-sentence description of it?
Sam Parr: It’s called TwoCan and it’s basically the really dumbed-down version is it’s like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it’s a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you’re reading into the language that you want to learn. So it’s contextual learning. Um, more complicated than that, but that’s the simple version.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It’s kind of genius, honestly. The the founder, what’s her name? Taylor something? She’s magical. She’s great. She’s been a fan of the podcast actually. She she messaged us a long time ago when like before this fundraise, uh, being like, “Hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I’m doing.” Or maybe I missed it.
Sam Parr: Did she really? Oh, I can’t believe I missed it.
Shaan Puri: And so I um so I’ve been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn’t pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. Um, but I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it’s okay, so here’s my thing. Um, anything that there’s a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, “I should, I should, I should.” And you uh as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you’re just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it’s that hard to learn a language. It’s hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book, or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. Um, it doesn’t sound that hard, but in practice, it’s like it’s a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what TwoCan is doing is you don’t have to make it a separate thing. It’s like you’re already just browsing the internet. So why don’t we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you’re visiting? So you’re not you don’t have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You’ll learn the language in bits and pieces while you’re browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And um and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don’t even know why I didn’t invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I’ll hit her up after this and and see if I can get in.
Sam Parr: Have you talked Yeah, do it. If you don’t know her well, I can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman’s a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, “Oh, well, you’re going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company.” Like Oh, really? Okay. I I hope it’s this one, but like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just she just oozed CEO. Um Wow, interesting. I’ve never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there’s if there’s anyone come to mind?
Sam Parr: Um, the guy from Superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, “Oh yeah, like you are a so you I would bet on you for just about anything.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, “I’m going to write a book,” I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be great.” Yeah, I was like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. Um, when we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey, or Harley, Harley, uh, I kind of but obviously he’s already hugely successful. But like there was a handful of people we’ve interviewed where they have the Harley when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody’s business. And so he just had this good-looking guy in this great-looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn’t he didn’t even have to say a word. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy’s like a power player.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, and so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, “Oh, you she just she just was on top of it. I just felt great.” Another person, and this is uh a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that’s her name, who started ClassPass. Payal. Payal. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, “Oh, you’re really special.” Uh, so uh, anyway, this woman Taylor, I met with her. I was like, “Oh, you’re I whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I’m in, no matter what.” Um, and so, but I started like also I mean, let’s we’ll just we’ll move on past TwoCan, but it’s joinedtwocan.com. The reason it’s interesting is they have this like head she worked at Headspace. So they have this like Headspace cute branding shit. Right. By the way, we should just say TwoCan is like the bird. TwoCan Sam type of thing. It’s it’s not yeah, it’s spelled like that. T-O-U-C-A-N.
Sam Parr: Yeah, TwoCan. Um, which I don’t know, do those birds like speak or something? I I don’t know why. Maybe maybe that might be it. Yeah. So so do you have any kind of stats you can share about them? Like give us a sense of why you feel like this is working.
Sam Parr: Uh, I didn’t ask her for permission to ask to talk about that, but basically Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like I think 5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that and what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I’m like, “Well, this company Duolingo is very successful. It’s a $5 billion company, I think.” Um, and I I I’ve been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is like, I do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say, “Well, how can I just create this in the form of a Google plugin?” Or two, which behaviors do people want, but they don’t do it because there’s a little bit of friction, and how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Right. Now, there’s a ton of downside with Google plugins, you know, you’re a Google plugin, so Google can ruin you. But it’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. And that’s what I wanted to bring up was some uh Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this I don’t know if this is how she did it, but she basically um uh or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing. So for example, learning a language. People already want to learn a language, you just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar. So you just fix it as you write. Uh, one that I use all the time is SimilarWeb, so it tells me the traffic of someone’s website. Uh, passwords, you use passwords on a regular basis, so a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?
Shaan Puri: Oh yeah. My my buddy was with the guy who started it.
Sam Parr: Isn’t that worth like a billion dollars? Uh, not yet, but getting close. It’s several hundred millions, I think, was the last round.
