Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en they sold it for 900 million dollars in cash they don’t really mention much about the company other than it was doing over 100 million in revenue but they what they don’t mention is the guy who started it he bootstrapped it raised no outside money and owned 100 of it all the way through the sale all the way through the sale owned 100 of it a million dollars isn’t cool you know what’s cool a billion dollars [Music] so let me tell you this quick story this was not a big headline i bet you didn’t even see it so my friend uh i was in college at the time he’s a little bit he’s older than me so he was not in college he was probably in his 30s when i was 21. he started this company called linode did you see yesterday a company called linode was acquired for 900 million dollars in cash yeah who bought it it was um um is it called akamai oh come on yeah akkamai and so they bought it for not the art everything i’m going to say is is relatively public or it’s you could piece it together in a bunch of different articles but basically they sold it for 900 million dollars in cash they don’t really mention much about the company other than it was doing over 100 million in revenue but they what they don’t mention is the guy who started it he bootstrapped it raised no outside money and owned 100 of it so his name was chris he uh i knew him when i was in college but not bad all the way through the sale all the way through the sale owned 100 of it um the company all right let me give you a little bit background i think when they sold they had like 300 ish employees but throughout their existence they had a relatively small staff like like they were doing like multiple millions of dollars in revenue per employee and it was it wasn’t run like a family business but almost kind of like a family business based out of new jersey so basically this guy what does it do what is linode so i’m not in this space so excuse me but basically it’s cl it’s basically like the generic term is it’s cloud computing so basically before amazon web services was around lynnode was there and i think some of their customers are like walmart so they host they help host you know applications and websites is the is the non-techie version uh that i’m that that i would say but what are you looking at the website what’s it say i’m looking at the website basically says you know clutch your cloud bill and your cloud bill in half um it’s basically like deploy linux servers in the cloud is the idea i think we used this by the way at my previous startup i remember seeing a bill for linode probably they’re they’re pretty popular but they because they were bootstrapped they couldn’t quite keep up with like uh what’s with the other competitor i think digitalocean which is like publicly traded now for multi-billions but basically in the early 2000s like 2005 or 2006 chris worked at this company called uh health stream which was uh it’s not important it was a boring company and they he worked in like with computers with tech and he he grew up with an apple and loved tinkering with computers but what he noticed was that hosting was really expensive so he basically locked himself in his apartment uh from like 2002 to 2003 and like had a year’s worth of savings and like locked himself in this apartment to code and build this website and he’s like if it works it works if it doesn’t it doesn’t so he launches it and right away it does good enough to pay his salary like single digit hundreds of thousands of dollars by year two because this was in early 2000’s i don’t even think amazon web services was around at this point and if it was it was like brand new and in fact this whole idea of cloud computing was brand new at healthstream chris was like look we’ve got to like spend all this money to buy servers what if we just like bought a bunch of servers and rented it out to people and that was like the idea because it’s really hard for a small business who doesn’t want to create a bunch of servers in their office to like actually host a website host applications things like that so that’s where the idea came from and so it grew like a little bit year over year it wasn’t growing like crazy for a long time um but it was doing okay chris kind of was always obsessed with automation so we did a really good job of automating a lot of the parts of the company and so they could hire relatively small staff you know like only like 10 or 15 people for the first handful of years even when it was getting close to making um over 10 million dollars a year still really small and basically the way it worked was i don’t think he ever took out a loan i don’t it was 100 self financing and so it would make a lot of money like these businesses can make uh on 10 million dollars in revenue can make 4 million in profit but in order to get to like 30 million in revenue you’ve got to go open up a warehouse or rent a warehouse and buy a bunch of servers and there was times where like my friends who worked there along with chris were literally like tinkering and assembling the servers and they did this for years and years and years and it and it grow it grew nicely and they did a really good job of like automating their customer service even for a long time chris was answering the customer service it grew really quietly he’s not on twitter i don’t if you google him you might find two pictures there’s basically nothing out there about him um he’s based out of philly and he bought a bank like uh like a physically a bank that was the home it was a bank turned house it was the house from the real world philly he bought it and they did an article about him how he was restoring this bank and leno it was leno’s new office but