Sam and Shaan build “Sarah’s List” — a curated list of pre-IPO startups where a mid-level employee accepting stock grants could realistically become a self-made millionaire within four years. Inspired by Sam’s wife Sarah joining Airbnb before its IPO, they nominate twelve companies across fintech, SaaS, defense, and crypto, debating each company’s 5-10x potential while keeping the risk profile manageable.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, co-founder of The Hustle), Shaan Puri (host, investor)
Introduction: Sarah’s Airbnb Story [00:00:00]
Sam: This episode is gonna be awesome, and there’s a story behind it. I don’t know if I told you this story, Shaan, but basically my wife Sarah — about four or five years ago — she’s pretty type-A, went to an Ivy League school, doesn’t particularly like taking risks. She’s someone who’s going to rise up in a big company and be an executive one day. And she wanted to join a new company and make a lot of money.
Sarah’s going to be 29 next week, so she was about 25 at the time. She said, “I want to join a company where I can make some money.” So we made a list of companies where we thought if she was given, let’s say, $250,000 of stock that would vest over four years, that stock could 10x. That’s how she eventually applied and got a job at Airbnb — that was about five years ago.
When she joined, what was their last valuation before they went public? Like 18 or 20 billion?
Shaan: I think so, yeah.
Sam: And now their valuation is like $100 billion. So what’s that — 5x? It did okay.
Shaan: You’re underplaying it. It did better than okay. Let’s just frame this fully. She joined a multi-billion dollar company that already had — how many employees?
Sam: Not that big. I think it had about 1,200.
Shaan: So over a thousand employees. Not joining a risky startup, not buying a lottery ticket. She knew this is going to have some gain — it’s just a question of how much. She got a job, and she wasn’t like an exec, so it was kind of an achievable thing.
Sam: Yeah, she came in as like a lower to mid-level manager. So she didn’t even come in as a hotshot. And before the age of 30, she was a multi-millionaire because of the stock that appreciated from joining Airbnb.
Shaan: Self-made multi-millionaire without eating it as a startup founder, where you’re stressed and making no money and might fail and have to make payroll and all that stuff. She had kind of a cushy gig — got to go in every day, pick which flavor of soy milk she liked from the company fridge, had health benefits, had all the good things you get at a company, plus got to see it grow.
Sam: By the way, I cannot confirm or deny the multi-millionaire part — I can’t completely blow up her spot — but the point is that Airbnb pays very competitively. They recruit people from Google and Facebook, pay competitive salary, wonderful benefits. You work really hard, but it’s not a startup of 20 people where you have no resources. You have resources to get help.
So the idea with this — we’re calling it Sarah’s List, though we should come up with a cuter name someday — the idea is we made a list of companies that are cushier than a 20-person startup but still have wonderful upside. You can make a very competitive salary, have wonderful benefits, and there’s like a 5-10-15x upside. Low risk, great reward. You’re not going to become a billionaire doing this, but most people don’t really care about that.
Shaan: When I heard this, I was like, wow — I think of myself as the hustler, but this is the ultimate hustle. Not in a bad way. This was the lowest-effort, lowest-risk way to get a great outcome. She didn’t have to work 120 hours a week, didn’t have to carry the whole company on her back, didn’t have to pick a winner — she pretty clearly picked a winner — and still walked away with a great outcome. I thought, wow, that’s actually fantastic. There are a lot of people who would love that path.
Some people want to be Elon Musk, change the world. Some people want to make a billion dollars. Some people want to sit on a beach and do nothing. But this — let me work at a great company with really smart people, working on a cool product, and build financial independence without risking it all like a degenerate gambler.
Sam: We’ve got Craigslist, we’ve got Angie’s List — now we have Sarah’s List. Sarah’s List is the companies we think you could go join today. They’re already valued over $250 million. We think they have a low risk profile, but if you stayed there for four years and came in as a mid-level person and got your grants — which is like $50,000 in stock every year — that could make you a self-made millionaire or multi-millionaire. That’s the thing.
Before we get into this — everything we’re going to say is not financial advice. All the information we have is basically what we’ve read online or rumors we’ve heard among friends. Everything is hearsay and a lot of predictions.
Shaan: Yeah, we could be wrong. But we thought it’d be fun. We’re not going to go take these jobs, but there are a lot of people out there who would love to know, “What would you recommend?” We know it’s not a guarantee. We know it’s not set in stone. But hey, some prediction is better than nothing. We’ll go on the record and see how these play out.