Sam Parr: And all it does is uh screen recordings. Screen recordings. Yeah. So so they basically say, “Oh, you want to show something on your screen, here’s a click, boom, record, share.” Um, so the the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several billion. $4 billion. So Honey had, I think 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you’re about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background, it’s looking for, is there a is there a deal on this? Is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else? Or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don’t have to take an action. I have to remember to go look for a coupon. It’s just going to do it and it the Honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Grammarly was another that I think shocks people because Grammarly does over $100 million a year. So The Grammarly founder spoke at HustleCon and he’s an engineer. He’s like a very um by the book, like straight shooter engineer. He’s really cool. His name’s Max. And I was like shooting the shit with him and I was like, “Dude, a freaking plugin. Who would have thought?” And he kind of had like a funny shit-eating grin on and I was like, “How big are you guys?” He was like, “We do over $100 million a year in sales.” And I was like, “Would you ever believe it?” He was like, “Yeah, I thought it could be done.” And then I and then I go, “You just raised money?” He goes, “Yeah, we raised $100 million the other day.” I go, “Why?” He goes, “Because it was at it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation.”
Sam Parr: Yeah. I was like, “Oh my god, you pulled it off.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, they did it. Exactly. Um, so those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as I believe a Chrome Chrome extension. So it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. Um, you needed a a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there’s others that like, like for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have AdBlock or, you know, UBlock Origin or whatever. Um, that’s definitely one of them. And so I think I think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It’s like, “Dude, you’re just making this like plugin.” And definitely there’s a lot of people like my mom doesn’t know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn’t know there’s a Chrome extension store. She doesn’t really know how to install them. Like she knows apps, but she doesn’t know Chrome extensions. So you’re going to get a little bit more of a tech-savvy audience. You know, it’s a smaller market overall. But the friction was a big deal.
Sam Parr: So I’m going to try and I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the the numbers. There’s 1.6 billion iPhone users, okay? 1.6 billion users, 2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There’s a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn’t know how to do this, but does your mom need to know how to do this?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and I think even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are it’s it’s kind of like a background thing. So, and you only get so little time to talk that even if there was a much bigger audience, it’s hard to get like it’s hard to really make any headway in a three-minute segment.
Sam Parr: Um, yes. So, like it’s I I it’s prestigious, but it’s definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you’re coming on to talk about, it was. Right. Or this podcast, right? More people will listen to this podcast and I’ll get more mileage out of this. It just doesn’t have the same it doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t get the juices flowing in the same way that being on CNBC does. But I also say this, I this is what I think is more interesting for anybody who’s ever done this. Um, have you ever gone on? It’s such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a a TV thing? So you get you get connected in and it’s like a Zoom call basically right now. Um, and you can’t see them. So on TV, it looks like you’re all like split screen, like you see your face, their face, and the other person. But in in reality, you have no you there’s no facial expressions because you can’t see each other’s video. So you’re only hearing each other. You don’t know when when it’s your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up, because I was like, I was going down this checklist of like worry. It was like, “Okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right. Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to” And then like, it’s never like the things you expect. It’s always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you look if you watch the video, my eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at. They’re not on video. And so I’m just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing and I look like a like a I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds in, I realized, “Oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that’s what will look normal.” And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian’s butt and I said, “I know, I thought that was funny.” to do balls and stuff. So I know I said some stuff maybe I wasn’t supposed to say.
Sam Parr: No, the Kim you’re it was good. You you were a good interview. It was great. Uh, I watched the whole thing. It was good.
Sam Parr: Thank you.
Shaan Puri: Um, all right, you want to talk about the first idea?
Sam Parr: Yeah, let’s do it.
Shaan Puri: You want to do uh this thing TwoCan?
Sam Parr: Yes.
Shaan Puri: Okay. So I um along with Joe Spizer, we I’m kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing hamptonvc.com um and we’re just investing in we’re just investing in companies together.
Shaan Puri: Why why Hampton?
Sam Parr: I grew up in a bad neighborhood on the street called Hampton and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons.
Shaan Puri: All right, that’s And we were thinking for we were thinking about names and I was like, “Uh, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live in the Hamptons. What do you think?”
Shaan Puri: And it’s just your own money or it’s a fund?
