Sam talks about his hack of cold-calling investment bankers to extract market intelligence on industries he’s interested in entering. He also recaps a Blippi live show that sparked a rabbit hole into VStar Entertainment, Cirque du Soleil, and the kids live entertainment business — which does hundreds of millions in revenue. The episode also covers peer group businesses, the “build to sell vs. build to win” framework, how Sam and Shaan approach celebrity encounters, and the restaurant-owner energy hack for meeting people.
Speakers: Sam Parr (co-host), Shaan Puri (co-host)
Meeting Jimmy O. Yang [00:00:00]
Sam: So bankers are basically people who help people sell companies and help people buy companies. When you sell a company for anything north of probably $50 million, they likely have a banker. I’ve been contacting bankers and my pitch to them is: “Hey, I’m thinking about starting a company in this space. You’ve sold a few companies in this space. Tell me everything about why this company was bought, what the buyer was looking for, and maybe in five or ten years I’ll let you sell my company.” I’ve been able to line up meetings doing this.
Shaan: Genius. And I’ve been a part of one or two of those types of conversations. I was like, oh wow, these guys are like vaults filled with gold.
Sam: I met a famous person this weekend. I went and saw Jimmy O. Yang — the comedian. He played Jin Yang in Silicon Valley. He was an awesome guy. My friend is dating him.
Shaan: Funny in person?
Sam: Yeah, he was awesome. Comedy funny, like you just talking to me. Not like, wow, this person should be a comedian if they weren’t. He was just really insightful, had strong opinions, told stories well.
Shaan: I think you could actually do it if you were to sit down and write a bit — you have the same traits. But no, he was just a really nice, thoughtful guy. But he was legit famous — everywhere you went, people would talk to him. And I imagine it’s quite annoying, particularly because he doesn’t actually talk like that. He’s American, right?
Sam: Right. But the people who are fans of him — particularly the Asian community, they love him — they come up expecting the accent or whatever. And a white guy came up and said something a little inappropriate, rooted in the Silicon Valley character. That kind of thing gets super annoying. But he was legit famous and it was cool to see.
How to Act Around Famous People [00:02:30]
Sam: When you’re around famous people — do you: A, treat them like a normal person and almost disregard their fame; B, nerd out and ask them all the questions they’ve probably heard before but with enthusiasm; or C, something else? What do you do?
Shaan: I do B, but in a very direct way. Like in this podcast — I’m really confident but I’m asking questions everyone wants to know. So it’s kind of like nagging them. A tiny example: I’ve got a friend of a friend who had cancer, he lost his leg, and when I first saw him I was like, “What’s going on man? Are you crushing it at pull-ups? Because you’re lighter now. How many pounds did you lose off that leg?” And he really quickly opened up, because I just got it out — but I’m also not making a huge deal out of it.
So with famous people I’m just like, “So what’s it like? You’re pretty famous. Is that cool or is it bad?” Very direct. And typically it makes people lighten up.
Sam: Yeah, you’re better looking in person. I watch the show. You’re way taller than I thought.
Shaan: My brother-in-law has the best celebrity move. He sees a celebrity, he greets them like a long-lost friend. He’ll see Mike Tyson and be like, “Mike, what’s up man! How you been?” And just dap them up and keep going. He just makes it seem like they’re reconnecting rather than meeting for the first time. Because these people meet so many people, they don’t remember everyone, so they’ll automatically go with your assumption that you kind of know each other. Peers in some way.
Sam: You ever been to a restaurant where the owner walks around greeting people?
Shaan: Of course.
Sam: A friend told me he used to meet women that way. He’d approach with the attitude — he didn’t act like he was the owner, but in his head he acted like the owner. “How’s everybody doing here?” And he had that energy. He was able to meet so many people. Restaurant owner energy.
Shaan: That’s so good. Like I’m just going to start wearing a small dish towel on my waist and go to restaurants, just walk around greeting each table, making sure everything’s going smoothly. And you’re not lying — you’re not telling them you’re the owner. You just have big restaurant energy.
The Blippi Live Show [00:06:00]
Sam: All right, I got a few interesting things to run by you. So I went to the Blippi show — did I tell you about this?
Shaan: No. What’s Blippi?