Sam: We each did research and got five. You go, I go, we’ll go back and forth.
Shaan: Okay, great. I’m going to save my best one. I’ll first-jab to see how strong you’re coming in. My power punch is coming second.
Nomination 1: Flexport [00:07:00]
Shaan: My first nomination for Sarah’s List is Flexport.
Sam: What’s Flexport?
Shaan: So Flexport is a company you use when you’re shipping things. My e-commerce company ships things — we need to arrange between an international supplier, we need our goods to go from their factory to our warehouse. How do you do that? You gotta go to a bunch of shipping carriers and say, “Hey, when do you have a boat leaving? My ready date is August third. Do you have a boat August third? What’s the price?” You get some quotes. This job is called freight forwarding.
Flexport is basically software that does what used to be done pretty manually or with very old clunky software. They made modern, slick software that does freight forwarding. You go online, you can see all your quotes, you book your boat with a simple click, you pay the fees, notifications come through — modern freight forwarding software.
Flexport is currently valued at about $3.2 billion. SoftBank put in a billion dollars at that $3.2 billion valuation. About 2,500 employees. They’re in a huge space — global shipping is massive and only getting bigger as e-commerce grows. They took a fragmented market with low NPS and built a best-in-class, integrated product so you don’t have to deal with the mom-and-pop telephone-call game.
The founder is Ryan Petersen. I’ve hung out with him once or twice, read a lot of interviews. He’s very charismatic. He once said this company is either going to be worth zero or a hundred billion dollars. He’s like, “This is going to be all or nothing.” And he’s very, very good.
Sam: We should compile an ebook of quotes like that — like “Talk Dirty to Me: The VC Edition.” What are some offhand things you can say as a founder that make every investor salivate? Because sometimes they sound dumb, like why would I say my company’s either going to be worth zero or a hundred billion? But that’s exactly what a VC wants to hear, because that’s how their economics work. We should cherry-pick these phrases — they’re like pickup lines for VCs.
Shaan: We should just make a little ebook out of those. That’s a good one.
Nomination 2: Zapier [00:11:00]
Sam: All right, my turn. Mine will be easy as well: Zapier.
It’s always hard for me to explain what this company does, but once you use it you immediately get it. Basically, they connect APIs. When The Hustle first started, I didn’t want to buy Greenhouse or one of these $500-a-month applicant tracking systems. So I created a Google Form and then used Zapier to connect it to Asana. Every time someone applied for a job, the information was automatically filled into an Asana board, and that’s what we used to track applicants.
Another example — really simple personal use case. I had a smart scale, and every time I stepped on it, it told Zapier, and Zapier put my weight into a spreadsheet. I compared it to all my friends’ weights and we had a competition. That’s a really simple use case, but they do incredibly complicated ones. You could build an entire company using basically Google spreadsheets and Zapier.
They’re interesting for a few reasons. First, they bootstrapped to about $60-70 million in recurring revenue very quickly. They recently raised a little bit of funding at a $5 billion valuation — I believe from Sequoia. They currently have 350 people.
My opinion is this is going to end up very similar to Atlassian. Atlassian is an Australian company that went public — I think in 2014 — at like a $6 billion valuation. They sold software to small businesses and people slept on them. It slowly scaled, and I think today Atlassian is worth $100 billion. I think Zapier is going to be similar. Wade Foster, the founder, spoke at HustleCon and I hung out with him. He was wonderful.
One downside I’ve heard through friends of friends: they pay against Chicago market salaries, not San Francisco salaries. That might be a downside. But I would love to own Zapier stock.
Shaan: So it’s a $5 billion company, and amazingly it raised only $1.3 million in funding to get there?
Sam: They basically only raised one million dollars in funding, got to $60 million ARR. They’re probably north of $100 million ARR now. They’re probably worth $10 billion at this point.
Shaan: That’s insane. You’d need them to become a $25-50 billion company and you’re betting they can do that over the course of four or five years when all your stock would vest.
Sam: I think so.
Shaan: They’ve surprised me every step of the way so far. I’d be like, “Zapier — oh cool, indie hacker project.” Then it’s like no, actually got to a million in ARR. Then it’s like oh, cool bootstrap software company, maybe you can sell for $25-30 million. Then they’re doing $50 million ARR. Okay, I keep being wrong. Do I really want to bet against them again? The answer is no. Thumbs up on Zapier — I’d include it in Sarah’s List.