Sam Parr: We’re mostly our my own money, but uh him and I uh I Joe’s an investor in your thing and he would like, “Man, I want to put even more money in.” And he goes, “You just want to invest with me?” I go, “Yeah, sure.” And then he’s like, “You want to do a rolling fund?” I was like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” Uh, he’s like, “You want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals?” I go, “Okay, cool. I’ll do it with you.” So it’s just like a deal-by-deal basis. So we created an AngelList syndicate, which so then basically whenever whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have you have to tell me and then I’ll invest.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, dude, I have a bunch. Um, also, so I heard this great description of AngelList, which is like, it’s Substack for VCs. Um, which is like the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund. Uh, the same way Substack lets you spin up a little newsletter. It’s awesome.
Sam Parr: So, yeah, we did it and like so we I found a company already um and we invest and I was just going to invest like I I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. I was just going to do a ton of stuff, but all low prices. And um he was like, “Why don’t you just do the syndicate thing?” And I was like, “All right, let’s try it.” So doing that, but can I tell you about the first company that we we uh are about to finish with?
Shaan Puri: So so I know I know about this company, but give the give the what is your kind of like two-sentence description of it?
Sam Parr: It’s called TwoCan and it’s basically the really dumbed-down version is it’s like Duolingo, which is a language learning website, but it’s a Chrome plugin and it changes a handful of words of every article that you’re reading into the language that you want to learn. So it’s contextual learning. Um, more complicated than that, but that’s the simple version.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort, I would say. It’s kind of genius, honestly. The the founder, what’s her name? Taylor something? She’s magical. She’s great. She’s been a fan of the podcast actually. She she messaged us a long time ago when like before this fundraise, uh, being like, “Hey, the pod is cool. Check out what I’m doing.” Or maybe I missed it.
Sam Parr: Did she really? Oh, I can’t believe I missed it.
Shaan Puri: And so I um so I’ve been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn’t pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. Um, but I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest it’s okay, so here’s my thing. Um, anything that there’s a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like, “I should, I should, I should.” And you uh as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you’re just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it’s that hard to learn a language. It’s hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book, or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do Duolingo for 30 minutes a day. Um, it doesn’t sound that hard, but in practice, it’s like it’s a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what TwoCan is doing is you don’t have to make it a separate thing. It’s like you’re already just browsing the internet. So why don’t we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every webpage you’re visiting? So you’re not you don’t have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You’ll learn the language in bits and pieces while you’re browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And um and you also like the space of Chrome extensions. You kind of tipped me off on the power of Chrome extensions. So actually, I don’t even know why I didn’t invest. It seems like a great idea. Maybe I maybe I’ll hit her up after this and and see if I can get in.
Sam Parr: Have you talked Yeah, do it. If you don’t know her well, I can try to introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman’s a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, “Oh, well, you’re going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company.” Like Oh, really? Okay. I I hope it’s this one, but like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She it just she just oozed CEO. Um Wow, interesting. I’ve never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about? If there’s if there’s anyone come to mind?
Sam Parr: Um, the guy from Superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, “Oh yeah, like you are a so you I would bet on you for just about anything.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, “I’m going to write a book,” I’d be like, “Oh, it’s going to be great.” Yeah, I was like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be successful. Yeah, so I felt that about him. Um, when we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey, or Harley, Harley, uh, I kind of but obviously he’s already hugely successful. But like there was a handful of people we’ve interviewed where they have the Harley when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody’s business. And so he just had this good-looking guy in this great-looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he couldn’t he didn’t even have to say a word. I was like, “Oh wow, this guy’s like a power player.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, and so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, “Oh, you she just she just was on top of it. I just felt great.” Another person, and this is uh a little bit early on in their experience was this woman named Payal. I think that’s her name, who started ClassPass. Payal. Payal. Uh, when I talked to her, I was like, “Oh, you’re really special.” Uh, so uh, anyway, this woman Taylor, I met with her. I was like, “Oh, you’re I whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I’m in, no matter what.” Um, and so, but I started like also I mean, let’s we’ll just we’ll move on past TwoCan, but it’s joinedtwocan.com. The reason it