he was taking a little bit of money off the table enough to buy a 10 million dollar bank um but owned the whole thing and just yesterday it was announced that it was sold for 900 million dollars in cash all right and then i forgot to tell you this but this is the most important thing uh i can’t believe we didn’t talk about this earlier to be honest with you because if you’re listening to this and you like what you’re hearing right now and you haven’t gone and subscribed to the my first million podcast wherever you get your podcast then that’s the thing you’ve got to do there’s nothing more important than doing that right now and don’t do it because i said to do it do it because you want to do it do it because that’s who you are how do you know this guy you said you knew him in college he was at your college or you just know while you were in college so when i was in college um i used to work for that show i told you american pickers and a guy came in and he was like i start internet companies and i was like oh really i like entrepreneurship that’s cool will you like just let me hang out with you and he let me hang out with him and this guy his name was casey he became the he was in my wedding i became friends with him for years and years he was probably 35 when i was 21 or probably 10 years older than me and casey helped chris get linode off the ground and was the ceo for a decade or gotcha uh wow and chris now at this point he’s got this like huge collection of b w motorcycles so for motorcycle fans there’s like motorcycle fans is like a sub category of like car enthusiasts and bmw vintage motorcycle fans is a sub category of that and chris owns i think one vintage bmw motorcycle from every single year ever produced and so we are all motorcycle nerds and we would geek out over that stuff and we would ride motorcycles together dude i need a white guy rich guy hobby this is what’s holding me back i realize i need to start [ ] buying motorcycles from you know the 19 anything like 30 years ago and then i need to care about it and i need to learn how to restore it and like polish it or whatever i need to become tim allen from home improvement and have this like thing in my garage i’m always working on so i can just when i meet these guys i gotta have something to say you got that you have that something to say i’m like what am i gonna say like you know hey what’s up bro you like the nba and it’s like yeah me and 100 million other people there’s nothing to get what about so rolex’s or rare watches is one of those if you you had to spend thirty thousand dollars so hard to care about these things dude why do i i can’t care about it i see it i just feel nothing i’m dead inside yeah it sucks man you got to get passionate about something outside of your house like you [ ] dork like i literally don’t leave a house dude by the chef was like hey um we need more gas for the grill and i was like oh i was like oh grills need gas and i was like never grilled it i was like okay where do i get that and she’s like you know just like next time i got a gas station i was like i don’t really go to run errands she’s like next time you got running errands just grab one i gotta really go run errands so like she’s like been asking for two months just i finally got it and i was like so proud of myself and she’s like so did you forget every time i was like no no i just don’t really go out of my house unless it’s like for very specific things like i’m taking my daughter to the playground i’m going you know to a restaurant and back home you need a little notice last night i went to home depot just to walk around and look like like in the evening i was like i’ve been at home all day i’m gonna go walk around home depot and see if like let’s like let’s check out like how many home depot workers do you know by first name number three what you could do if you go to home depot if you see a guy wearing carhartt and paint on their pants you don’t even have to ask a worker you could just ask that guy who’s there shopping that’s why he’ll take an hour to help you yeah like hey do you know where the wood screws are yeah i got you bro like i wouldn’t even know what to ask i would just be like hey do you know what home and where home improvement goods are yeah man you need to get a hobby like i bet ben has one ben do you have ben has one because he’s like a history buff another white which rich white guy hobby to have is like you know studying you know great men through history ben do you have any other you know very uh rapport building um rapport building things i don’t know that i do but i don’t know if you guys have seen this but mark andreessen has been going nuts of like reading history books and then tweeting about history so like i i feel like that’s your hand yeah yeah like if i was with mark andreessen and i could not talk about tech we would be on a silent retreat it would be a silence by the way you got to keep your camera on because when i see you laugh i know we’re onto something um anyway yeah you need to get a hobby rolex is a good one a lot of people like that if i see someone with a certain rolex i talk to them about it um cars is good but i have a feeling you don’t even know how to drive so i would stay away from that i learned how to drive at age 19. so because i just wasn’t interested yeah how your wife ever shocks me don’t listen to music i only listen to sports radio my whole life so if somebody’s like what songs do you like i’m just like oh you know i’m cool with whatever and they’re like oh you’re a [ __ ] weirdo huh oh my god that’s great uh yeah you need to get a hobby dude but uh this is the story of lenode kind of a cool story right you never really talked about it no that’s that’s awesome