Would you give Flexport a thumbs up?
Sam: Can it be worth $50 billion? Yeah, definitely. Good.
So we have two successful nominations to Sarah’s List.
Nomination 3: Uniswap [00:17:00]
Shaan: All right, I’d like to give you my next nomination. You’re going to roll your eyes. It’s called Uniswap. Do you know what Uniswap is?
Sam: No.
Shaan: That’s insane to me. Okay. Uniswap — let me just play this game. There’s a company in the cryptocurrency space and I have an opportunity for you to join. It is bigger than Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, and State Street combined in terms of current market cap.
Sam: Is that just one of those crazy crypto market cap things?
Shaan: Let me tell you a little bit more. What if I told you it has the trading volume of Coinbase with 50 times fewer employees? Would that be something you’re interested in? What if I told you this company is doing $10 billion a week in trading volume? What if I told you it was doing that with fewer than 35 employees? What if I told you that it took Coinbase eight years and a thousand employees to get to a billion dollars in revenue — and Uniswap is only two and a half years old, has fewer than 50 employees, and is on pace to do over a billion dollars in revenue this year? Would that be something you’re interested in?
Sam: Yes.
Shaan: Because that’s Uniswap right now.
So what do they do? Let’s say you’ve heard of all the different tokens that exist — Ethereum, Solana, all these different tokens. There are thousands of different currencies. Coinbase is really good at saying: you have US dollars, you want to go buy some Bitcoin or Ethereum? We’ll take your dollars, connect with your bank, and you can buy this crypto asset.
What Uniswap does: it says, “Thanks, Coinbase — we’ll take it from here.” You’re kind of slow and expensive. Once you have a crypto token, Uniswap is how you trade any crypto token for any other crypto token. It lets you swap between any crypto asset instantaneously. It’s what’s called a decentralized exchange.
There’s no central company with a bunch of employees that owns the exchange. It’s a protocol they built. If you go to the website, it just says: what currency do you have, what currency do you want, here’s the exchange rate, push go. Done.
Normally for a centralized exchange like Coinbase, they have to be the market maker — they find buyers and sellers, match them, and have reserves to bring liquidity. What decentralized exchanges — DEXes — do is: you have a buyer, you have a seller, and then there’s this group in the middle where I can also come in and be a liquidity provider. I can just give Uniswap some money and earn a portion of the revenue they make, just by providing liquidity into the pool.
Sam: Cool, so it’s like a three-sided market.
Shaan: Exactly. They have over $5 billion of liquidity that users just locked up into their market. It’s like a weird Lending Club type of thing.
Sam: Only 30 people. What type of person would be good to work there?
Shaan: These kinds of things tend to be engineering-heavy, but you can come and be a community person, a marketing person, a PR person. When you’re at 35 people with this much scale, they kind of need everything — more of everything. I think anybody could probably fit in. You just have to know how to solve some of their problems.
Do you think they give equity?
Sam: So there’s a company and then there’s the protocol. The company owns some of the tokens of the protocol. The company raised a Series A from Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm and others — they’ve only raised $11 million to date — and they’ve reached basically the same scale as Coinbase on $11 million. Coinbase is what, an $80 billion dollar company? So this would be a very, very, very valuable group to be a part of. The economics are different because it’s crypto and everything’s weird, but there’s definitely enough value there.
Shaan: Going super fast, I imagine the personality type is someone who’s okay with a lot of chaos and some risk. Not traditional.
Sam: Non-traditional, yes.
Nomination 4: Anduril [00:24:00]
Sam: All right, I’m going to give you one that might be one of my stronger ones. It’s called Anduril. Do you know what that is?
Shaan: I had it on my list. You stole it right off me.
Sam: Did you really? I didn’t see it on yours.
Shaan: I didn’t put it on there. I have my own little cheat sheet.
Sam: So Anduril — it was started by a guy named Palmer Luckey. Palmer Luckey started Oculus when he was about 16 or 17 and sold it to Facebook for something like a billion dollars. He’s very controversial — a big supporter of Donald Trump, which is very atypical in Silicon Valley. He was fired from Facebook and sued them for hundreds of millions and won. Regardless of what you think about that, he is controversial in Silicon Valley.