Sam: So back when we had Barney and Pee-Wee Herman — it’s like that. It’s a dude who went on YouTube, created this brand called Blippi. He’s entertaining, and the funny thing he does is there’s no set. He just goes to like an aquarium after 9pm when it’s closed, or a Las Vegas rock climbing studio. He uses those locations to film. The venue gets a shout-out at the beginning of the video, which gets 40 million views, so it’s worth it. He goes around and plays with toys, basically. There’s music overlaid.
My daughter loved Blippi. Then I saw an ad: “Blippi Live Show coming to Oakland.” My wife instantly buys tickets for the whole family.
We go to this thing last weekend. It’s at the Paramount Theater — same place we did HustleCon. And it is packed. Not sold-out-ish. Sold out sold out. Even the back shitty seats. Full of parents and their kids.
They created a little one-hour play — a mini musical. Kids don’t have a long attention span, so it’s just music, lights, colors, he’s like “Oh, dinosaurs! Oh, rocks!” How much do you think tickets cost?
Shaan: Sixty bucks a seat?
Sam: Something like that. Maybe 50 to 70. That venue seats about 2,500 to 3,000. So you’re in like $120,000. And he played four shows in a row that weekend, then went to the next city. So it was like eight shows or something. That weekend they made maybe $800,000. Crazy.
The guy on stage by the way was not actually Blippi. As he got famous they switched him out with a theater kid as a substitute sometimes. But the IP is Blippi — the character, the costume, the music.
So I started looking into this. There’s a company called VStar Entertainment. What they do is license kids brands and then put on kids Broadway that tours around the country. Blippi’s just one of them.
VStar Entertainment and the Kids Live Show Business [00:09:00]
Sam: VStar also does Paw Patrol. Guess how much they sold in Paw Patrol tickets last year.
Shaan: $20 million?
Sam: $40 million. In event tickets alone. Just tickets, not merch. And that was 2019 or 2020.
So the backstory: some guy decides sesame Street should do a live show. He raises $500,000 — borrows $25K from home equity, mortgages his house — gets the Sesame Street license. Started with Sesame Street, then Muppets, then merged with another company. That whole thing gets bought by Cirque du Soleil.
Speaking of Cirque — guess how much revenue Cirque du Soleil does?
Shaan: Have you been to a Cirque show?
Sam: No. But I know the guy who started it is a Canadian guy, billionaire. Very eccentric. He started a circus.
Shaan: A billion dollars a year in revenue. And five to ten percent of all Las Vegas tourists go to a Cirque show when they’re in town.
Sam: They have like ten shows at any given time. And they’re publicly traded — or were, before private equity acquired them. The concept was: do a circus but no animals. Only human performers. Crazy acrobats, great costumes. Now it’s basically its own genre.
And Cirque bought Blue Man Group and VStar. They said: Cirque does $10 million in ticket sales a year, Blue Man Group adds another $2 million, VStar adds another $2 million. Total 14 million tickets sold per year. Different price points, but that’s a real business.
Live Entertainment as a Macro Trend [00:12:00]
Sam: This whole live entertainment thing has really caught my attention. As the world moves more and more digital, the demand for one-off experiences — let’s get out of the house and do something — I think just keeps going up. Music festivals are a winner. Plays and musicals are going to be bigger than before. Because the world is going digital, that actually makes in-person more valuable.
Shaan: I 100% agree. I actually sent you a notion doc on peer businesses — you pay money and you’re part of a club, you meet up. One of them does $100 million a year in profit. It’s basically two or three meetups a year, and it’s executives paying $50,000 a year to be part of it. And I think those are going to boom. Conferences are hard. Intimate meetups — way easier to pull off.
Sam: So then I started thinking about the other opportunities. VStar took TV IP and turned it into a live show. Blippi took YouTube IP and turned it into a live show. You could just do this for more things. We’ve talked about religion — the greatest free IP in the world. Somebody could do a kid-focused Christianity show. Or dinosaurs. Or science as a genre. Kids love trucks and dinosaurs. If you build a quality show, moms will spread it. They’ll sell the tickets through their mommy groups. And the business model is simple: you build one show and you sell that show a thousand times.
Mamma Mia has made a stupid amount of money just being the same show on tour with lower-cost actors.
The Hustle’s 2X Events [00:14:30]
Sam: We used to do events at The Hustle. There was HustleCon — the big one, thousands of people. But then we had this thing called 2X. From 7pm to 10pm, we’d get 15 women in tech and business, not necessarily well-known, and they’d have 10 minutes to tell a story. We’d charge like $25 a ticket, but then we’d make tens of thousands in sponsors.