He started this company out of Orange County. They make stuff for the government. Their first product was basically an invisible wall — a way to build drones to monitor the US-Mexico border. So controversial, we can definitely agree on that. They’ve raised money and it’s worth about $4.6 billion. They have 510 employees.
This would not be good for a liberal person. You basically have to be moderate or right of center to want to work here. Palmer seems like a fine enough guy — a little quirky, but it’s a right-leaning company, which isn’t incredibly normal in Silicon Valley.
I think this could be a Palantir-style company. The way I describe what they do: if you’ve ever seen the movie “War Dogs” — the government says “we need blank,” people bid, and someone goes and builds it. What Anduril does is they build stuff they think the government needs, and then the government buys it.
Shaan: Yeah, exactly. Their primary revenue source comes from the government, and what they build is fancy hardware-software combinations. One of their products — if you go to their website — is the Sentry Tower. It’s a solar-powered tower, a giant pole used to autonomously monitor a border or area. It’s basically like a Nest camera for the government. They have drones, different things like that. It’s not a huge product line because these things are hard — they probably take tens of millions of dollars to make each one.
They’re basically trying to be the most technology-forward provider for the US defense budget, which I think is like $700 billion a year. Can this company be worth $20-50 billion in five years? It definitely can. This guy already built a billion-dollar company at like 22.
Sam: Definitely. Your turn.
Nomination 5: Replit [00:30:00]
Shaan: Okay, I’m going to do one that I actually invested in. So disclaimer — this is actually a flex. I’m an investor. This company is called Replit. Have you seen Replit?
Sam: Only because you’ve been telling me for years it’s going to be the greatest.
Shaan: So I’ll tell you how I found them. I heard about them from two different places, and anytime these two people talk about something, you pay attention. First: my teenage nephew was using this tool, Replit, to learn how to code. I stashed it away. Stuff teenagers use tends to become big companies — Snapchat, Minecraft, Roblox, things like that.
Second time I heard about it was from Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator. He tweeted a hockey stick chart and said something like, “This is one of the fastest-growing companies I’ve ever seen.” He said something like, “This is over 5 million users.” And that may not sound like a lot, but when your users are all programmers, 5 million is a hell of a lot. Five million programmers on a network is worth its weight in gold.
The company is valued just under a billion dollars right now. So if you’re looking at this, you’re asking: does this end up at $5 billion or more?
Sam: What does it do though?
Shaan: So if you’ve ever tried to learn how to code — gone down that path, bought a Udemy course, “I’m gonna learn Python” — one of the most confusing things is: where do I even type this? You don’t write your code in a Google Doc. You’ve got to use a code editor. Then you need to install Python packages. What’s npm? You need servers. Setting up that developer environment in itself is very confusing, and if the average person finds it confusing, it’s too confusing.
What Replit did was say, “Look, it’s just a website. It already has all that stuff baked in. You don’t have to install anything. You don’t need five different programs. You write the code here, push run, test it here, push deploy, and you deploy it here.” All built into one. That was really useful for young hackers, young engineers, and hobbyists who wanted to learn.
Then they were like, okay, but we’ve got all these programmers writing code — it’s like a social network. You know GitHub, the biggest network of developers? On GitHub you can fork something — make your code publicly available, I can read it, I can fork it, make my own version, and you get notified that I remixed your thing.
Replit does that on steroids. It’s almost like a game. Programmers can see what other programmers are doing. They can get inspired, literally take someone’s code and remix it, or contribute to each other. You can take little parts someone made — say someone made a bouncing ball in code — and just grab that, add it to your basketball hoop thing without remaking it from scratch. It’s like multiplayer for programmers, where you write your code, deploy your code, and also find other pieces of code to interact with. And you can monetize it — you can launch full apps on there and make money.
The bet here: if you look at their graphs, everything is a hockey stick, crazy upward curve. They do a side-by-side comparison — here’s our growth compared to GitHub’s growth from year zero through year four — and they’re outpacing GitHub’s growth.
Sam: I’m on board with that. That’s a good one. And in fact, technical companies tend to get built engineer-first, so they actually need non-technical people to join. All right, I’m on board.
Nomination 6: Airtable [00:38:00]
Sam: All right, my turn. This one is similar to Zapier: Airtable.
Airtable is a Microsoft Excel alternative, a Google Sheets alternative. When they first came out I was like, why on earth would anyone need this? Google Sheets works great. Then I used Airtable and I realized they’re kind of making their own category. It’s very sticky, very neat.
Right now they’re valued at $5.7 billion — they raised money at that valuation in 2021. I actually think they could be much larger. There’s another company I compare them to — not quite the same but similar in terms of stickiness — that came out around the same time: Monday.com. Monday.com went public at like $18 billion. I think Airtable could definitely do really great.
They currently have 645 employees. The guy who started it is Howie Lou — I think his name is Howard Liu — and he’s kind of stereotyped in the media as a prodigy genius. But in interviews I saw, he went to Duke, and he was very wise, not wacky-weird. Very well-spoken.
Shaan: You want to know something funny? Seven years ago, we were in a mastermind group — you, me, a couple other guys, we’d get dinner every month or two and talk startups, occasionally invite other people in. I have a DM where I DM’d Howie back when Airtable was a lot smaller — I think it had just raised money, maybe at under $100 million valuation. And I was like, “Howie, I love Airtable, think it’s great, I think it’s going to be big. You’re a fellow Duke guy, that’s awesome. Hey, I host these mastermind dinners, you should come to one.”
And he’s like, “Oh, I’d love to.” We scheduled it, and you and one other person cancelled, so I canceled the dinner. I never met him. Who knows what could have been — we could have been homies by now.
Sam: We could have invested a long time ago at under $100 million dollars. Did you hang out with them?
Shaan: No, that was the excuse. I was using these dinners as excuses to hang out with people. I didn’t want to just say “hey I’d love to meet you to coffee.” So I was like, “Hey, we do this founder thing, it’s great.” My bad, Howie. I’m sorry, dude.
Sam: Yeah, Excel is — there’s this great quote that every SaaS company actually competes with Excel, not with other SaaS companies, because people just use Excel for everything. If Excel is a $100 billion company — I think Excel would be like Airpods to Apple. Airpods would be a $100 billion company on its own. That’s what Excel is. So if Excel is a $100 billion company, the best threat to Excel is going to end up being worth $20-30 billion. I think there’s a pretty good chance of that.
I liked Airtable a lot more at one or two billion than at $5.7 billion, but we didn’t do the episode then, we’re doing it now.
Nomination 7: Figma [00:44:00]
Sam: So I’ll give you one that’s very similar — Figma. I’ll do it quick because people already know Figma. What Airtable is doing for Excel, Figma is doing for Photoshop. It’s the younger, slicker, cloud-based, sexier version of design software and it’s eating Photoshop’s lunch.
What’s Figma worth now?
Shaan: In July of 2021 they raised $200 million at a $10 billion valuation. But that sounds like a lot — how much is Adobe’s market cap?
Sam: Almost all their revenue at this point is from the Creative Cloud — basically a bundle where you want Photoshop but you also buy Fireworks and everything else bundled in.
Shaan: So what do you think Adobe’s market cap is?
Sam: I’d have guessed $150 billion or something like that. What is it?
Shaan: It is $315 billion. Adobe is the 30th largest company in the world.
When you think about how big Figma can be and you see $10 billion, it seems like so much money — but Adobe is one of the biggest companies in the world and Figma is going after it. It’s like — all the business trends. First: unbundling. Creative Cloud brings in $12 billion a year. Let’s unbundle the most valuable part of it — Photoshop — and do it differently. Second: cloud-based. Third: multiplayer. When you’re using Figma, your mouse is moving around — I’ll also see what you’re doing on the same canvas. They’re piggybacking off all these macro shifts and doing it right.
And by the way, if you think it’s already at $10 billion and it’s really going to 5x — last five years, Adobe has 6x’d. Adobe was trading at $100 a share, it’s now at $660 a share. That’s at Adobe’s large size. Figma’s growth rate over the next five years should be much faster than Adobe’s was in the last five.
Sam: I think there’s a fairly good chance of that. In fact, I should just go invest in all these companies on this list.
Nomination 8: Rippling [00:50:00]
Shaan: All right, my turn. So — I agree, I had to think about mine. This is a very boring company. I used it and it’s called Rippling. It’s a payroll software provider, but it also manages devices and gives you permissions to different stuff.
Basically, if you’re a small startup and people come to work at your company, I can easily track which person has which computer, pay software through there, do HR management, and issue healthcare stuff to people.