We got to the point where we could pull this off weekly in other cities. When we started, The Hustle wasn’t even that popular, but we were making like $30,000 a night with one employee running it using a team of contractors. And we didn’t even supply anything — I think we had free wine, but maybe not. We had corporate sponsors and it crushed.
In my head I was always like, I can fall back on this to make a living. Because it was so much easier than people thought.
Shaan: That’s pretty good for a tech bro.
Sam: Yeah, they labeled us wrong. We did 10 or 12 of them in one year, and every single time it was $20,000 to $30,000. The cost was like $3,000 to rent the venue. The speakers sold the tickets — we had 15 speakers and I figured each one would bring 25 people. And the business model was: tickets paid for the event, sponsors were all profit. Whenever you have an underserved community, sponsors definitely pay more. And it was a B2B component, which helped the economics.
It was far easier than people thought. And we just used Splash — basically Eventbrite. Nothing special. And it freaking worked.
Investment Bankers as a Research Tool [00:17:30]
Sam: All right, one thing I’ve been doing as I’m getting back into the game: I’ve been setting up calls with bankers. For a long time I thought “banker” meant someone who works at a bank. My wife’s friends would say “I’m a banker” and I’d be like, “Oh, which branch?”
Bankers are basically people who help people sell companies and buy companies. When you sell for anything north of probably $50 million, there’s likely a banker involved. My pitch to them: “I’m thinking about starting a company in this space. You’ve sold a few companies here. Tell me everything — why was this company bought, what was the buyer looking for? And maybe in five or ten years I’ll let you sell my company.”
They talk. They can’t discuss specific deals, but they know everything — like accountants. They’ll say, “Here’s why this company was doing well, here’s why they bought it.” And I’ll ask, “What were the other companies that buyer was trying to acquire? What were they struggling with?” And they’ll tell me. I’ll also ask, “You’ve sold three businesses in this space — which one was more fun to run?”
Shaan: Genius. These guys need podcasts. Why are they not talking publicly?
Sam: They can’t talk about specific deals. But they know everything, and they’ll tell you generally.
Vistage Model and Build to Sell vs. Build to Win [00:19:30]
Sam: Concrete example: the business I’m most interested in right now is basically a Vistage model — peer groups. A group of 10 to 40 people who all have a similar job title, they meet together, discuss their problems. A safe space to discuss things you can’t talk about on the internet.
Some of them are massive. One I can’t name does over $100 million in profit a year, just from meetups in real life. I’ll ask a banker: what job titles is Gartner or whoever buys these companies struggling to reach? And they’ll just tell me. Then I can go build a community around that and build it to sell.
But part of me asks: is building to sell even a good plan?
Shaan: Three options. Build to sell — optimizing for a clear exit. Build to win — you find a rinse-and-repeatable model, not lightning in a bottle, something someone could replicate in an adjacent space. And build for fun or mission — you’d never want to sell it, willing to do it even if the likelihood of success is low.
There’s a great clip of you and David Freeburg from All In where he basically says founders always sell themselves short and go for small ideas because they seem more reasonable. But actually bigger ideas attract crazier talent, and the timeline and effort aren’t that different. A railroad business and an FBA business will both take all your time. One will let you raise at a higher valuation.
Sam: I agree with Freeburg. I’ve thought this for a long time. Have you heard of the Unreasonable Institute? It’s based on the same idea — it takes unreasonable people to do unreasonable things for the world to move forward. You look at all the inputs — your time and energy are roughly the same — but the outputs can be very different.
Shaan: The counterargument is that it is possible to build something pretty cool without working crazy hard. But it’s kind of impossible to build something huge without working very hard.
Sam: Who do we know that’s building successful businesses without working super hard?
Shaan: Suuli maybe? Although — he works hard. He just gets there faster.
Sam: Yeah, he’s not putting in a tenth of the hours. He’s putting in the same hours and getting there ten times faster. That’s skill, not leisure.
Shaan: To wrap up the banker thing — I’m going to keep doing it. Very useful. And whether it’s specifically bankers or similar people — VCs, accountants, people who see hundreds of businesses a year — if you want to speed-dial your learning, go to them. Free learning. That’s it.