Why it’s interesting: the founder, Parker Conrad, has a controversial past. He started Zenefits, which was at the time one of the fastest-growing companies ever. He got fired because the culture was kind of crazy — people were doing crazy stuff — and there were compliance issues. Like, in order to do this HR thing, you have to have compliance training that takes 60 hours. He was like, “Cool, here I just created a macro that will go through the training for you, just push enter every five minutes and you’ll be done in six hours instead of sixty.” That’s a little bit like, oh, that’s slightly illegal.
Sam: Yeah.
Shaan: The good news is he has experience. Also good news: he screwed up, and so you’d think he’d have learned from being ousted. I always like that in a company — someone who’s on their second time around and has already been mildly successful.
Here’s why I think this company’s interesting. They were last valued at $1.3 billion. Workday, which is in the space, is worth $67 billion. Paychex, which is just a payroll provider, is worth $40 billion. I think Rippling is in its own category, which is why it’s even better. If you said, does Rippling end up as a 50x from here? I think it might be one of the best candidates on this list. Like when Square went public — I think at like a $2-3 billion valuation — it’s now at $100 billion. So after an IPO, which is already de-risked and liquid, it’s already had a 30-40x. Rippling might be the number one candidate for that kind of appreciation.
When I use the product, it did everything well but was still pretty clunky. So I think a lot of your product designers, customer support, and sales people — these guys are hiring for a bunch of different stuff.
Sam: All right, your turn.
Nomination 9: OpenStore [00:57:00]
Sam: Okay, this one’s a little — I think these are hits — by the way, I think, yeah, I think so too. All right, here’s one: OpenStore. Do you know what OpenStore is?
Shaan: It’s new, isn’t it?
Sam: It’s new. Okay. So this might not hit — this might be too early. But go ahead.
Shaan: Okay. So first, let me say who the founders are. One is Keith Rabois, who was the COO at Square — he’s part of the PayPal Mafia, he’s a big-time VC, and he’s very opinionated on Twitter. Entertaining. Very smart. And then this other guy, Jack Abraham — kind of a wonder kid, built a company and sold it to eBay early on, was a hotshot at PayPal, spun out and has his own studio.
Together they made OpenStore, which is a riff off of Keith Rabois’s prior company that’s now worth $5 billion: Opendoor. What Opendoor did was — you want to sell your house, don’t go through the whole dog and pony show. I will buy your house now. You don’t have to stage it, fix it up, hire an agent. Just sell me the home, I’ll give you a price right now, you can sell it today. Instant liquidity in the house market.
OpenStore is the same thing for e-commerce. They’re saying: you want to sell your e-commerce company? I’ll buy your Shopify store right now. Don’t have to go through the whole banker process. I’ll just plug into your data and give you an offer right now.
So what they’re trying to do is roll up Shopify stores. They raised — I think their first round was at about a $250 million valuation. To get your 5x here, you have to bet it becomes a billion-dollar company. With Keith Rabois’s track record — Square, Opendoor — and Jack Abraham’s track record, it’s a very good shot.
This space is very hot. Do you know Thrasio? The one that’s been rolling up Amazon FBA businesses?
Sam: Yeah.
Shaan: Thrasio is going to go public at something like a $10 billion valuation. They might be the fastest company to a $10 billion exit ever — three years old, very capital efficient. They used a lot of debt to buy these companies because the companies are already profitable, so they’re able to use big debt to do this.
OpenStore is doing the same thing without the Amazon angle — it’s for Shopify. I think this model is one of the fastest, easiest ways to build a billion-dollar company. At a $250 million valuation, I see a lot of value in this pick. But it could go to zero — this has higher risk than the other stuff on this list. Much higher risk, but also higher reward.
Sam: I agree. This could 10x, but it borderline wouldn’t be considered part of the list because it’s too new — they just launched, it’s a year or less, right? July 2021? So it wouldn’t fit the category of being a cushy gig. I’m cool with adding it, but it’s more like — you’re in the on-deck circle. You’re not quite on the list yet given the criteria. You got to season up a little bit.
Shaan: But we could swap it: Keith Rabois has another company he’s an investor in that’s incredibly interesting — I believe it’s called Faire. F-A-I-R-E. It’s a wholesale marketplace for retailers and brands.
Sam: Right.
Shaan: So you basically can just go to Faire if you want to sell wholesale. I used it recently for my brand — I was like, we should sell wholesale too. What am I going to do? Go contact every brick-and-mortar store and say, “Hey, would you like to carry my brand?” Make a catalog in Excel, update it weekly, here’s my pricing, they go buy from my Shopify store — you have to string together five tools to set up wholesale.
Faire is basically: you want wholesale, list yourself as a company, and brick-and-mortar stores can just choose to buy from you. Your catalog is stored there. It takes that whole problem and just solves it. I think it’s like a $15 billion dollar company. I didn’t do research on it for this specific project, but whenever people ask me where they should join, I say that company sounds incredibly interesting.
Nomination 10: NextHealth [01:05:00]
Sam: All right, I’m going to do one that I’m also an investor in — there’s a disclosure. It’s called NextHealth. And the reason why I think it’s cool: the very simple dumbed-down version is it’s almost like Shopify for doctors.
Basically, when you go to a doctor, you have to fill out a form. They’ve automated the form so you just fill it out online. And if every other doctor uses NextHealth, all your information is on that platform and it’s much easier — you have basically one medical record. They’ve also opened it up to third-party developers who can build apps using your health data and your whole health record.
An example: a tiny example is if you’re on SmileDirectClub and you want to find an orthodontist nearby who could fit you for your device, they say, “Hey, here are all the doctors in the NextHealth network in that area. Just click here.” That’s a third-party app.
They’re worth $500 million. Their CEO is young — 26, 27 years old. I’ve gotten dinner with him, and he basically told me — I don’t remember exactly how he said it, but he was like, “Yeah, I kind of want to take over the world.” He told me his parents are from Bangladesh and he said something like, “Bangladesh is an interesting country because it has a really large young male population and a low unemployment rate. So if I wanted to take over the world, I think I could go there and rally the young men and we could build an army.” He had this all thought out. I was like, “You’re nuts. I love you. I’m in.”
So NextHealth is interesting to me. They’ve raised around $150 million — actually maybe only $50 million. It’s big enough that it’s a little settled and they can pay well.
Nomination 11: OneTrust [01:10:00]
Shaan: All right, you want to bring it home?
Sam: Yeah, one that’s a little unorthodox. We said a lot of popular names. Here’s an unpopular name: OneTrust.
OneTrust specializes in making your company GDPR compliant. The most boring stuff on earth — valued at $5 billion. You have to endlessly keep up with privacy laws, which are different in all these different countries. GDPR for Europe, the US is going to have their own version, other countries will have their own versions, and they’re always evolving.
They have the customers, and they’re going to continue to service these customers. For the companies, you have huge risk — if you’re not compliant on GDPR, the fines are multiplied per user. Your fines can be exorbitant. Nobody wants to deal with this. Nobody wants to become an expert in it. Nobody wants to throw huge amounts of engineering, design, and policy headcount toward handling this. It’s going to be much easier to buy a solution and pay for somebody else as your cover-your-ass insurance to take care of your GDPR needs.
I think it’s one of the fastest-growing companies in the country right now. It’s called OneTrust. I think they’re based in Atlanta. There’s actually two companies that are both billion-dollar companies in this space. I love these companies — I want to invest in these companies. If I was going to send somebody to go work at a company with this profile, this would be one of them. I think it’s a good contender for Sarah’s List.
Wrapping Up Sarah’s List [01:14:00]
Shaan: All right. I think that’s the list.
Sam: I think this could be one of the most life-changing episodes for a listener applying to jobs. This is a really interesting idea. When I used to have this product called Just Jobs, I would write up companies like this and people would pay to have access to it. This is going to become maybe a recurring segment. We’ll see.
Shaan: I told you the thing I wanted to do with this: I’m going to curate 50 companies that meet this criteria and basically create a job board. The thing with the job board is you can’t just be a company who wants to come list on here. Only these 50 curated companies can post. They have to pay to do it, but if they don’t pay, they’re still on the list — no jobs will show up, though. I want to have a running job board.
We take this segment idea, and the reason I had a bunch of these companies listed is because me and Ben have been cooking this up — we should launch a job board. What would add value to the job board? If I could curate companies I think people should work for. This is not an original idea — lots of people have done curated company lists and turned them into products. We’re going to do that with a job board pretty soon. We’ll launch that with Pallet.
Sam: Sick. That’s freaking awesome. Good episode.
Shaan: All right, man. I gotta run.